Yemeni Emigration History and Political Activism 67 them were intensely active on Yemeni political issues through their involvement in the Southend-based Yemeni Arab Association and Yemeni Benevolent Society.” Community members included supporters of leftist and rightist political factions within Yemen itself, which caused intra-diaspora conflicts (Pennock 2017: 270–71).16 North–South tensions dominated activism as well. According to Halliday (2010[1992]: 108), as the governments of North and South Yemen fought wars internally and with one another, this “made NorthSouth collaborations difficult, and the two unions ceased to operate” in the diaspora thereafter. They also faced the problem of home-country officials who demanded bribes in order to renew migrants’ paperwork and came to Britain demanding gifts (Halliday 2010[1992]: 77–78). This likely exacerbated grievances and mistrust of home-country ruling elites. In the 1980s, funding from municipalities in Britain enabled community figures to set up community associations from each country: for North Yemenis, the Yemeni Immigrants General Union, and from the South, Yemeni Community Associations (Halliday 2010[1992]: 108). These organizations were primarily dedicated to promoting the Yemeni community’s abilities to navigate British society and achieve social mobility, though historian Fred Halliday (2010[1992]) mentions that they did raise several thousand pounds for a flooding emergency in South Yemen in 1989. In the 1990s, members of the Sheffield community reported establishing several organizations to help their fellow migrants and refugees. In the years preceding the Arab Spring, anti-regime activism in both hostcountries was dominated by calls for southern secession. One former southern politburo member I interviewed in Sheffield named Abdo Naqeeb, for instance, fled the sacking of Aden in 1994 by boat with other members of the defeated government. After settling in Sheffield, he and his colleagues engaged in lobbying efforts in 2004 and 2005, meeting with officials in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as with members of Congress in the United States. He was also a proud member of the pro-secessionist “TAJ,” or the Southern Democratic Assembly, which established a headquarters-in-exile in London in 2004.17 Abdo and his colleague Dr. Mohammed al-Nomani explained that they were part of a specific “current” within the former 16 17 Despite conflicts between Yemeni emigrants owing to conflict transmission, as I explain in detail in Chapter 3, the community would at times mobilize when directly threatened, as in the aftermath of a robbery and murder of Yemeni immigrant Ahmed Ali Almulaiki in Detroit (Pennock 2017). Leaders of an informal organization called the Detroit Yemen Society organized hundreds in a demonstration in front of the Detroit police headquarters in order to demand improved police protection. These “incidents likely facilitated the capacity of Yemenis for major political and labor activity in the fall of 1973” (Pennock 2017: 180). A week before our meeting in an Indian restaurant in Sheffield in 2012, Abdo Naqeeb and fellow TAJ member Dr. Mohammed al-Nomani had been in Cairo attending a conference of Yemeni southern secessionists led by Ali Naser Mohammed, a former southern elite. Ali Naser Mohammed lost the southern civil war of 1986 against another faction in the Yemeni Socialist https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press