Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 127 Ultimately, the chief obstacle to cooperation lay in the fact that, by April, Southerners feared the revolution would fail and that it had been compromised by opposition parties and regime insiders such as Ali Mohsen. . .. As it were, after his encounter with Northern protest leaders, a Southern representative remarked: “Youth in the North have the same mentality as the rulers.” . . . Distrust and differences grew over time, and by late April the initial euphoria over coordination with the North had faded. Protesters throughout the South once again vocally called for separation. When the revolution emerged, activists abroad who supported southern secession were split on how to respond. Some perceived the uprising as a natural extension of their anti-regime grievances, while others viewed it as a threat to their demands for autonomy. As a result, the Arab Spring produced heated debates within southern activist circles. Fathi, a journalist from London with origins in the South, described that some of his friends and colleagues felt they should wait and see what would happen, while others came out immediately for or against the revolution. Fathi himself decided to join the protests immediately, and urged other southerners to do the same. Just as elites in Yemen had asked southern protesters to lay down the flag of secession and mute their calls for independence, so too did organizers in the diaspora try to convince southern Yemenis to join northerners in support of regime change. Nadia in Birmingham recalled negotiating with southern leaders over the phone to convince them to participate in the protests without carrying their flags because revolution was for all Yemenis. She urged them, “It’s totally humanitarian. We will go to London just to show that our aim is to get [Saleh] down. It’s not about north and south. If you want to split later, you can. It’s not the time to talk about it [now].” Mazen O. of Washington, DC, reported doing the same and stated that early negotiations with southerners not to raise the South Yemen flag were successful. There [was] a group from the southern Hiraak movement. They came and they were raising the southerners’ flag. And then we had to, you know, communicate with them. We came to a common ground that this regime is killing everyone, whether they were northern or southern. So they have to come and raise the current Yemeni flag and join us with our effort. So we unified against the regime. Some pro-unity organizers also promised not to raise the national Yemeni flag or chant slogans about unity in exchange for the southerners’ support. These negotiations initially forged pro-revolution protest coalitions that converged in DC, New York, and London during the initial weeks of the uprising. However, many southerners reported changing their views shortly thereafter, echoing claims by southerners in Yemen that northern military elites, Islahis, religious figures, and tribal elements in Yemen were working to subvert the southern people. Saleh of Sheffield recalled that the revolution lost its potential for meaningful change as soon as these elites sided with the uprising after the Friday of Dignity Massacre. He explained, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press