A couple of years ago the BBC screened a television drama about the final chapter of British colonial rule called The Last Post. Set in 1965 in the southern Arabian Peninsula, the opening sequence of the show begins with some archive black-and-white footage and the current queen Elizabeth II extolling the virtues of the British protectorate of Aden as the finest exemplar of British colonial administration. The TV series’ storyline focused on the relationship dramas of a group of British Royal Military Policemen and their wives stuck in an unforgiving hell-hole of a desert outpost surrounded by largely nondescript bands of armed and hostile Arab insurgents. The Brits are shown behaving alternately badly and heroically in an alien and challenging environment (the Hadhramaut region in modern-day eastern Yemen, but actually filmed in South Africa!)

‘The Last Post’ ⇣

Brits on a very “sticky wicket”

Although the inter-personal conflicts of the main protagonists are at the forefront, The Last Post does convey a plausible sense of just how dicey a predicament the British on the ground found themselves in that political and military hotspot. It would be interesting to recount some background history of how Britain got involved in Aden and how things reached such a disastrous crescendo for the declining colonial power in the 1960s crisis.

(Source: Nafida Mohamed)

A base on the Red Sea

Britain’s decision to capture the town and port of Aden in 1839 via the agency of the British East India Co was a strategic move, all about securing up the lines of communication with Britain’s “jewel in the Empire”, India✲. Holding Aden, together with British Somaliland on the Horn of Africa, gave Britain control of the entrance to the Red Sea, this became even more critically advantageous following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 [‘A Short History of the Aden Emergency’, (Simon Innes-Robbins), IWU, (22-Jun-2018), www.iwu.org.uk]. The retention of Aden as a bunkering port facilitated the British navy’s task of ensuring a safe passage for merchant shipping from the threat of pirates between the Indian colony and the motherland [Charles Schaefer; “Selling at a Wash:” Competition and the Indian Merchant Community in Aden Crown Colony. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 1999; 19 (2): 16–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-16].Aden Settlement ⇡

The securing of a stronghold in Aden also allowed the British to check rival great power expansion into the Indian Ocean (eg, from the French and the Russians). The link with British India was cemented by making the Aden Settlement a province of the Bombay presidency.

‘Adan albaldat alqadima (old town) ⇣

Crown colony to federation 

In 1937 the area of Aden and its immediate environs (just 192km in size) was hived off and made a colony directly ruled from Westminster. In an attempt to make the British Arabian possessions more manageable, two separate jurisdictions were established – a West Aden Protectorate and an East Aden Protectorate…from this time on Britain encountered a heightening of dissent and disruption to its rule from within the various sultanates and emirates in southern Arabia (especially from the trade union sectors of society). The British army was reinstated in Aden in 1955 and the outbreak of a general strike three years later was mishandled by Westminster.

Britain’s overriding strategy was to try to hold out against these challenges and demands as long as it could…Aden and the Red Sea was still as vital as ever to the UK’s geo-political objectives, but it was also crucial to the Empire’s commercial interests, ie, the profitability of the trade route from South Asia, maintenance of access to Middle Eastern oil reserves (including a BP refinery located at Little Aden).

FSA Flag ⇡

By the late Fifties concessions were needed to quell the cries for full independence…in 1959 Britain sponsored the creation of the Federation of Arabian Emirates of the South, comprising six of the sheikhdom states. A further nine joined in 1962 and the expanded federation renamed the Federation of South Arabia (FSA). The following January (1963) Aden joined the association as the State of Aden (Arabic: Wilāyat ‘Adan) within the FSA – in all 16 states federated under UK protection⌖. The British government’s aim was to defuse the impetus of the southern peninsula Arabs while allowing Britain to continue running the states’ foreign affairs and retain it’s petroleum holdings in Aden [‘State of Aden’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org].

In 1963 Harold McMillan’s Tory government announced the decision to pull out of Aden and it’s hinterland by 1968. This was a fillip for the local nationalist opposition groups. Two preeminent rival nationalist groups emerged: the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY), both based in Aden. What began as opposition to UK colonialism evolved into a war for independence, partly inspired by Colonel Nasser’s Pan-Arabist movement. The NLF and FLOSY from 1963 fought each other for ascendency as well as fighting the British occupying forces.

Aden Emergency

As tensions rose in Aden, a grenade attack in December 1963 by insurgents intended for the British High Commissioner, triggered open conflict. A state of emergency was declared with the Arab militants engaging primarily in guerrilla activities against the British forces with part of the fighting centred around the mountainous Radfan region where local dissenting tribesmen (aided by NLF) launched raids on the British line of communications between Aden and Dhala – for this reason the Aden Emergency is sometimes also called the Radfan Uprising [Aden Emergency’, (National Army Museum), www.webcitation.org]. In 1964 the British government sent reinforcements to try to quell the insurgency…the short-lived FSA was suspended and an attempt made to reimpose colonial rule.

