Page 142 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 139

1969 onwards, to mark, savour and report to the faithful the progress of the
people’s revolution in darkest Arabia.
Tracts and exegetical disquisitions soon began to flow from their pens,

earnestly detailing every step in the rise and development of the NLF in South
Yemen and its proteges in Dhufar, along with painstaking dissections of every
political pronouncement and ideological declaration made by the two organiza­
tions since their inception. That neither the NF’s nor PFLOAG’s pronun-
ciamentos (still less the laboriously contrived interpretations put upon them by
the French dialecticians) bore any relationship to the actualities of South
Arabia, or to historical accuracy, or even to the character of South Arabian

society, did not seem to bother the tractarians or their acolytes in the least.
They had a ready outlet for their expositions in Le Monde, a journal which took
a decidedly indulgent, not to say celebratory, view of Marxist-Leninist revolu­
tions and liberation movements in Asia and Africa, and habitually reported
upon them with bemused rapture. Less space was accorded in the ‘progressive’
sections of the British press to metaphysical dissections of the Dhufar revolt,
although the Sunday Times's anonymous correspondent popped up again in
The Times on 14 June 1973 to deliver a further broadside on behalf of

PFLOAG and to ridicule the efforts of the SAF and their British officers to
defeat the guerrillas in the field.
It is reasonable to surmise that the identity of the correspondent in question
was not exactly light years removed from the person of Fred Halliday, an
English Marxist who visited South Yemen and the PFLOAG-held areas of
western Dhufar in February 1970 and again in April 1973. Halliday’s travels

and researches led him in 1974 to publish a book entitled Arabia without
Sultans, a lengthy analysis of society and politics in the Arabian peninsula
presented in uncompromisingly Marxist-Leninist terms. The main purpose of
the book would appear to have been to extol the revolution in South Yemen and
the insurrection in Dhufar. Beneath its Marxist-Leninist sentiment and jar­
gon there lies a solid layer of information, much of it obtained by Halliday at
first hand from participants in both events. It is the sentiment and the jargon,
however, which lend the work its particular value, for they reveal with the
utmost clarity how the insurgency in Dhufar was viewed in Marxist-Leninist
circles in the West.

On his first visit to western Dhufar and the PFLOAG training camp at Hauf
in 1970 Halliday was delighted with everything he saw. Wherever he went he
found people wearing Mao and Lenin badges, reading socialist works and
earnestly discussing the theory and practice of revolution, a favourite text
being the ‘Thoughts’ of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. (Two Chinese visitors to
Dhufar a short time earlier had been similarly inspired by what they saw there.

On their return to China they wrote an account of their visit for the Peking
Review under the heading, ‘Dhufar Liberation Army Fighters and People
vVarmly Love Mao-Tse-tung Thought’.) What Halliday found particularly