Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (9 page)

In the end, Ingrams’ mission to Hadhramaut succeeded where those of his fellow political officers in the Western Aden Protectorate failed for two reasons. The Hadhrami custom of migrating in search of work and wealth to places as far-flung as British-ruled Singapore or Malaya and Dutch-ruled Indonesia had given enough of the natives, essentially those of the educated
sayyid
class, a cosmopolitan and even western outlook. Quite apart from developing a taste for European cars and bicycles and gardens and telephones, for both Indonesian and British Raj architecture, they had thrived under colonial rule abroad and seen at first hand how peace and order might promote prosperity in their own land.

The wealthy
sayyid
al-Kaffs, who had made their fortune in Singapore
^g
by the end of the nineteenth century, were sufficiently influential by the time Ingrams arrived in Hadhramaut for a German explorer to dub them ‘the Medicis of the Hadhramaut’
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and Freya Stark noted that, ‘they run the Sultans, the schools, the trade, the army - in fact, all that there is to run’.
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Without Sayyid Abubakr al-Kaff’s enthusiastic support and active co-operation, without the large amounts of his money needed to sweeten the pill of compliance with the truce, Ingrams’ efforts would certainly have been in vain. Although much impoverished by the Japanese capture of Singapore during the Second World War, Sayyid Abubakr al-Kaff proudly accepted a knighthood for his services to the British Empire from a girlish Queen Elizabeth II on a visit to Aden in 1954, but only once a special dispensation had been granted him. On the grounds that a Muslim was forbidden to abase himself before anyone but God, he had refused to kneel before Her Majesty.

By the early 1960s, however, when my journalist father visited the Wadi Hadhramaut, to stay at Sayyid al-Kaff’s comfortable palace with its grown English garden and swimming pool, al-Kaff was disillusioned with the British. Like the Dutch explorer of the Hadhramaut, Daniel van der Meulen, who discovered that ‘the thorny subject of the Palestinian troubles’ was familiar ‘even in the remotest corner of Arabia’,
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my father was treated to a bitter tirade against Britain’s sponsorship of Israel. Like many Hadhramis at the time, the old
sayyid
also resented Britain’s failure to capitalise on the famous truce with more investment in the region. The sad fact was that the ravages of a mid-1940s famine had undone much of his good work. Hideous privation had helped to turn many against the colonial power that had proved incapable of alleviating their suffering and the names of both Ingrams and al-Kaff had become tarnished in the process.

But Hadhramaut, labouring under the yoke of
sayyid
supremacy as well as that of British rule, had long been showing signs of blazing a trail that would eventually, by many twists and turns, lead to them casting off both these burdens. Restricted by
sayyids
and British rule and yet more exposed than Yemenis of any other region to different ways of thinking and being, it was logical that the first stirrings of a movement for political reform and independence in the region should have sprouted among émigré Hadhramis, even before the First World War. Irritated by the stranglehold that the more established
sayyid
Hadhramis were exerting over economic opportunities,
non-sayyid
Hadhrami émigrés in the Dutch East Indies were the first Yemenis to organise themselves into a political movement, Irshad. A bitter contest between
sayyids
and
non-sayyids
erupted into violence on Java in 1933 when a crowd of
sayyids
barged their way to the front of a mosque, asserting their inalienable God-given right to occupy pride of place; the resulting clash left two
sayyids
and six members of Irshad dead, and the mosque scattered with knives and stones and sticks. By the time Freya Stark was roaming Hadhramaut, the émigré schism was being powerfully felt back home. The
sayyids
she encountered were voicing their distrust of Irshad, and successfully misrepresenting the movement to the British in Aden as a dangerous Bolshevik threat to Aden and the British Empire.

In time, the British realised that they were being manipulated by Hadhramaut’s
sayyids
, that treating Irshad members’ calls for improved access to education and equal opportunities as criminal offences was unfair and counter-productive.

In the dimming light of her declining empire and shrinking resources, Britain would be forced into a good many more about-turns in South Arabia.

Reluctant she may have been to acquire the protectorates, but Aden itself was an entirely different matter. Strategically situated from the point of view of British oil interests in the Gulf, with its Khormaksar airfield soon handling more traffic than any other RAF base in the world and its harbour receiving more ships than any other except New York and Liverpool, Aden remained a valuable jewel in the British crown, one worth making concessions to keep.

Accordingly, the colony acquired a parliament, the Legislative Council, in 1947, although not until 1955 was permission granted for four of its eighteen members to be elected. Permission to establish trade unions had been granted in 1942, but unions which crucially emphasised their members‘ group identity first as industrial workers and then as Yemenis (whether guest-workers from the north of the country or local Adenis), rather than as members of a particular tribe, did not appear until the early 1950s. The first to organise were employees at Britain’s gigantic joint forces base in Aden. Aden Airways workers, led by the softly spoken Abdullah Majid al-Asnag, soon followed suit. Al-Asnag’s first meeting with Aden Airways’ British management did not go well, as he recalled: ‘We were all scared to death as we sat, numbed and silent, opposite the management. For three minutes, we were too terrified to speak but glanced from one to the other, waiting for someone to pluck up the courage and break the silence. Finally, the Labour Commissioner rose to his feet and said: “You called this meeting, Why don’t you get up and speak?”’

He soon learned to use the weapon in his hand. By 1956 some 20,000 workers - the majority of them disenfranchised
^h
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’
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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 Command
ⁱ
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’.
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By then his residence, Government House at Steamer Point, boasted ‘two perimeter fences, lights, barbed wire and police, alarm bells behind the bed …’
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