Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Read online

  Far from calming the situation, the 1966 White Paper only inflamed it. While the loyal Federation government was distraught at being ‘thrown to the wolves’, the insurgents did not trust Britain’s promise to depart; why would London be abandoning such an important defence base, such a booming port city as Aden, without a real fight, they reasoned. The British responded to the continued unrest with toughened security measures. Crater, the over-crowded heart of old Aden where rumours flew and insurgents plotted, buzzed with angry tales of shopkeepers shot for displaying a portrait of Nasser, of poor people arrested for breaking curfews when they had nowhere but the streets to sleep. Starved of reliable intelligence, the British were also resorting to torturing suspects in interrogation centres, until one appalled soldier sent a letter of complaint to The Sunday Times, an eye-witness account of a British soldier beating an Adeni ‘about the head and prodding him in his midriff and genitals, a second soldier hitting him with a tin mug, before a third’ used his fists, which rendered the man unconscious and in need of reviving with a fire hose for a further beating.60 The Red Cross and Amnesty International complained; questions were asked in the House of Commons and Britain’s standing in the world reached a new nadir.

  By March 1967, when the date for the British withdrawal looked firmly set for November, anxious discussions were being held about the wisdom of letting some four hundred children of services families come out to Aden for their Easter holidays. It was eventually decided that a ban would dangerously lower morale. But in June, within a couple of weeks of Aden’s last High Commissioner arriving in the embattled colony, Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Day War triggered a wild speeding up of developments. Britain’s leading role in the establishment of Israel after the First World War meant that she was blamed for this latest and most resounding humiliation of the Arab world. ‘A bullet against Britain is a bullet against Israel’ was the new slogan accompanying stepped up attacks on the British and on Aden’s synagogues. The colony was daubed with the acronyms of the competing nationalist movements - FLOSY and NLF - who, while slugging it out between themselves, continued to attack the British.

  While London was still tinkering ineffectually with its Aden policy, backtracking on removing all security guarantees, and postponing departure until January 1968 on the advice of Saudi Arabia’s King Feisal, far more decisive events were in train. The Radfani tribesmen were up in arms again, imprisoning an unpopular sheikh in his own prison, successfully signalling that the time had come for the tribes of both the protectorates to throw off Britain’s ‘stooges’, their sultans. A mutiny in the Federal army, caused by Britain’s clumsy misjudging of tribal politics and promotion of an unpopular officer, revealed that the army of the fledgling Federation was unwilling to or incapable of either maintaining order or defending the federal government.

  In Crater meanwhile, NLF-directed Arab police mutinied, ambushed a British military patrol, brutally slaughtered three Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, and seized control of the area. This capture of Crater, the heart of the Colony, with the result was the first good piece of news the Arab world had had since its defeat by Israel that Arab celebrations lasted almost a fortnight until, enraged and shamed by the insurgents‘ barbarous treatment of his dead men, a Lt.-Col. Colin Mitchell marched his battalion of impressively piping Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders back into Crater and retook it without any British and only one Arab casualty. ’Mad Mitch‘, as he was admiringly dubbed by the British tabloids, proceeded to re-impose order in a manner that was, by his own clipped boast, ’extremely firm and extremely mean’. The American consul in Aden reported grimly back to Washington that in the space of less than a year ‘British handling of terrorists has evolved from efforts to take them unharmed, to summary justice in the streets’.61 The suspicion that Mad Mitch had contravened his orders in his manner of retaking Crater - especially as he later admitted that the task had required ‘as much smoke and subterfuge and haze to be directed at the people behind me as the people in front’62 - led to his speedy ejection from the army. The episode added up to little more than a heroic but hopelessly archaic echo of Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial past. It was far too late to turn any tide.

  The sultans, the backbone of the new Federal government, were desperately trying to come to terms with FLOSY, a lesser evil than NLF, they calculated, but without success. Some of them took British advice and flew off to Geneva in the hope that the United Nations would be able to help negotiate decent terms for them with the NLF, but the NLF seized the opportunity of their absence to overrun their sultanates, setting up its headquarters in the Fadhli tribe’s capital of Zinjibar, only thirty miles from Aden. Although FLOSY insisted it had the upper hand, it was the NLF that was toppling the sultans, making headway in Aden, efficiently winning over Hadhramaut and the more remote sultanates of Mahra and even the island of Soqotra. On 7 November the Federal Army hammered the last nail in the Federal Government’s coffin by coming out in support of the NLF.

