Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 9
He soon learned to use the weapon in his hand. By 1956 some 20,000 workers - the majority of them disenfranchisedh northern Yemeni guest-workers plugging the labour gap created by Aden’s rapid expansion - were organised into twenty-one different unions, demanding better working conditions but also loudly championing Egypt in the Suez War of that year, fired up by Nasser’s pan-Arab gospel. Their frequent strikes, especially at the new BP oil refinery and the port, threatened the colony’s prosperity to such an extent that by 1960 the British authorities were insisting that every dispute be referred to arbitration by an Industrial Court ahead of any strike action. The ruling had an unintended consequence; the unions’ growing dynamism was channelled into a political activism that aimed at an end to colonial rule. Before very long, the independence party had split in two. Al-Asnag and his ATUC became the face of Arab nationalist and Nasserite anti-imperialism that wanted the British out of Aden and longed for union with the brand new Yemen Arab Republic. Hassan Ali Bayoomi, meanwhile, led a faction that wanted to continue doing business with the British while slowly preparing for independence. Mindful of Aden’s economic interests, Bayoomi was prepared to countenance Britain’s unpopular plan for an arranged marriage between Aden and the protectorates.
Little by little, from 1950 onwards, Britain had been trying to rid herself of her colonial stigma while securing her stake in the region with a plan to bind the protectorates and Aden into a new country called South Arabia. In its first phase, the myriad mini-sultans and sheikhs of both protectorates were encouraged to join forces in a federation strong enough to face down the rising Arab nationalist tide, which was threatening their interests as much as it was Britain’s. A useful majority of Western Aden Protectorate sultanates was duly toeing the line by 1961, though not the Hadhramaut’s Qaiti and Kathiri sultanates which both dreamed of a sudden oil find that would make Hadhramaut’s independence a viable proposition.
The next phase of the plan, to marry this federation to Aden, was trickier because, in the words of an Adeni novelist, it seemed to have come straight from ‘the corporate brain of Whitehall’43 rather than from any on-the-spot feasibility study. The former protectorates, the British argued, would be enriched and developed by closer links with Aden, and Aden, in turn, would feel more secure if it could rely on the physical protection of the tribes. But from a practical and emotional point of view, the plan was anathema to both parties. The tribes distrusted and scorned the cosmopolitan bazaar cum army camp that was modern Aden, while Adenis, for their part, both feared and despised the archaic and xenophobic tribesmen who encircled them. The more thoughtful among the British in Aden were sympathetic to Adenis‘ distaste for the project. One political officer wittily compared Aden to ’a neurotic maiden being cajoled and prodded into wedding a virile though retarded cousin‘. The colony’s governor, Charles Johnston, one of its keenest advocates, later acknowledged that the scheme was about as workable as ’bringing modern Glasgow into a union with the eighteenth-century Highlands of Scotland’.44 Far removed from the scene, and perhaps ignorant of the gulf of civilisation dividing the protectorates from Aden, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan insisted in his diary that the real problem Britain faced in Aden was ‘how to use the influence and power of the Sultans to help us keep the Colony and its essential defence facilities’.45
The old mistake of fatally over-estimating the power and authority of the sultans whom Britain was subsidising - to the tune of £800,000 a year by that stage - tripped Britain up. The assumption that the tribes led by their sultans represented a constituency that was at least as solidly pro-British as the merchants of Aden, for example, was badly mistaken. Most Aden officials, let alone Macmillan, had no conception of the extent to which Nasser’s thrilling radio propaganda had penetrated the remote wadis and mountain fastnesses, or of the increasing antipathy felt by tribesmen towards many of what Cairo called their ‘puppet’ sultans. Instead, charmed by a world they judged still unadulterated by modern politics, one governed by bravery and honour and personal loyalty, many British officials greatly preferred the protectorates to the brashly materialistic mongrel mix that was Aden. Especially in the wake of north Yemen’s revolution, when Conservative Britain was convinced that Nasser was a new Hitler, this predisposition towards the sultans and their tribes meant that their interests came to take precedence over those of Aden’s merchants and the preservation of the British base. In the later estimation of a British diplomat, ‘the tail had been allowed to wag the dog’.46 The extent to which the still impoverished and under-developed protectorates were able to set the agenda seems astonishing now. While they were of no strategic interest whatsoever to anyone except perhaps north Yemen, Aden - so ideally situated between East and West - was the whole world’s transport hub.
