Battling forAden
The irony of reviewing a book about onebattle for Aden when another one is raging, particularly when many ofthe same names keep coming up in both battles, is both bitter andprovocative. The bitterness is easy to comprehend: it is a sadstory of political folly that this city, once the jewel of Arabia,has been reduced to penury and increasingly, if news reports are tobe believed, rubble. Its inhabitants have gone from trial to trialwith little if any prospect for improvement of their lives in thenear future. The provocation is more intellectual. Is thereanything that can be learned from the experience of the independencestruggle against Great Britain in what was then called South Arabiaabout the collapse of the unity experiment of 1990 and the prospectsfor the recently proclaimed (but ultimately unrecognizedinternationally) "Democratic Republic of Yemen"?
That question does not engage KarlPieragostini, but I will return to it later. His purpose in writingthe work under review is to understand British policy-makingregarding South Arabia during the 1960's, specifically to answer thequestion "[h]ow did Britain come to invest considerableresources, effort and prestige in its commitment to Aden and SouthArabia, only to scuttle the effort so abruptly?" (p. 183) He hopesin studying the series of British decisions that led to the "scuttle"in Aden to shed some light on what he sees as a similar process ofAmerican entrapment in and then abrupt departure from Vietnam. Dr.Pieragostini, who teaches at the Defense Intelligence College inWashington, is well-positioned to grapple with the complexities ofWhitehall and Westminister. Though an American, he lived in Britainfor ten years, serving part of that time as a research assistant to aMember of Parliament. His contacts in the British political systemgave him personal access to a number of the decision-makers,including both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Denis Healey, whoplayed a central role in South Arabian decisions as the Labourgovernment's Defence Secretary, as well as a number of Britishofficials who served in Aden. Besides these personal interviews, herelied primarily in his research on British government documents,declassified American documents, the memoirs of a number of theBritish participants, and the contemporary English-languagepress.
His reconstruction of the Britishdecision-making process is detailed and convincing. The centralreason for the abrupt change that emerges from his account is theassumption of power by the Labour Party after the October 1964elections. The new ministers brought an entirely differentperspective to colonial questions than their Conservativepredecessors, which is hardly surprising. Healey admits to theauthor that his goal upon taking up the Defence portfolio was toliquidate Britain's military position East of Suez, which he saw asfinancially draining, morally questionable and of little strategicvalue. One can hardly imagine many of his Tory colleaguesennunciating such views, though their behavior in power might not inthe end have been that much different, given the intense financialpressures the British exchequer was under during those years. TheConservative ministry of Edward Heath (1970-74), after vociferouslycriticizing Wilson's policies East of Suez while in opposition,continued its policies of withdrawal from the Gulf.
Pieragostini traces the interesting changesin the bureaucratic politics surrounding British policy toward SouthArabia, changes that were greatly affected by the switch fromConservative to Labour governments, but that had a dynamic of theirown. His account of how Colonial Office officials, particularlythose on the ground in Aden, worked to undermine the policies oftheir more liberal-minded Labour ministers, is a bracing antidote tothe stereotype of the faithful British civil servant who carries outgovernment policy regardless of his personal preferences. Thecrucial bureaucratic turning point, in the author's view, was whenthe Defence Ministry switched in 1966 from being a supporter of acontinued military role in South Arabia to an opponent. The ForeignOffice, which had been more willing to reconsider Britain's positionin Aden, had previously been overruled by a bureaucratic alliance ofDefence and the Colonial Office. With this change, the ColonialOffice found itself without bureaucratic allies, and thus less ableto make the case to a skeptical government that staying the course inAden was in Britain's interest.
The switch of position at the Ministry ofDefence was in part a response to the pre-existing preferences of Mr.Healey, but other factors contributed as well. New budgetingtechniques introduced by the Labour government allowed more preciseestimates of the actual cost of the bases at Aden, which was muchhigher than had previously been thought. The military value of thebases was increasingly called into question by the servicesthemselves, as military energies came to be almost completely devotedto defending British positions against attacks by partisans of theNational Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation ofOccupied South Yemen (FLOSY). Aden could hardly be an adequatejumping-off point for British forces if they were all required tostay there to protect the bases. Alternative facilities in Bahrain,Oman and in the newly formed British Indian Ocean Territory(including the base at Diego Garcia that was subsequently leased tothe United States) were seen by the services as providing similarstrategic benefits at lower cost and with fewer politicalproblems.
