Page 135 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

132 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

quick to appreciate the strategic advantages of securing a foothold in southern

Arabia. The Russians provided arms and technical assistance, the Chinese
supplied medical aid and built a road from Aden to the Hadramaut, the Cubans
helped with agriculture and the training of the air force, while the East
Germans organized the security system. This aid from the communist world
played a vital part in enabling the regime to survive and impose its will upon the
country. Without it, and particularly without the modern surveillance
methods, security techniques and improvements in communications intro­
duced by the Russians, Cubans and East Germans, the NF might well have

fallen victim either to those twin scourges of South Arabia, tribalism and
anarchy, or to its own internecine quarrels.
The Marxist-Leninist faction now in the ascendant in the NF had insisted,
virtually from the start of the original uprising in the Radfan mountains on 14
October 1963, that the theory of the permanent revolution had to be applied in
its entirety to South Arabia. If the revolution faltered, if it lost momentum, it

would wither and die. The nationalist revolution to expel the British had to be
succeeded (if not accompanied) by a social and economic revolution to destroy
the power of the sultans, ihesada and the haute bourgeoisie. Any attempt by the
petite bourgeoisie to appropriate the revolution and inherit its fruits had to be
frustrated, and the dictatorship of the proletariat imposed instead. The revolu­
tion could never sleep; and while it proceeded at home it should also be
extended abroad. To the politburo in Aden the most obvious field for its

proselytizing activities was North Yemen, where, exhausted by seven years of
civil war, the republicans and royalists were uneasily co-operating in a
government of national unity. No matter how fragile their reconciliation might
be, however, the Yemenis at least were as one in rejecting the Aden regime’s
pretensions (as represented by its designation of itself as the ‘People’s Demo­
cratic Republic of Yemen’) to political sovereignty over the whole south­

western corner of Arabia. The Yemenis had no wish to subject their ravaged
country to a Marxist-Leninist revolution of the kind that was taking place in
the south, the true nature of which was attested to by the thousands upon
thousands of South Arabian refugees who had fled to the Yemen. All that the
attempts of the NF politburo to stir up disaffection in the north achieved was to
progressively poison relations between the two countries, until in 1972 they

degenerated into open hostilities along the border.
If northwards the outlook for the extension of South Yemen s brand 0
revolution was gloomy, eastwards the land was brighter. Beyond the Had­
ramaut and the Mahra country, a fitful rebellion was going on in Dhufar, whic
promised, if carefully sustained and cultivated from outside, to culminate in
the establishment of another Marxist-Leninist enclave in southern Ara 1a. t

was to the cultivation of this exotic hybrid that the Aden regime began, in t e
spring of 1968, to give serious attention.