People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), also referred to as Democratic Yemen or Yemen (Aden), was a country that existed from 1967 to 1990 as a state in the Middle East in the southern and eastern provinces of the present-day Republic of Yemen, including the island of Socotra.
South Yemen’s origins can be traced to 1874 with the creation of the British colony of Aden and the Aden Protectorate, which consisted of two-thirds of the present-day Yemen. However, Aden became a province within the British Raj in 1937. After the collapse of Aden Protectorate, a state of emergency was declared in 1963 when the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) rebelled against British rule.
The Federation of South Arabia and the Protectorate of South Arabia merged to become the People’s Republic of Southern Yemen on 30 November 1967 and later changed its name to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and became a Marxist–Leninist one-party state in 1969 supported by Cuba, East Germany and the Soviet Union. It was the only communist state to be established in the Arab world. Despite its efforts to bring stability into the region, it was involved in a brief civil war in 1986.
With the collapse of communism, South Yemen was unified with the Yemen Arab Republic (commonly known as “North Yemen”) on 22 May 1990 to form the present-day Yemen. After three years, however, a political crisis arose between the South’s YSP and the North’s GPC and Islah parties after the parliamentary elections in 1993. A year later, South Yemen declared its secession from the North in 1994 and a new, unrecognized secessionist state, the Democratic Republic of Yemen, which ended with its dissolution and the North occupying South Yemen after the 1994 civil war. 23 years later, another attempt to restore South Yemen (as only a country, not a socialist state) with the Southern Transitional Council as its new government continues on since 2017.
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