Page 476 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions
473

safety to the Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Dhufar, among them army officers and
police officials who feared the consequences of yet another vindictive purge of

the army and police force. An entire battalion of the army in Beihan defected to
the Yemen, its place being taken by an Ethiopian battalion brought in by the
Russians. For students of history this last circumstance had a certain ironic
interest; for in ad 525 the ancient Himyarite kingdom of Yemen was destroyed

by invaders from Ethiopia, who remained in possession of south-western
Arabia for the next fifty years, until they in turn were expelled in AD 575 by an
expeditionary force sent from Persia. Thereafter Yemen was ruled as a Persian
satrapy for half a century. The chances of such an historical episode recurring

in our day would appear to be fairly remote.
Whatever other benefits the Soviet Union may have reaped from the ascen­
dancy she has established at Aden, three at least are plain to see. She has
acquired a base for the penetration of Africa; she has placed herself within

striking distance of the Gulf oilfields; and she has gained control of one of the
most important strategic outposts in the world, an importance which Aden has
possessed ever since the early years of the sixteenth century when the great

Portuguese captain, Affonso d’Albuquerque, sought to capture the trade of the
Indies by seizing its traditional outlets, the Red Sea, the Gulf and the Straits of
Malacca. Moreover, the Russians have learned the uses of sea power, which the
West is in danger of forgetting, and they are ready to act upon this knowledge
in the seas east of Suez.

How far the Soviet Union may desire access to the oil reserves of Arabia and
the Gulf for her own sake, how far to deny them to the West, can only be

matters for speculation. Much depends upon the Russians’ reliance upon
outside sources of oil to meet their own needs and those of their Eastern
European allies. Up to about 1966 the Soviet Union produced sufficient oil
each year to have a surplus after satisfying these requirements. Normally, the
surplus was exported to the West in order to earn the hard currency needed to

import industrial goods and machinery. After 1966, however, consumption of
oil in the Soviet bloc began to exceed production, despite a rise in the volume of
oil produced annually - from 148 million tons in i960 to 353 millions tons in

r970 and perhaps as much as 520 million tons in 1976. Consumption has
continued to increase in recent years and will probably go on doing so, though
to w at extent it will exceed production it is impossible to forecast with any
Precision. Western estimates of the probable size of the gap between the two

ve varied considerably: from 20 million to 100 million tons annually in the
the / fl?085 UPt0 3S much as I^° miEion tons annually by the early 1980s. So far
g e ciency has been made good by the importation of oil from the Middle

of b ^uroPean satellite states, the transaction being arranged as a form
Bar ar^r ~~ *n exc^anBe f°r machinery and other industrial equipment.
^Jler eals of this kind have been concluded, for instance, between Persia on
e one side and Rumania and Czechoslovakia on the other, and between Iraq