While his account of British decision-makingis thorough and persuasive, Pieragostini is less successful inachieving his stated purpose of using this case to built a model forunderstanding the general process of great power commitment tomarginal strategic areas, reassessment of that commitment, andwithdrawal. In the first chapter he sets out a number of hypothesesabout this process, dividing it into three stages of "passiveentrapment," "active entrapment" and "scuttle." However, there isvery little effort to apply systematically these hypotheses to thecase at hand. In the end, he offers the weak conclusion that "themodel, as applied here, does not indicate those changes that would beeither necessary or sufficient conditions of either entrapment orscuttle; it merely suggests certain properties of the system thatencourage each" (p. 201). Though this reviewer finished the bookwith a better understanding of British policy in Aden, I am no moreenlightened about the general issue of what international relationsscholars are now calling "imperial overstretch" and imperial retreatthan I was before. If the author came to a new understanding ofAmerican policy in Vietnam through his examination of this case, hedid not share it with the reader.
Pieragostini spends little if any time onthe domestic politics of Aden and South Arabia. He provides accountsof events on the ground as background to the policy debates inLondon. While not ignoring such issues as the growth of the NLF, themovement within the Aden Trades Union Council (ATUC) and FLOSY towardarmed opposition to the colonial authorities, and the efforts of theprotectorate shaykhs and sultans to make the fledgling South ArabianFederation work, he tends to discount their importance in Britishdecision-making. This is understandable, given both the sources heuses and the story he wants to tell, but the reader interested inYemeni history and politics will be disappointed by the thinness ofthe coverage. Pieragostini also fails to give a satisfactory answerto one of the continuing puzzles of British policy in Aden: whyLondon in the end tilted toward the NLF rather than FLOSY when itcame time to surrender power. This failure is largely the result ofhis decision to end his detailed narrative account in 1966, with theannouncement of Britain's intention to withdraw from Aden. Heprovides a short epilogue carrying events up to the actual withdrawalon November 29, 1967, but with none of the analytical depth thatcharacterized the earlier chapters.
Are there any lessons to be learned from thesouthern Yemeni experience in the 1960's about the current civil war? I think there are, but they must be considered with caution. Theimmediate and superficial conclusion someone analyzing events of the1960's and now would reach is that there is some kind of southernYemeni political culture &emdash; based on the shared experience ofBritish colonialism and the fight against it &emdash; that sets thearea off from the rest of Yemen. There is some circumstantialevidence supporting this analysis. The willingness of some of theNLF's bitterest enemies, including the League of the Sons of theSouth (now renamed the League of the Sons of Yemen), Abdallahal-Asnaj of FLOSY and Abd al-Qawi Makkawi, former chief minister ofAden colony, to put aside their old conflicts and join with thebreakaway government in Aden is both ironic and surprising. Theconstant refrain among intellectuals associated with the YemeniSocialist Party (the successor to the NLF) that the old South Yemenhad "nizam" (order) while the North, and by extension theunified Yemeni state, was characterized by "fawda" (chaos), isfrequently explained both by Yemenis and by outside observers as theproduct of the South's British colonial experience.
I think that these observations must betaken with a large grain of salt. Political culture arguments aboutthe distinctiveness of North and South Yemen just do not hold up. The fact that the breakaway "Democratic Republic of Yemen" stronglyemphasized its commitment of the concept of Yemeni unity in itsfounding documents demonstrates that even separatists realize thepopularity of the concept. "Southern" units loyal to former SouthYemeni president Ali Nasir Muhammad are spearheading the assaults onAden and Mukalla for the "Northern" government. If the current civilwar were being fought by spontaneously mobilized popular forces onboth sides, perhaps the political culture explanation would be moresupportable. But in fact it is being fought by regular armies; inthe case of the Aden government an army that was built by andcontrolled through a party organization. There is no doubt that thepolitics of South Yemen was different from that of North Yemen, andthat these two styles came into conflict in the unified states. Butthe origin of that difference is to be found at the top of thepolitical system, particularly in the organization of the rulingparty in the South, rather than in some vague notion of politicalculture.
