Page 165 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

162 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the circumstances which enabled the NLF to seize power in South Arabia a

dozen years ago is whether in fact the Aden regime will continue to be able
to hold down the towns and tribes of the hinterland indefinitely.
Arabs rule but do not administerWilfred Thesiger wrote some years aeo in
Arabian Sands.

Their government is intensively individualistic, and is successful or unsuccessful
according to the degree of fear and respect which the ruler commands, and his skill in
dealing with individual men. Founded on an individual life, their government is
impermanent and Hable to end in chaos at any moment. To Arab tribesmen this system
is comprehensible and acceptable, and its success or failure should not be measured in
terms of efficiency and justice as judged by Western standards. To these tribesmen
security can be bought too dearly by loss of individual freedom.

Political and social life in South Arabia and Oman alike has for centuries been
shaped by a trinity of forces - tribalism, factionalism and sectarianism. Tribal­

ism and factionalism today still exert a stronger claim upon the loyalties of the
people of South Arabia than does the nebulous concept of the People’s Democ­
ratic Republic of Yemen. It is one thing to declare tribalism outmoded, as the
politburo in Aden has done, and to condemn it as a relic of a past order whose
survival is incompatible with the Marxist-Leninist vision of society. It is
another thing for the politburo to compel obedience to its ukases from men
who neither know nor understand any other arrangement of human affairs

than the tribe and the clan, whose very sense of personal identity is inextricably
bound up with their tribal affiliations, and who are all too ready to impress this
fact forcibly upon others. Detribalization may occur with comparative rapidity
and facility in the heterogeneous setting of the towns and seaports of the
Arabian littoral; but in the deserts and the mountains beyond the tribe is still

the dominant social phenomenon.
Much the same may be said of religious belief and sectarian conflict. Islam
has been an inseparable component of men’s lives in Arabia for thirteen
centuries. However much the regime in Aden may deplore what it sees as the
enslavement of men’s minds by Islam, and its exploitation by the traditional
ruling classes to keep the masses in political and economic subjection, there is
little chance that Islam will be displaced in the thoughts and emotions of the

people of South Arabia by Marxist-Leninist abstractions, even when backe
by the apparatus of a cheka. Islam is the only spiritual and temporal order that
the South Arabians know; it is the only social and political system that they
comprehend. Against this rock the windy pronouncements from Aden beat in

vain.
If proof were required of the Aden regime’s failure in the past dozen yeys 0
wean the people of South Arabia from their attachment to their tra 1U0^
ways and to convert them to the precepts of Marxism-Leninism, it ies in e
monstrous engine of repression (complete with concentration camps or po i