Nasser soon conceded that the job of sustaining the newborn republic required a great deal more Egyptian assistance, not just military but civilian too; the project of modernising Yemen was indeed about ‘creation’ rather than ‘reform’. Hundreds of Egyptian teachers, doctors and administrators were shipped in to set about fashioning a twentieth-century nation state from scratch, and still the fighting continued. At the end of 1962 some 10,000 more troops were shipped off to Yemen with their president’s grandiose exhortation - ‘We must, under all circumstances, defend our principles in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula against reactionism, imperialism and Zionism!’8 -ringing in their ears. But within a year their number had doubled. Two years into the Yemen campaign, Nasser was thoroughly exasperated by the protracted chaos, but even more so by al-Sallal whom he introduced to Nikita Khrushchev on a Red Sea cruise aboard his yacht, before remarking, ‘I just wanted you to see what I have to put up with.’9
Three years after the revolution, all Yemen’s main ministries remained under tight Egyptian control. By the end of 1964 Egypt’s troop commitment in Yemen had reached 50,000 and it had climbed as high as 55,000c by the end of 1965,10 at the cost of approximately 5 million dollars a day.11 By the time Israel launched its pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, triggering the Six Day War of June 1967, approximately half of Egypt’s ground forces were still bogged down in Yemen,12 very far from where they were needed. What had been conceived as ‘a limited action comprising political, moral and material support’13 had become what President Nasser himself ruefully described as ‘my Vietnam’.14
He had only himself to blame. His troops were ludicrously ill-prepared for the task he had set them, in part, because they were stumbling into a country they knew nothing about beyond the fact that it bordered Egypt’s rival for Middle Eastern hegemony, Saudi Arabia. They had expected to be fighting in desert, not mountains. A chronic lack of maps meant that, like the Turks before them, they were forced to rely on untrustworthy locals. Without suitable kit, Yemen’s climate, which could veer between 130 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the mountains, was a horrible handicap.
Initially encouraged by the republican fervour of the Sunnis in Tihama, their generals had seriously underestimated the level of Royalist resistance they would encounter in the Zaydi highlands. Morale plunged. Many had expected to be fighting only a few die-hard Royalists and a lot of Saudis and Jordanians and were appalled to find that, in the absence of a Yemeni army worthy of the name, it was just them against tens of thousands of recklessly brave tribesmen who knew every inch of their treacherous terrain, and whose hit and run raids exposed the clumsy ineffectiveness of their own air attacks and tank assaults. The Egyptian forces were largely composed of conscripts from the Nile Delta area, men of sturdy peasant stock who knew little about fighting and nothing about the rigours of either cold or mountains, let alone fierce warrior tribes. Even today, one only has to mention Yemen to an Egyptian chef or businessman living in London, to elicit the same gruesome tale of a whole platoon of snoring Egyptians having their throats slit at dead of night by nimble, jambiyah-wielding Yemeni tribesmen. But Egypt’s officer class must bear as much of the blame for the fact that Egypt’s casualties in Yemen between 1962 and 1967 have been reckoned as high as 20,000. More interested in pocketing their enhanced salaries and trading in cheap electrical goods brought in from Aden than in fighting, they scandalously neglected the welfare of their men.
A revolutionary romantic like the poet al-Maqaleh is still grateful to the Egyptians, still convinced that without them the revolution would have been lost. ‘The Egyptians’ help, and that of Iraq and Syria, meant that the enemies of the revolution couldn’t win - the Egyptians‘ mistakes here have all been forgotten,’ he assured me. But there are many ordinary Yemenis with tales to tell of random Egyptian air-attacks that killed women and children. One highlander recalled for me being four years old in 1966, walking along a wadi near his home, with his mother, his grandmother, some other women from their highland village and some camels, when an Egyptian plane swooped down low over their heads. Instantly, his grandmother and mother threw him to the ground and shielded him with their bodies, causing one of their neighbours to berate them for cowardice. ‘I remember looking up and seeing that plane, and a black hole at the back of it and something moving’, he told me, ‘and the noise of the bombs. And when the plane had gone and we all got up we saw the woman who had called us cowards was dead. All the coloured bracelets on her arm had been broken, so I took them to play with.’