  Ten days before the last British troops left Aden on 20 November, London at last recognised the NLF for the sizeable organisation it had become, as the de facto new power in the land. The interim, until the 30 November departure date, was spent parleying with its representatives at the UN headquarters in Geneva, about how little aid Britain could get away with paying; the promised £60 million was meanly pared down to £12 million.63 Oliver Miles, a Foreign Office aide to Aden’s last high commissioner, has eloquently recalled how bewildered the British were by the pace and nature of events by late 1967, how irrelevant they had become:

  The end was a mystery. The Front for the Liberation of South Yemen, absurdly known as FLOSY, the darling of Cairo, of the United Nations and of a great part of the British Labour Party … was blown away in a few weeks by a mysterious organisation known to us as the NLF, the Qawmiyin. Who were they? How did they do it? How was it that when we eventually sat down with them for our hasty handover negotiations in Geneva, we recognised more than one face we had known in the Federal Army or the armed police, people of whose true purpose we had known nothing?64

  The last thousand British troops departed by 1500 hours on 29 November, just eleven hours before the birth of the ‘People’s Republic of South Yemen’ at midnight on 29–30 November. In the brief, bleak words of one British official in Aden at the time, ‘it was not a moment to bring tears to any eyes, or lumps to any throats’65 - unless you happened to be one of Aden’s thousands of middle-class Indians, for example, or a sultan of one of the former protectorates, humiliated and furious at Britain’s betrayal of her treaties.

  a Mutawakkilite refers to al-Mutawakktl, which means he who depends on God. The Kingdom was formally declared by Yahya in 1926.

  b The Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood was working to establish cells all over the Arab world during the 1940s, aiming at establishing Islamic states. The religious and isolated nature of Imam Yahya’s Yemen made it an ideal target.

  c The Chinese are back in Yemen today, involved in building the planned ring road around Sanaa, the president’s new mosque, the new Foreign Ministry and the Parliament.

  d In about 1948 Imam Yahya had permitted a first small batch of officers to leave Yemen for military training in Iraq.

  e The light top-floor room in traditional Sanaa homes, furnished with low cushions along the wall, low tables and carpets, where discussion and qat chewing take place.

  f In 1937 Aden was officially designated a Crown Colony and its hinterland protectorates divided into the East and West Aden Protectorates - EAP comprising Hadhramaut and Mahra.

  g Like other important Hadhrami families in Singapore, the al-Kaffs had first arrived in Indonesia to trade in spices. The founder of Singapore in 1819, Sir Stafford Raffles, designated a large part of the new colony as an Arab quarter for Hadhramis.

  h The colony’s Indians, Pakistanis and Somalis were given the vote on the grounds of their belonging to the Commonwealth. There were added qualifications of income, property and
length of residence in the colony.

  i Aden became home base therefore to all three services - army, navy and air force - operating to the east of the Suez Canal.

  j News of the NLF was first broadcast from Sanaa four months earlier, in June 1963.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TWO YEMENI REPUBLICS (1967–1990)

  EGYPT’S VIETNAM

  In the space of only five years - between late September 1962 and late November 1967 - the two parts of Yemen rid themselves of both the imams and the British. In theory, the northern Zaydis’ old dream of unity and independence, which had become that of most Yemenis under the influence of Nasser’s Arab nationalism, was attainable at last. In practice, any chance of it had evaporated within days of the Sanaa coup.

  Contrary to popular report, Imam Badr had not perished in the botched tank assault on his palace. After withstanding a siege in his crumbling palace for twelve hours, after running out of cigarettes and low on ammunition, after a fierce argument with his father-in-law about what to do with their families, Badr had decided that if he could only escape Sanaa, he could do what he had done for his father in 1955: make for Hajja in the north, break open the royal arsenal there, and rally the Zaydi tribes to his defence. Badr, in other words, was down but not out.

