Britain and State Formation in Arabia 1962�1971

From Aden to Abu Dhabi

Clive Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138556751
• eBook ISBN: 9781351367844
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Half a century ago, Britain abandoned Aden, its last colonial outpost in the Arab world as its

attempt to establish a new polity foundered amid a rising tide of Arab nationalism, tribal

infighting and anti-colonial sentiment that eventually gave rise to the establishment of

South Yemen. Yet just over three years later in 1971, a new state, the United Arab Emirates,

emerged in Arabia, formed from the old Trucial states over which Britain had long held

sway. At a time when state failure and fragmentation has become synonymous with much

of the Middle East and where the very idea of sovereignty and legitimacy have become

contested issues, this comparative historical study of the varied British attempts at state

creation on the Arabian peninsula offers important insights into the limits of external ambition,

as well as the possibilities that great power retrenchment offered to the peoples of the

region. The legacy of British influence in Aden and Abu Dhabi still very much resonates

today; this volume explains why.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Middle Eastern Studies.

A triumph of realism? Britain, Aden and the end of empire, 1964–67

Aaron Edwards

In a letter to Elaine Windrich of the Labour Party’s Commonwealth Department, the double-hatted President of the newly formed People’s Socialist Party (PSP) and General Secretary of the Aden Trades Union Congress (ATUC), Abdullah al Asnag, warned that it was ‘a matter for history to record how a progressive government like the one now in power in the United Kingdom could walk hand in hand with feudal Sheikhs and reactionaries against the wishes of the people in the area’. Moreover, he argued, events now unfolding in Aden could be effortlessly compared with ‘those acts… [which] the French became famous of in Algiers’. Signing off on a more upbeat note, he appealed directly to the Labour Party for ‘continued sympathy and support’.¹ As al Asnag mulled over the prospect of a 12-month prison sentence for ‘conspiring to publish a seditious publication’, his request for assistance from his fraternal comrades in England did not go unnoticed.

Bringing the matter of al Asnag’s incarceration to the attention of Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan, David Ennals, head of Labour’s International Department, speculated whether it might be possible to ‘get the Executive to agree to a small grant being made from the Labour Party’s Socialist International fund’. Recalling a meeting with George Thomson, a Labour spokesman on Commonwealth and Colonial Affairs, who ‘was anxious that we should help if we could, largely because it was his feeling that we ought to keep in close and friendly touch with the People’s Socialist Party to counter possible influences from elsewhere’, Ennals appealed directly to Callaghan to bring the issue of Aden to the attention of the House of Commons. Though Ennals hoped to place Aden on the agenda of a meeting of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee at the end of October 1962, it does not appear to have been included until the end of November. Even then it received only received scant attention in a letter from the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), George Woodcock, to Labour’s General Secretary, Len Williams. Woodcock’s letter makes a minor, passing reference to Labour’s deputation to the Conservative Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys, which sought to express an objection to ‘the proposed structure of the Federation [of South Arabia]’, while highlighting how the ‘threat of intimidation which… had become very serious in Aden’.²

Within a few weeks a flurry of resolutions were being submitted by individual Constituency Labour Parties concerned by growing tensions in Aden. As 1962 drew to a close, Ennals seems to have succeeded in raising at least a modicum of awareness of Aden amongst Labour MPs, several of whom highlighted the plight of PSP detainees in parliamentary debates on 13 November and 22 December 1962. By the New Year, Ennals could dutifully report to PSP member Mohamed S. Ali that the Labour Party was now doing everything in its power to push for the immediate release of al Asnag and the other detainees. Indeed, he went further by suggesting that the party would continue to follow ‘the events in Aden with much concern and shall do all we can to assist in the struggle for freedom in Aden’.³

While the Labour Party archives are replete with fraternal correspondence on the issue of Aden, particularly in the run up to the 1964 Westminster Election, when hopes were high that a new Labour government could reconcile British influence in the region with Arab nationalism,⁴ there is little to suggest that any of this fed into policy-making in a meaningful way once the party entered government. Moreover, and as the quotations headlining this article demonstrate, Harold Wilson seems to have changed his mind on the issue of Aden (and on East of Suez policy more generally) shortly after entering Downing Street. Having emerged as a Bevanite in the late 1950s, Wilson later recalled in his political memoirs how Labour was divided between its ‘left wing and a minority of the Cabinet’ who ‘favoured pulling out [of East of Suez] totally’ and ‘a majority, including myself, [who were] moved more by thoughts of a contribution to international peace-keeping than by considerations of imperial splendour’.⁵ At a time when Labour’s international policy was tempered by the rising tide of nationalism and a bleak fiscal outlook, to say nothing of Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence and a host of expensive Cold War commitments, Aden created an unwelcome, exacting challenge. In perhaps the most incisive analysis of the Labour government’s policy of decolonization, Professor John Young suggests that the party ‘inherited a dismal situation and it is debatable how far Wilson’s administration can be blamed for the fiasco that followed’.⁶

