Vicious Little War : S. Yemen: Blood and Struggle

For Garth Wood, a British engineer working on a water pipeline project in South Yemen, there was a sense of deja vu.

The first time that Wood was evacuated from Aden, in 1967, it was as a member of the British army withdrawing under fire from Yemeni rebels, whose struggle for independence finally brought an end to 127 years of British rule.

Independence was followed by a succession of coups and bloody power struggles that pushed this tiny but strategically situated country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula into the Soviet camp. For most of the next two decades, the place the Romans called “Arabia felix” (happy Arabia) was closed to the West as the Soviets consolidated their control.

Overtures Toward West

In recent years, however, there were signs of a reopening, as South Yemen sought to attract Western expertise and investment for its heavily indebted economy.

Envious of the discovery of large oil deposits by the Hunt Oil Co. in neighboring Yemen, the authorities here in Aden began discussions with Western companies to search for the oil that East European firms were never able to find.

The government contracted with France to build Aden’s largest and most luxurious hotel, and last year the state airline Alyemda added two Boeing 737s to its fleet of aging Soviet airliners. Even the British started to make a comeback, providing the engineering expertise for several water-drilling and distribution projects.

In all, there were about 2,000 Westerners in South Yemen on the morning of Monday, Jan. 13, shortly after 10 a.m., when all hell broke loose.

Account by the Winners

As those in power in South Yemen now tell it, the trouble started when head of state Ali Nasser Hasani tried to bring off a preemptive coup by ordering the massacre of his rivals in the Politburo of the ruling Yemen Socialist Party.

Hasani called the Politburo together at 10 a.m. on the fateful day but did not attend himself, survivors of the massacre said. Instead, he sent his bodyguards, who went through the motions of preparing Hasani’s papers and serving the others tea. These courtesies dispensed with, the bodyguards produced machine pistols and opened fire on the men in the room, killing several of the president’s opponents, including deputy head of state Ali Ahmed Antar and Defense Minister Salih Muslih Kasim.

“We were sitting and chatting,” one of the survivors, Local Government Minister Ali Salim Bidh, recalled. “We didn’t suspect the reason the president was late. One of his bodyguards, whose name was Hassan, brought in the president’s Samsonite briefcase while the other brought a thermos of tea. Comrade Ali Antar was standing, opening his briefcase, when the bodyguard Hassan moved behind him and fired a whole magazine from his pistol into his back as the other bodyguard opened fire on us from the doorway.”

Salim and the others ducked under the oval conference table and returned the fire--one of the first rules of South Yemeni politics being never to attend a Politburo meeting unarmed.

The clamor from the shooting summoned the bodyguards of the other Politburo members, and a wild gunfight erupted. Salim and two other Politburo members escaped.

The fighting widened quickly after that, and by the next day, fierce rocket and tank battles were raging in several parts of the city between opposing units of the armed forces and the tribal militias summoned down from the surrounding hills.

“It was hell,” said a South Yemen resident who spent two days huddled on the floor of his house with his wife and children. “The shells and bullets were coming from everywhere. Oh, God, it was hell.”

Evacuation of Foreigners

The evacuation of foreigners began on Friday, Jan. 17, on the fifth day of the fighting that was to last for another week. After several failed attempts, the Soviets arranged a limited truce on a beachfront near their battered embassy in Khormaksar, one of two districts in the city where the heaviest fighting took place. The first to leave, aboard a Soviet freighter, were women and children.

The next day, Saturday, Jan. 18, about 800 people, among them most of the diplomatic community, gathered on the beach at daybreak to await evacuation by the British royal yacht Britannia, which was in the area en route to New Zealand when the fighting broke out.

As Bryan Wannop, the resident representative of the U.N. Development Program, said later, the evacuation was proceeding as planned when, in midmorning, with half the evacuees still waiting on the beach, the Britannia suddenly turned and steamed away.

“We were flabbergasted,” Wannop recalled. “At first we couldn’t believe it. Without warning, they set sail and left us.”

