Page 144 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 141

mock, until with a final swing, he split the girl’s head open like an overripe pomegra­
nate.
Whereas Halliday, like the French Marxists, rejoices in the recruitment of

women and children into the PFLOAG forces, Fiennes merely remarks
laconically, and with greater accuracy, ‘The war was getting dirtier.’ Again,
while Halliday paints a sunlit picture of a pastoral-intellectual idyll up on the
jabal, with the devoted evangelists of the PFLOAG patiently striving to
impart the gospel of Marx and Lenin to attentive tribesmen, Fiennes supplies
some rather more down-to-earth illustrations of the way in which the Dhufaris’

political education was conducted. Two elderly shaikhs of the eastern Mahra,
so Fiennes learned from a Bait Qatan shaikh, had been rather outspoken in
their contempt for the new Marxist-Leninist enlightenment, so a PFLOAG
idaara was sent to show them the error of their ways. Before their assembled
tribesmen the two old shaikhs had their eyes burned out with a red-hot knife,
wielded by the nephew of one of them, who then went on to upbraid the
tribesmen for their adherence to the outmoded beliefs and practices of Islam.

In June 1970 signs of revolutionary activity akin to that in Dhufar surfaced in
central Oman. A night attack was made on the SAF garrison at Izki, at the
western end of the Wadi Samail, and another at Nizwa, fifteen miles to the
west. A statement issued to the press in Beirut proclaimed the emergency of a
new revolutionary organization, the National Democratic Front for the Liber­
ation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. It had been formed, it would seem, by the

amalgamation of four small underground groups - Omani adherents of the
Marxist-Leninist wing of the ANM, exiles who had returned surreptitiously
from abroad, Omani ex-soldiers from the various Gulf states, and disaffected
tribesmen. The new organization, so the statement proclaimed, would operate
in Oman along the same lines as PFLOAG in Dhufar.
The attacks at Izki and Nizwa, together with the discovery of an arms cache
and the arrest of some NDFLOAG adherents at Matrah in July, were to seal

the fate of Saiyid Said ibn Taimur. Feeling had been rising against him in the
country with each year’s passing, and more particularly since 1967, when oil
revenues began to flow into his treasury from the fields which had been
discovered in the Oman steppes. Very few of these revenues had flowed out
again in the form of measures to alleviate the conditions under which his people
lived, for Saiyid Said’s financial caution was still as excessive as ever. Even in
London, where the Foreign Office had for years tiptoed around the question of
applying pressure to make him do what needed to be done in Oman, exaspera­
tion with his refusal to heed the writing on the wall had finally supervened. The

only concession that Saiyid Said would make to the growing murmurs of
discontent around him was to announce in June 1970 that ill-health and
advancing age would in due course compel him to abdicate in favour of his son,
Qabus. The Foreign Office, perturbed by the possibility that the incidents at