Page 24 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden II

tion of authority within it. To the protectorate rulers it seemed only right and
natural that the federation should be a loose grouping, expressive of their
interests, and over which they would wield ultimate power in association with
leading merchant families of Aden. The external defence of the federation
would remain Britain’s responsibility for some years to come. To the radical
nationalists of the Aden TU C, on the other hand, such a prospect was complete
anathema. They wanted power for themselves, first of all in the colony, which
they could only achieve legally through the enfranchisement of the transient
Yemeni and protectorate-Arab proletariat, and later in the protectorate, which
they could only obtain by the overthrow of the hereditary rulers. Ultimately,
they wanted union with the Yemen, after the imam had been swept away and
the country purged of the evils of theocratic rule by the tide of revolutionary
Arab socialism.
Six of the states of the Western Protectorate combined in February 1959 to
form the Federation of Arab Amirates of the South. Another half a dozen
joined in the next three or four years, and the federation eventually numbered
seventeen member states. A treaty of advice and protection was concluded at
the same time with Britain, which made the defence of the federation and the
conduct of its foreign affairs a British responsibility. The British government
also undertook to provide the federation with financial aid, to improve social
and economic conditions and to ensure internal security. Naturally the federa­
tion was at once condemned by devout anti-colonialists everywhere as a sinister
device to keep South Arabia in subjection, as a means of perpetuating feudal
rule by the hereditary sultans and amirs, as a barrier to Arab unity and as a
crime against Arab nationalism. None of the criticism was particularly
thoughtful or well-informed, but what it lacked in sagacity it more than made
up for in vehemence, especially as voiced in Cairo and only slightly less so in
left-wing circles in Britain. The latter particularly objected to the lack of any
provision in the constitution of the new federation for popular elections to the
federal legislature, membership in which was restricted to the rulers, their
naibs (deputies) and their nominees. What the latter-day Rousseaus of the
British political scene overlooked in their infatuation with the visionary figure
of the noble democratic tribesman was that the federation had to build upon
whatever political tradition was at hand; and the only basis of authority that
existed in South Arabia, the only stabilizing element in a chronically unstable
society, was thedaulah. Far from being instruments of oppression, the daulahs
were restrained in the arbitrary exercise of their power by custom and prescrip­
tion, and by the tribesmen’s ingrained contumacy. ‘To anyone who has worked
with South Arabian tribesmen’, observed Kennedy Trevaskis, who was politi­
cal agent for the Western Protectorate at this time,
it would be hard to imagine any people less amenable to authoritarian government or
one upon whom any dictatorship could be less easily imposed. With bullets in their
cartridge belts they had the most effective means of influencing their rulers and so long