Jarallah Omar

Jarallah Omar al-Kuhali was a Yemeni politician, intellectual, and guerrilla fighter. He was trained in Islamic law, but in the 1960s he turned towards Marxism. He was a political prisoner from 1968 to 1971 and participated in the civil war between North Yemen and South Yemen as a leader of the National Liberation Front, a politico-military coalition affiliated to the socialist government of the South. He escaped to the South after his forces were defeated by then-North Yemeni President and current unified Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Omar became a member of the Politburo of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), the ruling party in the South, and was named minister of culture in the government of a newly unified Yemen in the early 1990s. He resigned his cabinet post and went into exile shortly before a failed attempt by former southern politicians to re-establish a "Democratic Republic of Yemen" in 1994. The president of the ephemeral secessionist regime, Ali Salim al-Baidh, was a former ally of Omar in the factional disputes within the YSP in 1986. When Omar returned to the country in 1995, he developed a reputation as a leading advocate of human rights and political freedoms in the authoritarian political climate of Yemen.