The commander of the Britannia, Adm. John Garnier, later told reporters that the cease-fire was collapsing and that shelling was advancing toward the beach, forcing a suspension of the evacuation. But Wannop said the area around the beachfront was calm for another 20 minutes as the evacuees waited on the shore, still thinking that the Britannia would return for them.

Strafed From Beach

“Then all of a sudden, we were strafed by machine-gun fire coming from the buildings in the back of the beach,” Wannop said. “Everybody fell on their faces, and then there was mass panic and we started running.”

No one was hit by the strafing, which Wannop said may have been a warning to the evacuees to get off the beach. “But if so, it was awfully close,” he said. “When I got back to my car, there were two bullet holes in it.”

The evacuees spent the next several days huddled in basements and moving from building to building in search of food and water, both of which were running low. Some put sugar in sea water to make it potable. At the British Embassy, they drank and bathed in champagne.

During this time, while the Soviets and the British continued to try to negotiate a truce and select an alternate evacuation site, two heroes emerged--Wannop, who is a Canadian, and Abbas Zaki, senior representative in Aden of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Zaki was several hundred miles outside of Aden, in a remote part of the country, when the fighting broke out. On hearing the news, he drove to the capital, arriving on the fourth day. Under his direction, the PLO ran supply convoys for the foreigners, crossing the lines to bring back food and bottled water scavenged from abandoned apartment buildings.

‘Responsible Role’

“The PLO played a very responsible role; they helped the rest of us immensely,” said Wannop, who himself led convoys around the city, a white flag flying from his car, to help gather together foreigners stranded in different areas.

After the first week, the fighting began to taper off as Hasani’s resistance crumbled. Scattered shooting continued, but by the 10th day an evacuation route had been secured through rebel territory from Khormaksar to Little Aden, site of a sprawling oil refinery west of the capital. The evacuees drove there in three convoys, white flags flying, as victorious rebel forces lined the route and waved goodby.

By Thursday morning, Jan. 23, the rescue operation had been completed as the last of nearly 7,000 foreigners--5,000 Soviet nationals and 2,000 people of other nationalities--set out for the Red Sea port of Djibouti in Soviet, French and British ships.

Aden is quiet now, and much of the war damage--crippled tanks, flattened cars and thousands of spent shell casings--has been cleared away. Members of the new collective leadership, in their first interviews with Western reporters, said they want the foreigners to return as soon as possible to finish work on the various projects abandoned in the fighting. But for Garth Wood, twice was enough.

“I’ve been there twice and been shot at both times,” he said over a beer in Djibouti. “I’m not going back--no sir--though I do wish I could get my golf clubs back some time.”

A handful of Western reporters managed to make their way across from Djibouti and into Aden on Tuesday, Jan. 28. They found that most of the shops had been badly damaged. The turret of a Soviet-made tank lay in the twisted embrace of the collapsed balcony of the building into which it had crashed. Farther down the road, the blackened, skeletal remains of several trucks and another tank lay scattered about an intersection.

Turbaned tribesmen and uniformed militiamen armed with Kalashnikov rifles cruised up and down the streets in cars and pickup trucks spattered with oil from two nearby storage tanks that had been punctured by shellfire.

Along with Khormaksar, the area around the port known as Steamer Point was the scene of the heaviest fighting because of its proximity to key government offices, including the Central Committee headquarters where the Politburo massacre took place.

More than two weeks after the event, it is still littered with gruesome reminders and still reeks of death. Dark patches of blood, which are black now, stain the carpets beneath overturned bullet-riddled chairs. The conference table and the two rows of microphones on it are also flecked with blood. Shards of glass crackle underfoot.

Now Classed as Criminals

Now that the fighting is over, the new leaders are mounting a propaganda campaign to expose what they assert were the myriad crimes of “Ali Nasser and his conspiratorial clique.” They complain about descriptions of themselves in the Western press as Marxist hard-liners and seem eager to portray their differences with Hasani as personal rather than ideological.

Salim Saleh Mohammed, secretary of the Central Committee of the Yemen Socialist Party and a survivor of the Jan. 13 ambush, indicated in his first interview with Western reporters that a power struggle had been simmering for more than a year, ever since Hasani began to lose control of the Politburo.

