Page 29 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

20 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

interests of the pan-Arab cause but also in conformity with the extensive
propaganda campaign which had been launched earlier in the year by the

professional anti-colonialist lobbies, both at the United Nations and in the
capitals of Europe, to compel Britain to withdraw from South Arabia. So
Sandys’s decision was greeted by the PSP not with approval but a general
strike. An attempt was also made upon Trevaskis’s life in December as he was

about to board an aircraft at Khormaksar airport, with the federal and Adeni
delegations, to attend the constitutional conference being convened in London
to fix a date for independence. The grenade that was intended to kill Trevaskis
and his wife instead killed George Henderson, his deputy, and an Indian

woman bystander.
As a result of the incident the plan to surrender sovereignty over Aden and to
grant independence to the federation was shelved for the time being, and a state
of emergency was declared in the colony. Henderson’s assassin, a member of

the PSP by the name of Khalifah Abdullah Hasan al-Khalifah, was put on trial
in April 1964, but the case against him failed because the chief prosecution
witness had conveniently gone off to Cairo. Khalifah was kept in detention,
however, under the emergency regulations. Naturally the proclamation of the

emergency was greeted by an orchestrated outcry from the usual quarters
abroad, and a delegation of Labour MPs flew out from Britain in the new year
as the guests of the PSP to protest against the detention of political prisoners

and the suppression of civil rights. The MPs refused to accept Trevaskis’s
patient explanations that these were dangerous times, and that even a Nasser
could not rule South Arabia without the power of preventive detention. (The
Egyptian president could not even rule Egypt without it.) It was all too evident

that the governor’s knowledge and experience counted for nothing in the eyes
of these newly minted authorities on Arabian affairs, although as he himself
wryly reflected at the time, they were unlikely to allow him to tell them in
return how to run the Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers.

By June 1964 the tribal uprising in the Radfan mountains had been crushed,
after some hard campaigning by British and federal troops. The outcome of the
campaign proved conclusively that, with determination and adequate military
strength, such Egyptian-inspired tribal insurrections could be defeated. For,

whatever myths have since been woven by the Marxist regime in Aden and its
sympathizers abroad about the ‘glorious beginnings’ of the ‘people’s revolu­
tion’ in the Radfan uprising of 14 October 1963, the fact is that the Radfan

tribesmen were fought to a standstill and forced to sue for peace. It remained
now for the British government to make plain its resolve to defeat every
uprising that might occur in the protectorates in the same way. The calculated
purpose behind the Federation of South Arabia had been to hold down the
radical nationalists of Aden by the weight of the traditional rulers and tribal

daulahs in the protectorates. With the Egyptians in the Yemen backing them
with arms and money, the nationalists were able to extend their activities