Page 138 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 135

more than carry out haphazard raids, although in April 1966 some askaris in
the sultan’s service, who had been recruited by the Front, came near to success
in an attempt upon his life. The number of insurgents was small, no more than
fifty at the start of the rebellion, but it began to grow after the sultan, in reprisal

for the uprising and the attempt on his life, forbade all Dhufaris to go abroad to
work. Deprived of one of their chief means of supporting their families, many
tribesmen took to the jabal to join the rebels.
As time went by, differences began to assert themselves within the Dhufar
Liberation Front. Most of the tribesmen regarded the rebellion as being
directed primarily against the repressive rule of the sultan and the Omani

ascendancy in Dhufar. They were concerned to preserve Dhufar’s
individuality - its linguistic singularity, its religious particularism, its caste
system - and consequently they viewed the revolt as fundamentally a domestic
affair, possibly, but not inevitably, terminating in the secession and indepen­

dence of Dhufar from Oman. The ANM faction, on the other hand, wanted to
make the revolt part of the wider campaign in which the AN M as a whole was
engaged throughout the Arab world. Hence they kept insisting upon the
‘Arabness’ of Dhufar, upon its identity as part of the ‘Arab nation’, and upon
the role it should play in the great Arab struggle against the forces of reaction,
capitalism, imperialism and Zionism. Rhetoric of this kind was unintelligible
to most of the rebel tribesmen, and it did not make any discernible impression

upon them until events outside Dhufar from the latter half of 1967 onwards
tipped the scales in favour of the ANM minority.
The principal event, of course, was the accession of the National Liberation
Front to power in Aden, which put it in a position to supply the Dhufar

Liberation Front with arms by way of the Hadramaut and the Mahra country.
There were other far-reaching results of the NLF’s assumption of de facto
control of the Dhufar rebellion. This was a time, it may be recalled, when the
Arab Nationalists’ Movement as a whole was breaking in two, with the
Marxist-Leninist wing making the running. At a conference in Beirut at the
turn of 1968 the Kuwait branch of the movement was deprived of the control it

had hitherto exercised over subversive activities in the Gulf region on the
grounds that it had exhibited ‘bourgeois tendencies’. A strategy of‘revolution­
ary violence’ for the movement was adopted by the Marxist-Leninist majority,
and at a further conference in July 1968 the membership of the Kuwait branch
was suspended. A new ‘Politburo and Regional Command for the Gulf’ was set

up, and within a brief space of time the intestine quarrels in Beirut were finding
an echo in the leadership of the Dhufar Liberation Front. In the contest for
power that ensued, the Marxist-Leninist faction in the ANM component of
the leadership, backed by the National Front in Aden, carried the day. At the
second ‘congress’ of the DLF held in the Wadi Flamrin in central Dhufar on
I~25 September 1968 a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary programme was
adopted.