Page 141 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

i38 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

The airfield itself was operated by the Royal Air Force under the terms of the

Anglo-Omani agreement of 1958 and guarded by a detachment of the RAF
Regiment. To make sure that the field remained operational the guard detach­
ment was reinforced in the closing weeks of 1969. North of Salalah the
guerrillas made unrelenting efforts to cut the road to Thamarit (the ‘Red Line’
as they somewhat enigmatically dubbed it), laying mines, setting ambushes

and trying to wipe out the SAF outposts along the road. The main focus of
their attacks was the Hamrir (or Hamrin) Pass, where the road climbed the
escarpment. From September 1969 until the spring of 1970 they repeatedly
assaulted the S AF’s positions within and beyond the pass, inflicting substan­
tial casualties upon the troops but ultimately failing in their aim of dislodging
them.
By the early summer of 1970 PFLO AG guerrillas were in control of roughly

two-thirds of Dhufar. Within these areas the work of ‘liberating’ the inhabi­
tants proceeded apace. The traditional leaders in each community - the tribal
shaikhs, thesat/a, the religious functionaries - were deposed, and their places
taken by ‘popular councils’ manipulated by PFLO AG apparatchiks,. Private
ownership of property, whether houses, land, livestock or wells, was

abolished, and villages were reorganized into agricultural communes on the
Chinese and North Vietnamese models. Equality of status was decreed for
women, who were given the right to participate in the popular councils and to
enrol in the militias. To promote the disintegration of the family (which
PFLOAG denounced as an outdated ‘bourgeois manifestation’) children
were removed from their parents’ care and sent to be educated in revolutionary

camps.
While the insurgency in Dhufar was viewed with foreboding by the conser­
vative regimes of the Arabian peninsula, and with suspicion even in Cairo and
Damascus, it caused frissons of delight among Western connoisseurs oi Afro-
Asian ‘liberation movements’. Here, it seemed, was a miniature Vietnam in the

making, a country where the corrupt, reactionary and oppressive regime of the
sultan, even though backed by the forces of British imperialism, was rapid!)
succumbing to the wrath of an aroused and vengeful peasantry, spearheaded
by the heroic and selfless cadres of PFLOAG, Maoist breviary in one hand,
Kalashnikov rifle in the other. ‘Army cannot win war against guerrillas in
desert’ trumpeted the Guardian on 3 August 1970; and the Sunday Times on 22
March 1970 published an article by an anonymous correspondent alleging

wanton destruction by British troops in Dhufari villages. Even more exC*
ment was generated among French aficionados of Marxist-Leninist m
ments in Asia and Africa, who had already fallen over themselves in acclaiming
the emergence of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen as the rsl,. u
fledged, Marxist-Leninist state in the Arab world. The bolder spirits $

them, like Jean-Pierre Viennot of the National Institute of Orienta ang
and Civilizations in Paris, made pilgrimages to South Yemen and u a