Page 119 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

116 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

that by seizing the western end of the pass he could virtually hold PDO io
ransom; and with this in mind he slipped away from Muscat early in July and
hurried back to his lair in the Jabal Akhdar.
Talib ibn Ali in the meantime had made his way across the Hajar to the
vicinity of the Jabal Kaur, where he assembled the tribesmen he had trained at
Dammam. Reinforced by a contingent of Bani Riyam sent by Sulaiman ibn
Himyar, Talib moved upon Bahlah with half his force, while the other half
made for Nizwa. Ghalib ibn Ali emerged from seclusion at Balad Sait and
announced he was resuming the active functions of imam. Bahlah and Nizwa
both fell without a fight to the triumvirate’s forces, and the white niutawwa
banner was broken out over the great fort at Nizwa. Said ibn Taimur, who was
incapable of quelling the uprising, turned to the British for help. Troops and
aircraft were dispatched from Bahrain and Aden, and by the early part of
August the rebellion had been suppressed. Talib, Ghalib and Sulaiman
escaped to the fastnesses of the Jabal Akhdar, where they went to ground with
two or three hundred followers, determined to carry on the fight.
A good deal of fuss was made at the time about the British military interven­
tion in Oman, especially as it occurred so soon after the Anglo-French expedi­
tion to Egypt the previous year. Said ibn Taimur was denounced at the United
Nations and by the ‘non-aligned’ Afro-Asian states as a mediaeval despot
propped up by British imperialism, while the imamate of Oman was depicted
in these same circles as a modern, progressive and enlightened polity whose
independence had been snuffed out by the unholy alliance of despotism and
imperialism. The ‘question of Oman’ was placed upon the agenda of the UN
General Assembly by the Afro-Asian bloc and remained there for several years,
affording occasions for profound disquisitions on Arabian politics by a variety
of delegates from the most unlikely countries. There was rather more point, so
far as the people of Oman were concerned, to the efforts which were made after
1957 to put an end to the insecurity rampant in the interior and to effect an
improvement in the sultan’s administration. An agreement was concluded
between the sultan and the British government in July 1958, whereby the latter
undertook to provide military, financial and technical assistance to reorganize
the sultanate’s armed forces, to improve the country’s communications and
agriculture, and to lay the foundations of medical and educational services. A
regular British army officer, Colonel David Smiley, was appointed to com­
mand the sultanate army, other officers and n.c.o.s were seconded to help him,
and the work of directing economic development was entrusted to Colonel
(later Sir) Hugh Boustead, lately Resident at Mukalla in the Hadramaut, who
before then had spent many years in the Sudan civil service.
The most pressing task was to deal with the hard core of rebels up in the
Jabal Akhdar, who since the autumn of 1957 had been carrying out a series of
raids and ambushes along the length of the Wadi Samail and elsewhere. At first
Smiley and his fellow officers could do little more than contain the rebels and