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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Jun 30 2011 - 02:39:49 EDT
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27826.htm
*Yemen’s Useful Tyranny – The Forgotten History of Britain’s ‘Dirty War’
By Media Lens
April 04, 2011 "**Media
Lens*<http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=613:yemens-useful-tyranny-the-forgotten-history-of-britains-dirty-war-part-2&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68>
*" -- Using *declassified government files, historian Mark Curtis
<http://markcurtis.wordpress.com/about/>has
exposed Britain's ‘dirty war’ in Yemen in the 1960s, which he describes
as one of the ‘least known aspects of recent British history’. The war
lasted almost a decade under both Tory and Labour governments, and cost
around 200,000 lives.
Even today, Curtis notes, the files are heavily censored: ‘probably more so
than in any other foreign-policy episode I have looked at.’ The official
reason for the secrecy is ‘national security’. The *actual* reason is to
protect the reputations of ‘the people with blood on their hands’: the
leading politicians of the day, including Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Alec
Douglas-Home and numerous other officials. (Mark Curtis, ‘Unpeople’, Chapter
16: ‘Arabians: Dirty Wars’, Vintage, 2004)
Curtis describes how, in September 1962, the Imam of North Yemen was
overthrown in a popular coup. Until then, 80 per cent of the population had
lived as peasants under a feudal system of government, with control
maintained by graft, a coercive tax system, and a policy of divide and rule.
The coup was led by Arab nationalists within the Yemeni military who
supported Egypt's reformist president Gamal Abdel Nasser. In turn,
Nasser sent troops to bolster the new Republican government. Royalist forces
supporting the deposed Imam fled to the hills and began an insurgency backed
by Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Curtis notes that Britain ‘soon resorted to covert action to undermine the
new Republican regime, in alliance with the Saudis and Jordanis’. British
officials privately recognised that they were thus supporting a ‘monopoly of
[royal] power’ that was ‘much resented’ by the Yemenis. But the Foreign
Office's 'pragmatic' concern was that the nationalist uprising might spread
to neighbouring Aden, then a UK colony, where Britain was ‘supporting
similarly feudal elements against strong popular, nationalist feeling.’
Why? For longstanding reasons of ‘national interest’. Curtis explains:
‘The military base at Aden was the cornerstone of British military policy in
the Gulf region, in which Britain was then the major power, directly
controlling the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf and with huge oil interests
in Kuwait and elsewhere.’
Aden was surrounded by a ‘protectorate’, the Federation of South Arabia:
feudal fiefdoms controlled by autocratic leaders like the overthrown Yemeni
Imam, and all ‘kept sweet by British bribes.’ Britain feared that a
progressive, republican, Arab nationalist Yemen would act as an inspiring
example and so threaten other feudal sheikdoms in the region and throughout
the wider Middle East. British ministers feared ‘a collapse in the morale of
the pro-British rulers of the protectorate,’ putting ‘the whole British
position in the area ... in jeopardy.’ The rulers of oil-rich Saudi Arabia
were similarly concerned about the possible domino effect of neighbouring
monarchies being overthrown by Arab nationalist forces.
Early in 1963, working with the Saudis, Jordan and Israel, Britain began
covertly arming and supplying the Yemeni royalist forces against the new
Yemen Republican government. A British mercenary operation was set up,
funded by the Yemeni royalist foreign minister, the Saudi prince Sultan, the
British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. SAS volunteers were
given temporary leave from official duties and French mercenaries were also
recruited.
In early 1964, SAS forces undertook their first clandestine air-drop of arms
and ammunition, with the discreet backing of MI6 and the CIA. UK Defence
Secretary Peter Thorneycroft spoke of the need to organise ‘tribal revolts’
in the frontier areas and to initiate ‘deniable action ... to sabotage
[pro-Yemeni Republican] intelligence centres and kill personnel engaged in
anti-British activities.’
Curtis adds that a top-secret document in the government files went even
further. Entitled ‘Yemen: The range of possible courses of action open to
us,’ it considered ‘assassination or other action against key personnel’
involved in subversion in the federation. As these options were being
debated in private, Prime Minister Douglas-Home lied to parliament on 14 May
1964:
‘Our policy towards the 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 the Yemen.’
Curtis notes that the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in
October 1964 ‘seems not to have upset the covert operation.’
Secret RAF bombing took place in retaliation for Egyptian attacks on camel
trains supplying weapons to French and British mercenaries. As part of an
arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Britain agreed a £26 million contract with a
private company, Airwork Services, for the training of Saudi pilots and
ground crew. Airwork also recruited former RAF pilots as mercenaries on
missions against Egyptian and Yemeni targets along the Yemeni border. And by
1965, MI6 had a secret agreement with Israel to use its territory for
launching attacks against the Yemeni Republicans.
Following Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasser withdrew his
troops from Yemen. In November, Britain withdrew from Aden. Then, in March
1969, the Saudis cut off supplies to the Yemeni Royalists. A treaty was
signed, and hostilities ceased. As mentioned, a total of around 200,000
people had died.
As far as current reporting on Yemen is concerned, none of this exists. On
March 29, we conducted searches using the LexisNexis newspaper database for
mentions of ‘Yemen’ in UK national newspapers since the start of the Yemeni
protests in January. We found 898 articles. Apart from two reviews of a new
book from an imperialist perspective (see next section), not one of these
articles contained any mention of the key names from this grim episode of
British history. Nor was there any mention of Mark Curtis. The war has been
effectively erased from the record.
