Page 28 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 15

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Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Badr, had not yet properly grasp ecd the reins of
power. It was as well for the Colonial Office’s plans that the vote on Aden’s
merger in the federation was taken when it was. ‘If the Yemeni revolution had
come one day earlier,’ Sir Charles Johnston drily observed afterwards, ‘or the
Legislative Council vote one day later, I feel pretty certain that [the merger]
would never have obtained the support of a majority of local me mbers.’ As it
was, there were eruptions of violence and strikes in the colony ^s soon as the
news of the revolution broke. The PSP threw off the mask of x~e=asonableness
and gleefully prophesied the coming of revolution to South zX. rsbia, and the
liquidation of all its enemies in Aden and the protectorates. Fou r of its leaders,
exiles from the former imam’s rule, flew off to Sana to become m£ nisters in the
republican government, and they were followed in the next few weeks by
a stream of Yemenis in search of pickings and preferment f rom the ‘new
order’ that was being established in the Yemen with the help of xhe Egyptian
army.
From this moment forward the future of South Arabia depended upon the
outcome of a contest between the British, on the one side, who xv'ere trying to
integrate Aden with the federation and strengthen that body sufficiently to
enable it to stand upon its own feet, and the Yemeni-Adeni nati<z> r* alists, on the
other, who were determined to bring Aden to its knees t>5s/ chaos and
bloodshed, and then, with Egyptian help, destroy the federal s T ructure in the
protectorate. Two conditions were vital to the federation’s survi val: one was
adequate financial aid, the other was effective protection from its enemies,
within and without. Neither was immediately forthcoming in the months
following the formal inauguration of the Federation of South Ara aa in January
1963, mainly because the Colonial Office was lulled into a torpid sense of
security by the initial setbacks suffered by the Egyptians in the e men, and by
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the consequent dying down of disruptive activity by the F P in Aden.
Up-country, however, a new and more ominous insurgenty' was in the
making.

Among the host of returning exiles, tribal freebooters ^^d assorted
desperadoes who streamed northwards from Aden and the pro 'C^^totates into
the Yemen after September 1962 were several bands of political ^ottieri from
the various clandestine organizations which had come into j^ence m the
colony and the hinterland over the previous few years. Genet”speaking,
their strength and consequence were in inverse proportion to £2^° grandil°-
quence of the names they gave themselves, e.g. ‘the Secret ,
of Free Officers and Soldiers’ and ‘the Revolutionary Orgat if 1°
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Youth of Occupied South Yemen’. Not a great deal is known emTr^611
now, and it is not likely that much more information on them <5>ge is
the future. All that one can reasonably say about them at this ~ the Ye 3
number of the leading activists in them, who had decamped 01611