Page 139 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

136 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Dhufar was to be transformed into a proletarian state according to the
principles of‘scientific socialism’ - whatever the DLF thought these to be (At
the ANM conference on the Gulf in July the Kuwaiti delegate, in an endeavour
to rebut the charge of bourgeois recidivism levelled by the Marxist-Leninists
had reasonably but unavailingly argued, ‘The Movement has adopted scientific

socialism, but we do not yet know exactly what it means . . .’.) The insurrection
in Dhufar was declared to be not only part of a wider revolution by the masses
of Arabia against ‘imperialism, colonialism, Arab reaction and the rotten
bourgeoisie’, but also part of the national liberation movement throughout the
Arab world, and, indeed, of the armed struggle of the peasantry and the

proletariat in Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere. To succeed in Dhufar, so the
DLF programme proclaimed, the revolution had to be spread to all parts of
Arabia, it had to be unified under the leadership of ‘the proletarian left’, to be
inspired by ‘correct ideology’, and to follow a strategy of ‘constant struggle,
multiplying its revolutionary efforts against colonialism and the bourgeoisie,
overturning the old social order, and creating a state of poor workers in place of
the bourgeois reactionary state’. Such was the language of the communique

issued at the end of the congress, a document stuffed with the dreary vul­
garities and stale tautologies of standard Marxist-Leninist literature yet which
nevertheless purported to speak in the name of the simple and untutored
tribesmen of Dhufar. To celebrate the transmogrification of a local tribal revolt
into an ideological struggle of heroic proportions, the DLF was solemnly

renamed the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf.
The old leadership of the movement was dismissed, and several members,
including Musallim ibn Nufl, were expelled altogether as ‘bourgeois deviation-
ists’. Control over PFLOAG was henceforth exercised by a small Marx­
ist-Leninist politburo, or ‘general command’, headed by a Qara, Muhammad
Ahmad al-Ghassani (who went under thenom de guerre of Talal Saad Mahmud),
in the post of ‘secretary-general’. Others among the twenty-five members of
the politburo who were to achieve eventual notoriety were Ahmad Ali Suhail of

the Bait Qatan and Salim Musallim al-A war of the Bait Said.
For operational purposes, PFLOAG divided Dhufar into three comman s.
the western region adjoining South Yemen, which included the border tow^s

of Madhub and Dalkyut, the coastal town of Rakhyut and the hinterlan , e
central region covering the capital, Salalah, the port of Raisut and the plateau
of the Jabal Qara; and the eastern region, which took in the coastal °
Mirbat, Taqa, Sudh and their hinterland, along with Darbat an Ja
Samhan. Units of the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ were assigned to eac regl ’
and a ‘people’s militia’ was conscripted from the local inhabitants an

ized into three groups, with the historic Dhufari names of Lenini,
Minh’ and ‘Che Guevara’. Camps were set up in South Yemen for t e
indoctrination and military training of recruits, the main camp eing s
at Hauf, just across the border from Dalkyut. Arms and supp ies’ as