Page 133 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

130 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

rival body, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The
schism spread rapidly throughout the entire ANM, splitting its branches in
every Arab country beyond hope of repair, and destroying whatever cohesion
the organization may once have possessed as a pan-Arab movement.
It was against this background that the struggle for power in the National

Front in South Yemen was rejoined in the first half of 1969. The economic
distress caused by the drastic decline in Aden’s entrepot trade through the
closing of the Suez Canal and the flight of its mercantile classes, together with
the armed uprisings and expropriations of agricultural estates and commercial

property, had brought the regime of Qahtan al-Shaabi into increasing unpopu­
larity. Confusion and disaffection reigned throughout the army and the civil
service as a result of a succession of ideological purges and counter-purges,
while the populace at large had grown more and more disenchanted with the
fruits of the revolution. It was a situation of which the Marxist-Leninist faction

in the NF, most of whose leaders had made their way back from exile in the
spring of 1969, were ready to take full advantage. On 22 June 1969 the
Marxist-Leninist faction led by Abdul Fattah Ismaii, Ali Salim al-Baid and
Salim R.ubayyi Ali, the former guerrilla commander in the Abyan district,

ousted Qahtan al-Shaabi from office and placed both him and his cousin, Faisal
Abdul Latif, the acting prime minister, in confinement.
A new government was formed, with Muhammad Ali Haitham, a so-called
‘moderate’ Marxist, as prime minister, Ali Salim al-Baid as foreign minister,
and Muhammad Salih al-Aulaqi, another reputed ‘moderate’ Marxist, as

minister of defence. Actual power, however, was exercised by a presidential
council consisting of Salim Rubayyi Ali as president, Muhammad Ali
Haitham, Muhammad Salih al-Aulaqi, Ali Ahmad Nasir al-Bishi (‘Ali Amar’,
the one-time NLF commander in the Radfan), and Abdul Fattah Ismail,
now designated secretary-general of the party. It was a collective leadership of

dedicated Marxist-Leninists, all young, all utterly ruthless and all fiercely
determined to turn South Yemen into a full-blown Marxist dictatorship. What
followed was an intensification of the repressive measures which had been the
lot of the South Yemenis since independence. The army was purged yet again
to rid it of any officers or men whose political outlook or tribal affiliations miglit

render them less than abjectly submissive to the regime. At the end of 19 9 1
Ahmad Nasir, who had in the interim succeeded Muhammad Salih al-Au aqi
as minister of defence, was himself replaced in that office by Ali Muhanuna

Nasir and appointed commander-in-chief of the army, the more effective yw
supervise its politicization. To hasten the demoralization of the army,
people’s militia (the ‘Red Guards’) was expanded, to act both as a coun
weight to the army and as an instrument of surveillance and intimidation
towns and countryside. Agrarian reform was pushed forward in a pa^rucu

unscrupulous manner by a series oiinlifadat - in essence, government insp
jacqueries, whereby gangs of peasants led by agitators seized lan o