Ali Salem al-Beidh

On 21 May 1994, as the South's military position weakened, al-Beidh proclaimed the creation of the Democratic Republic of Yemen on Aden Radio and served as its only president until 7 July. After fleeing to Oman he withdrew from politics for about fifteen years, then resumed political activity in May 2009, on the eve of the 19th anniversary of unification, with a televised speech from Kitzbühel, Austria, calling for the restoration of South Yemen. The speech listed as grievances the violation of the 1990 unity terms, the illegal seizure of southerners' lands and businesses, and the forced retirement or firing of former PDRY soldiers, officers and officials, described the south as under military occupation, and was directed particularly at the widening Southern Movement. His speeches and statements circulated widely in the south, where protesters displayed his image, and at the Abyan gathering of Southern Movement components in May 2009 those groups agreed to form a provisional council chaired by him. Yet the movement had a fluid, decentralized leadership from its inception, so accepting him as representative of the whole remained limited. Differences over non-violent tactics and rivalries among its organizations persisted, and the armed southern figure Tariq al-Fadhli publicly disputed that al-Beidh spoke for the Southern Movement or for South Yemenis as a whole, labelling him a member of the ancien regime and debating his relevance. Because Oman had granted him residency on condition that he abstain from political activity, his return to southern politics cost him the right to remain there. In 2009 he moved to Vienna and began political activity aimed at restoring the southern state, then moved to Beirut to widen his media and political activity and to lead one of the most prominent factions of the Southern Movement demanding the return of the southern state to its pre-1990 status. In exile he acted in many ways as the south's international spokesman and had long cultivated contacts within the influential community of expatriate South Yemenis. Around 2010 the movement combined those who looked back to the secular and socialist past with a south that had undergone re-Islamization since unification, and his position fell well short of an organizationally unified leadership of the south. In 2017 the Southern Transitional Council formed under Aidarus al-Zoubaidi as a faction of the Southern Movement pursuing southern independence separately, and in December 2025 it launched an offensive that captured most of the former South Yemeni territory, only to lose most of it, including Aden, to a Saudi-backed counteroffensive in early January 2026. Al-Beidh was not at the centre of that turn, and he died in a hospital in Abu Dhabi on 17 January 2026, aged 86.