Still, Britain was confident it was getting things more or less right, convinced that the tribes would remain friendly and Aden a thriving port for decades to come. A few months before the start of the Suez Crisis, in May 1956, Selwyn Lloyd, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, had flown into Aden to inform the colony that ‘Her Majesty’s [Conservative] Government wish to make it clear that the importance of Aden both strategically and economically within the Commonwealth is such that they cannot foresee any fundamental relaxation of their responsibilities for the colony’.47 Almost a decade later, after Britain’s defeat in the Suez Crisis, after the strikes of the ATUC, after the revolution in north Yemen, that official line remained unaltered. The ruinous effects of ATUC’s strikes had been neutralised by a threat to break all strikes by inviting the sultans and their tribesmen into town to do the work that needed doing. A few months before the revolution in Sanaa, in early 1962, a Ministry of Defence White Paper had confidently designated Aden the ‘permanent’ headquarters of Britain’s Middle East Commandi and Defence Minister Harold Watkinson had flown in to preside over a week of festivities. A few months after Yemen’s revolution a £3.5 million contract for the construction of new married quarters and army workshops was signed and a year later, a further contract - for £20 million worth of investment, spread over three years - was in place.48
There still seemed to be ample grounds for optimism. In January 1963, lured by some solid constitutional reforms designed to pave the way to full political independence, Aden’s Legislative Council’s reluctance to accede to a federation with the protectorates was overcome at last. Sultans and Adenis were hastily herded into the government of a brand new political entity called the Federation of South Arabia. A daringly complicated new flag was designed - a black stripe for the mountains, two yellow ones for the desert, a green one for the fertile lands and a blue one for the sea, all overlaid with a central white crescent moon and a star - and a South Arabian national anthem composed:
Long live on this Arab land
By the people’s wishes planned
Live in pride and dignity, upright men with conscience free,
All adversity withstand;
Long live, with wills aflame in pursuit of lofty aim,
Valiant in freedom’s name:
Men who’ve won the right to fly the Federation’s flag on high
Now the Arab South proclaim.
A similar note of dogged optimism informs one of my father’s reports about the prospects for the new Federation: ‘If you want to see exactly how the proposed merger between Aden and the Federation of South Arabia is going to work, you have got to read through a big blue book with 297 pages.’ Less than four years later, the last High Commissioner of Aden, Humphrey Trevelyan, the man who presided over Britain’s hasty withdrawal from the colony, did not care how the merger would work. He never bothered to read the big blue book because ‘it was obviously never going to come into force’. On arriving in Aden in May 1967, Trevelyan noted, ‘the only question of importance was whether the country would hold together or be submerged in anarchy’.49 By then his residence, Government House at Steamer Point, boasted ‘two perimeter fences, lights, barbed wire and police, alarm bells behin
d the bed …’50
TO THE BITTER END
What had gone so wrong in the intervening four years?
Less than a year after the joyous proclamation of the Federation of South Arabia, in October 1963, a tribal uprising in Radfan - a mountainous region north of Aden, not far from the border with the brand new Yemen Arab Republic - could have alerted the British to the fact that for all their careful manoeuvrings the tide in southern Arabia was turning to their permanent disadvantage.
The British did not understand that the restive Radfanis were not just over-excited by developments across the border or letting off steam against British sponsorship of an unpopular local ruler. No useful intelligence had apprised Aden of the fact that some 7,000 Radfanis - renowned for their sharp shooting - had been converted to the dream of independence and organised into a reasonably efficient guerrilla force by the very best activists of a new guerrilla movement called the National Liberation Front (NLF)j that had been organising with Egyptian encouragement north of the border, in the Yemen Arab Republic. Thoroughly committed to two key aims - violent rather than merely political struggle, and mobilising the tribes of the protectorates rather than merely the workers of Aden - the NLF was a broad church, open to anyone prepared to take up arms against the British. Its strategy in Radfan was to mobilise the tribes to harass and exhaust the British military with hit and run raids, to wage a war of attrition in which the enemy’s superior technology and even manpower were no real advantage.
By the end of the year, the British had manifestly failed in their aim of ‘convincing the tribesmen that the Government had the ability and will to enter Radfan as and when it felt inclined’.51 Worse still, the violent struggle was being taken to Aden. In December, a hand grenade hurled at the then High Commissioner, Ken Trevaskis, who was a former political officer in the Western Aden Protectorate and the main brain behind the unpopular Federation plan, kicked off what became known as ‘The Aden Insurgency’, provoking the British authorities to impose the first of a series of states of emergencies. The new year brought an all-out three-month effort against the Radfanis. Operation Nutcracker employed three battalions and air-strikes but failed, largely because the British discovered they could not rely on the native Yemeni troops in the new Federal Army. By the spring it was clear that only a massive push by 2,000 fresh troops, flown straight out from Britain and backed up by helicopters, tanks and bombers, would do the trick. The cost to Britain in bad publicity was gigantic, but still there was no understanding that everything had changed with the advent of the NLF, no idea that the NLF even existed.
Radfan was subdued at immense cost, but for those with eyes to see the battle lines were already clearly drawn. On the one hand were the rebellious Radfan tribes and Aden’s army of disenfranchised but unionised and mainly north Yemeni workers and disgruntled intellectuals who had picked up nationalist, socialist and even Marxist notions while studying in Cairo. None of these groups cared twopence for the arduous forging of a new Federation of South Arabia that might one day be independent, because it was so obviously the creature of the colonial imperialist power they were intent on expelling. On the other side were the British, the majority of Aden’s middle class which was dominated by Indian and Jewish merchants, and the sultans of the protectorates, all of whom were still hoping against hope that the Federation of South Arabia’s transition to independence could be managed without detriment to their interests.
