Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  It was during this period that the great trading houses of Aden founded their fortunes. At the forefront were the two Parsee firms of Messrs Cowasjee Dinshaw and Mr Muncherjee Eduljee, the Harrods of Crater where, Hunter says, ‘almost anything that could ever be wanted may be purchased’. These emporia, and others like that started by Captain Luke Thomas, were still going strong in the 1960s, when their lists of agencies included transport and irrigation equipment, Doulton Sanitary Potteries Ltd., Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Babycham, and Walters’ Palm Toffee.

  Greatest of all was the business founded by the Provençal Antonin Besse. Besse, who inevitably became known as al-Biss, the Cat, arrived in Aden in the late 1890s and stayed until his death in 1951, by which time he was able to donate £1.5 million to set up St Antony’s College, Oxford. The money came from a vast empire of concerns around the Horn of Africa and along the Arabian coast to Hadramawt. Besse handled ‘hides, skins, oilseeds, pulses, black and white cottonseed, incense, myrrh, opoponax, aloes, mother of pearl shells, cuttlefish bones, gum Arabic, and coffee’, but the bulk of his fortune derived from monopolies on the distribution of sugar and paraffin. An eccentric, his loves included Nietzsche, Wagner, street football and rambles over Jabal Shamsan; his bugbears were Mussolini and anyone who wore socks with shorts. The latter must have caused friction with the bestockinged British, who prattled about him mercilessly. Perhaps worst of all in their eyes was that he chose to live on the wrong side of Aden, in Crater. But whatever was said about him, Besse was an extremely successful businessman who combined a romantic streak with hard-nosed acumen – something most Anglo-Saxons could only envy. He remains a paradigm for Aden’s curious marriage of the exotic and the mundane. John Masefield might have described the arrival in Aden, this city of lists, of a Besse freighter,

  With a cargo of kerosene,

  Car tyres, spare parts,

  Frankincense, lavatories, and Gilbey’s gin.

  It is all gone. But yet again the tide is on the turn for Aden’s trade, heralded by publicity brochures for the resurrected Free Zone; and by that small, insistent voice, pleading from Port Sa’id to Penang and now once more in the late-night hotel lobbies and taxis of al-Tawwahi: ‘What you want? I get you anything … anything!’

  Alongside more tangible goods, Aden has long had a parallel market in ideas. This century it has been host to anti-imamate Yemenis, Nasserist Arab Nationalists, the labour movement and Marxism.

  A photograph taken in 1977 shows the three major personalities of the Marxist period – Salim Rubay’ Ali, Abdulfattah Isma’il and Ali Nasir Muhammad. Salim Rubay’ looks cuddly, a teddy-bear of a man; Abdulfattah is diminutive and sly; Ali Nasir is thick-set, no great thinker but, in retrospect, a survivor. All three wear regulation safari suits; all are looking to the left as the Independence Day parade rumbles past, out of the picture. They might more usefully have kept their eyes on each other. In less than a year President Salim Rubay’ would be deposed, shot, and succeeded by Abdulfattah; in 1986 Abdulfattah was himself killed in a coup against elements unsympathetic to Ali Nasir. In the ideological jostle of PDRY politics, shove all too often turned to putsch.

  The growth of Marxism in such an outwardly conservative society as that of South Arabia came as a surprise to many; it was largely due to the unique hothouse atmosphere of Aden itself. In the end, differences between the city and its vast hinterland, between the Sons of Haines and the Sons of Qahtan, were never reconciled.

  Three factors helped the rise of the Left. First, the British had engaged in a programme of massive social deconstruction. The cash donations handed out by them over the years to Western Protectorate rulers, and which had increased considerably during the 1950s, enabled the sultans to develop standing armies, thereby reducing their need to control or cajole difficult tribesmen. Even more marked was the outcome of this policy in the Eastern Protectorate, where Ingrams was so successful in promoting peace treaties and centralizing authority that in 1953 Sayyid Abu Bakr al-Kaff said of the newly gunless Hadrami tribes, ‘They are dead.’ At the same time the sayyids, the traditional mediating class, were denied the role on which much of their standing in society depended. Some of them became characters in search of parts.

