Although no one could have guessed it at the time, Salih was embarking on a period of rule as long as (perhaps longer than) Imam Yahya’s.
ARABIA’S ONLY MARXIST STATE
If independent north Yemen was firmly under the rule of Zaydi military tribesmen by 1978, the south, under Marxist rule for the past decade, had been doing its best to ensure the word ‘tribe’ was never heard again.
Although all Yemenis continued to recall their ancient unity as a people and dreamed of being, as they thought of it, reunited, the leaders of the two Yemens were very far from agreeing on what a unified Yemen might look like. No real progress was made. In the south, increasingly dogmatic Marxists, the backbone of the old National Liberation Front (NLF), made aggressive attempts to spread their creed north, while the north never relinquished the old Zaydi imams‘ claim to Aden. Each side even supported armed dissident movements in the other, each hunted down and persecuted those dissidents, and demonised the other. Southerners were infidel atheists, hell-bent on destroying Arab customs and Islam with their imported infidel creed, while northerners were simply primitive barbarians, a bunch of lawless and greedy tribes. The financial need for both states to choose sides in the superpowers’ Cold War was another polarising factor. While the YAR was mainly subsidised by Saudi Arabia and western aid, southerners were tackling the ambitious project of building the People’s Republic of South Yemen,e the only Marxist state on the Arabian Peninsula, with mostly Soviet-bloc backing.
In 1968, the year after the British departed, the Soviet Union discovered to its delight that, without having to lift so much as a finger let alone mount a military expedition, it had made the first (and only, it turned out) Arab convert to its ideology, expanded its sphere of influence onto the Arabian Peninsula, and gained a useful port from which to conduct its Indian Ocean naval manoeuvres. ‘We wanted to prove that a small under-developed Arab country, a former British colony, would advance with seven-league strides towards the bright future provided it was armed with the slogans of scientific socialism,’ recalled one former Soviet ambassador to south Yemen.32 Another Russian diplomat who served in Aden described his country’s involvement in the furthest corner of the Arabian Peninsula to me with more world-weariness: ‘South Yemen was a great asset to us at the time, simply because it proved our ideology was right, but we soon understood that we had to pay for this result.’
That payment was never enough as far as the Yemenis were concerned. Fraternal feeling towards Moscow was generally in short supply and the Kremlin soon tired of its little Arab brother’s pestering demands. In the eyes of the Soviet leadership, the PDRY was never a fully-fledged ‘Marxist’ country, like Cuba or Vietnam, only ever ‘a state of Marxist orientation’, on a par with Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique. As Yevgeny Primakov, a Soviet-era diplomat who served as Russia’s foreign minister after the fall of Communism, recalls in his memoir, Russia and the Arabs (2009), ‘the example of Southern Yemen showed the perils of making the “leap” to socialism without taking account of the country’s socio-economic and political situation’.33
The Marxist NLF had inherited a country that was one-and-a-half times as big as the YAR thanks to Hadhramaut and Mahra, but with a population totalling only two million to the YAR’s approximately five million. They had also inherited economic chaos, caused by a sudden impoverishment for which they were not to blame. The closure of the Suez Canal in June 1967 reduced traffic to the port of Aden to a quarter of what it had been in its colonial heyday and the dismantling of the British base had left 25,000 people out of work. The level of direct British aid to its former colony plunged abruptly from accounting for almost 70 per cent of its revenue to accounting for none at all.34 But, unlike the YAR under President al-Iryani after 1970, the south’s NLF leadership made little attempt to heal the divisions in the population by gathering together the most constructive elements in society, whatever their political colouring. There were more pressing concerns. Thanks to the cultural and economic gulf dividing Aden from the protectorates, the threat of the territory completely disintegrating was very real. A strong totalitarian state and the binding force of a brand new ideology had to be the priority, especially after the Maoist branch of the Hadhramaut NLF’s early attempt to secede from the rest of the country.
