Page 31 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

22 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Arabian League hold raucous demonstrations in the streets, denouncing every­
thing in sight, whether it be the legislative council or the governor or the
federation, but they were joined by the National Liberation Front, which
coolly represented itself as just another political party - something it was able
to do because its connexion with the campaign being waged in the protectorates
from the Yemen was as yet unknown to the British authorities. Despite the
nationalist parties’ ostentatious boycott of the elections, several of their sup­
porters stood as ‘independent’ candidates, winning seven out of the sixteen
seats in the legislature. One of them was the murderer, Khalifah Abdullah
Hasan al-Khalifah, who was still being held in gaol under the emergency
regulations. On his election a clamour immediately arose for his release.
Trevaskis refused to heed it, but the new colonial secretary, Anthony Green­
wood, decided otherwise. It would be a gracious gesture of goodwill on the part
of the new Labour government, he thought, if Khalifah were to be set free. He
was, and promptly took his seat on the legislative council.
Aden, it was clear, had taken a long step backwards in its constitutional
development. There was little possibility that this regression could be halted in
the interval remaining before the date of independence. When that day came,
Trevaskis warned Greenwood, there would be three contenders for power in
South Arabia — the federal government, Nasser, and anarchy. The British
government had only two paths open to it: either to support the federal
government to the hilt or, in a phrase much in vogue in Labour circles in those
days, ‘to come to terms with Nasser’. Greenwood thought he saw a third path -
to come to terms’ with the People’s Socialist Party and its leader, Abdullah
al-Asnaj, in whom he discerned the lineaments of another Archbishop
Makarios. Believing, with sublime simplicity, that all Aden’s troubles sprang
from its ‘unnatural’ alliance with the federation and from the ‘unrepresenta­
tive’ character of the Aden legislature, Greenwood set out to court the PSP and
the Aden TUC. Because Trevaskis had not the stomach for such a policy,
which he was certain would only result in victory for the third contender for
power, anarchy, he was sacked by Greenwood at the close of 1964. The colonial
secretary s foolish delusions about the reasonableness and devotion to demo­
cratic ideals of Asnaj and the other PSP leaders persisted for several months
afterwards, despite a barrage of insults and humiliations from the nationalists.
What Greenwood could not, or would not, grasp was that they had not the
slightest interest in peaceful and constitutional progress to independence or in
sharing power with the federal rulers. What they wanted was what they had
wanted all along - to destroy the authority of the rulers and the daulahs, and to
rule South Arabia themselves, whether as a separate state or in some form of
association with the Yemen. Furthermore, they were well aware that ii their
rule was ever to receive the imprimatur of nationalist legitimacy from the
revolutionary Arab regimes, their coming to power would have to be preceded,
if not actually accomplished (for in these matters the appearance is all), by an