Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (11 page)

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.

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 Israel
^a
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’.

Nasser soon conceded that the job of sustaining the newborn republic required a great deal more Egyptian assistance, not just military but civilian too; the project of modernising Yemen was indeed about ‘creation’ rather than ‘reform’. Hundreds of Egyptian teachers, doctors and administrators were shipped in to set about fashioning a twentieth-century nation state from scratch, and still the fighting continued. At the end of 1962 some 10,000 more troops were shipped off to Yemen with their president’s grandiose exhortation - ‘We must, under all circumstances, defend our principles in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula against reactionism, imperialism and Zionism!’
⁸
-ringing in their ears. But within a year their number had doubled. Two years into the Yemen campaign, Nasser was thoroughly exasperated by the protracted chaos, but even more so by al-Sallal whom he introduced to Nikita Khrushchev on a Red Sea cruise aboard his yacht, before remarking, ‘I just wanted you to see what I have to put up with.’
⁹

Three years after the revolution, all Yemen’s main ministries remained under tight Egyptian control. By the end of 1964 Egypt’s troop commitment in Yemen had reached 50,000 and it had climbed as high as 55,000
^c
by the end of 1965,
¹⁰
at the cost of approximately 5 million dollars a day.
¹¹
By the time Israel launched its pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, triggering the Six Day War of June 1967, approximately half of Egypt’s ground forces were still bogged down in Yemen,
¹²
very far from where they were needed. What had been conceived as ‘a limited action comprising political, moral and material support’
¹³
had become what President Nasser himself ruefully described as ‘my Vietnam’.
¹⁴

He had only himself to blame. His troops were ludicrously ill-prepared for the task he had set them, in part, because they were stumbling into a country they knew nothing about beyond the fact that it bordered Egypt’s rival for Middle Eastern hegemony, Saudi Arabia. They had expected to be fighting in desert, not mountains. A chronic lack of maps meant that, like the Turks before them, they were forced to rely on untrustworthy locals. Without suitable kit, Yemen’s climate, which could veer between 130 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the mountains, was a horrible handicap.

Initially encouraged by the republican fervour of the Sunnis in Tihama, their generals had seriously underestimated the level of Royalist resistance they would encounter in the Zaydi highlands. Morale plunged. Many had expected to be fighting only a few die-hard Royalists and a lot of Saudis and Jordanians and were appalled to find that, in the absence of a Yemeni army worthy of the name, it was just them against tens of thousands of recklessly brave tribesmen who knew every inch of their treacherous terrain, and whose hit and run raids exposed the clumsy ineffectiveness of their own air attacks and tank assaults. The Egyptian forces were largely composed of conscripts from the Nile Delta area, men of sturdy peasant stock who knew little about fighting and nothing about the rigours of either cold or mountains, let alone fierce warrior tribes. Even today, one only has to mention Yemen to an Egyptian chef or businessman living in London, to elicit the same gruesome tale of a whole platoon of snoring Egyptians having their throats slit at dead of night by nimble,
jambiyah-wielding
Yemeni tribesmen. But Egypt’s officer class must bear as much of the blame for the fact that Egypt’s casualties in Yemen between 1962 and 1967 have been reckoned as high as 20,000. More interested in pocketing their enhanced salaries and trading in cheap electrical goods brought in from Aden than in fighting, they scandalously neglected the welfare of their men.

A revolutionary romantic like the poet al-Maqaleh is still grateful to the Egyptians, still convinced that without them the revolution would have been lost. ‘The Egyptians’ help, and that of Iraq and Syria, meant that the enemies of the revolution couldn’t win - the Egyptians‘ mistakes here have all been forgotten,’ he assured me. But there are many ordinary Yemenis with tales to tell of random Egyptian air-attacks that killed women and children. One highlander recalled for me being four years old in 1966, walking along a wadi near his home, with his mother, his grandmother, some other women from their highland village and some camels, when an Egyptian plane swooped down low over their heads. Instantly, his grandmother and mother threw him to the ground and shielded him with their bodies, causing one of their neighbours to berate them for cowardice. ‘I remember looking up and seeing that plane, and a black hole at the back of it and something moving’, he told me, ‘and the noise of the bombs. And when the plane had gone and we all got up we saw the woman who had called us cowards was dead. All the coloured bracelets on her arm had been broken, so I took them to play with.’