Since Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the Six Day War had taken all the shine off the glamorous figurehead of Arab national-socialism, it was soon abundantly clear that anyone opposed to the project of turning the new state into a laboratory for a hard-line Marxist experiment that took no account whatsoever of existing conditions and ancient customs, was more or less superfluous. An elderly Adeni lawyer of Muslim Indian extraction named Sheikh Tariq Abdullah recalled for me what the end of British colonial and beginning of NLF rule had meant for him. ‘It took us about a year to start regretting the departure of the British.’ Here and there one could still find faint traces of their presence, he remembered. The waiters at Aden’s Crescent Hotel still addressed each other in English as ‘Boy’. A small army of Somali women whom British forces families had employed as nannies begged in the streets, among the scavenging stray pets the British had abandoned. ‘We all understood that the NLF was more violent than FLOSY; most of us educated Adeni intellectuals had supported FLOSY for that reason alone, but when the NLF took power we assumed they’d need us.’ Sheikh Tariq recalled, ‘I was personally naïve enough, unfortunately, to very much believe that every single educated person would be fully exploited, because there was such a shortage of such people with standing in the community.’
The former trades-union leader and leading light of FLOSY, Abdullah al-Asnag, was a lot less starry-eyed than Sheikh Tariq. Invited by his old school-friend, Feisal ash-Shaabi, to join the new government in 1969, al-Asnag joked that since he valued his life he would only accept the post of his country’s ambassador to Mauritania. Thousands were slung in jail, thousands of civil servants - the sturdy backbone of the former colony - fled north where their British-honed skills were appreciated in the YAR’s new banks and government offices. Salih Farid, a member of an old ruling family in the former West Aden Protectorate, returned from his scholarship studies in Britain in 1968 only to be jailed for four years for being ‘a stooge of the imperialists’, a ‘semi-feudal bourgeois’. On his release he also fled north where, armed with a law degree gained by a correspondence course he had completed in jail, he soon arranged to leave for Saudi Arabia.
An estimated quarter of south Yemen’s population - principally its educated elite - fled, meaning that the country was in no fitter state than its northern counterpart to tackle the nuts and bolts job of establishing a functioning modern state. ‘People here are not even used to reporting facts and evaluating data,’ complained a finance minister who had been trained in India.35 The entire first year of the first three-year plan had to be devoted to planning. ‘We educated Adenis all felt that the barbarians had taken over,’ Sheikh Tariq recalled. Southern Yemenis learned to fear their new East German-trained security service and grew accustomed to their new leaders’ alien mode of speech which was stripped of any references to Allah and his will but peppered with neologisms like brulittariyah [proletariat]. NLF stalwarts were soon gamely parroting variations on statements like: ‘Making the Marxist revolution means transforming the existing social relations and installing revolutionary social relations, in other words, destroying the old state apparatus and building an entirely new one in its place’36 and ‘The compromising petty-bourgeois leadership in the epoch of imperialism is even more dangerous for the national popular democratic revolution than the explicit counter-revolutionary policies of the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois alliance.’37
But there were plenty of advances too. After three years of independence the southern half of Yemen had leapfrogged over its northern counterpart again, at least in terms of the civil order and social development. The PDRY boasted more than double the number of clinics it had in British times by 1972, the 199 primary schools and eight seconda
ry schools in existence when the British departed had been augmented by a factor of more than four; there were 910 primary schools, ten secondary schools and almost four times as many teachers.38 School children were required to wear uniforms like those worn by children in the Soviet Union. There are tales of schoolboys hurrying to school in their fiitas with pairs of trousers bundled under their arms, quickly changing at the school gates.
A universal literacy campaign involved thousands of women government employees and schoolteachers in supplementing their regular work with lessons in reading for adult women. Women organised themselves in a General Union of Yemeni Women, joined the NLF militias and demonstrated against wearing the veil. But, although a Family Law of 1974 substantially improved their status in divorce settlements (allowing them to retain custody of their children), regulated the payment of dowries and outlawed polygamy, their position remained glaringly unequal. There was always a yawning gulf between the law and its practical implementation. One woman complained to a visiting westerner: ‘Here, too frequently, the progres-siveness of some men in the Front [NLF] stops at their doorsteps. They still consider women as property. We don’t blame men personally for this. We recognise it as an illness that pervades the whole society.’39 Only one in five of those privileged to attend primary school were girls.
