Page 27 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

14 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

It would have been a strange application of our principles to insist that the Adenese,
being urban and relatively sophisticated, should be allowed to decide the question of
merger by their own vote, while the inhabitants of the original Federation, although five
times as numerous and no less vitally concerned, should not be consulted at all -
presumably on the theory that as illiterate rifle-carrying tribesmen they somehow
counted as second-class human beings.

No one, in fact, except the rump of the Aden Association, wanted inde­
pendence for Aden alone. All knew that Aden was the natural leader of the
federation: half the seals in the new federal legislature were allotted to it, and
its wealth, its experience, its mercantile and technical resources, all ensured its
eventual primacy. But for the young, frantically ambitious nationalists of Aden
the idea of sharing power with the traditional rulers of the hinterland was
abhorrent. They wanted power for themselves alone, securing it first in Aden
through the diversionary campaign for the colony’s independence, and after­
wards in the protectorate, by calling in the Yemenis and Egyptians to crush the
hereditary rulers. What was more, they wanted nothing to do with Britain,
with British constitutional proposals, and least of all with British defensive
guarantees. These sentiments only endeared them more to their champions
among the British left, who were further gratified when the Aden TUC
spawned a political party in 1962 with the pious title of the ‘People’s Socialist
Party’ (PSP) to fight for the colony’s independence from British rule. What its
sympathizers and apologists in Britain failed to grasp about the Aden TUC,
however, was that it and the People’s Socialist Party were one and the same
thing, in leadership, membership and programme, and that its aims and
methods were a long way removed from those of Transport House. Instead,
they looked benignly upon the Aden TUC as something akin to the British
trade union movement, and upon Abdullah al-Asnaj as a kind of fledgling
Ernest Bevin. Two Labour members of Parliament, George Thomson and
Robert Edwards, who accepted an invitation from the Aden TUC in June 1962
to ascertain for themselves the state of opinion in the colony about the merger,
found themselves on arrival being paraded about Aden by their hosts and
inveigled into making speeches to the Yemeni workers. They were then taken
surreptitiously across the frontier into the Yemen to meet some exiled,
nationalist ‘patriots’ — all without realizing that their presence was being
advertised as evidence of the British Parliamentary Labour Party’s support of
the People’s Socialist Party.
On 26 September 1962, against a background of riots and street demon­
strations organized by the PSP, the Aden legislature voted for Aden’s acces­
sion to the Federation of South Arabia. That same night in Sana, the capital of
the Yemen, a group of army officers, financed, indoctrinated and armed by the
Egyptians, overthrew the government of the imam and proclaimed a republic.
The old Imam Ahmad had died a week previously, and his son and successor,