Page 33 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

24 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

The armed insurrection which has swept the South as an expression of the will of our
Arab people and as the fundamental means of popular resistance to the colonialist
presences, its interests, its bases, and its institutions of exploitation, docs not only aim
to expel the colonialists from the area. This revolutionary movement is the expression of
a global conception of life which aims basically at the radical transformation of the social
reality created by colonialism through all its concepts, values and social relations, which
are founded on exploitation and tyranny, and to determine the type of life to which our
people aspires and the type of relations which it wants to see installed on the local,
*
regional, national and international levels.
Whether this turgid stuff was intelligible to the labourer on the Aden docks
or the up-country tribesman is highly improbable; but it was not really
intended for their ears, except perhaps as a background chant to the acts of
terrorism to which they were being exhorted. Il was mainly designed to serve as
ammunition in the propaganda battle which the NLF was fighting to discredit
its ideological adversaries and to secure recognition (especially in Cairo,
Damascus and Baghdad) as the sole, legitimate champion of Arab nationalism
and revolution in South Arabia. Chief among these adversaries was Asnaj’s
People’s Socialist Party, which in the spring of 1965 had decided to commit
itself to a terrorist strategy in Aden and the hinterland, as much to compete
with the NLF as to harry the British. Under Egyptian guidance and sponsor­
ship the PSP combined with the South Arabian League in May 1965 to create
the Organization for the Liberation of the Occupied South, a hybrid coalition
of deposed sultans, politically progressive saiyids, and disaffected minor
shaikhs and amirs from the protectorates, linked incongruously with the trade
union rabble-rousers of Aden. Obviously it was destined to have a short life. To
the NLF the new organization was nothing more than an alliance of ‘bourgeois
nationalists’ - which was precisely why Nasser had been its accoucheur. For he
was growing very tired of the costly and bloody struggle in the Yemen, now
nearly three years old, and was anxiously searching for a way of reducing the
scale of the Egyptian involvement. At Jiddah in late August 1965 he reached
agreement with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia about the cessation of Saudi aid to
the Yemeni royalists in exchange for a cease-fire between the royalists and the
republicans and the withdrawal of Egyptian forces within twelve months.
Having achieved this measure of disengagement, Nasser was determined not to
be drawn into new commitments by the exuberance or miscalculations of the
nationalist guerrillas in South Arabia. While wanting the terrorist campaign
against the British to continue, indeed to be intensified, he also wanted it to be
under his control. Hence the creation of the OLOS, with its headquarters in
Cairo.
After its congress at Taiz in June and the public declaration of its aims, the
NLF was banned by the government of Aden as a subversive organization. Up
to this time the British authorities had known little about the movement, and
• Quoted in Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans, p. 194.