  The British, meanwhile, had been rebuilding society in a way that was to have far-reaching consequences. An educational system was set up based on the public-school ethos with an Arab-Islamic overlay. Its beginnings were small: in the Aden Residency School in the 1870s pupils were taught ‘the Elementary Histories of England, India and Rome; Euclid as far as the first book; Geography, Arithmetic and Algebra’. The intake was mostly from Adeni Indian families, but at Aden College eighty years later it had widened to encompass the sons of the traditional learned classes. The British brought boys from sayyid and other influential families into a milieu where free thought was encouraged. After a millennium of received notions, the colonial rulers took their Arab protégés and introduced them to ‘character training, physical training and literary education’ based on the ideas of Plato, Rousseau and Dr Arnold. The sprouting intelligentsia included many members of the traditional elite: Hadrami sayyids like Haydar al-Attas and Ali Salim al-Bid were to play an important part in the spread of Marxism.

  The third – and decisive – factor in the growth of the Left was the defeat suffered by Egypt in the 1967 war with Israel. The NLF had begun life as the Yemeni branch of Dr George Habash’s Arab Nationalist Movement, founded in Beirut in 1954. Thirteen years on, Nasser’s rhetoric had begun to ring hollow and Dr Habash embraced Marx and Lenin instead. The NLF followed suit. In the face of Zionist and imperialist might, revolutionary guerrilla struggle was totally alluring and at least partially successful.

  Curiously, the doctrine of Scientific Socialism pursued in the south, ‘making use of all that is positive and fighting all deviations’, was not unlike that of the Zaydi imamate, which enjoined ‘commanding all that is suitable and prohibiting that which is disapproved’. To determine what constituted strayings from the Straight Path of Islam, or leftist/rightist swervings from the Socialist path, the northern sayyids studied the Book of God, while the books of Marx and Lenin became the major reference for the Socialist Politburo. Chief Politburo exegete was Abdulfattah Isma’il, an expert on Socialist doctrine who was known, wrily, as al-Faqih (literally, the scholar of holy writ). Under his guidance, the early caliphs of Islam were classified according to their rightist or leftist tendencies.

  According to another Scientific Socialist tenet, ‘not all the old and traditional is bad, and not all that is new is good’. But much of the traditional was deemed bad and the post-independence regimes continued the transformation of society begun by the British. Tribal surnames were banned, qat restricted, polygamy prohibited. As for the new, housing (except that which was owner-occupied) was nationalized, as were businesses (except BP and Cable and Wireless) and transport (including, it was mooted, bicycles); women were deveiled and encouraged to join the army; a Fine Arts Institute was set up to provide courses in music, painting and sculpture, acrobatics, theatre and ballet; speaking to a non-South Yemeni without permission became a criminal offence.

  Within two years of the British departure, President Qahtan al-Sha’bi had been branded a moderate and deposed in a Corrective Move. He was to die after a decade of house arrest. Then, in December 1970, Aden ceased to be a free port. With the remains of Western trade went the fag-end of Western aid, but the PDRY joined another international fraternity and developed close ties with Cuba and East Germany. South Yemen’s socialist clubbability was confirmed when the USSR shifted its regional naval base from Somalia to Aden in 1977.

  Relations with the neighbours, however, ranged from sullen to violent. There were border clashes with the North well into the 1980s, and the PDRY supported Dhofari resistance to the Sultan of Oman. A singular bone of contention was the tiny Kuria Muria group of islands off the Dhofari coast: Muscat had presented them to Queen Victoria in 1854, Britain had given them back to Oma
n in 1967 and, although their only natural resource was guano, Aden laid claim to them and incorporated a blue triangle into its flag to symbolize concern for overseas possessions.

  Another neighbour, Saudi Arabia, was alarmed by developments within the PDRY – perhaps because, according to a statement from the World Bank, the PDRY had ‘among the world’s most egalitarian systems for the distribution of domestically earned income’. Nevertheless this income was minute, and by the government’s own admission over a million PDRY citizens left home in the decade following independence – somewhere between a quarter and half of the population. Those who stayed were deprived of all but the barest essentials of life. An Italian diplomat, on his way to Nairobi in 1977, said he was going there ‘to buy tomatoes’.

