128 Coming Out and Coming Together Momentum was gradual, and it was meaningful, and it was making progress. And then as soon as you got these [people like] Hamid al-Ahmar all of a sudden becoming revolutionaries, I thought, it’s the end. What can we do? We need them, because they’re powerful, in order to get rid of the regime. [But] it just distorted the whole momentum that was going on. Understandably, Saleh and his colleagues in Sheffield found the slogans of “unity or death” proclaimed by Sanaʻa-based elites such as Hamid al-Ahmar and General Ali Mohsen to be both threatening and insulting. Fathi in London also recalled that rather than benefitting his homeland, “We realized that the fall of Saleh [would be] to the benefit of Hamid al-Ahmar and Ali Mohsen. They are as bad, if not worse, than Ali Abdullah Saleh in terms of [stolen] land acquisition” in the South. In the eyes of many southerners at home and abroad, northern defections had hopelessly compromised the uprising. In addition to losing their faith in the revolution itself, many southern respondents also withdrew their support because they came to feel marginalized in pro-revolution protests abroad. Ali from Birmingham stated unequivocally that the revolution period presented another example of how northerners were speaking over southern voices and muting their demands in Britain. This claim was further substantiated, according to Ali, by the displaying of the Yemeni national flag at these protests, which for him and many others was a symbol of occupation. He recalled, In 2011, we went to London to support the anti-Saleh demonstrations with our brothers and sisters from the North. We thought that this is going to bring change. When we went as one, we forgot [about] all the [different] parties. The main objective was one: to get rid of Ali Abdullah. Everyone forgot their own objective – the Houthi, the South. We had an agreement before we left that the banners should have only “get rid of Ali Abdullah,” nothing about the South. But when we went there, we were shocked to see them lifting different banners. Even some of them were speaking [against] the idea that we agreed [upon]. I saw that people were trying to show themselves as a leader, they’re trying for their own benefit. They had their own agendas. [So] the wool [was pulled] off our eyes. They were trying to fool us. Islah party jumped on the bandwagon of the revolution, the Islamic ideology, and took it over. They were taking advantage of this opportunity and not being fair. Other southerners also found newcomers to the anti-regime movement to be untrustworthy partners. Fakhary, a southern youth activist in Sheffield, felt that because the pro-revolution protests were organized by many people who had “switched sides” from pro- to anti-regime over time, “how would you trust people like that?” he exclaimed. When meeting with a pro-revolution organizer who was trying to convince all Yemenis to come out and support them, Fakhary recalled, I stood up and said, “hold on a minute. [Before], you were protesting for Saleh in London. Today, you’re asking us to protest against Saleh! Why didn’t you come with us https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press