Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (8 page)

The fuse of revolution was finally efficiently lit in Sanaa a week after Imam Ahmad’s peaceful demise. On the night of 26 September 1962, Imam Badr, and the centuries-old imamate with him, were overthrown in a military coup d’etat.

It was an intimate, treacherous affair. A forty-five-year-old Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal - described by two French reporters as looking ‘absolutely like a comedy villain; smouldering coal-black eyes, bristling eyebrows, hard profile, sombre and distrustful’
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- a man who had twice been jailed by Imam Ahmad, once for seven years, but had recently been rehabilitated as chief of Badr’s personal bodyguard and trusted confidant - emerged as the president of the new Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). It was typical of Badr, a well-meaning but naive man with a pronounced fondness for foreign travel and whisky, that he failed to suspect that his friend’s military training in Iraq
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might have inclined him towards republicanism after that country experienced a military coup against its Hashemite monarchy in the summer of 1958.

Al-Sallal who, at the age of thirty, had never slept in a bed and was so confused by the first pair of trousers he owned that he wore them as a shirt, was one of around 400 Yemeni army officers who had been infected with Republican ideals while receiving training abroad, in Iraq or Egypt. In the words of a fellow member of the clandestine Free Officers movement, he had long dreamed of being ‘the hope for our nation’ and rescuing it from ‘backward and dirty rule’.
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Yemen’s most famous living poet of the revolution, Abdul Aziz al-Maqaleh, a venerable old man today, was a member of an equally clandestine civilian organisation made up of intellectuals who all shared al-Sallal’s dream and had managed to avoid being hurled into jail for dissidence. Al-Maqaleh fondly recalled how they had all drunk qat tea together -‘qat was cheap back then, and the tea had the same effect’ - and how literature served as an excellent cover for their activities and ‘a great bond’, how ‘even the army officers’ used to write poetry and enjoy Shakespeare. Officers and intellectuals were also supported by some powerful sheikhs; Imam Ahmad’s execution of the al-Ahmars, father and son, in 1955 was still crying out for vengeance. If the average Yemeni remained in the dark as to what the Arabic word for republic,
jumhouriya
, actually meant - there are tales of tribesmen assuming from the word’s feminine gender that it must be a woman and descending in their hordes on Sanaa after the coup for a glimpse of a ravishing beauty - the likes of al-Maqaleh were soon whipping up excitement and enthusiasm for the new order over the airwaves. Almost half a century later, the elderly poet still basked in the memory of having been responsible for composing the declaration of revolution for broadcast on the morning after the coup.

Imam Badr’s account
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of events of the night of the coup suggests a surprising capacity for trust. After a late meeting of his Council of Ministers in his palace, Badr had been heading back to his living quarters with his father-in-law when one of al-Sallal’s men had tried but failed to shoot him in the back. The rifle’s trigger had temporarily jammed, but he had proceeded to shoot himself in the chin the instant another guard moved to arrest him. Not much alarmed by their lucky escape, the Imam and his father-in-law had repaired to the palace’s top-floor
mandar
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to relax, agreeing that the failed assassin must have been sick or just drunk. Less than an hour later the lights had gone out, which was not a remarkable occurrence either since power cuts were common in Sanaa, but, when Badr picked up the phone to find out when the power would be restored, the line had gone dead. ‘By the light of another match, my father-in-law and I looked at each other for a long moment, then, without speaking, we both turned and walked across the room to the verandah, opened the French window and stepped onto the balcony’ The city was silent, until they had heard the ‘rumbling noise’
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of three or four tanks heading towards the palace. With the telephone exchange already under their control, the revolutionaries were seizing Sanaa’s radio station and the airfield, and Colonel al-Sallal overseeing operations from the city’s military academy.

Hurrying downstairs to the third floor of the palace because the lower floors were shielded by surrounding buildings and so out of range of tank fire, Badr and his father-in-law had called for Bren guns and rifles. Just in time. Within minutes the
mandar
they had occupied a moment before was crashing down into the garden and the narrow lane behind the palace. After sending some loyal guards out through the firing line in search of any remaining loyal officers, the Imam had organised others to fetch sandbags, douse them with petrol, set them alight and hurl them down onto the tanks, while he and his father-in-law manned the third floor balcony with their submachine gun.

The strategy worked. The terrified tank crews deserted their vehicles and the palace was not stormed. But the coup-plotters controlled the radio station so the news that the Imam had been killed in the assault on his palace was confidently broadcast through the land and, by early the following morning, eager revolutionaries were wreaking a terrible vengeance. Forty-six men, among them two of Badr’s uncles and his entire council of ministers were hauled to the main square and killed. Some were shot, some tied to army trucks by their feet and necks, some hacked to pieces with knives. Others were executed and their severed heads nailed to the city walls.