  Politically, the PDRY was beset throughout its short history by Party squabbles, which reflected splits in the wider Socialist bloc. Salim Rubay’ Ali, influenced by the example of Chairman Mao, brought peasants into Aden during the 1970s to demonstrate against bureaucrats and in favour of low wages. Abdulfattah Isma’il, who ousted him in 1978, was pro-Soviet: it was to Moscow that he fled when, two years later, he was himself deposed by the more moderate and pragmatic Ali Nasir Muhammad. In 1985 Abdulfattah was back in Aden and encouraging hardline opposition to Ali Nasir. Events were to reach a bloody climax in January 1986.

  ‘So Ali Nasir said, “Yes, but what do I do with the opposition?” and Mengistu said, “Oh, it’s simple. Kill them.” Well, that’s what some people say …’

  The man smiled into his tea. The story of the Ethiopian leader’s advice to his South Yemeni counterpart may not be entirely apocryphal – Ali Nasir was in Addis Ababa in December 1985, and Mengistu was to support him subsequently; but it is only one of many versions – onion layers which you peel to get to the heart of the matter. Except that, like onions, the stories tend to have no heart, just a final little layer curled in on itself, and the truth is no more than the sum of its different versions. At least, that is how it seemed at the Zaku Café in Crater which, being the centre of Aden’s busiest market, the Suq of Rumours, ought to be a place for intrigue and the telling of tales. The Four Martyrs, hardliners killed in the 1986 coup and subsequently beatified by their victorious comrades, smiled avuncularly down as they did all over the former PDRY, and gave nothing away.

  The Aden Ministry of Culture’s official account, Aden’s Bloody Monday, was published three months after the events of 13 January 1986, when truth was still at its most malleable. Wherever it stands on the line between fact and fiction, the booklet is compelling reading, a mixture of Marxist rhetoric, British understatement and Damon Runyon. It was 10.20 a.m., the booklet says, and in the Politburo premises Vice-President and Presidium Vice-Chairman Ali Antar, Defence Minister Salih Muslih Qasim, Politburo member Ali Shayi’ Hadi and others were preparing for a routine meeting when one of the President’s bodyguards walked into the room and shot Ali Antar in the back. As the account comments, ‘One can well imagine the moments of total surprise that prevailed.’

  While the diehard Marxist dialecticians Salih Muslih and Ali Shayi’ were swiftly added to the PDRY role of martyrs others, including the future leader Ali Salim al-Bid, dived for cover and escaped down a rope of curtains. Meanwhile, a gunboat pumped seventy shells into the villa of the Fourth Martyr, Abdulfattah Isma’il. (He was not at home, but may have been canonized presently by an anti-tank missile; Aden’s Bloody Monday is strangely silent on his fate.) Throughout the city Ali Nasirists moved against other hardliners.

  Ali Nasir Muhammad, for nearly six years Party and State leader, was a reformist seeking to broaden dialogue with his neighbours and the West. What he had not allowed for in his drastic solution to problems at home was that, for the most part, the army was loyal to Ali Antar and Salih Muslih.

  The fighting lasted ten days, leaving thousands dead – far more than in the struggle for independence. By the end of it ‘the so-called Ali Nasir, a cunning opportunist petty bourgoise [sic] giving not a hoot to scientific socialism or the class struggle’, was out of the country. The hardliners had won.

  In their public ‘confessions’, Ali Nasir’s supporters repeated the claim that he had duped them into believing they were fighting a ‘rightist’ coup against him. By the airforce commander’s admission, ‘there was a great deal of mystery surrounding the situation, which was getting out of hand’. He had put his finger on it: the PDRY had entered an Einsteinian world where the usual co-ordinates of right and left had been reversed, and revolutionaries had become reactionaries.

  Much has been made of the fact that the conflict was polarized between regional groups – Ali Nasir’s power base was Abyan and Shabwah, that of his opponents Lahj – and commentators have seen the root of it in a centralized ‘distributor’ state favouring one region over another. At the same time, the more recent history of the former USSR shows how bitter the reformist-traditionalist struggle within Socialist regimes can be.

