The Saudi-egyptian Conflict Over North Yemen, 1962-1970

Saeed M Badeeb

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367295684
• eBook ISBN: 9781000305340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 1962 coup d'état in North Yemen initiated one of the most debilitating Middle East conflicts ever, the eight-year civil war in North Yemen. This conflict in an obscure corner of the Arab world eventually assumed global importance, attracting the attention of the superpowers and the United Nations. This book focuses on the Yemeni civil war's impact at the regional level, where it provoked enmity between two influential Arab states, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Dr. Badeeb argues that for Egypt, the war constituted a means of intensifying and confirming its role as the leader of the revolutionary camp in the Arab world. For Saudi Arabia, however, it presented a direct challenge to the security and stability of the kingdom. Dr. Badeeb provides a valuable elucidation of Saudi Arabia's concern over Yemen as a potential source of political and strategic upheaval. This lately unappreciated aspect of the regional security picture is in part a legacy of the Saudi-Egyptian conflict of the 1960s and is one of the central elements of current Saudi security policy.

Chapter 1
Background to the Revolution

The Yemen Arab Republic (Y.A.R.), or North Yemen, lies along the southeastern shore of the Red Sea and stretches inland toward the Rub al-Khali desert, north to the Arabian highlands of Saudi Arabia, and south to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (P.D.R.Y.), or South Yemen. The P.D.R.Y. commands the Red Sea's southern entrance, the Bab Al-Mandab Strait. This strait has been a principal source of Yemen's regional political importance for over 2,000 years.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, parts of North Yemen were controlled by the Ottoman Empire and then again from 1872 through the end of World War I. For most of the last thousand years, Yemen was ruled by a Zaydi Imam, except during periods of foreign occupation. The Zaydi Imamate system, which existed in Southern Arabia as early as 897 A.D., eventually disappeared from the Peninsula in all but the portion later known as North Yemen.¹ One possible reason for its disappearance is that in claiming descent from Zayd, a son of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, the Imams are Shia, whereas Sunnism prevails in most other areas of the Peninsula.

North Yemen is divided nearly evenly into Islamic sects: the Zaydis, a Shia subsect, inhabit the mountains of the north; the Shafis, a branch of Sunnism, are found mainly in the south, along the coast and in neighboring South Yemen. The Zaydi tribes of the northern mountains are loosely grouped into two confederations, the Hashid and the Bakil. Such divisions in the country present both a social and a security issue.² During the civil war, the northern Zaydi tribes, who were traditionally aligned with the government, supported the royalists. In contrast, the southern tribes, Shafis and traditionally outsiders, supported the republican forces. In addition, the fact that the society is organized along tribal lines presents a major problem for the central government, which attempts to encourage a common sense of national identity which transcends tribal and sectarian loyalties.³

Yemen was last united by Imam Yahya, of the Hamid al-Din family of past Imams, who succeeded his father, al-Mansur Muhammad, in 1904. By shrewdly exploiting the factionalism which characterizes Yemen, taking hostages and using both bribery and intimidation, Yahya succeeded in uniting the country and consolidating his power.⁴ After the Turkish defeat in World War I, Imam Yahya gradually assumed both temporal and spiritual control of all of North Yemen. In the process, he established Yemen's first rudimentary central administration and divided the country into six governorships. This tactic helped the state to gain some control over the tribes and villages. Distrusting everyone, however, Imam Yahya gave his governors no power, reserving all authority to himself. Isolationist and xenophobic, he was assassinated in 1948 by Ali al-Qardaci, shaykh of the Murad tribe.⁵

Upon Yahya's death, Abdallah ibn Ahmad al-Wazir, head of a rival family of past Imams, succeeded in getting himself named Imam. A month-long battle for control of the throne followed, with Imam Yahya's son, Ahmad, eventually being victorious. Not wishing to take any chances, Imam Ahmad promptly had many of his rivals executed and others imprisoned.⁶ During his reign (Imam Ahmad remained in office until his death in 1962), he continued most of his father's domestic policies. In foreign affairs, however, he showed some willingness to abandon his father's policy of virtually complete isolationism and to venture into official contracts with other countries.