⇣ British patrol on Radfan Mtns

(source: UK Mail Online)

In a change of tack, NLF in late 1964 switched the point of attack, concentrating the war on Aden itself. The insurgents sought to hit home where the garrisoned British troops were…the soldiers and their families became the targets of NLF terrorist attacks – with a resultant effect on morale [ibid.].

Meshing of the Yemen Civil War

The imbroglio in the State of Aden was exacerbated with fighting spilling over into the region from the nearby civil war raging in North Yemen. Meanwhile, the British Labour government led by Harold Wilson signalled its intent to grant independence to the territory under the leadership of FLOSY, however this was vetoed by US president Lyndon Johnson who wanted to avoid an escalation of the Yemen conflict whilst the Vietnam War was raging.

Aden street riots 1967 ⇡

By the beginning of 1967 the focus of the Emergency fixed on the Crater district in Aden after NLF had orchestrated street riots. When units of the indigenous South Arabian Army mutinied, the British military lost control of this key district… eventually the British under a hard-line commander Lt-Col “Mad Mitch” Mitchell regained control of the perimeter. By now the Wilson government had had enough of the whole disastrous mess, announcing an earlier than planned pull-out from Aden (November 1967) – despite the fact that no clarification of the Arab leadership situation had been realised [‘Aden Emergency’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/]

By late 1967 this issue was resolved however…NLF had become the dominant group, triumphing over FLOSY with the help of the (North) Yemen federal army. As British forces were withdrawn in November, the result of NLF negotiations with the British government was that the Marxist-oriented NLF immediately took over the former protectorates of Aden and Hadhramaut, establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen [‘Federation of South Arabia’, www.unostamps.nl].NLF (South Yemen) flag ⇡

It was left to a diplomat to put the best face-saving spin on it for the retreating Brits (last High Commissioner of Aden Humphrey Trevelyan): “So we left without glory but without disaster”✥. Whichever way you view it the British colonials were gone for good, more than anything else at this time the Aden episode symbolised the eclipse of Britain as an imperial power… conflict in the Yemen, however as time would show, was far, far, from being at an end.

Post Scriptum: Failure of FSA to unite the tribal potentates

Many historians of the Aden crisis view the British construct, the Federation of South Arabia’s failure to take root as inevitable, “a hopeless misadventure almost predestined for failure” [Harrington, Craig A.”The Colonial Office and the Retreat from Aden: Great Britain in South Arabia, 1957–1967.” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 25 no. 3, 2014, pp. 5-26. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/553185]. Many reasons have been advanced…elements within the southern tribes put loyalty to the Aden nationalist groups ahead of loyalty to the Federation, and the ingrained regional rivalries of the parts (the sultanates) did not make for a cohesive federated whole; what was imposed by London was a “Whitehall Federation” which failed to address the issues facing the southern Arabian protectorates; the creation of a modern unified state was an illusion, given it was being carved from such unpromising material (remote, traditional fiefdoms and sheikhdoms with no experience of democracy and beset by a culture of ongoing internecine conflict). For some scholars FSA’s demise can be sheeted home to a deficit of both political resolve and financial investment on the part of the colonial power – with the catastrophic outcome of Britain cutting and running, leaving the regional entity without any viable succession plan and without any prospect foreseeable for a peaceful solution – a blatant abdication of its responsibility as a protectorate [Clive Jones (2017) Aden, South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study in state failure and state creation, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 2-5, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1200031].

PPS: Condemnation by association

Moreover, as one observer put it, as the FSA remained “remained dependent on British backing, and in consequence became ineffably associated with British imperialism in an era of anti-colonial Arab nationalism” [Simon C. Smith (2017) Failure and success in state formation: British policy towards the Federation of South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 84-97, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1196667].

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✲ for instance, Sir Robert Grant, the governor of Bombay, (1834-1838), argued that India could only be protected by pre-emptively seizing “places of strength” to protect GB’s Indian Ocean possessions [Britain: Gaining and Losing an Empire, 1763-1914, (Nikki Christie), (2016)]

⌖ they were Fadhi, Audhali, Beihan, Dhala, Lower Yafa, Upper Aulaqi Sheikhdom (the original six) …

Alawi, Aqrabi, Dathina, Haushabi, Lahej, Lower Aulaqi, Maflahi, Shaib, Wahidi …

and the State of Aden

 ✥ although Trevelyan did concede that Britain achieved “little permanent good for the country”