Worse still, as early as 1963 the Egyptian air force was using chemical warfare against the Royalist tribes. Richard Beeston of the Daily Telegraph scored a world scoop with the news that Nasser was the ‘first person to employ chemical warfare since Mussolini used mustard gas on Ethiopian tribesmen during the thirties’.15 Beeston travelled for three days from the Saudi border to a village in north Yemen named al-Kawma where he witnessed the ‘pitiful coughing of the gassed villagers’, saw the ‘vivid yellow face’ of one woman and a twelve-year-old boy’s ‘deep blister wounds’ and learned that seven people had died. In January 1967 a greyish-green poison cloud drifting downwind over the village of al-Kitaf killed 200 villagers within fifty minutes of its descent. Four months later, over 300 more died in attacks on five different villages.16 Only then did the Red Cross and subsequently the United Nations condemn Egypt for employing chemical warfare against civilians.
Dr Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former foreign minister and prime minister of Yemen, was out of the country, studying in the United States in the 1960s, but is likewise in no doubt today that Nasser’s intervention in Yemen’s revolution was a costly disaster. ‘For one thing, we never knew anything like secret police before the Egyptians came. The imams had just a few spies, but with the Egyptians terrible things went on - sodomising, torture, people having air pumped up their anuses.’ And al-Iryani had a more general objection: ‘Even if Nasser got fed up with him, al-Sallal was completely Egypt’s man. Without showing any respect for our national identity or pride, the Egyptians came in here and practised “direct rule”, just like Bremerd in Iraq. That was the biggest problem of all, because it lost us the very best of our revolutionary leaders.’
In 1965 two of the leading lights of the Yemen liberation movement whose activities dated back to the 1940s - the Sanaani lawyer and poet Mohamed al-Zubayri and Ahmad Numan - were neutralised (one by assassination, the other by retreat into exile) for daring to call for Egypt’s withdrawal. In the same year Nasser summoned al-Sallal to Cairo for a dressing down, permitting a General Hassan al-Amri to rule in his place. When General al-Amri, in turn, travelled to Cairo with around fifty more of the cream of Yemen’s revolutionaries to beg that al-Sallal be prevented from returning and that the Egyptians loosen their stranglehold on the country, Nasser had the general and his entire retinue either placed under close house arrest or hurled into jail, while al-Sallal returned to Yemen.
One of those eminent dissidents, Yahya al-Mutawakkil, has recalled his freezing, squalid prison cell and the nights he spent scraping away with a belt buckle at the mortar in the wall between his cell and that of a friend:
I managed to dislodge one of the bricks. I removed it every night after the final guard check so I could tell Ali about the films I had seen and Ali could recite poetry to me in return. In the daytime I would seal the brick back in place with cooking oil. So many flies swarmed on the grease that they were like a coat of black paint over the brick, so the guards never noticed that the mortar had been removed.17
The cream of Yemen’s revolutionaries were not freed to return to Yemen until 1967, by which time Egypt had been defeated in the Six Day War against Israel and Nasser was offering to resign, admitting that his adventure in Yemen had been a mistake and would soon be terminated.
