People, it seems, are everywhere. The narrow streets of Sana’a teem with them – mostly men, of course. Nearly all the men carry a janbiya, a large curved dagger in their belt. And almost all of them either owns or has ready access to a gun in this, the capital of the Arab world’s second-poorest country.

A short distance away, President Ali Abdullah Saleh addresses delegates at an Arab democracy conference. ‘Democracy is the choice of the age for all peoples, and it is the lifeboat for political regimes, especially in the Third World,’ he tells them.

Indeed, ‘democracy’, or at least the widespread perception of it, has served the former soldier, who has ruled in Sana’a since 1978, well. When he took his Yemen Arab Republic (commonly known as North Yemen) into a unification process with the People’s Democratic Republic (South Yemen) in 1990, it must have seemed to many in the country that the new state was set to enjoy a rosy future: peaceful integration, political pluralism, press freedom, guarantees of local autonomy, nearly all political prisoners freed, swiftly improving relations with many of its Arab neighbours and the West, and the prospect of prosperity from newly discovered oilfields.

By the time the first multiparty elections took place in April 1993, however, the country had already begun to fall apart. Exactly one year later, civil war began. The Socialist Party which had ruled South Yemen until reunification took up arms in a bid to secede and restore the old two-state set-up.

The rebels were easily crushed in the end when Washington intervened to dissuade the Gulf Co-operation Council states from continuing their support. President Saleh’s regime – once in America’s bad books for failing to back the first military operation in Iraq in 1991 – has been seen on Capitol Hill as a trusted ally ever since.

As Sana’a has grown closer to Washington, so has the prospect of a rosy future. The Socialist Party’s defeat in the civil war soon led to its decline and the erosion of many of the social and civil liberties the southern provinces were promised would be maintained after unification. The rise in importance of Islah, an Islamist party which is now the principal opposition to Saleh’s General People’s Congress, saw Shari’a become the ‘only source’ of the country’s legislation. As the 1990s progressed, press freedom was reduced, the conduct of subsequent elections was characterized as ‘pork-barrel politics’ by an American NGO, the country’s jails again filled up with political prisoners and, as the IMF took hold of the country’s economic management, prices rose and people got poorer.

Two other developments characterized the 1990s: the increased kidnapping of foreigners, usually by people using them as bargaining chips to get what they wanted from the Government; and the presence of ever-larger numbers of men who had either fought in Afghanistan against Soviet forces or who came to study at one of the country’s many Islamic schools. The Yemeni countryside, over much of which central government held little control, proved an attractive venue for jihadis (holy warriors) from all over the Muslim world.

By 11 September 2001 the jihadis, in co-operation with local extremist groups, who had begun to use the kidnapping tactic themselves to further political demands, were reportedly using Yemen as a major base of operations, resulting most spectacularly in the sinking of an American warship in Aden harbour. But the events of that day brought a sharp increase in American pressure on the Government to crack down on their presence. A long-threatened measure to shut down the Qur’anic schools, a stronghold of Islah, began to be carried out, and security co-operation with Washington grew to the extent that Yemen is now described as a principal ally in the ‘war on terror’. US security advisers and intelligence agents are allowed to operate in the country and Yemen boasts one of the Majority World’s most sophisticated (and expensive) electronic surveillance networks at its ports and key installations. More sinister was the assassination by US undercover forces of six suspected al-Qa’ida fugitives in Marib in October 2002.

But there is a danger all this could backfire on the Government. Despite its oil, Yemen remains a poor country, with one of the fastest-growing populations, and fastest depletion of water reserves, in the world. And there are believed to be three guns for every one of its 19 million inhabitants.

Fact file

Leader	President Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1978. Has considerable executive powers.
Economy	Gross national income (GNI) per capita $490 (Saudi Arabia $8,460, Canada $22,300).
Monetary unit	Riyal.
Main exports	Crude oil, foodstuffs. Yemen has reasonably fertile soil and relatively high levels of rainfall, which gives it the best conditions for agriculture on the Arabian Peninsula, though it is more suited to fruit and vegetables than grain. Agriculture has traditionally employed two-thirds of the workforce. The main crop for the domestic market is qat, a popular mild narcotic, which takes up around a quarter of the irrigated land.
People	19.3 million. People per square kilometre: 36 (Britain 245).
Health	Infant mortality 79 per 1,000 live births (Saudi Arabia 23, Canada 5).
Environment	Over-use of water resources and deforestation are long-term problems. The sinking of a French oil tanker by jihadi extremists two years ago has left 80km of coastline badly polluted.
Culture	Almost entirely Arab (98%).
Religion	Muslim (65% Sunni, 35% Shi’a).
Language	Arabic. Non-Arabic dialects are spoken in the far south-east and on the Indian Ocean island of Socotra.

Country ratings in detail

Income distribution	There is a small wealthy élite but the vast majority of the population is extremely poor.
Literacy	46%, but only 25% of women can read and write, compared with 68% of men.
Life expectancy	60 years (Saudi Arabia 72, Canada 79).
Freedom	A plethora of political parties and what is still one of the freer press environments in the Arab world, but the expectations of the early post-unification period have been disappointed.
Position of women	Women have the vote and there are a few women MPs. But the overall position has declined in recent years, particularly in Aden and the southern provinces. Few girls complete schooling.
Self-reliance	Self-sufficient in oil. Most other things have to be imported, including grain.
Previously reviewed	1993
New Internationalist assessment	For all its problems, Yemen is the only state in the Arabian Peninsula with democratic political institutions and a functioning civil society. The President’s rule is effectively unchallengeable, though, even without his party’s huge parliamentary majority.