One did not have to venture far outside Aden to see the changes being wrought among the ‘poor people’. On a visit to Lahej, just to the north-west of Aden, in 1972 a visiting American academic found one of the former sultan’s palaces transformed into an agricultural college and watched men of all ages finishing their seven-hour shifts in a fruit farm and gathering for lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic. ‘They are impetuous and eager and frustrated at this recent encounter with knowledge and the dignity which this whole act, this almost ceremony, confers’,40 he observed approvingly, mentioning that the walls of the local NLF headquarters were plastered with magazine photos of Lenin and Mao Tse Tung. What he was witnessing was the implementation of a nation-wide programme aimed at securing tribesmen’s support for the new regime.
Because spending on the army was gobbling up half the state budget by 1971, it was decided that regional NLF centres should take the risk of establishing militias of armed tribesmen and just hope that they would not turn their guns against their political masters. Under the supervision of Cuban and Chinese advisers, tribesmen were required to undergo a three-month training period that included a crash course in literacy skills, basic Marxism and modern farming methods. Ideally, it was hoped, they would return to their villages and spread, not just their learning and know-how, but their freshly acquired grasp of Marxist dogma.
In practice, Yemeni tribesmen were not nearly as biddable as either Cuban or Chinese peasants; their loyalty to the NLF and Marxism was usually conditional on adequate tribal representation in the higher echelons of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP, the renamed NLF), the government and the army. A Russian anthropologist who spent much of the 1980s in the PDRY described to me the way in which the southern tribes easily accommodated themselves to the new regime without ever troubling themselves with the philosophical implications of Marxism: ‘If a tribesman settles successfully in the capital he constitutes a vanguard for other members of his tribe to follow and position themselves gradually in the economic, military and political spheres. It has nothing to do with individual success or any political ideology - it’s just reinforcement of the overall position of the tribe.’
Despite concerted attempts to demolish the old tribal order by branding it ‘sectarianism’, it survived. From the start the NLF had promoted Yemeni and Arab nationalism and denigrated tribalism, and the country was speedily re-divided into six governorates whose boundaries bore no relation to the old tribal ones, but none of these measures eradicated millennia of custom. A five-year General Truce Among the Tribes in 1968, followed by the outlawing of tribal justice in the form of murder in 1970, only succeeded in curbing tribalism’s more violent manifestations. Tribal divisions and loyalties continued to dictate the country’s true political geography, a truth that would be brutally exposed in a coup d’etat in 1986, but one about which the thousands of Soviet military and civilian ‘advisers’ who poured into the PDRY within weeks of the British departure were always acutely aware.
Professor Vitaly Naumkin, now Director General of Moscow’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, began teaching history at the Yemeni Marxist Party school in Aden in 1972, a position that afforded him easy access to the PDRY’s leadership, some of whom attended his classes and revealed themselves to be a good deal more dogmatic than he was. Salim Rubaya Ali, a former Radfan rebel with strong Fadhli connections who emerged as the Maoism-inclined leader of the country in 1969, was responsible for the most doctrinaire excesses. ‘He was tribal,’ recalled Professor Naumkin, ‘very cruel and very devoted to the violent change of society.’ Naumkin vividly recalled a meeting with Rubaya Ali at which he urged him to learn by the Soviet Union’s mistakes and not set about nationalising every aspect of the country’s economy, illustrating his point by extolling the virtue and value of a hard-working owner of a small bakery near where he was living. Rubaya Ali’s response was immediate and unhesitating: ‘We’ll nationalise him!’
