Yemen is a highland state whose war runs on along the coast

Sanaa lies high, in a highland that has long carried Yemen politically. Aden lies on the sea, the port of the south. In 1990 the state put both places into one country and left the capital in the mountains. The war has shown that mountains and coast are not an administration by themselves.

The country data give 41,773,878 inhabitants and 527,968 square kilometres. Saudi Arabia lies to the north, Oman to the east. To the west the land drops to the Red Sea, to the south to the Gulf of Aden, and farther east to the Arabian Sea. Arabic is the official language. The Yemeni rial is the currency, but it is no longer a single treasury. Read Yemen as one patch on the Arabian Peninsula and you miss the distance between Sanaa and Aden.

Sanaa in the mountains, Aden on the sea

Sanaa is a highland city. For a long time its politics were the politics of the mountains, of the tribes and of a north that could not be governed from the sea. Aden was the opposite: a port, marked by the British period, then capital of the south, open toward the sea and far from the highland. The road between them is not only a distance. It runs from a height that holds the country together down to a coast that lives by trade and by the strait.

At the Bab al-Mandab strait the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden. Yemen lies on that narrows without controlling it alone. Farther east the Hadramaut is another country again: wadis, coast, a diaspora across the Indian Ocean. Socotra, out in the sea, speaks Soqotri, its own Semitic language, and still belongs to the Yemeni state. The capital in the mountains holds these edges only if the coast helps to govern. That is precisely what has failed.

Unity did not close the gap

In 1990 the Yemen Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen united. Sanaa became the capital of the joint state, Aden the economic city of the south. On paper the distance was now an internal relation. In practice north and south remained different political societies, with different memories of the state, the army and property. A constitution can name a capital. It cannot force the highland and the port to understand themselves as the same office.

The war has separated Sanaa and the highland from Aden and the southern coast. The Houthi movement controls the constitutional capital and wide parts of the mountains. The internationally recognised government is tied to Aden and the south. Front lines shift. The two poles of the geography do not. Anyone who speaks today of the Yemeni capital has to say which force sits in Sanaa and which one claims the port in Aden. The union of 1990 has not vanished from the map. It is ungoverned.

Sanaa remains the name of the capital. The country is governed from places that do not accept each other as the same office.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

One rial, two treasuries

The Yemeni rial is still the name of the money. The treasury is not. The recognised central bank works from Aden, while in Sanaa a parallel administration carries the same name of the currency and not the same policy. For a trader this is not a constitutional sentence. It is the rate at which he reckons bread, fuel and remittances. A state that no longer issues its currency from one place has already lost the capital, even if the constitution goes on naming it.

Saudi Arabia and Oman remain the land neighbours, and the sea remains the other border. None of these edges replaces the missing centre. Yemen is not poor in situation: a narrows, a port, a highland, an island with its own language. It is poor in an administration that could hold that situation from one office. As long as Sanaa and Aden run two treasuries, unity is a map and not a budget.

Yemen wrote its capital into the highland and did not lose its coast. What it lost is the single treasury that would make both places the same state. The constitution names Sanaa. Aden holds a port and a bank. Between them the war lies as geography.