Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (10 page)

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)
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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 Chequers 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’,
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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.’
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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.’
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One of the protectorate sultans confided his fear of ‘being murdered in the street’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’
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- 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.