The root of the Egyptians’ problem was not that all those tribes were thoroughly, nobly wedded to the enemy Royalist cause and the dream of restoring their
Imam Badr. It was not even that Republican and Royalist tribes had eventually formed a powerful coalition against the foreign invader. It was the fact that many of them were inconstant in their affiliation, indifferent to any ideology, pragmatic and flexible, eager to prolong the hostilities indefinitely, happy to receive guns and supplies from anywhere and to continue fighting for whichever side would pay them the most. A Soviet Pravda correpondent, reporting on an abortive peace conference near the Saudi border in 1965, has described an almost shocking absence of hostility between the various Royalist and Republican tribes gathered for the negotiations: ‘They hugged each other like old friends, kissed each others’ hands, and, once the initial greetings were over, spent a good while strolling around the enclosure hand in hand, as is the local custom.’18
The tribes had rarely, if ever, had it so good. The case of a Bakil sheikh whose fortunes were immensely enhanced by the end of the war graphically illustrates the point. Very shortly after the revolution Sheikh Naji al-Ghadir declared himself and his following of 120 tribesmen for the Royalists, and was rewarded with Saudi arms and money via the Sharif of Beihan in the West Aden Protectorate. A year later he was being bribed by the Egyptians with 2,000 rifles, plenty of ammunition and 800,000 Maria Theresa dollars to bring all his Khawlan tribesmen out on the side of the Republic instead. He gave some of the booty to the Royalists, but he was in Saudi Arabia six months later asking King Feisal for more guns and money for 12,000 men. In 1967 he was boasting to a French journalist: ‘At the moment I receive subsidies from King Feisal, from Sharif Hussein of Beihan, and from our sovereign (May God grant him a long life!) the Imam al-Badr.’19
Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of the Hashid played an almost equally flexible hand. Initially inclined towards the republic on account of Imam Ahmad’s cruel killing of his father and brother, he even served as Minister of the Interior and Tribal Affairs in the republican government, but he turned against the Egyptians and al-Sallal in 1965 and went into exile, while his tribesmen chose whichever side offered them the best pecuniary inducement. Representing the durable, pragmatic might of the northern highlands, al-Ahmar was the biggest winner of all, emerging as Yemen’s chief power-broker, the speaker of the Yemen Arab Republic’s Consultative Council by 1971. Almost without a break, he retained his pre-eminent position as power broker and éminence grise in Yemeni affairs until his death at the age of seventy-four in late 2007.
Like every unwelcome invader before them, the Egyptians had been seen off at last by Yemen’s highland tribes. Field Marshal al-Amer, who masterminded the Yemen campaign and later committed suicide or was poisoned after his country’s defeat in the Six Day War, bitterly regretted the way the Yemen adventure had distracted his army from preparing to face its real enemy. In terms eerily similar to those used by the last Ottoman Turkish governor of Yemen, he wrote about those five wasted years in Yemen: ‘We did not bother to study the local, Arab and international implications or the political and military questions involved. After years of experience we realised that it was a war between tribes and that we entered it without knowing the nature of their land, their traditions and their ideas.’20
With the Egyptians gone after 1967, and al-Sallal finally fled into exile in Iraq after attending the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian revolution celebrations in Moscow in November that year, the Royalists were emboldened to mount a last offensive, a siege on Sanaa which lasted seventy days, from November 1967 to February 1968. Officers from the southern highlands whom the Egyptians had trained and encouraged as a useful counterweight to the Royalist northern high-landers played an important role in defending the revolution and finally throwing off the siege, but were soon deemed too dangerously leftward-leaning in their views to reap the rewards of their efforts. In effect, their more egalitarian outlook represented a threat to the Zaydi northern highlanders‘ traditional supremacy. General al-Amri, then in charge of the armed forces and effectively Yemen’s ruler, but presumably still smarting from his humiliating treatment by Nasser, was as determined as sheikhs like al-Ahmar to purge the new Yemen of any taint of socialism. So the fighting and killing continued among the Republicans themselves. By the start of 1969 the desired purge had been achieved and a group of what the historian Fred Halliday calls ’tribalist republicans’ - General al-Amri, President Abdul Rahman al-Iryani and Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar of course - were in a strong enough position to extend a conciliatory hand to the Royalists. In the end, it was far easier to do business with home-made highlander Zaydi Royalists than with foreign-made Socialists with Sunni backgrounds, especially since Saudi Arabia had made clear that it would only agree to stop funding the Royalists if the Yemen Arab Republic declared itself ‘Islamic’.
When it came down to it, the Yemen Arab Republic was likely to get more aid with fewer strings attached out of Saudi Arabia than out of impoverished, demoralised and leftward-leaning Egypt. But, just as importantly, the Zaydis had reasserted their ancient right to rule north Yemen. Royalists and Republicans mingled easily at last in a new unelected National Assembly. The country, it was easily agreed, needed no political parties because it had its tribes and, in the words of President al-Iryani, parties only brought unwelcome foreign interference because ‘people import political ideas from outside the country’.21 But al-Iryani knew just what kind of a new Yemen he was presiding over. His politician nephew, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, told me that his uncle was perfectly well aware of the extent to which he, like any imam before him, depended on the support of the northern highland tribes, because he once told their principal sheikhs, ‘If ever you want me out, you won’t have to do anything to me. Just tell me to go and I’ll go. There’ll be no need to kill me.’
