Page 30 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 21

into the protectorates, making it all the more essential that Britain should

strengthen the protectorate rulers and give them whatever military
support they needed to defeat the nationalists and to cut their supply lines from

the Yemen.
When the delayed constitutional conference convened in London in the

summer of 1964 a date for independence for South Arabia, 1968, was fixed. It
now became a race against time to make the federation strong enough to stand
on its own feet when independence came. To do so required both a financial

and a defensive commitment from Britain of a substantial kind. Whatever
chance there may have been that a British government would commit itself to
taking this hard road, however, faded from sight when the Labour party was
returned to power in the general election of October 1964. Every pronounce­
ment made by the Labour party on South Arabia before it assumed office had

been marked by delusion and prejudice, and these two elements were to figure
prominently in nearly every decision taken by the Labour government from

1964 onwards which affected the future of Aden and the protectorates. The
party’s doctrinal convictions about the evils of Western imperialism and the
foreordained emergence of socialism in Asia and Africa had led it automatically
to sympathize with the Aden nationalists from the start, seeing them as
progressive social democrats anxious only to achieve national independence for

Aden and social and economic justice for its people. The federal rulers, in
contrast, were held to represent all that was abhorrent in the socialist creed -

tradition, privilege, inheritance and absolutism. That these simple categories
scarcely defined the tangled web of politics, religion and race in South Arabia
did not seem to enter the minds of the Labour party’s doctrinaires, or if it did,
it troubled them little. For they had, without overmuch difficulty, come to the
conclusion that the federation was nothing other than a device to perpetuate

the rule of the hereditary sultans, shaikhs and amirs of the protectorates, to
subordinate the interests of Aden to the latter’s selfish ends, and to stifle the
legitimate nationalist and socialist aspirations of the colony’s radical politicians

and trade unionists.
From the moment the Labour party came to power the fate of the Federation
of South Arabia was sealed. The day before the general election in Britain
elections had been held in Aden so that a new legislature with a fresh mandate

could negotiate with the federation and with the British government for the
transfer of power by 1968. As in the past, the nationalists demonstrated their
attachment to the principle of free elections by boycotting them. On this

occasion they had somewhat better grounds for doing so, as the electorate had
een reduced from around 21,000 to 8,000 in an attempt to ensure the election
® resPensible candidates. Both the election and its outcome were a farce. The
en AjS0Ciatl°n had been in ruins since I959’ and the two Pa^ies which had

erged from the wreckage were still at daggers drawn over Aden’s accession
0 the federation. Not only did the People’s Socialist Party and the South