In the space of a single night the backward and isolated theocracy that had been the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen for the past forty-four years had leap-frogged over the British-ruled southern portion of Yemen into the modern world.

The Age of Empires was ending but, far from loosening her grip on Aden, Britain had been tightening it since the end of the First World War. Among the factors dictating London’s new energy in the region was Imam Yahya’s loudly and constantly reiterated claim to be the rightful ruler of a Greater Yemen that included Aden, and his dispensing of free rifles and Maria Theresa dollars to any protectorate tribesman willing to betray the British infidel. One former tribal ruler told me he had been sorely tempted in the 1940s and had accepted a rifle, 400 rounds of ammunition and 400 Maria Theresa dollars from Yahya before thinking better of it and wasting all the ammunition on shooting birds, and all the cash on a battery charger for his radio.

For decades, if not centuries in the case of the British, the rulers of both parts of Yemen had been enjoying precisely the same sort of ‘carrots and sticks’ relationship with their tribes. In each case, carrots involved stipends, tax exemption and ‘gifts’ of guns. Anyone who dared to question the morality of Britain exercising a protectorate over an area it was arming to the hilt was asked if he would prefer to see a military occupation of Aden’s hinterland, and ‘if so, how many divisions of troops?’
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Britain was not about to fall into the trap the Turks had fallen into, so flooding the area with weapons - an arms race with the Imam, in effect - was the lesser of two evils.

One important aspect of Britain’s more proactive inter-war style of securing the colony was the appointment of ‘political officers’ who were usually young single men posted up-country to live among the tribes in order to keep them out of the Imam’s clutches. While doing their best to ensure that the roads were kept open and safe and the occasions for intertribal fighting reduced, they tried to encourage a respect for the law and the spread of education. A member of one tribe’s ruling famly retains to this day his own less rosy memory of the role of a political officer: ‘They [political officers] were the real rulers - they kept saying “I advise you” and “If I were you, I would do such and such.” If we didn’t
have
to take their advice then, of course, we didn’t. But if we had to, then we had to.’

The real reason why the deployment of British political officers in the Aden protectorates constituted a big stick was that, as early as 1928, a refusal to do the British bidding was liable to bring down the destructive wrath of an RAF bombing raid on their villages and crops. Resort to this controversial, if economical, means of control was one which successive administrators of Aden were always at pains to justify: ‘The Arabs are a proud race and rate personal bravery highly, as highly as they do prestige,’ explained a 1950s governor of Aden, ‘and frankly, that is far too high. They will not give in to an inferior force, but will shoot it out to the end. They are unlikely to give in to a slightly superior force, but they will give in to an overwhelming force and often be secretly glad to do so.’
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Owing to the fact that the raids were provoking outrage back in Westminster over thirty years later, in 1961, my father, the BBC correspondent in South Arabia at the time, accompanied one to the Lower Yafai Sultanate, and reported back in some detail, explaining how many advance warnings were given to move humans and livestock out of the area and how carefully pinpointed the targets were and concluding his despatch with: ‘This is a highly exacting task and the RAF rightly resents any suggestion that bombs are being scattered carelessly or lives endangered.’

On occasion tribal custom served far better than a bombing raid to bring an end to an inter-tribal war over water or land rights. A political officer advising the Fadhlis in the early 1960s recalled accompanying the Fadhli sultan to one tribal battlefield where some10,000 tribesmen had been fighting all day, with only a short break for a lunch brought to them by their womenfolk because both sides had determined that only an even score, deadlock, would resolve the matter. Alarmed by the mounting death toll, the officer called in British armoured cars to shoot over the combatants’ heads and then Hawker Hunter planes to rocket the hillsides, but to no avail. At last, a religious leader of a neutral tribe arrived to lead his tribesmen in a formal procession down the middle of the battlefield, parting the combatants to either side. The gesture swiftly ended hostilities because tribal law dictated that no one would harm anyone of the neutral tribe for fear of setting off yet another cycle of vengeance. The injured were ferried by helicopter to hospitals in Aden, leaving each side with twelve deaths to mourn.

