Page 148 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 145

South Vietnam, who arrived in Dhufar on a visit in September 1972)
PFLOAG decided to launch an uprising in Oman. The preliminary arrange­
ments for the outbreak were made in Iraq in October 1972 by delegates from
the Front and a member of the NF politburo in Aden. Weapons supplied by
the Soviet Union, China and Czechoslovakia were to be smuggled into Oman
through the port of Sur, on the coast south of Muscat, and distributed to
PFLOAG cells in the capital and at Nizwa and Rastaq. The agent in charge of
the operation was a political commissar from the ‘Lenin Unit’ in Dhufar who
had slipped into Oman the previous year to set up the underground cells.
Unfortunately for him, he was spotted in Matrah by a PFLOAG defector in
November 1972, and a watch was kept on his movements. The surveillance led
to the uncovering of the cell network the following month, and seventy-seven
PFLOAG supporters were arrested. They were brought to trial in January
1973: ten were subsequently executed, thirty-two were sentenced to life
imprisonment and most of the remainder were imprisoned for terms of from
one to twelve years. Simultaneous and subsequent sweeps in the United Arab
Emirates netted several more PFLOAG conspirators in both the Abu Dhabi
and the UAE Defence Forces.
Somewhat unnerved by the discovery of the PFLOAG plot, Qabus ibn Said
decided that he needed more help than he was already getting if PFLOAG was
to be defeated. Since his accession he had received several million dollars in
financial aid from Shaikh Zayid ibn Sultan of Abu Dhabi, and when he visited
Riyad in December 1971 he was promised further assistance by King Faisal.
Two Saudi missions visited Muscat in 1972 and a further offer of money and
arms to the value of some $15 million is said to have been made to him towards
the end of that year. A Libyan delegation visited Muscat in January 1973, after
Qabus had travelled to Libya the previous month to see if he could persuade
Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to bring pressure upon the NF regime in South
Yemen to cease supporting PFLOAG. This rather quixotic venture had been
inspired by Qaddafi’s success a short time previously in inducing the PDRY
and the Yemen Arab Republic to begin negotiations towards eventual
unification. Qabus’s plea for the Libyan leader’s intercession was as unavailing
as were the negotiations Qaddafi had set in train between the two Yemens.
More concrete assistance was forthcoming from Tehran, where the shah had
been observing the course of the insurgency in Dhufar with some uneasiness
and not a little irritation. In the forefront of his concern was the possibility,
remote though it might be, of the overthrow of Saiyid Qabus by the guerrillas
and the transformation of Oman into a Marxist-Leninist outlaw state like the
PDRY. Other calculations, too, of which more will be said later, may have
played a part in determining his attitude towards the Dhufar war. On his side,
Qabus was a little wary of accepting help from the shah, lest it should offend his
Arab neighbours or his own subjects. The last time Persian troops had set foot
in Oman had been in 1810, when 1,500 of them, along with some fifty Russians