WHO CAN RULE?
For four years, from 1970 until 1974, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani struggled to steer Yemen on a fair and steady course that put all its factions to work rebuilding a country on its knees after almost a decade of war and three years of drought.
A member of the qadhi class who had spent fifteen years in the imams’ jails and narrowly escaped beheading by Imam Ahmad for his part in the 1955 coup plot, al-Iryani embodied the spirit of reconciliation. He took steps to heal the old Zaydi/Sunni regional split. Sunnis from the southern highlands and Tihama were welcomed into his five-man Republican Council and well represented in his government of foreign-educated technocrats and intellectuals, some of whom were even moderately inclined towards socialism. But so were the appointees of the leading northern Zaydi tribes, whose stipends and access to lucrative posts in the rapidly expanding civil service cost Yemen very dearly, as did the army which was demanding heavy expenditures in weapons purchases. Yet, for all al-Iryani’s strenuous efforts at establishing a new politics, for all his good relations with the tribes (he was close to Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, having tutored him in one of the imam’s prisons), for all his promotion of a new breed of urban technocrat and his laudable achievement of providing the Yemen Arab Republic with its first constitution and a vital Central Planning Organisation to power his reforms, there was no reconciling the clamouring demands of the disparate factions. The most serious obstacle was the tribes: accustomed as they were to stipends and exploiting the more productive Sunni areas of the country for their income, they did not take kindly to the threat posed by a new, modern order to their age-old hegemony.
Prime ministers came and went. One lasted less than four months in 1971, complaining that when the YAR was £75 million in debt and annual expenditure running at more than double its revenues, the tribal leaders were grabbing far too large a slice of the budget pie.22 General al-Amri, the mighty defender of the country from the socialist contagion in 1968, lasted hardly a week in 1971, having lost his temper and shot a photographer who insulted him. Muhsin Alaini notched up four separate terms of office under al-Iryani, two of which lasted only a month. A boldly determined reformer, Alaini once tried to cancel all stipends to the tribes and was so embarrassed to be begging for international food aid while Yemenis spent what money they had
on qat that he banned all government workers and military from on. In his autobiography, 50 Years in Shifting Sands, Alaini details the miserable impotence of the Yemeni premiership: ‘When the Prime Minister or one of his ministers “dares” take a decision that even slightly challenges the authority of those in power (be it tribal, religious, military or economic [note the order of interests]) his own position is threatened. Mediators may even have to intervene for him to be forgiven and pardoned.’23 The time-honoured customs of respecting physical might and seeking direct access to the highest authority - preferably by winning an invitation to the president’s afternoon qat chew - sabotaged the creation of an efficient government machine. The various powerful interest groups effectively rendered all governments as superfluous to the running of the country as they had been in the imams’ day.
By mid-1973 the Saudis had come to al-Iryani’s rescue with an agreement to cover the deficit in the YAR’s annual budget, and made a first payment of $25 million, but there was a price to be paid for their help. The extent of Saudi leverage, not just financial but also political, would sink al-Iryani. Alarmed and infuriated by the establishment of a Marxist state in the formerly British-ruled south after 1967, Saudi Arabia helped to reopen old civil war wounds by encouraging an army of ex-Royalists from the north and ex-sultans from the former protectorates to invade the south. In 1972, with al-Iryani and the technocrats in his government looking on helplessly, a two-week war between the two Yemeni republics erupted, at the end of which the leaders of both parts of Yemen suddenly concluded a peace based on a reiteration of their commitment to the ideal of unity. Wise President al-Iryani had good-humouredly defused his Marxist counterpart’s dogmatic stipulation that unity was impossible until the north had got rid of its bureaucracy and bourgeoisie, with ‘I agree. But first you have to give me a bureaucracy and also give me a bourgeoisie. Once I have them, I can then discuss getting rid of them again.’24
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 11