It may be that an important reason why the British and southern Yemenis co-existed as well and for as long as they did in south Arabia was not just that the British conceded so much ground to the tribes by playing by many of their rules and forbearing from collecting any taxes, but that the two races shared an exuberantly boyish sense of humour and a love of derring-do. Recalling his years spent in the West Aden Protectorate,
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one political officer wryly observed that ‘not many people have had the privilege of being paid to play cowboys and Indians when they were grown up’.
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The tone had been set before the First World War by mettlesome adventurers like George Wyman-Bury, alias Abdullah Mansur. On one occasion Wyman-Bury had ascended with a posse of soldiers to the mountain stronghold of a ‘miscreant sheikh’, boldly demanding that he descend to Aden to pay his respects to the
Wali
, the British Resident there. ‘It is not our custom to visit strangers until they call on us,’ the sheikh replied, to which Wyman-Bury retorted, ‘Does the lion seek the mountain fox? Will you call on the
Wali
as a chief of your house should, with safe conduct and respect, or will you visit him lashed to the back of a gun mule?‘ and pressed home his point with a wounding jibe, ’Is this your tribal hospitality?‘ Instantly, ’the tension relaxed at this allusion to a national virtue’.
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The tribes of the protectorates and the British amused and greatly interested each other. A political officer posted to the Western Aden Protectorate in the late 1950s recalled a conversation with the son of a Yafai sultan: ‘I don’t understand,’ said the young man, ‘I’ve seen your country now. I’ve seen so many strange things that I could never have dreamed of, cities so big that one could spend one’s whole life without knowing all the people, full of cars and great houses. I have seen fields there, and the grass, and the many, many fine trees. I have seen that the cattle and the horses and sheep are fat and nearly double the size of ours. With all this, tell me, why do you come here to work? Here, where it is too hot…’
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Aden’s efforts to wean the tribes away from their weapons and wars by educating the sons of sultans remained an uphill struggle. Thirty-six sons of sheikhs and sultans, ‘political pupils’ funded out of the British Resident’s entertainment allowance, had begun to attend school in the colony in 1928, but the arrangement had soon proved impracticable. First, the education was not perceived to be a special training in the art of ruling, so that only six of the thirty-six had been sons of sultans. Second, there had been no suitable boarding facilities so that boys were mixing ‘with undesirable persons in the town’; two, aged fourteen and eight, had had to be expelled for contracting venereal diseases. A boarding school, the ‘Aden Protectorate College for the Sons of Chiefs’, was opened in 1935 but Aden’s colonial masters were disappointed by the number of chiefs who deigned to contribute ‘even a few rupees from their stipend’ towards its running costs. A signed portrait of King George VI hanging in the hallway and the claim that the Emperor was taking a ‘personal interest in the college’, did little to remedy the lack of enthusiasm; the college boasted ten staff but only seven pupils when it opened.
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Aden’s twin civilising strategy of educating the sons of the sultans and backing up the efforts of political officers with punitive RAF bombing raids could be said to have worked best in the East Aden Protectorate. But that had a good deal to do with the fact that the Wadi Hadhramaut, a deep and fertile canyon carved into a high, barren plateau known as
the jol
, happened to have a dominant non-tribal elite of Sunni merchant
sayyids
with whom the British found it easy to do business.

The wadi’s fabled inaccessibility meant that it was almost
terra incognita
as far as the western world was concerned until the early twentieth century. In 1918 the British in Aden had been ‘protecting’ Hadhramaut for over thirty years, but only a handful of explorers and not a single British official had taken the trouble to venture beyond the coast. The traffic was all the other way. Since as early as the tenth century
sayyid
Hadhramis had been descending from their wadis to the port of Mukalla on the coast to travel east to south-east Asia as well as west across the Red Sea to East Africa to spread their distinctively Sufi brand of Sunni Islam. Generally welcomed on account of their
sayyid
claim to be descendants of the Prophet and their great learning, they soon settled among the higher echelons of their Muslim host societies and prospered.

Where
sayyid
Hadhramis led,
non-sayyid
Hadhramis followed, to trade and do business and make fortunes. In British times, Hadhrami boys as young as twelve and of all classes migrated to join whichever of their relatives had blazed the most lucrative trail, to learn a trade from the ground up, goaded into money-making by sayings like ‘Be as industrious as an ant and you’ll eat sugar’ and ‘If there is a benefit to you in the arse of a donkey, stick your hand in it up to the waist.’
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By the end of the nineteenth century there were thriving communities of migrant merchant Hadhramis scattered over much of the southern hemisphere. Often, they remained in
al-mahjar
[place of emigration] for decades and intermarried with the natives, sometimes maintaining a wife and establishment back in Hadhramaut as well. Mixed-race Hadhramis are still a common sight because they always sent their foreign-born sons home to
al-Balad
, as they called it, at the age of seven to imbibe the moral purity of their beloved ancestral homeland.

