United Yemen Emerging as Key Force in Mideast; Tensions With Saudis Escalate : Arabs: The Islamic north merged with the Marxist south. The new nation plays the nonaligned game.

Almost unnoticed by the world last May, the two Yemens ended a generation of ideological and military warfare and merged into a single country that became a significant new power on the Arabian Peninsula.

The union of Marxist South Yemen and the nonaligned, rigidly Islamic north--which together once formed the ancient domain of the Queen of Sheba--transformed two impoverished, isolated entities into a single country with the largest population (12 million) and the second-largest army (61,000 men) on the peninsula. The move surprised even Saudi Arabia.

As a member of the U.N. Security Council, Yemen suddenly is a key player in Washington’s attempts to gain international support for its campaign against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. What preoccupies Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh these days is not Iraq, however, but his country’s increasingly tense relations with Yemen’s northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, though publicly supporting the merger, has always wanted a weak central government in Sana, the Yemeni capital. It denied Yemen membership in 1981 in the Gulf Cooperation Council in order to keep the country isolated. To maintain influence in the mountainous countryside, it bought off the fiercely independent northern tribal chiefs with payments of up to $200 million a year.

Denied a role in its own back yard, Yemen found partners in the Arab Cooperation Council, which bound Egypt, Jordan and Iraq into a loose fraternity. Unlike Egypt, Yemen was responsive to Hussein’s call to turn the council into a military alliance. After not having been even consulted about the merger of the two Yemens, Saudi Arabia thought it now had cause for worry.

The Saudis’ gravest concern was not Sana’s claim to three southwestern territories, stemming from a war the two countries fought in 1934. It was that a democratized and unified Yemen would challenge the kingdom’s unquestioned dominance in the gulf and would encourage others to agitate against the region’s ruling families for more personal freedoms.

Upwards of 2 million Yemenis worked in Saudi Arabia, forming an important middle class of merchants and skilled laborers. The $2 billion they sent home annually represented Yemen’s major source of foreign currency. (Its only other income came from rock salt and modest oil reserves discovered in the late 1980s.)

When Saleh criticized Saudi King Fahd’s decision to call in American troops and issued a condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that was less than wholehearted, Saudi Arabia retaliated. The privileges that had given Yemenis easy access to Saudi Arabia and had enabled them to start businesses with few restrictions were withdrawn, and the Yemenis were ordered home. At last count, more than half a million Yemenis had been expelled, causing devastating economic hardship for Saleh’s government.

“For the Saudis to take such an extreme step obviously means they’re very serious about this crisis,” said Gregory Gause, assistant director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute. “It also means that in the longer term, Saudi Arabia may see threats coming from a united Yemen.”

Saleh’s orientation is distinctly pro-Western, and the open society he has nurtured since the merger stands in contrast to the traditions of the gulf states. Yemen has 25 newspapers, 31 political parties and a 139-seat Parliament that gives fair representation to the less-populated south.

But Saleh plays the nonaligned game so skillfully, courting all suitors who arrive bearing gifts, that many Middle East watchers are never quite sure just what his political allegiances are.

Yemen’s aid donors and contract workers, in fact, traditionally have been the most diverse in the Third World. The international airport in Sana was started by the Soviet Union, completed by West Germany and expanded by China. At one end of the runway a few years ago stood two government workshops. In one, American technicians taught Yemeni pilots the intricacies of the F-5; in the other, Soviet instructors worked with the fliers on MIG-17s and MIG-21s.

The air-defense system that Yemen designed itself consisted of a 20-millimeter Vulcan gun made by General Electric mounted on a Soviet BTR-152 personnel carrier. But such an oddity attracted hardly a second glance in a country that had Italian mechanics, Dutch doctors, Pakistani pilots, Filipino waiters, Egyptian teachers, Saudi financial sponsors, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers from North and South Korea, China and Taiwan.

While the Yemenis’ neighbors became the home of sparkling new cities and jet-setting oil barons, the two Yemens remained dirt-poor and traditional, an outpost at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula that was important only because of its strategic position. In 1982, according to the World Bank, the nonaligned northern part had the worst trade balance in the world, exporting $30 million worth of goods--mostly rock salt and the tobacco-like narcotic leaf, qat --and importing $2 billion worth.

When God divided up the resources of the gulf region, Yemenis like to say, “We got shortchanged.”

The Yemenis, though, have maintained a distinct cultural identity, often walking through towns with curved daggers in their belts and rifles over their shoulders. They are a tribal people, among the toughest and most self-reliant in the Arab world, and are considered excellent soldiers, having had much experience at warfare.

Ottoman Turks spent 400 years in Yemen and never managed to establish administrative control over many areas. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt sent 50,000 troops to Yemen in 1962 in an effort to topple the Saudi-backed monarchy and managed nothing better than a stalemate. He brought his soldiers home, after five years, having lost 35,000 men.

“How could you fight a war against the Yemenis?” an Egyptian officer once asked. “They’d sneak up to your camp in the middle of the night and cut your throat just for the fun of it.”

The two Yemens fought a border war in 1979, and a bloody civil war ravaged South Yemen in 1986. Oman battled guerrillas from South Yemen’s Dhofer Liberation Front for 15 years before putting down the rebellion in the early 1980s and signing a nonaggression pact with Aden that was brokered by Kuwait.

Whether the merger of the two Yemens is solid remains to be tested. But in the gloomy scenario of the Middle East, where hostilities are allowed to fester for generations, Yemen stands as a striking exception. It is a place where tensions have been defused and democratic roots planted.