It is the same phenomenon of media blindness and adherence to state ideology
that would have us believe that Iran’s history began with the Islamic
Revolution in 1979. This also neatly and conveniently omits the UK-US role
in the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected leader Mossadeq after he
nationalised Iran’s Western-controlled oil industry. History is reduced to
an elite-friendly script that minimises public understanding of the
background to current events.
An Exchange With The BBC’s Sarah Montague
A segment of the Radio 4 Today programme on February 16, 2011 was a rare
exception in even referring to this shameful history of British involvement
in Yemen. But its cavalier treatment of the events was telling, as the
exchange below reveals.
The radio piece comprised a discussion between Today presenter Sarah
Montague, author Duff Hart-Davis and the former British mercenary Kerry
Stone. It was conducted in an almost light-hearted tone of ‘look at the
scrapes these old boys got into back in the days of empire.’
We emailed Montague the same day:
Dear Sarah Montague,
I listened to your interview with author Duff Hart-Davis and the former
mercenary Kerry Stone this morning about Britain’s ‘secret war’ in Yemen in
the 1960s.
You said to Stone: ‘And *was* it an adventure because I mean it sounds
exciting?’
Duff Hart-Davis’s biased account is summed up in the subtitle of the book
[‘The War That Never Was’] he was promoting: 'The heroic true story of
Britain's greatest secret victory'. He told us that British colonel Jim
Johnson ran the [mercenary] operation from a basement in Sloane Street. And
then you indicated to listeners that this secret war took place:
‘Purely because he [Johnson] looked across [to the Gulf] and didn’t like the
loss of empire.’
This assertion, and your ill-advised use of ‘adventure’ and ‘exciting’, is a
misleading description of a war which was motivated by longstanding UK
‘national interests’ in the region. It was not merely the personal mission
of a few disgruntled imperialists or greedy mercenaries.
There was no mention in the Today piece of the *realpolitik* that natural
resources in the region were a prime motivation, and that profits were being
made in arms deals. The serious diplomatic historian Mark Curtis has
presented the evidence of all of this from previously secret government
files (see pp. 288-301 of ‘Unpeople’, Vintage, 2004). As Curtis notes, the
war cost up to 200,000 lives with British complicity in those deaths.
There was surely time in the 4 min : 30 sec piece to provide *some* serious
account of these crucial facts and thus proper balance?
Perhaps you could invite Mark Curtis on to the Today programme to provide
the balance that was so lacking this morning?
There was no response for a few days, so we nudged her gently on February 22
and she then responded that day:
Apologies for not replying sooner.
You may very well have a point. It occurred to me during the interview that
I may have been making too light of it. I shall have a word with our
planning editor and forward your email, but he may judge that given the way
the story was told and the time elapsed since it happened it was not too
serious an error.
I am on holiday at the moment but shall follow it up when I get back next
week.
Thank you for the email.
Despite a couple of gentle nudges in the month since then, we have not heard
back from Montague, her editor or anyone else on the Today programme.
Curtis notes in ‘Unpeople’ that Yemen and the other case studies he examined
in declassified government files illustrate the three basic principles that
guide British foreign policy.
The first is the systematic deception of the public by British ministers,
which is ‘deeply embedded in British policy-making.’ (Curtis, ‘Unpeople’, p.
3). Blair’s lies about Iraq fit comfortably as part of this trend.
The second principle is that policy-makers are typically open and frank
about their real goals in secret documents. The glaring gap between state
realpolitik and government claims of benevolence is rooted in a fundamental
contempt for the general population. As Curtis says:
‘The foreign-policy decision-making system is so secretive, elitist and
unaccountable that policy-makers know they can get away with almost
anything, and they will deploy whatever arguments are needed to do this.’ (*
Ibid*., p .3)
The third basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not feature in
the rationale for foreign policy. Curtis observes bluntly:
‘In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and
other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where
such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.’ (*
Ibid*., p .3)
When such concerns are not evoked for PR purposes, it is because a focus on
human rights would throw an unwelcome light on the West's support
for oppression. Saudi Arabia is a classic example, of course - as
is modern-day Yemen, where Saleh’s thirty-year record of oppression has been
facilitated by Western 'defence' companies and soft-pedaled by Western
diplomats. As noted in Part
1<http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=612:yemens-useful-tyranny-the-forgotten-history-of-britains-dirty-war&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68>,
Saleh has been a ‘useful tyrant’ for the West. He, or an acceptable
replacement, will remain a favoured figure – unless democratic forces become
uncontainable, both in Yemen and in the West.
The framework for understanding Britain’s war in Yemen in the 1960s,
then, remains valid for the situation there today as it does for much of the
world: namely, that control and geostrategic dominance - routinely sold to
the public as 'humanitarian intervention' and maintenance of global
‘security’ - continue to be the key concerns guiding Western policy.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for
others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a
polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to:
Sarah Montague, BBC Today presenter,
Email: sarah.montague@bbc.co.uk
Copy to: today@bbc.co.uk
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/arusbridger
Please blind-copy us in on any exchanges or forward them to us later at:
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