Page 45 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

38 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the timetable laid down for the army’s assumption of duties from the British
forces. Thus the hinterland was left to cope as best it might with the NLF
guerrillas. When the young ruler of the Wahidi state returned from abroad and
was flown up to his capital in a RAF helicopter, only to be abducted on landing
and the helicopter pilot and a British army officer with him killed by
insurgents, the British authorities in Aden did nothing. ‘There was nothing we
could do,’ Trevelyan explained afterwards. ‘We had left all that country and
could not go back.’
With unnerving suddenness, the collapse of the federal rulers’ authority in
the Western Protectorate had brought the threat of chaos to the very doors of
Aden. ‘We now faced that situation which we had tried to avoid,’ Trevelyan
recalls.

There was no Government, only an army and civil servants with no authority over them.
There was serious danger of anarchy. The British and Arab servants from the Federal
capital [Al Ittihad, a few miles from Aden proper] urged an immediate British move.
Everyone was looking to us. The NLF were not far from Aden and might at any
moment take over the Federal capital.

The most obvious British move would have been for Trevelyan to take a firm
grip on the situation and assert his dual authority as high commissioner of the
Federation of South Arabia and governor of Aden to suppress disorder and
rebellion and maintain peace and security in the protectorates and the colony.
Trevelyan did not do so, presumably because it would have run counter to the
spirit of his instructions and to the wishes of the government at home. He was
also, it should be recalled, a diplomatist, not a colonial officer, and there was (as
we shall have occasion to notice more fully later in connexion with the Gulf) a
considerable difference in outlook between the British foreign and colonial
services, the guiding spirit of the one being accommodation, that of the other,
consolidation. So Trevelyan flew off instead to London at the beginning of
September to talk to the foreign secretary. As a result of this consultation he
announced on 5 September that, the federal government having ceased to
function, he was prepared to recognize the NLF and FLO SY as representa­
tives of the people of South Arabia and to discuss with them the transfer of
sovereignty.
That same week the NLF openly set up headquarters at Zinjibar, about
twenty-five miles up the coast from Aden, where Qahtan al-Shaabi called a
press conference to announce his refusal of the high commissioner’s offer of
joint negotiations. He was ready, however, he said, to discuss the immediate
handing over of power to the NLF as the sole representative of the South
Arabian people. To back up his claim to paramountcy the NLF launched a
fierce attack upon FLOSY’s supporters in and around Aden. A pitched battle
lasting several days took place at Shaikh Othman, a satellite town of Aden, in
the first half of September, under the astonished gaze of British troops who had