Conflict Transmission 87 Movement for Justice and Development was to have some sort of classic-liberal party, which is pro-business, free market, that isn’t Islamist. We also came under fire from a lot of these old communists who thought, who are these new kids on the block? A lot of them thought we were like a Trojan horse for the Muslim Brotherhood, which wasn’t true. And funny enough, the Muslim Brotherhood thought we were a Trojan horse for another Muslim Brotherhood breakaway faction. We couldn’t please anybody! Thus, organizing done independently of established factions was met with suspicion and criticism by many older exiles and elites. As a result of conflict transmission, various members of the community were constantly accused of trying to dominate the opposition on behalf of the Brotherhood regardless of whether they were personally affiliated with the movement or not.5 As such, the anti-regime movement as a whole suffered from a significant degree of mistrust about who-was-who and working-forwhom, as well as splits with Syrian Kurds who had lost faith that they could ever attain freedom in the Syrian Arab Republic. 3.2.3 Yemeni Divisions Conflict transmission hindered the transnational mobilization of the Yemeni diaspora before the Arab Spring in several ways. As referenced in the previous chapter, “Yemenis have divided along fractures imported from their home country” (Halliday 2010[1992]: xiv) in the diaspora since their first major wave of emigration to the United States and Britain in the 1880s. Because anti-regime activism was dominated by calls for southern autonomy following the surge in secessionist activism and regime repression in 2007, opposition to the Saleh regime became a partisan issue that divided Yemenis along pro- and anti-unity lines. Interviewees also reported being generally mistrustful of community elites with political ties to the homeland due to cronyism, corruption, and a general state of institutional dysfunction in Yemen. Yemenis from North Yemen were divided by political party and the issue of meddling by Saudi Arabia. Halliday (2010[1992]: 56) likewise observed that “division between the mainstream of the community and a newer grouping derived from Al-Islah (Reform), a party in Yemen itself which received support from Saudi Arabia and was propagating an Islamist politics,” was prominent in British Yemeni communities by the early 1990s. As a result, many of the youth interested in mobilizing their communities before the Arab Spring perceived community elites as part of a corrupt 5 Lefèvre (2013: 189) argues that such accusations are also due partly to the mischaracterizations made by outsiders in their discussions of exiled Islamist groups; he writes, “The landscape of political Islam has become highly heterogeneous and complex since the Brotherhood was forced out of Syria in the early 1980s. Many opposition figures classified as ‘Islamists’ . . . actually do not belong to the Ikhwan and are even personally and politically hostile to them, if not ideologically so.” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press