Page 22 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 9

Imam Ahmad cherished pretensions to suzerainty over the tribes of the West­
ern Protectorate and, indeed, over South Arabia as a whole. When the British
authorities in Aden began in 1950 to exert more control over the states of the
Western Protectorate, in an endeavour to bring some semblance of order,
coherence and security into their internal affairs, the imam complained that
such a forward policy was a violation of the status quo in the protectorate and
prejudicial to his sovereign rights. He vented his pique in a series of armed
incursions across the border into the protectorate, simultaneously intimidating
and subverting the tribes with arms and money. To counteract his activities,
and at the same time facilitate economic co-operation and progress among the
treaty states, the governor of Aden, Sir Tom Hickinbotham, proposed to the
Colonial Office that the rulers of the states be invited to combine in a federa­
tion. The Colonial Office agreed, and in January 1954 a plan for a federation
was put before the rulers. They rejected it out of hand, which was not
surprising since the plan envisioned the setting up of an administration similar
to those which had developed elsewhere in the British colonial dependencies
and which were entirely unsuited to conditions in South Arabia. The idea of
some kind of association, however, persisted with the rulers, and the events of
the next two years lent it additional attraction.
Subversion from the Yemen continued, and was supported from the closing
months of 1954 onwards by Egypt. Britain’s agreement in October of that year
to evacuate the Suez Canal base in two years’ time was interpreted by Nasser as
evidence of British feebleness and a prelude to a British withdrawal from the
Middle East in general. To hasten that withdrawal he supplied Imam Ahmad
with arms and technical assistance, while Cairo Radio and the other organs of
Egyptian propaganda portrayed the rebellion being stirred up among the tribes
of the Aden hinterland as a revolt against British colonial rule, inspired by Arab
nationalist feeling and a desire for union with the Yemen. Needless to say, it
was nothing of the kind. The tribesmen, who were Sunni Muslims of the Shafi
rite, had no wish to be brought under the rule of the imam, who was head of the
Zaidi sect of Shii Islam. Nor were they affirming their natural political affinity
with the distant masses of Syria, Iraq, Algeria or Egypt - least of all the
Egyptians, who on every occasion when they had appeared in south-western
Arabia had come in the capacity of invaders and would-be conquerors. Far
from rebelling against British colonial rule, which they had never directly
experienced, the tribesmen were expressing their distaste for the political and
economic reforms which were being pressed upon their rulers and daulahs by
the British authorities in Aden, reforms which they resented as an unwarranted
interference with their accustomed way of life, a life ruled by cupidity, disaf­
fection and xenophobia (not nationalism). They cared not in the least that the
daulahs struck Europeans as hopelessly ramshackle and corrupt, and the
protectorate rulers as capricious, grasping and inept. The daulahs were
the only political institution that existed in South Arabia, and together with the