88 Silenced and Split system who were highly suspect and incapable of promoting genuine social change. This suspicion extended to any person associated with home-country politics writ large. Because being associated with politics in the Yemeni diaspora was inherently problematic, the mobilization efforts of non-secessionists were focused on immigrant empowerment, such as literacy, in a “nonpolitical” way. The Yemeni Community Associations (YCAs) in Britain, for example, had been impacted by authoritarianism in Yemen since their founding. In the Liverpool and Birmingham YCAs, respondents claimed that pro-Saleh individuals had corrupted the organizations and rendered them impotent to help their local communities. Respondents viewed the YCA in Liverpool, for example, as an insular crony organization that provided no benefits to its constituents because of its regime-like functioning. Omar Mashjari, a Liverpudlian youth, explained, They’d been a corrupt and incompetent body for a long time. They never actually did anything. They never hosted any organizations, any dialogues, any parties whatsoever. They host elections once every ten years. A ten-year term! Most of them supported Ali [Abdullah Saleh].6 Respondents had similar complaints about the YCA in Birmingham. Several interviewees involved in the leadership confirmed that there had been no elections held there before 2007, and that the former president had run the organization like an autocrat. Nageeb, the subsequent head of the YCA, recalled of this period that “They’d pretend to have elections and cancel them at the last minute.” He argued that the former heads had personal relationships with Saleh and that the Yemeni government helped to fund a legal case for the old leadership to retain the property after they ran the organization into the ground (which they eventually lost in court). Nageeb assumed leadership of the Birmingham YCA in 2007 to reform the organization and immediately set about instituting elections every two years. However, he lamented that they were still far from being the fully functional organization that their community members were calling for. Furthermore, constant fighting between North and South Yemen, especially during the civil war of 1994, led to antagonisms between these communities and a separation of their organizations. As Halliday (2010[1992]: xi) writes, “On a visit to Birmingham in October 2007, I was particularly struck by the chasm between the two, each with their own buildings and social centres – the Northerners in one part of town, the Southerners in another.” I observed the ramifications of this division myself in 2012. According to interviewees on 6 At Omar’s encouragement, I interviewed the chairman of the YCA in Liverpool named Abdul Alkanshali. He did not deny being affiliated with Saleh, and he concurred that the organization had significant solvency problems. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press