CONFIDENTIAL Sir Richard Beaumont Lessons from South Arabia? Over 10 days' ago I promised you what would be an over-simplified, personal and doubtless distorted view of how we had got to where we were in South Arabia. With apologies for the delay, here it is. ARCHIVES No 5 populat 2. In 1839 we acquired the ruins of earlier ports per V-D 1 0f Aden, degenerated into two fishing villages with a Nol 5 population of less than 1,000. Over the years, for 1 reasons of commerce and imperial communications, it DEC 1991 built up into a seedy but reasonably well administered boblony. It was always a deficit territory, but Bis adquired the normal administrative and welfare agpurtenances with that limitation. Its population built up by 1950 to round about 100,000 by immigra tion from the Protectorate, the Yemen, Somaliland, and India in particular. The Arab elements, as they became Adenised, came to think themselves superior to the people of the hinterland. In terms of literary and modern ways they were, but not to the extent that they thought. The Indian and other foreign interest was largely to make money. It followed from this that no sense of national identity in the full sense could develop. Any separatist feeling in Aden was some thing less than Adeni patriotism. 3. The hinterland consisted of various Shaikhdoms and Sultanates on which the dominant external influences, at any one time, were the extent of British interest from Aden: and the extent of Turkish/Yemeni assertiveness. This last fluctuated. according to the power first of the Turks, and later of the Zaidi Imams of Northern Yemen. At times their influence and domination extended to the outskirts of Aden itself. At other times the Shaikhdoms and Sultanates enjoyed a kind of anarchic independence and autonomy. As late as the 1930s, much of Dhala and Audhali was occupied by the Yemenis, who never accepted the boundary which the Turks and the British had negotiated before World War I. The Yemenis regarded South Arabia as a natural part of Yemen, or at least as a sphere of Yemeni influence, the character of which had been wrongly distorted by British power. 4. In earlier years, the latter was exercised distantly. Though there were Protectorate treaties designed to prevent interference with Aden in particular, the general attitude of the Government of India was to confine itself to so much involvement, and no more, in the Protectorate as to keep the territory quiet enough for Aden to get along in peace. (The main instrument after World War I was air power. It was supplemented by the RAF-run Aden Protectorate Levies, though these were never a reliable force, being mercenary, composed of venal tribesmen and not always well officered.) CONFIDENTIAL
