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Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 129

suppressed, and for a lime it seemed that Qahtan al-Shaabi’s government was
in control of the country. He had dismissed the more radical of his ministers,
notably Abdul Fattah Ismail and Ali Salim al-Baid, and they, in turn, had
thought it wiser to remove themselves from his reach. Abdul Fattah Ismail
went off to Bulgaria for ‘medical treatment’, while Ali Salim al-Baid went to

ground in the Hadramaut. Obviously this was no more than a lull in the battle
for power between the two factions of the National Front, a battle which could
only result, so intense was the hatred between them, in the total eclipse of the
one by the other. Before describing the outcome of the struggle and its
significance for the political future of the whole of southern Arabia, it is
necessary to turn for a moment to the fortunes of the Arab Nationalists’
Movement at this time; for the factional struggle in the leadership of the South
Yemen National Front was both a reflection and a part of the ideological battle

then being waged in the higher councils and the national branches of the
ANM.
The Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 had shattered the faith of the ANM in
Gamal Abdul Nasser as the paladin of its cause. Thereafter he and the regimes
in power in the other ‘progressive’ Arab states were anathematized by the
movement as ‘petty bourgeois’ and worse. The more radical theoreticians of

the ANM, like the Lebanese Muhsin Ibrahim and the Jordanian Nayif
Hawatima, had been arguing for some time that the only way to accomplish
their ultimate aims (the elimination of imperialism and Zionism from the
Middle East and the restoration of Palestine to Arab control) was to widen
these aims to take in the overthrow of capitalism and the traditional social order
in the Arab world, and thereby to attract the support of the Arab masses.
George Habash, the most prominent ANM leader, had remained unconvinced
of the necessity for a mass movement up to the time of the June war. Now, in

the aftermath of that terrible defeat, he changed his mind, declaring that
henceforth the movement should dedicate itself to leading the armed struggle
of the masses against Zionism, imperialism, capitalism and ‘Arab reaction’
alike. To mark his conversion to this more radical policy he effected in
December 1967 a merger of the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine-
the organization he had created three years earlier from the Palestinian mem­

bers of the ANM - with a handful of other splinter groups to form the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Though Hawatima shortly afterwards
joined the leadership of the PFLP, he did not believe that it or the other
branches of the ANM had moved far enough leftwards in their political
orientation. At the general conference of the ANM in August 1968 his faction
within the PFLP, and the radical faction within the movement as a whole,
pushed through a programme as thoroughgoing in its Marxism-Leninism as
that adopted by the National Front at Zinjibar in March. A bitter feud between
Habash’s faction and that led by Hawatima ensued, culminating in the defec­

tion of the Hawatima faction in February 1969 and its transformation into a