Page 131 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

128 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

bourgeoisie, who were deemed incapable of bringing about a national, democra­
tic revolution, and entrusted instead to popular councils in each governorate.

These in turn would elect a supreme popular council to govern the country.
Until then power would continue to reside with the general command of the
National Front. The programme also decreed that, as the burden of protecting
the revolution and supporting the government was too heavy for the army to
carry unaided, people’s militias would be formed to assist it and generally to
advance the cause of socialism. To ensure that the army remained obedient to
the party’s commands, and paid due heed to socialist doctrine, its activities

were to be monitored by political commissions. Finally, as the general com­
mand saw it, South Yemen constituted on the political map of Arabia ‘a
revolutionary democratic islet in the middle of a reactionary imperialist sea’. It
was the PRS Y’s bounden duty, therefore, to dedicate itself to the extension of
the socialist revolution to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the Gulf shaikhdoms.
Beyond Arabia, naturally, it would align itself with the Palestinian resistance

movement and with ‘progressive’ states like Cuba and North Vietnam.
Fired by the triumph of the extreme left at the Zinjibar congress, the NF
zealots in the Hadramaut intensified their programme of confiscations and
purges. The most rabid of these fanatics were the Maoists, many of whom were
refugees from the former Hadrami community in Zanzibar, where they had
been converted to Chinese communism some years earlier. Those who sur­
vived the general massacre of the Arab population of the island by the Zan­

zibari Africans in 1964 made their way to the Hadramaut, where they set about
recruiting others to their way of thinking. The best known of them was Faisal
al-Nairi al-Attas, a renegade from thesackz class, who had paid more than one
visit to China by 1967. In the early months of 1968 he and his fellow Maoists
embarked upon a campaign of calculated violence designed to achieve the total
transformation of the Hadramaut into something approaching the Chinese

People’s Republic. The attempt was a failure. The revolutionaries’ excesses
angered not only many of the tribes but also the remnants of the former federal
security forces, so that fighting broke out all over the Hadramaut. In Aden
senior officers of the regular army, alarmed and disgusted by the radical
programme adopted by the fourth congress, attempted a minor coup d etat.
Although the attempt misfired, it served to intimidate the Marxist ministers in

the government and to strengthen Qahtan al-Shaabi’s position. Troops were
sent to the Hadramaut to help restore order, and by early June the Maoists an
their allies had been subdued and Mukalla and the other principal towns ree

from their control. r
Disaffection persisted in much of South Yemen throughout the summer
1968. There were outbreaks of insurgency in the western governorates, w ic

were supported, and in some cases incited, from outside the country y
former federal rulers, along with Emigre tribesmen and adherents o
who had taken refuge in the Yemen or Saudi Arabia. The revo