He said the ousted South Yemeni chief of state first plotted to eliminate his rivals last May, but that the crisis was averted at a meeting of the Central Committee, which adopted a resolution renouncing violence as a means of settling political disputes.

Pressed for examples of Hasani’s misdeeds, Mohammed said he used his power to profit from a series of illegal import-export deals channeled through the office of the governor of Abyan, Hasani’s home province and tribal stronghold.

“Abyan was a state within a state,” said Mohammed, who added that the governor, Ali Ahmed Mohammed, was doing a brisk but illegal business importing and selling Toyota pickup trucks in violation of a 1985 decision to suspend all imports of foreign cars. More seriously, Mohammed charged, the governor was importing small arms for distribution to “conspiratorial elements.”

Abyan, where scattered fighting took place, was quiet when journalists arrived there. The former governor is rumored to have fled with Hasani, who is believed to have gone to Yemen with the presumed objective of reaching Ethiopia. His supporters continue to broadcast surrender ultimatums from a mobile radio station across the border.

Continuing Instability

It seems unlikely that Hasani can make a military comeback, but with outside support he could be a threat and a source of instability for his successors. Aware of this, the new leaders have taken pains to assure people in Yemen and in the nearby Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait that they will continue to pursue Hasani’s conciliatory foreign policies and keep the door open to Western investment.

But for the time being at least, most of the gulf countries seem to be unconvinced. Many seem to be waiting for the outcome of what they are certain will be another power struggle between the survivors before recognizing the new regime.

At the moment, the government is nominally headed by Hasani’s prime minister, Haider abu Bakr Attas, who was visiting India when the fighting broke out. He flew to Moscow and was brought back as acting chief of state under an agreement brokered by Palestinian and Soviet officials.

Authoritative sources point out that Attas has no independent tribal power base, and they believe that he will be in office only so long as the jittery gulf states need assurances that the old regime’s moderate foreign policies will continue.

In the meantime, the emerging strongman, according to these sources, seems to be Mohammed, who has been Central Committee secretary, a member of the Yafi tribe, which is strong in the military. Mohammed, 39, fought the British as a teen-ager. He has held a series of senior party posts and served as foreign minister under Hasani from 1980 to 1983.

Bidh, the local government minister, is a possible rival. The Soviet news agency Tass reported late last week that he had been chosen to succeed Mohammed as party secretary. However, Western diplomats see this as a sign that Mohammed will succeed Attas as head of state.

Soviet Role Pondered

Questions remain concerning the Soviet Union’s murky role in the coup. Some Western diplomats monitoring events from afar say it is inconceivable to them that the Soviet Union did not know that a move to oust Hasani was afoot.

“They had that country under lock and key,” one diplomat said. “It’s hard to believe they didn’t know what was going on.”

The fact that rebel tank forces, loyal to Antar, were close enough to the city to enter the fighting on the first day lends some support to this theory. So does the heavy damage inflicted on the Soviet Embassy by Hasani’s forces.

According to this theory, the Russians, displeased with Hasani’s flirtation with the West, wanted to replace him with a more doctrinaire Communist like Abdul-Fattah Ismail, whom he deposed in 1980. Ismail, who had been exiled in Moscow but was sent back to Aden last fall, was killed in the fighting, according to the new authorities.

Unlikely to Risk Progress

However, other diplomats noted that Moscow has recently made some progress in establishing ties with other Persian Gulf countries and said it is highly improbable that it would jeopardize that process by risking a return to the mischievous foreign policies of the Ismail era.

Finally, they noted that the scale of the fighting seems to have taken the Soviets by surprise.

“I have a hard time believing that they weren’t surprised,” one Western diplomat said. “You’re talking about getting caught with your pants down at a time when you have men, women and children leaving with nothing but a suitcase.”

Indeed, the brief but vicious little war in Aden appears to illustrate how quickly events can spiral out of control, even for the Soviet Union.

“South Yemen’s tribal traditions extend back hundreds of years, while Marxism has been around (in the country) for only the last 19,” an observer said. “If nothing else, what happened shows how thin the veneer of their ideology really is.”