For all its bloody internecine conflict, theYemeni Socialist Party that (as the National Liberation Front)emerged from the independence struggle to rule South Yemen maintaineda tight control over society. It successfully reduced the autonomyand political power of the tribes. It played a dominating, andultimately destructive, role in the economy. It built a pervasiveand effective secret police organization. In short, it did many ofthe things that governments in the North either could not or wouldnot do. When a combination of international factors and its ownworries about its ruling position in the South led it to agree tounity in 1990, it expected to play a leading role in the governing ofthe new state while maintaining its controlling role in the southernand eastern governates. When the election results of April 1993indicated that it would be relegated to a secondary, if not tertiary,role in the state, and when Ali Abdullah Saleh proved unable to stopthe campaign of assassinations against YSP figures in the north, theparty leadership opted to provoke a political crisis to improve itsbargaining position. It was that political crisis, which began withAli Salim al-Beidh's self-imposed seclusion in Aden in August 1993,that led to Salih's decision in late April-early May 1994 to usemilitary force to bring the crisis to an end.
The discipline of the YSP, its confidence inits ability to control the former South Yemen, and its capacity tomobilize military force for its political purposes all stem from itsformative experiences both as the leader of the armed struggleagainst the British and as the ruling party of the People'sDemocratic Republic of Yemen. It is to the development of the partyand the goals of its leaders, as well as the development of politicalinstitutions in the North and the goals of their leaders, that weshould look for reasons for the current civil war, not to putativedifferences in Northern and Southern "political cultures".
Another aspect of the current civil war thathas analogues in the independence struggle against the British in the1960's is the importance of tribal identity in the mobilization ofpolitical support. The original revolt against the British in Radfanwas based on tribal grievances, though it was enveloped within alarger political agenda by the NLF cadres who assumed leadership ofthe fighting. Much of the NLF's recruiting, particularly in thecountryside, was on tribal bases, though it also recruited in Adenitself on more class and nationalist-ideological bases. Once inpower the NLF/YSP was able to curb the autonomous power of the tribes(unlike the government in Sanaa), so that independent tribal militarypower was not a threat to the state. However, tribal and regionalloyalties remained important in the factional politics within theparty. Thus the ouster of Ali Nasir Muhammad in the bloody fightingof 1986 was accompanied by the wholesale defection of South Yemeniarmy units based in Abyan and Shabwah, the home territories of AliNasir and many of his closest allies. These units have played animportant role in the Sanaa government's offensive. Likewise, as manyof the YSP leaders who split from the central government hail fromHadramawt, suspicions have arisen that their real goal in thefighting is to establish a separate Hadrami state. The fact that AliSalim al-Beidh spent most of the war in al-Mukalla, not in Aden, the"capital" of his new state, fed those suspicions.
That tribal and regional identificationshould play an important role in the political life of the southernareas of Yemen is not surprising, given the enduring importance overthe centuries of tribal and village social structures. But it isinteresting to note that the recrudescence of the politicalimportance of tribal identity in the South is directly related topolitical crises that reduce the power of the state, which throughoutthe Middle East has always been the greatest threat to tribalpolitical power and autonomy. Tribalism was important in the 1960'swhen the power of the British colonial authorities and their localclients were being challenged (and even more so in North Yemen, withthe collapse of Imamate rule and the ineffectiveness of itsrepublican successor). Tribalism comes to the fore in the South attimes of crisis within the state, like 1986 and the current war. Ifone wants to call the enduring importance of tribalism a part ofYemeni, or more generally Arab, "political culture," I will notquibble. However, it seems eminently clear that the way thattribalism affects politics differs enormously according to thespecific political and social circumstances surrounding the eventsbeing explained.
Finally, both the independence struggle ofthe 1960's and the current civil war underline the importance ofregional powers in Yemeni politics. Egyptian support for the NLF wascrucial in its development and in its eventual ability to win thepower struggle among the South Yemeni contenders for power, eventhough Cairo withdrew its support from the NLF in the last stages ofthe fighting. Likewise, it is hard to imagine that the YSPleadership would have declared the independence of the "DemocraticRepublic of Yemen" without at minimum the tacit encouragement ofSaudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The role of regional powers,particularly Saudi Arabia, remains an important element inunderstanding Yemeni politics.
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