Page 134 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 131

houses without warning or cause, expelling their owners at gunpoint. Several
of the estates occupied in this manner were subsequently transformed into
agricultural communes on the Chinese model. The intifad method was also
used to confiscate commercial undertakings and fishing vessels.

Needless to say, the suppression of all political dissent was pursued with
the same ruthlessness. With the ancien regime already destroyed, the NF
proceeded, after the normal fashion of revolutionaries, to devour its own.
Faisai Abdul Latif al-Shaabi was shot dead in April I97°> allegedly while
trying to escape from confinement, and others were imprisoned or executed
for ‘crimes against the state’. Change followed change in the closed circle of

the politburo, the reasons for which - personal or factional vendettas, ideo­
logical rifts, tussles for office - we can only surmise, since they never emerged
into the light of day. If there was any logic to these successive upheavals it
lay in their respective outcomes, which was to move the regime politically

ever further to the left - as happened, for instance, in August 1971, when
the defence minister, Ali Muhammad Nasir, replaced Muhammad Ali
Haitham as prime minister.
That the politburo of the NF intended its power to be absolute was made
abundantly clear when, on 30 November 1970, the third anniversary of inde­
pendence, it changed the name of the country, after the example of Hawatima’s

PDFLP, to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and promulgated a
constitution which purported to vest sovereign authority in a Supreme Council
of the People, elected by popular councils or soviets throughout the country.
Since such local councils were, for the most part, non-existent and could not

therefore elect a supreme council, the members of the council were nominated
instead by the politburo. When the council eventually met its sole accom­
plishment was to transfer all power, legislative, executive and judicial, to the
politburo. Popular participation in government remained as much a mockery
as did the lofty declarations in the constitution about personal liberties, basic
rights and equality of status.

Towards the world outside the regime behaved in a highly predictable
manner. It condemned the conservative Arab states outright as corrupt, reac­
tionary autocracies, it sneered at die ‘progressive’ Arab states for their petit
bourgeois character (Libya alone was exempted from abuse), and it aligned

itselt wholeheartedly with the terrorist ‘rejection front’ of the Palestinian
movement. It was regarded in return with loathing by almost every Arab
government, even by its closest neighbour, the Yemen Arab Republic to the
north, union with which had been one of the ostensible aims of the NLF’s
struggle to end British rule in South Arabia. Beyond the Middle East the
National Front established diplomatic relations with, among odiers, North

Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba, and declared its support for liberation
movements everywhere. It courted the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s
Republic for the economic and military aid they could furnish, and both were