  At noon on 27 September he and his father-in-law slipped out of the crumbling palace, into a back lane, and knocked on a friendly neighbour’s door. The woman of the house swiftly surmised that they stood a better chance of getting out of town alive if Badr was relieved of his priceless jambiyah and dressed as a common soldier in her husband’s uniform of futa, khaki shirt, turban and cheap jambiyah. Armed with two sub-machine guns, a rifle and a pistol, the pair were soon safely outside the city walls and headed north. Day and night they trudged, stopping off here and there to eat, snatch a few hours’ sleep and some cigarettes, and gather support. By Saturday, 29 September, word was spreading that he was still alive and soon he could count on 3,000 supporters. But his luck changed. With recent injuries such as Imam Ahmad’s execution of the al-Ahmar sheikhs still raw and smarting, many highlanders were relieved to see the back of the imamate and welcomed the revolution. Hajja could not serve as Badr’s loyal heartland because it was already won for the new republic. With a loyal remnant of only 250 followers, the fugitive monarch kept heading north and at last crossed the Saudi border, where he called a press conference.

  The sure proof that Badr was not only alive but willing and, more importantly, able to fight for his inheritance thanks to generous financial backing from the Saudi royals who easily detected their Egyptian archenemy’s hand at work in Yemen’s revolution, helped secure another switch in his fortunes. Many of the more pragmatic and mercenary highland tribes, the Bakil tribes and much of the Hashid federation, now rallied to his cause. Basing themselves in caves in the highest mountains of some of Yemen’s remotest reaches, Imam Badr, his uncle Hassan who had been Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, and a handful of younger relatives embarked on an unwinnable but also unlosable guerrilla war for his restoration. Just as the Saudis, not to mention the British in Aden, had feared, Nasser was pouring troops into Yemen to bolster the new republic.

  For the next five years, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, Jordan, Iran and even Israela tried to counteract the Egyptian push onto the Arabian peninsula by funnelling cash, know-how and arms to the Imam and his Royalists. Alarmed for the safety of Aden and convinced since the national humiliation of the Suez Crisis that Nasser was Hitler reincarnated in Middle Eastern form, Conservative-run Britain was at least as determined as Saudi Arabia that Yemen’s new republic must fail. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan briefly lamented that it was ‘repugnant to political equity and prudence alike that we [British] should so often appear to be supporting out of date and despotic regimes and to be opposing the growth of modern and more democratic forms of government’,1 but the prospect of Nasser establishing a puppet regime in north Yemen and from there heading south to threaten Aden was a great deal more repugnant than championing Imam Badr and his Saudi backers.

  With the tacit approval of first Macmillan’s and then Alec Douglas-Home’s Conservative governments and the active encouragement of MPs known as ‘the Aden Group’,b mercenaries were despatched to the region, flush with Saudi money and arms, to bolster the Royalist war effort by means of ‘keeni-meeni’ - undercover operations like mine-laying, sabotage and gun-running. While Aden played its part by organising arms, intelligence gathering and cash transfers over the border, the plucky Imam’s David-like resistance to the Egyptian Goliath caught the imagination of the British public, generating plenty of eye-witness reporting from war zone. One account described Imam Badr’s HQ in a deep cave in a high mountain near the Saudi border, its entrance protected by an arrangement of ’elaborately cemented stones and boulders‘, its ’royal privy, artfully contrived between the rocks‘, its ’open-air kitchen, over which a cheerful Egyptian prisoner presided as chef’2 and its infestation of mosquitoes and scorpions. Apparently, it was not as comfortably appointed as a previous residence that had taken the reporter seven hours to reach by mule. Another correspondent described being received by Prince Hassan in ‘a roomy cave’3 richly furnished with carpets and cushions and a hubbly-bubbly pipe, just as graciously as he would have been in the prince’s suite at the New York Plaza Hotel. Imam Badr never succeeded in reclaiming his ancient inheritance and removed himself to Saudi Arabia in 1967. Hurt and angered by his hosts’ formal recognition of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1970, he left for Britain, where he died, aged seventy in 1996, in the south London suburb of Bromley.

