Unifying North Yemen through the Indelible Imprint of Foreign Intervention: A 1960s Civil War between Royalists and Republicans

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Yemen in 1962 was a trifurcated political entity – in the south and southwest was Britain’s eastern and western protectorates beset by tribal insurrection. In North Yemen (which borders Saudi Arabia), the ruler of the Hamid al-Din branch of the al-Qasim dynasty (of the Yemeni Mutawakkilite Kingdom) was about to face his own formidable internal challenge. In that year fighting broke out in the north when the newly elected imam (Muhammad al-Badr) was deposed by Yemeni rebel forces led by army strongman Abdullah as-Sallal.

YAR republican coup leader as-Sallal at military display in 1963 ⍗

An internal war augmented by ‘friends’ with benefits

Al-Badr escaped to Saudi Arabia where he rallied support from the northern Zaydi Shia tribes. Meanwhile the rebels declared North Yemen a republic – the Yemen Arab Republic. With the battle lines of the Civil War drawn, royalists V republicans, it immediately attracted the willing participation of competing foreign elements. Within a very short time, Egypt had entered the conflict on the republic’s side. President Nasser provided as-Sallal with bulk shipments of military supplies and a massive infusion of troops to fight the royalists. Later, the Soviet Union, after switching ‘horses’ in the conflict, contributed to the republicans’ armaments, delivering them 24 Mig-19 fighter planes.

At the same time Md al-Badr’s royalist partisans were receiving military aid from the Saudis and Jordan※, and diplomatic support from the UK – who was also bankrolling mercenaries to fight for the royalists [Stanley Sandler, Ground Warfare: The International Encyclopedia, Vol 1 (2002)]. In addition the Shah of Iran provided advisers for the royalist side, while Israel provided intelligence and its air force to airlift supplies to them.

A regional proxy war: Egypt V Saudi Arabia

There has been much written about Nasser’s motives for involving Egypt in the war (including the haste with which he committed the UAR). Nasser’s ambition to be recognised as leader of the Arab world had taken a hit in the couple of years prior to the war’s outbreak…in 1961 Nasser’s showcase creation, the United Arab Republic had unravelled when Syria, tired of the “second-class treatment” from Egypt, broke away from the UAR. By the summer of 1962 Egypt’s regional prestige had plummeted… only Algeria remained on good terms with Egypt, the UAR had lost control of the Arab League and the other major Arab states were all aligned against Nasser [Nasser’s Gamble: How the Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power, Jesse Ferris, (2012)].

These Egyptian reversals of fortune and an attempt in the same year at a power play by Iraq’s dictator Qasim who threatened to annex newly-independent Kuwait✣, were a wake-up call for the Egyptian president – he was, he knew, at risk of being isolated in the Arab world. Therefore, as has been noted, the Yemen Civil War presented “a foreign policy opportunity for Nasser to become relevant again” [Asher Aviad Orkaby, ‘The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, Mass.), April 2014]. And the involvement of the region’s leading monarchy, Saudi Arabia, in the conflict on the deposed imam’s side, was impetus for Nasser to do what he could to limit its expansion in the peninsula.

The early phases of the civil war saw initial successes by the royalists commanded by al-Badr’s uncle Prince Hassan, culminating in a drive towards Sana’a to retake the capital for the Imam. The offensive was checked only after Egypt increased its commitment to the conflict, providing essential air support for the republican troops. Estimated numbers vary but all up Nasser is thought to have injected at least 70,000 Egyptian soldiers into the war. As the war dragged on without resolution Egypt unleashed chemical warfare, a series of poison gas bombings of Yemeni villages loyal to the Royalists (1966/67).

UAR military instructors training Yemeni republican soldiers ⍗.

Parallel with the ongoing prosecution of the civil war on the battlefield, international efforts, spearheaded by the UN, were being made to encourage the proxy combatants Egypt and Saudi Arabia to pull back from the domestic conflict.

Yemen, “a cage for Nasser and Arab nationalism”

With regard to the superpowers’ role in reining in the combatants through mediating the conflict, some historians have argued that, behind the scenes, the superpowers were actually not unhappy with the prospect of Egypt being tied up militarily in Yemen for so long. The US and USSR, they contend, were content to see Egypt’s military strength shunted off into the Yemeni imbroglio. Thus preoccupied, the chances of war breaking out between Israel and the UAR (which would lead to the two superpowers intervening and the risk of a dangerous confrontation between them), was headed off. Washington also saw a secondary benefit in Egypt’s preoccupation with the war in North Yemen – it would be less likely to pose a threat to the UK base in Aden and to the US base in Libya [ibid.].


⍐ The Civil War in stamps – royalist & republican

The US had a vested interest in maintaining stability in the Arabian Peninsula … preserving access to vital oil resources was high on its agenda. The Soviet Union also had its own interests in Yemen to consider – it was of geopolitical advantage, making it a potential base for the Soviets to expand into the Arabian Peninsula, as well as a jump-off point into post-colonial Africa to make Cold War gains at the expense of western interests [Orkaby, loc.cit.]. The Soviet-built port at al-Hudaydah (Hodeida) was constructed to give Moscow an influential role in international shipping through the Red Sea.

