Bloody denouement
THROUGHOUT its history, the South Yemeni national liberation movement and subsequently the state it founded have been riven by violent factional conflicts. There are two obvious main reasons for this.
SOUTH YEMEN the war of independence. During the rise of the left after June 1969, he was minister of defense. In the December 11-14, 1972, issue of Afrique Asie he defined the role of the army as Tollows:
"It functions as a small corps of technicians,' whose role is to teach the population how to defend itself... Within the army, all power is in the hands of political leaders who are obliged to carry out the decisions of our last congress.
The third of those reported execu ted, Ali Salem Al-Beedh, staged one of the major coups of the left in the period before the 1969 victory, firing 28 British military instructors in February 1968. He was a leader from the Hadramaut region, the stronghold of the left.
The fourth claimed dead by the regime was Ali Shai Hadi, chairman of the Yemeni Socialist Party.
It seems apparent that despite very extensive nationalizations and peasant mobilizations, the society had not been definitely transformed. The militia, which got Cuban training, is by all accounts substantially smaller than the army, which all reports agree was the essential base of the apparent victor in this confrontation, President Ali Nasser.
The Paris daily Liberation's correspondent Jose Garcon described the origin of the conflict as follows:
"Seeing the economic crisis as making it necessary to seek aid from the 'moderate' Arab countries and not just Moscow, the Yemenite president was to adopt a more 'flexible' policy toward the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia (rapprochement with North Yemen, ending the long dispute with Oman, etc). This evolution was violently opposed by Ali Antar."
Obviously for such a small country, the material weight of the Soviet Union could be decisive. The reported dead leaders have been linked by the big press to Moscow. But they have taken positions to the left of the USSR in the past, if only because they had to fight for their lives against Nasserism, then backed by the Kremlin.
Against this background, it does not seem impossible that they would have needed a green light from Moscow to act. The Kremlin has, moreover, kept its alliance with Iraq despite the regime moving the right.
The bloody conflict that erupted on January 13 in fact raises many political and theoretical questions, not just about the evolution and parameters of Soviet policy, but about the revolutionary process and institutions in such countries, desperately poor radical ministates which are becoming a more common feature today.
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GERRY FOLEY
The first is that there has been a strong radical element feared both by the bourgeois nationalist leadership and the reactionary Arab regimes in the area, and they have brought every pressure to bear to push this radical element aside, including promoting rival factions and corrupting the more moderately inclined leaders.
The second is the vulnerability of this tiny desperately poor country of barely two million inhabitants to such pressures. It is bordered on one side by the right-wing regime in North Yemen, which presides over a much larger population (7 million) and on another by the thinly populated but enormously rich Saudi Arabia, closely allied to the US. Some 70% of the national income comes from the port of Aden, and it is obviously vulnerable to economic pressures from the Western countries, which account for most shipping. Another major source of income is remittances from South Yemenis working in Saudi Arabia.
Tribal traditions and great unevenesses in the country also are a complicating factor.
Up until now, the more radical element has made advance after advance in the successive confrontations, in the conflict with the Egyptian backed FLOSY faction during the fight for independence, in the ouster of Qahtan ash-Shaabi from the presidency in June 1969, and in the ouster of Salem Robea Ali from the presidency in June 1978.
Qahtan had represented a Nasserite wing of the ruling National Liberation Movement (NLF). Robea Ali had been trying to move toward reconciliation with imperialism.
The fall of Robea Ali prompted the Arab League to impose a boycott on South Yemen, and aroused bitter comment by some representatives of the US government. In an article in the July 7, 1978, Washington Post, Congressman Paul Findley wrote, "An internal power struggle cut down the outstretched hand just as it was about to welcome a long-awaited US negotiating team to Aden."
In February 1979, there was a serious armed confrontation with North Yemen. Washington accused South Yemen of invading its much more populous neighbor and sent an aircraft carrier to the area.
In October 1979, South Yemen signed a twenty-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. It was also accorded observer status in the Soviet bloc economic coordinating organization, Comecon. The Soviet Union was granted the right to establish an important naval base.
The four leaders that the government of President Ali Nasser claims now to have executed were identified with the more radical aspects of the national liberation process in South Yemen.
The most important, Abdul Fatah Ismail from North Yemen, [now thought to be still alive] was a trade-union organizer, and the chief of the NLF struggle in the city of Aden during the war of independence. He was influential also on the theoretical level, where he distinguished himself by his attacks on Nasser's "Arab socialism." He denounced it for its denial of the role of class struggle and characterized it as a product of the petty bourgeoisie, along with a whole series of radical bourgeois nationalist regimes, including the Indonesian, the Syrian, the Algerian, and the Iraqi.
At the Fourth Congress of the NLF in early March 1968, he said, among other things:
"The compromising petty-bourgeois leadership in the epoch of imperialism is even more dangerous for the national popular democratic revolution than the explicit counterrevolutionary policies of the semifeudal, semi-bourgeois alliance."
At the same time, he called for the smashing of state structures left over from colonialism and for building a militia of 100,000 to 150,000 people.
Abdul Fatah emerged as the leading figure after the 1978 events, but was pushed out in 1980.
Another of those reported executed was Ali Antar, leader of the guerrilla front in the Radfan mountains during
International Viewpoint 27 January 1986