Page 46 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 39

been instructed not to interfere. The FLO SY terrorists got the worst of the
fight, despite the arrival of a thousand Yemenis to reinforce them, and they
were only saved from complete defeat by the intervention of officers of the
South Arabian Army who arranged a cease-fire. The affray at Shaikh Othman
was the beginning of the end for FLOS Y, and the start of what was to prove to
be the fateful involvement of the South Arabian Army in the terrorists’ struggle
for supremacy.
For the next few weeks FLOSY and the NLF fought a hit-and-run cam­
paign against each other while marshalling their forces for a final requital. It
came in the first week of November, when the most savage encounters again
took place at Shaikh Othman. At first, the South Arabian Army did nothing
but hold the ring. Then, after the fighting had gone on for three days, it
intervened on the side of the NLF to bring the conflict to a close. FLOSY was
defeated and destroyed as a political movement, not so much by the arbitra­
ment of war, for it had given as good an account of itself in conflict as had the
NLF, as by the collapse of its logistics base in the Yemen. The government of
Abdullah al-Sallal had fallen on 5 November and the Egyptians, who had
underpinned both his regime and the activities of FLOS Y, were packing their
bags and leaving. Shorn of their support, the FLOSY organization fell to
pieces. Its supporters in South Arabia were hunted down and killed or
imprisoned, while those who escaped fled to the Yemen to join their exiled
leaders.
Nothing now stood in the way of the NLF’s ultimate triumph except the
possibility that the British government might raise difficulties at the last
moment. It was an extremely remote possibility, especially as the actions of the
British authorities in Aden in the intervening weeks had seemed almost
consciously directed towards facilitating the NLF’s accession to power.
When, for instance, the most redoubtable of all the federal rulers, Sharif
Husain of Baihan, was reported to be gathering support from the Yemeni
royalists and the Saudis to fight his way back into his amirate, which had been
seized by the NLF with the aid of a battalion of the South Arabian Army, he
was warned by the high commissioner that if he crossed into Baihan from the
Yemen his force would be attacked by the RAF, since it was British policy to
support the South Arabian Army, including the rogue battalion encamped in
Baihan.
It was an incident almost beyond belief, yet Trevelyan in his recollections
makes it all too comprehensible.

So we had come to threaten the use of British aircraft against an attempt by a man, who
was still nominally under British protection, to recover his State by attacking from
across the frontier the rebels who had usurped his power with the aid of a battalion
w ch we were helping to pay and arm and which was still nominally under British
command. We were right to do so. We could not compromise our main objective to
cave in peace and leave the country at peace.