Page 166 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 163

cal ‘undesirables’) which the regime has been forced to construct to keep itself
in power and which it is abjectly dependent upon an East German security
force, several thousand strong, to operate. As with South Arabia, so also with

Dhufar: the only way in which the Marxist-Leninists could gain ground there
was at the point of a gun, and it was their own excesses, as much as the
counter-insurgency campaign against them, that brought about their defeat. A
brutal, ideologically motivated despotism of the kind that now oppresses the
people of South Arabia could never arise in Oman from internal causes. It
would have to be both implanted and enforced from outside.

For Oman, then, it would seem that the portents are plain: it is infiltration
from without rather than agitation from within that is to be feared. And as the
PDRY is now thoroughly subservient to the Soviet Union and its Cuban and
East German surrogates, there will be lacking neither malevolence of intent nor
preponderance in arms to threaten the stability and integrity of the sultanate.