  The legacy of Nasser’s intervention in Yemen’s revolution was to prove far more durable. The poet of the revolution, Abdul Aziz al-Maqaleh, insists to this day that the coup d’etat of September 1962 had needed no ‘outside push’ from Egypt, but the speed with which Egyptian military arrived in Sanaa, let alone Badr’s credible claim that the conspirators had been in close touch with Egyptian diplomats in Sanaa,4 have considerably muddied the picture. What is certain is that Nasser moved swiftly to exploit the opportunity Yemen’s revolution offered him to restore a prestige that had been badly battered by the collapse of his United Arab Republic (UAR) a year earlier. The establishment of a republic in Yemen was just the new boost his pan-Arab project needed. It was also a deliciously hard punch in the eye for his arch-rival, Saudi Arabia, not to mention a likely means of extending his sway onto the Arabian Peninsula, up towards the Saudi Kingdom’s oil treasure, and down towards the British imperialists in Aden.

  Within three days of the coup, while Imam Badr’s fate was still not certainly known, Anwar Sadat, then the Speaker of Egypt’s National Assembly, was already on a plane bound for Sanaa. There he discovered the freshly promoted Brigadier al-Sallal desperately trying to secure the wavering support of the tribes by welding the four separate tribal armed forces bequeathed him into a useful Republican army. Only twenty-four hours later he was back in Cairo, confidently opining that Yemen’s revolution badly needed Egyptian reinforcements. Convinced of the inexorable might of his country’s forces, Sadat boasted to a Yemeni, ‘we train every soldier to eat serpents. Who in Yemen can face them or stand in their way?’ and was deaf to the Yemeni’s wise warning that Yemen’s tribes were ‘solid as a rock, carved out of the mountain itself… [people] who, in some areas, regard serpents as delicious fruit’.5 Within a fortnight of the coup a hundred Egyptian troops were on the ground in Yemen. A week or so later Nasser believed that a bodyguard for al-Sallal, a regiment of Special Forces and a few fighter bombers would suffice, but within a month he was committing another almost 5,000 troops to the fraternal struggle.

  Nasser might have hesitated if he could have imagined the extent and likely duration of the chaos in Sanaa. A former Yemeni prime minister has recalled his bitter disappointment at the way things were already turning out: ‘It was obvious that chaos, offhandedness, recklessness, ambitions, competition and the rush to jostle for positions and
power were dominating the new political arena in Yemen.’6 Within a month of the coup my father, thrilled and fascinated by his first visit to Sanaa, was filing a more colourful report:

  There’s still no pattern to the piecemeal efforts of the reformers to change a way of life centuries old … Inside the Republican Palace where the antique gilded chairs of royalty are rapidly being scratched into junk-shop condition by submachine guns and rifle-barrels, there is a ceaseless coming and going of sheikhs and their followers indescribably clad in what looks like the wardrobe for a wide-screen production of the Arabian Nights. They contrast oddly with the returned expatriate Yemeni officials in their natty suiting and two-tone shoes bought in Cairo or Aden … Then there are the Egyptian officers with banks of gaudy medal ribbons and shovel peak hats and two Soviet diplomats in slate-grey lounge suits … The new Minister for Justice who, oddly enough, is a slim hawk-faced aristocrat in traditional white robe, turban and with an immense curved dagger at his belt sits down for a moment beside me for a cup of coffee and a chat. ‘What sir,’ I ask, ‘are your plans for the reform of justice in Yemen?’ ‘There is nothing to reform,’ is the reply, ‘What we have to do here is to create.’7

  Outside the palace plastered with posters of al-Sallal and Nasser and teeming with foreigners ineffectually trying to order the chaos to their advantage, were clamouring crowds of ordinary Yemenis desperately trying to get their needs attended to in the only way they knew, by scribbling petitions about taxes, crops, infirmities and land disputes for the ruler to solve, utterly oblivious to the wider geo-strategic power game suddenly being played out in their backwater of a country. After an interview with al-Sallal that was ‘cut short by the steadily mounting tribal chorus in the yard below’, my father emerged to find ‘a bullock beheaded in a pool of gore and a couple of hundred tribesmen from a turbulent place called al-Gauf - looking none too pleased with life’.