Just as it is hard to imagine a people with a narrower and more parochial tradition than the northern highland tribes of Yemen, so it is hard to imagine a people with a broader outlook and more experience of the world than the Hadhramis. Their hard-headed thriftiness and an exclusivity that was often interpreted as arrogance gradually superseded their earlier reputation for holiness and learning, earning them a reputation not unlike that of the Jews in pre-Second World War Europe. Hadhramis are often referred to as the Jews of the Arab world, and a still popular joke against them goes, ‘If a Hadhrami had a place in Heaven he would rent it out and go and live in Hell.’

Hadhramaut remained a well-kept secret in the outside world until, at some point in the 1910s, a fabulously wealthy Hadhrami, the founder of a property empire in British-ruled Singapore, imported the first motor-car to the Wadi Hadhramaut, undeterred by the fact that there was not a single road in the region. Once disembarked at Mukalla, the precious vehicle had to be carefully dismantled and loaded piecemeal on the backs of camels to be ferried the 200 miles up from the coast, up to and across the baking
jol
plateau and down the precipice of the wadi wall. Lovingly reassembled in the city of Tarim, it was set to work every Friday for almost the next thirty years, ferrying its owner along the region’s single, tiny stretch of road he had constructed between his home and the mosque. Only in 1932 did Aden get around to endowing its future East Aden Protectorate with a few landing-strips, one of which proved useful the following year when the romantic dream of retracing Arabia’s ancient frankincense route tempted the British explorer and travel writer Freya Stark to brave Hadhramaut’s pulverising heat, insanitary conditions and lack of roads. The effort almost cost her life. After weathering the long donkey ride across the bleak
jol
and reaching the sweltering lushness of the Wadi Doan she was felled by an attack of measles and dysentery. At death’s door, she had to summon the RAF to airlift her from Shibam back to Aden.

In the early 1930s Abubakr al-Kaff, a member of the same family that had imported the first car, invested over a million pounds of his own money in a first road up and out of the wadi, onto and across the
jol
, all the way back down to the coast. Without any surveys, its builders relied on ancient camel tracks to indicate how wide and steep the hair-pin bends up the wadi wall should be. With the magnate’s money, the builders paid off the tribes through whose land the road passed. It was almost finished by the time Freya Stark visited. As soon as it was, the camel drivers who had been plodding the eight-day-long route for centuries realised that it spelt doom for their livelihoods. They wasted little time in obstructing it, forcing the British to broker a compromise between the old and the new; some goods were restricted to carriage by camel, others by lorry.

Difficulty of access was one excuse, but the British had had other good reasons not to investigate Hadhramaut too closely. The region’s tribes were as restive and quarrelsome as those of the West Aden Protectorate but, thankfully, sufficiently distant not to threaten Aden. It was shortly after Freya Stark’s ill-starred expedition and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 that Aden turned her attention to Hadhramaut. Once it had been ascertained that its two rulers, the Qaiti and the Kathiri sultans, were incapable of ordering their lands and securing the trade routes, a British colonial official named Harold Ingrams was despatched to the region to introduce it to the benefits of a Pax Britannica.

Energetic, ambitious and deeply committed to the task in hand, Ingrams succeeded in persuading an impressive total of 1,400 different tribal leaders to sign up to an agreement that put a stop to the warfare which had even been impeding work in the Wadi Hadhramaut’s date groves and fields. At least three factors seemed to have secured what is still remembered in Hadhramaut today as
al-sulh
Ingrams - ‘The Ingrams Truce’. First, Ingrams was backed by the inexorable force of the RAF whose bombing raids he called in reluctantly but effectively, and with some approval from the natives. ‘What do a few lives matter if we’re all gong to have peace?’ one wealthy migrant Hadhrami reassured him, ‘And anyway it is nothing to do with you - it is from God.’
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Secondly, and more importantly, because he and his at least equally impressive wife Doreen both held enlightened views about how to treat with Arabs, they went as native as they possibly could. Taking up residence in Hadhramaut, they learned Arabic, dressed in the local style and did not begrudge hours, days and months spent cajoling and reasoning and arguing with Hadhramis, she with the women, who proved largely receptive to the message of peace, he with the men who were more distrustful. Instead of behaving like a typical British colonial officer, Ingrams strove to conduct himself among the Hadhramis in the manner of the wisest of native sheikhs but the strain of the job must have told on him; while staying with the couple in Mukalla in 1937, Freya Stark noted how, with his mop of fair hair and pale blue eyes, Ingrams looked ‘like an angel whose temper has been tried rather often’.
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