YAR stamps commemorating the Soviet-built port at Hodeida ⍗

Egypt’s folly – the Vietnam parallel

The conservative western media at the time (Time, The New Republic, etc) was quick to call out Nasser’s military engagement as a monumental blunder [Tharoor, loc.cit.]. Later historians in hindsight have labelled Yemen Egypt’s ‘Vietnam’. Historians such as Michael Oren have attributed Egypt’s abysmal performance in the 1967 Six-Day War in part to the Egyptians’ being seriously understrength owing to the massive over-commitment to the Yemen war [Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (M Oren), (2002)].

Sana’a (old town) ⍐

The civil war reached its climax in 1967/68. The royalist forces laid siege to Sana’a to try to break the back of the republican heartland. Bolstered by the hefty Egyptian contribution this attempt was resisted by the republicans and proved the war’s turning point. Although pockets of tribal royalist resistance lingered on till 1970, the royalists and al-Badr were effectively defeated. In late 1967 the republicans replaced as-Sallah (who voluntarily went into exile in Baghdad) as president with Abdul al-Iranyi (formerly the YAR prime minister in 1962-63).

Royalist territory in red/Republican territory in black ⍗

Rapprochement

In March 1969 the warring parties – of a conflict that had claimed around 200,000 lives including civilians – held peace talks in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), from which agreement was reached to form a unified government in North Yemen. The government was to represent both royalists and republicans although it would excluded members of the Hamid al-Din family. Subsequently in 1970, Saudi Arabia recognised the Yemen Republic (YAR) [Orkaby, op.cit.].

Wash-up of the war

As suggested from the above, Egypt, despite being on the winners’ side in the civil war, was a loser in the wider, regional political contest. Nasser’s reckless foray into the Yemen adventure expended an horrendous casualty toll on Egypt’s military manpower✪ and left it woefully ill-prepared materially for the pre-emptive, surprise strike from Israel when it came in June 1967. The six-day catastrophe that followed left Egypt with long-term disadvantages, loss of key strategic territories to its enemy and forfeited the ascendency to it in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

⍗ King Faisal – Saudi ruler 1960s-70s

Though a blow to Nasser’s foreign policy ambitions and a setback to the cause of Pan-Arabism, there were nonetheless some positives for Egypt that came out of the foreign venture. The Khartoum Agreement (1967) saw Saudi king Faisal and Nasser “bury the hatchet” and agree that both withdraw their support from the two sides in the war [‘How the 1967 War dramatically re-oriented Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy’, Brookings, (Bruce Riedel), 30-May-2017, www.brookings.edu]. In material terms, Egypt benefitted from the closer ties with its wealthy neighbour – many thousands of Egyptian workers gained employment in the Saudi oil industry. Geo-strategically, the outcome in South Yemen was a plus for Egypt – the British colonials were vanquished from Aden, allowing Nasser to secure the Red Sea approach to the Suez Canal (albeit with the loss of Sinai) [Orkaby, op.cit.].

As the YAR moved to the right (recognising West Germany in return for aid), Saudi Arabia acquired itself a stable ally on its southern flank, one dependent on Saudi financial support. The Soviet Union, despite seeing the YAR moving towards alliances with the West, also benefitted in the Cold War game of “one-upmanship” from the new status quo – the emergence of a Marxist regime in South Yemen saw its influence in the region broaden. The Soviets’ new naval and military base in Aden gave Moscow a convenient haven to launch missions into Africa countries experiencing revolutionary turmoil, (especially Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Somalia) [ibid.].


Footnote: North Yemen tribal politics and coup proclivity
The coup in 1962 would not have come as a surprise to the Hamid al-Din rulers of North Yemen. There had been a history of tribal-centred coup attempts in the kingdom⊡…in 1948 al-Badr’s grandfather Imam Yahya was assassinated by the Hamid al-Din’s Sayyid rivals, the Alwaziris, who briefly assumed the imamate until Yahya’s son regained power for the family after tribal and Saudi intervention. A second coup was launched in 1955 by the Alwaziris and some military officers but was easily squashed [Peterson, J.E. “Tribes and Politics in Yemen.” Arabian Peninsula Background Note, No. APBN-007. Published on www.JEPeterson.net, December 2008].

❄ ❄ ❄ 👑 👑 👑 ✨ ✨ ✨

※ however the Jordanians severed their material support to the royalist side in 1963 and formally recognised the YAR one year later

✣ prompting Britain and other Arab states to send troops to Kuwait to protect its sovereignty (forcing Iraq to back down)

✪ about 10,000 of which are thought to have died in the drawn-out war. Egypt also incurred massive war debts from its intervention [‘How Yemen was once Egypt’s Vietnam’, Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 28-Mar-2015, www.washingtonpost.com]

⊡ Yemen has been described as perhaps the most tribal-based society and nation in the entire Arab world (Peterson, op.cit.)

Aden End-Game: The Union Jack’s Imperial Curtain Call

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Travel

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”