In 1951, Imam Ahmad negotiated a treaty designed to improve relations with the British rulers of Aden. Because of unsettled territorial questions between Sanaa and Aden, the treaty failed to achieve its purpose.⁷ Deviating from Yemen's traditional alignment with Saudi Arabia on foreign policy issues, Ahmad also opened relations with the U.S.S.R., recognized the People's Republic of China, and acquired closer ties to Egypt. In 1956, he sent his son, the crown prince, on a visit to the Soviet bloc in search of financial and military aid.⁸ Still later, Ahmad himself visited Saudi Arabia, where he signed the Jeddah Military Pact with King Saud and President Nasser.⁹ In 1958, Yemen joined with Egypt and Syria to form the United Arab States.¹⁰

Under Ahmad, Yemen also expanded its contacts with the United States, with which it had signed a friendship and commercial agreement in 1946.¹¹ In 1957, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee arrived in Sanaa at the head of a delegation charged with explaining and promoting the Eisenhower Doctrine. Ahmad rejected the doctrine because he did not want to publicly associate himself with a policy aimed at—according to his view—buying Arab support against the U.S.S.R. (communism). However, an American economic mission which presented itself as being unconnected to the Eisenhower Doctrine arrived in Sanaa in September 1957 to do a feasibility study of possible aid prospects.¹² The mission produced a study, but nothing concrete came of it, apparently because of Imam Ahmad's personal distrust of Americans and the United States' lack of interest in Yemen.

The limited progress that Imam Ahmad was able to achieve in social and political affairs was soon brought to an abrupt halt. An unsuccessful coup attempt in 1955 led by his brother, Abdallah, and supported by Colonel Ahmed al-Thalaya, prompted Imam Ahmad in part to rethink his policies. Because he was not a radical innovator, the Imam's modernizing goals and the means used to implement them proved too little, too late, for some of those in the emerging society he governed. The coup attempt, as a rejection of his policies, manifested just how far the struggle between modernity and traditionalism had progressed.¹³

One outcome of the coup was Imam Ahmad's revision of his regional policies. Soon thereafter, he became hostile toward Nasser. Nasser by that time had begun openly promoting his Pan-Arab philosophy and his socialist policies, both of which the Imam regarded as un-Islamic and threatening to his regime. Undoubtedly, he sensed that even if Nasser's speeches were not directly aimed at his overthrow, the relentlessness of the calls for changes, at least partially, had inspired the coup attempt against him. Despite his hostility toward Nasser (and in some ways, because of it), the Imam joined Egypt and Syria in forming the United Arab States in 1958, explaining to Saudi Arabia's King Saud that joining the U.A.S. was the best way to avoid becoming a target of Nasser's propaganda.¹⁴ Not long after Syria's September 1961 withdrawal from the U.A.S., the Imam wrote a poem criticizing socialism and those who nationalize the property of people and those who permit what Islam had prohibited (an oblique reference to the nationalization of property). The poem so angered Nasser that he terminated the confederation in September of 1961.¹⁵

The Coup and Its Aftermath

Ahmad died of natural causes on September 19, 1962. The rule of his successor, his son Imam Muhammad al-Badr, lasted only eight days. On September 26, 1962, a partially successful coup, led by a Yemen junior Army officer, forced al-Badr to flee from his capital and triggered the events that eventually led to civil war. That night's events, described in Imam al-Badr's own words, were as follows:

On the evening of the coup d'état, I was presiding over the new Council of Ministers located inside the Royal Palace. The meeting ended late at night because many affairs and subjects had to be discussed. While I was walking toward the residential quarter of the palace, an officer called Hussein al-Sukary, who was a deputy to Colonel Abdallah al-Sallal in providing security for the royal palace, tried to assassinate me from behind, but the rifle's trigger jammed. While my personal guards tried to arrest him, he shot himself in the chin. He is still alive today, but with a disfigured face. Al-Sallal, himself, was neither in the meeting of the council nor in the palace at the time. I continued my way towards the residential palace. After resting awhile, the electricity was cut off, and I felt that something wrong was going on. This was followed by gunfire on the palace. I then began with my personal guards and the guards of the palace to fire back. In fact, the ringleader of the coup and its principal Yemeni leader was an officer called Abd al-Ghani who was killed during the early hours of the coup. It is possible that he was the one who had constant contact with the Egyptian Embassy in Sanaa. The death of the Yemeni head plotter and the rumors that the Imam was also killed provided the opportunity for Colonel Abdallah al-Sallal to take over. Al-Sallal, himself, was a long time confidant of mine, whom I appointed Commander of the Royal Guard.¹⁶

