Page 40 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 33

one suspected, had only been adopted as a sop to King Faisal’s susceptibilities.
The battle for South Arabia was being fought, and would continue to be
fought, on the ground. While strikes by seaborne aircraft might make a limited
contribution to the winning of such a battle in the hinterland (assuming that
liaison and communications between the naval force and the federal troops
were efficient - a very large assumption to make), they could hardly be used
within Aden itself. Nor could the Vulcan bombers, whose function was
predominantly that of strategic offence, be employed in the counter­
insurgency campaign in South Arabia, indeed against anything less than a
full-scale invasion of the country by a modern army, an extremely remote
possibility, and one which, if it had ever materialized, would have removed the
South Arabian question to another, more serious, dimension. What, in fact,
the proposed defensive undertakings signified, when taken in conjunction with
their limitation to a period of six months, was a desire to be rid of the troubles of
South Arabia and to avoid the risk of being drawn into them again. Trevelyan,
in his memoirs, states it plainly. ‘If things went wrong, at least the ships could
sail away, the aircraft could fly away and at worst we should look rather
foolish.’ Would that it had been so simple.
On the very day that Brown unfolded his proposals to the House of Com­
mons they were being rendered more or less irrelevant by events in Aden. At
the beginning of June the federal army and the federal guards (the gendarmerie
which policed the protectorates) had been reorganized into the South Arabian
Army and the South Arabian Police. The reorganization and the appointments
and promotions which accompanied it had aroused strong tribal jealousies
among the officers and other ranks in both forces, especially as tribesmen from
the Aulaqi sultanates, which had traditionally supplied a high proportion of
recruits, seemed to be particularly favoured. Feeling was also running high in
both the army and the armed police over the Arab defeat by Israel, a defeat
which Cairo and Sana Radios mendaciously and insistently proclaimed had
been facilitated by British assistance to Israel. The armed police, and to a lesser
extent the lower ranks of the army, had been partially penetrated by the NLF,
so that the two forces, although still disciplined and competent, w’ere becoming
increasingly disturbed by the emotional tug-of-war created by their sympathy
for the Arab nationalist cause, on the one side, and their fealty to their oath of
service to the British and federal governments, on the other. Their mood was
not improved by the deterioration of confidence between them and the British
security forces brought about by nationalist propaganda and infiltration, or by
the affront to their pride caused by the British Army’s assumption of responsi­
bility for internal security in Aden.
These several discontents came to a head with the nomination of an Aulaqi
colonel of doubtful military ability to be the first Arab commander of the South
Arabian Army. Four non-Aulaqi colonels protested directly to the federal
minister of defence about the choice of commander, and were suspended from