Page 37 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

30 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

What we should like to achieve is a central caretaker government, broad-based and
representing the whole of South Arabia.

Our central task is to ensure that South Arabia will come to independence under the
best conditions possible and will be able to defend that independence and develop the
economy for the benefit of the people.

Three years later, when he published his recollections of his service in the
Middle East, Trevelyan revealed that his mission had been constructed upon
much narrower premises than these remarks suggested. Although Britain was
still publicly committed to remaining in South Arabia until the end of 1968,
George Thomson, the minister of state at the Foreign Office, had gone to Aden
in March and proposed to the federal rulers that the date of withdrawal be
advanced to November 1967. If this were agreed to, Thomson said, a naval
force, including an aircraft carrier, would be stationed in South Arabian waters
for six months after independence to deter any attack upon the federation from
the Yemen. The rulers refused to accept the proposal, demanding instead that
independence should not be conceded before the spring of 1968, that it should
be accompanied by a defence agreement, and that British troops should remain
behind to carry out the agreement. A month later they were told by Lord
Shackleton, when he came out to Aden, that their demands could not be met.
All that could be conceded was a two-month delay in the date of withdrawal, to
January 1968.
Small wonder, then, that Trevelyan in his memoirs infuses a sense of
urgency into his account of his first few weeks in Aden. His brief, he says, was
‘to evacuate the British Forces and their stores in peace, including the large
Middle East Headquarters, and, if possible, to leave behind an independent
government which could assure peace and stability in the tiny country of South
Arabia, so poor and so ravaged by age-long tribal warfare and revolution’.
Before he is half-a-dozen pages into his narrative Trevelyan has narrowed his
aim still further. ‘Our job was somehow to untie the knot and release ourselves
without disaster.’ He goes on to record his conviction that the Federation of
South Arabia had been a failure, that Aden colony had been brought into the
federation ‘by methods which were dubious and widely criticised’, and that
what confronted him was ‘not a strong and coherent nationalist movement but
a prospect of anarchy’. What, then, was his prescription for these serious ills?
Search though one may through his recollections, one can find little substantial
discussion of suitable remedies. Instead, again and again, we are told that the
high commissioner’s overriding concern was to get the British troops out
safely. ‘We could not leave British troops to face the alternative of either being
drawn into a civil war with an uncertain outcome or of sitting helplessly and
dangerously while the place crumbled round them.’ In brief, it would seem
that Trevelyan saw his mission in terms of a rescue operation, something along