Page 52 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Abandonment of Aden 45

the more backward rulers by British advisers to reform their administrations.
It was the very effectiveness of this interference, however well-intentioned, in
conjunction with the amelioration of his material circumstances that was in
large measure responsible for unsettling the ordinary tribesman. For innova­
tions, especially those designed to curb his anarchical behaviour, were resented
by him; while at the same time his predatory instincts were sharpened by the
economic benefits which were beginning to accrue to him and his fellows.
In such a frame of mind the tribesman was, if not exactly ripe for sedition, at
least highly vulnerable to nationalist propaganda, especially of the skilful kind
broadcast from Cairo and, after 1962, from Sana and Taiz. The spread of this
propaganda was greatly facilitated by the ubiquity of transistor radios
throughout the protectorates, again the consequence of economic progress. Its
success in arousing the tribesmen (as well as the proletariat and intellectual sans­
culottes of Aden) was undeniable, and this success was seized upon by the
federation’s critics in the West, where the irresistibility of the advance of Arab
nationalism was one of the pillars of the current political orthodoxy, as conclu­
sive evidence of the essential rottenness of the whole federal structure and of
the rulers in particular. Whether the tribesmen appreciated precisely what
Arab nationalism was or meant is highly improbable. What they did under­
stand was its appeal to their xenophobic and Muslim sentiments, and it was
precisely these elements in Arab nationalist ideology that Egyptian and
Yemeni propaganda was at pains to emphasize. It sought, by playing upon the
tribesmen’s Muslim prejudices, already excited by British interference in their
accustomed ways, and by portraying the federal rulers as tools and allies of the
infidel British, to condemn them as traitors to Islam. Needless to say, the
propaganda was also charged with rancorous denunciations of the principle of
hereditary and princely rule, coupled with vehement exhortations to the
tribesmen to put their rulers to the sword and set up a people’s republic in their
place.
The contribution of the NLF to the coming auto-da-fe was to provoke the
tribesmen’s endemic blood-lust and avarice by harping upon the contrast
between their comparative poverty and the wealth of the rulers and the more
prosperous saiyids. That the NLF’s incitements derived from a quasi-Marxist
source was neither known, nor of any consequence, to the great body of the
tribes. Their lives were lived by the blood-feud and the razzia; any pretext
would serve for them to take up arms in pursuit of plunder and blood-letting.
ut what won them over to the NLF more than anything else was the quantity
0 arms and money supplied by the organization, which was far greater than
anything the tribesmen had encountered before. Thus primed, they went on
e rampage, and before they had time to discover that they had been manipu-
ated, they had gone further than they had ever conceived of doing, disrupting
e e ementary but serviceable system of customs, prescriptions, loyalties and
uties that had upheld the rough-and-ready political order in South Arabia for