  The waste was appalling, one PDRY diplomat declaring, ‘When they see how hard we fight our own brothers, no outsider would ever dare to interfere in our internal affairs.’ After the unification of Yemen in 1990, the two sides declared an amnesty, and Ali Nasir stated in Damascus – his home since 1986 – that responsibility for the bloody events was shared. ‘The files’, he said, ‘must be closed.’ Memories, however, will last even longer than the rusting and crab-infested hulk of the gunboat in Elephant’s Back Bay.

  In 1982 it was not outlandishly prophetic to say, as Robert Stookey did in his book on the PDRY, that ‘The association [between the PDRY and the Soviet bloc] has, in all likelihood, passed beyond the point where it could be dissolved even in favour of such a major national objective as union with North Yemen.’ Unification agreements had been signed by the Yemens in November 1972 and March 1979, both after periods of violent border clashes. Both came to nothing. And then the unthinkable happened: the Soviet bloc crumbled. The PDRY was no longer viable as a state, politically or economically. By 1989, its leaders could see that their own future – like that of their comrades in Eastern Europe – was bleak, and suggested federation with the YAR. At the end of the year YAR President Ali Abdullah Salih made a surprise visit to Aden, and his PDRY counterpart Ali Salim al-Bid agreed to a merger. The Yemenis, a people joined by history, culture, religion and ancestry, had been separated by nineteenth-century empire-building and by Cold War ideology. On 22 May 1990, the two parts of their country reunited and adopted a system of parliamentary democracy with San’a as the capital. And the PDRY, that strange offspring of imperialism and Marxism, ceased to be.

  There had already been an intimation of change during the fighting of January 1986, when the British Royal Yacht Britannia evacuated the Soviet expatriate community from Aden. Perhaps it was then, in the heat of a South Arabian winter, that the Cold War finally began to thaw. At any rate, those on board, the British and the Russians, might well have reflected as they looked back at the smoking barrack stove of Aden that, between them, they had a lot to answer for.

  The Marxist period now seems like a dream that slid in and out of a nightmare. Somewhere back in the ethnographic present of this chapter, in the dying stages of dream-time, I was down in Aden again. Passing by the night-club, I noticed the same desultory scrap going on by the door, and remembered Fidel Castro’s comment to the Yemeni Socialist Party leader, Ali Salim al-Bid, following the 1986 bloodbath: ‘When are you people going to stop killing each other?’

  The answer came, as I shall relate, in 1994. The war of that year, between the pro-unity government and a secessionist faction led by al-Bid, was to bring to an end a quarter century as bizarre, in its own way, as the British era. But, while memorials to the British are ubiquitous and tangible, the traces of Marxism have all but vanished: the war sent Scientific Socialism the way of the well-devil of Sirah Island. With it went Ali Salim al-Bid, the Four Martyrs and the night-clubs. Husky Havana voices are no longer heard in the Ching Sing, and Arabia has lost its only brewery, dis
mantled in spite of a last-ditch attempt to convert it to the production of lemonade. Now, work is under way to extend Aden’s port facilities; the Crescent Hotel is getting a facelift; Rimbaud’s godown in Crater has become the French Cultural Centre and offers films, good coffee and tasteful décor; and the advance guard of a new imperialism has landed – on Crater sea-front opposite Sirah, at the place where the Portuguese were sent packing, where Sulayman the Eunuch and Captain Haines landed, and plonked down next to the Abdali Sultan’s lavatorial green palace, sits a building with a red-tiled roof as unexpected as a Parsee hat: the Aden Pizza Hut.

  Looking at it over the water, I had an awful vision: today the Aden Pizza Hut, tomorrow the Marib McDonald’s, the Sa’dah Spud-U-Like … Yemen subjugated by an empire of fast food, held in bondage by restaurant chains. The vision went. This, after all, was Aden, and here, in this island manque, the finest harbour of the Old World, alien arrivals had come, tied up for a time, then passed on; and so they would until Doomsday.

  7

  Visiting the Underworld

  ‘There were giants in the earth in those days.’

  Genesis 6, v.4

  IF ADEN SETS its face longingly seaward, then Hadramawt is a Janus of a place, a land of schizoid tendencies. There is an endless, crab-infested strand looking out to the ocean, where Mombasa and Mangalore, Surabaya and the Celebes, are only a monsoon away And there is another parallel, interior world, Wadi Hadramawt, Hadramawt proper, introspective, separated from the coast by a five-hour drive across empty country.