Before the repercussions had ended from the coup d'6tat which removed Imam Muhammad al-Badr from power, much more had been affected than the destiny of one ruler. His fall from power and the government takeover by republican forces was followed by Egyptian intervention to secure the republican victory. This intervention, in turn, triggered Saudi Arabian participation in the form of political and financial assistance on the side of the deposed Imam. The conflicts of varying interests—Yemeni royalist, Yemeni republican, pro-republican Egypt and Saudi Arabia pro-royalist—ultimately led to a bloody civil war that lasted eight years and transformed a local problem into an international issue. Moreover, as their involvement deepened, Saudi Arabia and Egypt became engaged in what was an undeclared state of war, producing one of the most complex problems to face the Arab world in the 1960s. The deepening divisions between Saudi Arabia and Egypt over their respective roles in the conflict soon had the other Arab states taking sides, contributed to a general state of unrest among the Arab states, and created an ideological spectrum in which Arab countries became classified as nationalists, imperialists, radicals, conservatives, and moderates. This "side-taking" thereby broadened the scope of the Yemeni conflict so that it engulfed both the conservative and revolutionary Arab camps, with Saudi Arabia leading the conservatives and Egypt leading the revolutionaries.

The conflict, which lasted from 1962-1970, was resolved only when the Yemenis themselves opted to decide their fate alone and without further outside influence. Before that happened, however, the reach of the Yemeni Civil War had extended far beyond the original players and their partisans and had affected even the superpowers. It involved the United States as a mediator to cool the tensions between Saudi Arabia and Egypt and as an executor of limited military operations on the side of the Saudis. The U.S.S.R.'s involvement cast it as a supporter of Egypt's Gamal Abd al-Nasser, encouraging his continued participation in the conflict, and later supplying military and technical aid to the republican forces. Finally, the impact of the war and the Saudi-Egyptian conflict expanded to include even more participants—from other Arab states to regional and international organizations.

Significance of the Issue

The consequences of the Yemeni Civil War are with us today in the form of continuing border disputes and negotiations between North Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Aside from this, the civil war must be regarded as a watershed in that it presaged a new political era in the Arab world and in the relations of the powers within the region. The Yemeni Civil War also represented a major issue in the superpowers' rivalry over the Third World and the Middle East.

In the chapters that follow, we will examine the internal and external factors within Yemen which determined the course of events in that country both prior to and following the 1962 coup d'état and the ensuing civil war. This will include a survey of the internal situation existing in North Yemen prior to the coup in order to develop an understanding both of the reasons behind it and of the character of the groups which opposed and supported it.

A second major purpose of this work is to trace the historical development of the Saudi-Egyptian conflict over North Yemen. This task requires an understanding of the relations among these outside parties at the time of the 1962 coup as well as the political and military relations which had existed among them up to that time.

A third basic objective of this study is to treat, for the first time, the Saudi perception of North Yemen. Analyzing and examining this issue will clarify t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 BACKGROUND TO THE REVOLUTION
• 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF POLITICAL AND MILITARY RELATIONS AMONG SAUDI ARABIA, YEMEN AND EGYPT, 1932 TO 1962
• 3 THE COUP D'ETAT AND THE EGYPTIAN INTERVENTION IN NORTH YEMEN IN 1962
• 4 THE SAUDI ROLE IN THE YEMEN CIVIL WAR
• 5 THE SUPERPOWERS' ROLE AND INVOLVEMENT IN THE YEMEN DILEMMA
• 6 THE END OF THE SAUDI-EGYPTIAN CONFLICT AND THE YEMEN CIVIL WAR
• 7 SAUDI ARABIA AND NORTH YEMEN: THE INEVITABLE PARTNERSHIP
• Appendix 1 A Historical Document Written by H.M. Imam Muhammad al-Badr Concerning the Coup d'Etat Against Him
• Appendix 2 An Interview with H.M. Imam Muhammad al-Badr (the Former Ruler of North Yemen)
• Appendix 3 Agreement Between the United States of America and the Kingdom of the Yemen, May 4, 1946
• Appendix 4 Interview with His Excellency Mahmoud Riad (Former Egyptian Foreign Minister and Secretary-General of the Arab League)
• Bibliography
• Index