Dr Veniamin Popov, who served as the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Aden in the 1970s, observed, ’They understood that power was the important thing. Looking back now, I don’t think we did them any favours by telling them how only 10,000 of our Bolsheviks were able to convert millions to their cause by means of good organisation and discipline. They listened to those kind of stories extremely attentively.’
Professor Naumkin was particularly close to the staunchly pro-Soviet Abdul Fattah Ismail who, fearing too much Fadhli influence over the running of the PDRY, was possibly behind Rubaya Ali’s assassination in 1978. Ismail, whom Naumkin first encountered as a student in Cairo and who later worked at Aden’s BP oil refinery, was ‘a real intellectual, a mild person and a very good poet, in touch with other poets all over the Arab world, and very keen to belong to something bigger and better than fragmented little Yemen,’ Naumkin recalled. ‘His great advantage was that he was not a tribesman, or even a southerner. His roots were in the north, in Taiz, which meant that he could act as some sort of “honest broker” on occasion’. It was Ismail who consolidated the NLF and other left-wing forces into a semblance of unity by the creation of the Yemen Socialist Party (YSP), but in the long run his idealistic internationalism was too abstract for Yemenis. He was ousted from his position as Chairman of the Party by a coup in 1980.
Islam proved at least as difficult as tribalism to extirpate in the quest for the ‘new Yemeni man’. The nationalisation of all awqaf- religious trust property - in 1970 stripped Muslim clerics of much of their influence but came nowhere near uprooting ancient belief and religious custom. After a short period of excessive Marxist zeal in which tombs of Hadhrami saints were smashed and eminent preachers and scholars from towns like Tarim hounded, humiliated and even murdered, the regime refrained from trying to ban religious practice. A high-ranking member of East Germany’s Marxist Party suggested a cunningly foolproof means of co-opting Islam to the Marxist cause: ’Why don’t you say “We are against exploitative capitalism” and say at the same time “Our master Mohammed was against exploitative capitalism”? No faqih [religious teacher] or qadi will be able to find any Quranic verse or hadith to prove that Mohammed was in favour of exploitative capitalism since he was, in fact, against exploitation.’41 Islam remained part of the school curriculum and its holidays were observed, though routinely downgraded by the media. Ramadan, for example, was marked by media exposés detailing epidemic rates of absenteeism from the workplace, lower productivity and increased food consumption. Similarly, the great holiday of Eid al-Adha was stripped of any religious significance and defined as just ‘a good opportunity to strengthen ties among comrades’.42
The economic aspect of the PDRY’s grand Marxist experiment was hobb
led from the start by the fact that the country had no natural resources to seize back from the exploiting capitalist British - no mines, certainly no industry, and no agricultural wealth. Although less than 1 per cent of the land was arable, the doctrinaire leadership forged ahead with creating first collectives and then larger state farms, which proved as inefficient as they had already done in other eastern bloc countries. A Soviet anthropologist who worked in Hadhramaut explained to me: ’Large-scale land nationalisation couldn’t possibly work in the PDRY because irrigation systems and their maintenance could only be organised on a co-operative basis.’ Within five years of the establishment of state farms - between 1975 and 1980 - official wheat yields had dropped by almost two thirds. Like the YAR, by the end of the 1970s the PDRY found itself relying for 40 per cent of its GDP on remittances earned by some 200,000 migrant workers in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, no matter that official rhetoric declared those countries the PDRY’s arch enemies.
Isolated, hemmed about by enemy capitalist imperialist regimes, the leaders of the poor and unhappy PDRY consoled themselves with the moral high ground of constituting a Marxist vanguard on the Arabian Peninsula, and with their ardent backing for other revolutionary organisations in the area, especially the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which opened an office in the centre of Aden in 1973. Members of the Baader-Meinhof group have admitted to receiving training in terrorism at camps in the PDRY43 and Carlos the Jackal held a PDRY passport for a long time. Occasionally, there was money to be made from such associations. When the PFLP hijacked a Lufthansa flight bound for Athens in February 1972, the PDRY claimed a 20 per cent cut of the $5 million ransom paid by the airline in ‘landing fees’.
Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 13