The ugly experience of Radfan and the start of the Aden Insurgency forced a change of British tone in 1964. At last, the question of whether there was any point in trying to hold onto Aden was being raised, both inside and outside Parliament. A Chatham House essay entitled Imperial Outpost - Aden: its Place in British Strategic Policy, delicately pointed out that ‘there are undoubted military difficulties inherent in trying to cling on to a base which at present depends upon a large Arab labour force, in the face of strong and possibly violent opposition’.52 It went on to draw the still widely unpalatable conclusion that ‘British defence policy in Aden is at the mercy of Arab events which the United Kingdom has no power to control’.53 The installation of Harold Wilson’s first Labour government in October that year might have generated a greater willingness to swallow that hard truth, and abandon for good any vestige of imperial self-regard, especially since money was tight, but Wilson was unexpectedly firm. Although with Labour at the helm there was not so much bullish talk of defending Britain’s oil interests in the region or of keeping the Soviet-backed Egyptians at bay, Wilson boldly announced: ‘I want to make it quite clear that whatever we may do in the field of cost-effectiveness… we cannot afford to relinquish our world role which, for shorthand purposes, is sometimes called our “east of Suez” role.’54
The Aden Insurgency moved up a gear, albeit in an amateur fashion at first. One insurgent destroyed himself and an empty club room by wiring his explosive wrongly; two more blew themselves up; another hurled the pin of his grenade instead of the weapon itself, and blew off his feet. But in December 1964 the sixteen-year-old daughter of a British air commodore, Gillian Sidey, was killed by a hand grenade hurled into a teenage Christmas party. Another grenade which landed on the dinner table of an officers‘ mess terrace wounded six, and two forces’ open-air cinemas were attacked. The NLF also got busy in Aden; one of their training manuals for insurgents, entitled How to Disturb the British, lists eight different actions to be undertaken, including ‘rendering their air-conditioners useless’, ‘pouring sugar or earth in the petrol tanks of their cars’, ‘puncturing their tyres with nails’, ‘setting fire to their cars, NAAFIs, petrol, and arms stores, and anything British which is inflammable’.55 It was often a game of cat and mouse: the rebels threw grenades at British Land Rovers; the British responded by throwing nets over their tops; the rebels attached fish hooks to the grenades; the British replaced the nets with metal covers; the rebels hurled their grenades into the centre of the vehicles’ spare tyres; the British covered the tyres with dustbin lids. A strict injunction to British troops not to offend the locals by entering mosques, which often doubled up as useful arms caches, combined with school children’s support for the insurgency and their use by the insurgents as cover, and a fresh rash of strikes, rendered the job of suppressing the unrest intensely frustrating. Both Aden and its hinterland were awash with weapons whose flow the British proved powerless to restrict: women helped with gun-running, the ranks of the native army and police forces were being steadily infiltrated by insurgents and their sympathisers.
By 1965, the battle lines were not looking quite so clearly drawn because al-Asnag of the ATUC, frustrated at his friends in the new Labour Government’s refusal to change tack in his favour of independence for Aden, had regretfully abandoned his non-violent stance, broken off links with the British TUC and formed the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) which was closely supported by Egypt. This should have meant easier and closer relations with the similarly Egypt-supported NLF for whom violent struggle was a sine qua non, but it did not, in large part because, by then, the NLF had moved far to the left in its politics. By 1967 FLOSY and the NLF would be at each others’ throats, battling for power among themselves, rendering the soon to be departing British no more than an irritating obstacle, virtually irrelevant.
But in September 1965 there was still no real question of a British withdrawal. Five British schoolchildren, about to fly back to London after their summer holidays, were badly injured by a grenade attack. When, in the same month, the generally liked and respected Speaker of Aden’s Legislative Council, Sir Arthur Charles, was shot dead, it was clearly open season. Another state of emergency was declared and direct rule imposed. Panicking at last by the end of the year, wondering if Britain’s declared aim to retain her military base at Aden might lie at the root of the insurgents’ dislike of the Federation solution, if that might be the real reason why they did not trust the promise of independence, Wilson’s government devoted nineteen meetings and two weekends at Ch
equers to the production of another Defence White Paper in February 1966. It declared that Britain would evacuate her base in Aden, cancel all her defence treaties with Aden and the protectorate sultans, and allow her former colony to achieve its independence no later than 1968.
The volte-face was shocking. The American consul in Aden easily spotted the bomb in the pudding, reporting to Washington that London’s decision to cancel her security guarantees to her former colony amounted to ‘throwing the Federation to the wolves’,56 and to losing South Arabia for the West in the Cold War. A British colonel clear-sightedly noted: ‘The fact is, that having encouraged the rulers [sultans] to take an anti-Nasser line and having turned them into “imperial stooges” hated by the Arab world, we are now about to go back on our word and desert them.’57 Robin Young, the senior political officer in the West Aden Protectorate at the time, noted in his diary: ‘We are clearing out lock, stock and barrel, leaving our friends high and dry and apparently London does not care a hoot what happens thereafter. I was hit for six. I felt as if my tummy had suddenly been removed.’58 One of the protectorate sultans confided his fear of ‘being murdered in the street’.59