In order to ascertain whether the Wilson administration was indeed an innocent bystander amidst the ‘dismal’ contraction of Britain’s imperial real estate, or an active participant in the ‘fiasco that followed’, this article examines Labour’s policy towards Aden in both Opposition and Government. Drawing on under-utilized documents in the party’s archives and elsewhere, it examines the ebb and flow of British policy on Aden. It makes the case that, in contrast to the Conservative government’s support for its traditional tribal allies in South Arabia, the Wilson government adopted a non-committal stance that would ultimately lead to inertia in its grand strategy towards the Middle East.⁷ Furthermore, Labour’s ties to the ATUC, in particular, and the ideological sympathies of its backbenchers to the cause of Arab nationalism may well have clouded the judgement of some of its leading figures and, ultimately, left Britain at a strategic disadvantage in the Cold War.

Fraternal relations

Aden had been seized by the East India Company on behalf of the British Empire in 1839 when Captain Stafford Haines issued an ultimatum to the Sultan of Lahej, one of the most powerful tribal sheikhs in south-west Arabia at the time. When he refused to hand over the port of Aden to the British his palace was bombarded and he took flight to the interior, later returning to agree terms by which Aden was ‘gifted’ to Britain. Aden sat in Britain’s outer empire and was only formally brought into the fold as a Crown colony by the Colonial Office in 1937. This was in recognition of its growing importance since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and as a coal station for passenger liners and other ships travelling to British India. Leading Colonial Officers in the 1950s looked for a better way to secure Aden for the future as part of an ambition to open up the surrounding hinterland, which had been traditionally lawless and governed by way of ‘indirect rule’.⁸ Negotiations aimed at integrating Aden into the 16-member Amirates took place in the early 1960s and were concluded in Lancaster House in the summer of 1962. Aden would become the 17th member state of the new Federation of South Arabia on 1 January 1963.⁹

Aden’s entry into the Federation of South Arabia was greeted with increasing chaos in the Middle East. An armed challenge launched by revolutionary forces against the Yemeni Imam, a high priest of the Zaydi tribal tradition, a Shi’ite subsect, had successfully dislodged him from power in September 1962.¹⁰ Egypt’s President Gamel al Nasser, who himself came to power through a coup d’état in the 1950s, dispatched troops to assist republican forces,¹¹ while the Egyptian Intelligence Service (EIS) set about arming militias along the border between Yemen and South Arabia. Incursions into the interior of the rugged and mountainous Radfan region in the porous border soon followed. Against the backdrop of growing Egyptian intrigue, civil disobedience and industrial strike action began to take root in Aden colony. This was expedited by the EIS’s role as midwife in the birth of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which consisted of tribesmen from the rural interior who joined with an assortment of urban-based Arab nationalist students, intellectuals and workers, who took their reign of terror onto the streets of Aden colony by the closing months of 1964.¹²

Against the backdrop of mounting chaos, fraternal relations between Labour and the ATUC continued to grow. They had already proven strong enough to survive the assassination bid on the Aden High Commissioner Kennedy Trevaskis on 10 December 1963 and his prompt declaration of a State of Emergency the same day. Trevaskis’s decision to order the detention without trial of terrorist suspects would prove controversial, especially since the Aden Special Branch proceeded to arrest several prominent trade union activists. Most of the higher echelons of the ATUC were seized in swoops on 11 December, including al Asnag, who was then transferred from Zigjibar to Ja’ar, where he was kept in a prison office with access to books, fans and regular exercise.¹³ Nevertheless, news of his incarceration spread far and wide, and strongly worded letters were received by the High Commission from trades unions as far away as Trinidad, Malaya and Yugoslavia. Unsurprisingly, the news of the detentions caused political problems for the Conservative government back in London, which quickly issued a flurry of telegrams to Trevaskis. As one Colonial Office communique made clear:

We have no wish to weaken your hand in a very difficult situation or try to run your security operations from London but I think you should know the difficulties which detentions without charge or proof of complicity are going to cause here if they are con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Epigraph
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Aden, South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study in state failure and state creation
• 1. A triumph of realism? Britain, Aden and the end of empire, 1964–67
• 2. The missing link? Police and state-building in South Arabia
• 3. Explaining the triumph of the National Liberation Front
• 4. The Nasser factor: Anglo-Egyptian relations and Yemen/Aden crisis 1962–65.
• 5. The North Yemen civil war and the failure of the Federation of South Arabia
• 6. Failure and success in state formation: British policy towards the Federation of South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
• 7. Anglo-American relations over Aden and the United Arab Emirates, 1967–71
• 8. From union (ʾīttihād) to united (muttahida): the United Arab Emirates, a success born of failure
• 9. Aden and the Gulf: the reflections of a political officer
• Index