Page 50 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 43

firmed by Humphrey Trevelyan’s testimony. ‘We left without glory but with­
out disaster. Nor was it humiliation. For our withdrawal was the result not of
military or political pressure but of our decision, right or wrong, to leave....’
The fatal blow at the Federation of South Arabia was struck by the statement
on defence policy of February 1966, which gave full rein to the Labour party’s
aversion to residual imperial responsibilities and overseas military
commitments by reducing Britain’s political and defence obligations east of
Suez to a cipher. The architect of the policy of retrenchment and retreat, the
secretary of state for defence, Denis Healey, was impenitent when Kennedy
Trevaskis went to see him to protest against the decision to remove the British
base from Aden at the end of 1968 and to default on the undertaking to
conclude a defence treaty with the Federation of South Arabia after indepen­
dence. The decision, Healey said, was irrevocable. ‘Surely I must see’, Trevas­
kis records of his conversation with the defence secretary, ‘that to undertake a
defence commitment which had only been proposed ... as a complement to a
British base would be nonsensical? I did not. I saw only a long line of Arab
friends whom I, and others, had led up the garden path.’ Colonel Colin
Mitchell formed much the same opinion of Healey:

He was a shadow without substance. He had all the apparent qualities, the appearance
and the methods of a statesman. But I suspected he was entirely dominated by his
colleagues in the Socialist Cabinet and their useless dogma, later demonstrated by his
series of utterly contradictory defence policies. There must have been a terrible cyni­
cism in him to be party to the Labour government’s fundamental allergy to monarchical
institutions in the Middle East whilst having the intelligence to realise that the only
long-term alternative was for South Arabia to look towards Egypt and Russia for
support.

Much of the criticism of the hereditary rulers of South Arabia voiced in Britain
in the decade up to 1967 was as uninformed as it was ill-intentioned. The
sultans and amirs of the protectorate states, far from conforming to the
standard caricature of them as avaricious, callous and feudal despots (albeit,
also, effete, timorous and incompetent), were men of widely differing charac­
ters and abilities, ranging from the wise to the foolish, the enlightened to the
backward, the able to the inept, the strong to the infirm, the noble to the
disreputable. In this they were like the generality of mankind, including their

own people. It was as pointless for their distant critics to rail against them for
their defects as it was to deplore the existence of hereditary rule itself. South
Arabia had never in its history developed any form of government beyond that
0 the sultan and his daulah. If the rule of the sultans was to be replaced, then it
would have to be replaced by one equally, or even more, authoritarian; for the
very nature of South Arabian society (primitive, violent, riven by tribal feuds)
required the constant application of coercive power for its effective govern­
ment. In the case of the hereditary rulers, this power was sanctioned by