Britain is currently backing a Saudi-led invasion of Yemen that has cost thousands of innocent lives. It is providing advanced weaponry to the Saudis, training their military and has soldiers embedded with them, helping with the targeting of air strikes.

This is true of today. But it also describes what was happening during the 1960s, in a shameful episode which Britain has, like so much of its colonial past, effectively whitewashed out of its history.

In 1962, following the death of the Yemeni imam Ahmed, Arab nationalist army officers led by colonel Abdallah Al-Sallal seized power in Yemen and declared a republic. Their royalist opponents launched an insurgency to reclaim power backed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Britain, whilst president Gamal Abdel-Nasser of Egypt sent troops to support the fledgling republican government.

In his book Unpeople, UK historian Mark Curtis has pieced together Britain’s “dirty war” in Yemen between 1962 and 1969, using declassified British files which – despite their public availability and the incendiary nature of their revelations – have only ever been examined by one other British historian.

The British involvement in Yemen spanned both Conservative and Labour Party governments in the UK and implicated leading members of the British government in war crimes. Like today, the side under attack from Britain in Yemen had clear popular support – as British officials at the time were well aware. Christopher Gandy, then Britain’s top official in Yemen’s cultural capital Taiz, noted that the previous regime was “unpopular with large elements and those in many ways the best,” describing it as “an arbitrary autocracy”.

At first, Britain’s role was primarily to support and equip Jordan’s involvement in the war. Like today, British-supplied fighter jets carried out airstrikes on Yemen, with British military advisers embedded at the most senior level. This involvement stepped up a gear in March 1963, when Britain began covertly supplying weapons to the royalist forces in Yemen themselves via their Gulf allies.

The following month, says UK historian Stephen Dorrill, millions of pounds worth of light weapons were shipped from a British air force stationin the UK to the insurgents, including 50,000 rifles. At the same time, a decision was taken by Britain’s foreign minister at the time, shortly to become prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, head of the security services (MI6) Dick White and special forces (SAS) founder David Stirling to send British forces to work directly with the insurgents.

In order to avoid parliamentary scrutiny and public accountability, these forces would be comprised of mercenaries, rather than serving soldiers. British SAS soldiers and paratroopers were given temporary leave to join the new forces on the then handsome salary of £10,000 per year, paid for by the Saudis. At the same time that these decisions were taken, Douglas-Home told the UK parliament that “our policy in Yemen is one of non-intervention in the affairs of that country. It is not therefore our policy to supply arms to the royalists in Yemen.”

British officials also knew that the insurgency had no chance of winning. But this was not the point, for as the former UK prime minister Harold Macmillan had told US president John Kennedy at the time, “I quite realise that the loyalists will probably not win in Yemen in the end, but it would not suit us too badly if the new Yemeni regime were occupied with their own internal affairs during the next few years.”

What Britain wanted, he added, was “a weak government in Yemen [that is] not able to make trouble.”

The Labour Party came to power in Britain in the autumn of 1964, but the policy stayed the same; indeed, direct (but covert) British air force bombing of Yemen began soon after. In addition, another private British military company, Airwork Services, signed a $26 million contract to provide personnel for training Saudi pilots and ground crew involved in the war.

This agreement later evolved into British pilots actually carrying out bombing missions themselves, with a UK foreign office memo dated March 1967 noting that “we have raised no objection to their being employed in operations, though we made it clear to the Saudis that we could not publicly acquiesce in any such arrangements.” By the time the war ended – with its inevitable republican victory – an estimated 200,000 people had been killed.

This was not the first time Britain had aided and abetted a Saudi war against the Yemenis. In 1934, the Saudi king Ibn Saud had invaded and annexed Asir, “a Yemeni province by all historical accounts,” in the words of Yemen specialist Elham Manea, and forced Yemen to sign a treaty deferring its claims to the territory for 20 years. The territory has never been returned to Yemen and remains occupied by the Saudis to this day.

Britain’s role in facilitating this carve-up was significant. As Manea explains, “during this period, the real power was Great Britain. Its role was crucial in either exacerbating or containing regional conflicts… [and] in the Yemeni-Saudi war it intensified the conflict to the detriment of Yemen.”

When Ibn Saud claimed sovereignty over Asir in 1930, the British, who had been neutral towards disputes between the peninsula’s various rulers hitherto, “shifted their position, perceiving Asir as ‘part of Saudi Arabia’... This was a terrible setback for [Yemeni leader] Yahya and drove him into an agreement with the British in 1934 which ultimately sealed his total defeat.”

The agreement forced the Yemenis to recognise British sovereignty over Aden, south Yemen’s major port, for 40 years. Britain then provided military vehicles for the Saudi suppression of the Asiri revolt and subsequent occupation.

As a result, the current British-Saudi war against Yemen is in fact the third war in a century. Why is Britain so seemingly determined to see the country dismembered and its development sabotaged?

Strange as it may seem, the answer is that Britain is scared of Yemen, the sole country on the Arabian Peninsula with the potential to challenge the colonial stitch-up reached between London and the Gulf monarchies it placed in power in the 19th century and which continue to rule to this day.

As Palestinian author Said Aburish has noted, the “nature of the Yemen was a challenge to the Saudis: It was a populous country with more than half the population of the whole Arabian Peninsula, had a solid urban history, and was more advanced than its new neighbour. It also represented a thorn in the side of British colonialism, a possible springboard for action against their control of Saudi Arabia and all the makeshift tributary sheikhdoms and emirates of the Gulf.”

“In particular, the Yemen represented a threat to the British colonisation of Aden, a territory which considered itself part of a Greater Yemen which had been dismembered by colonialism.”

The potential power of a united, peaceful Yemen was also highlighted by Kennedy Trevaskis, UK high commissioner in Aden in 1963-4, who noted that if the Yemenis took Aden, “it would for the first time provide the Yemen with a large modern town and a port of international consequence” and “economically it would offer the greatest advantages to so poor and ill-developed a country.”

A peaceful, united Yemen would threaten Saudi-British-US hegemony of the region. That is why Britain for more than 80 years has sought to keep it warring and divided.

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The writer is a specialist on Western foreign policy in the Arab world.