Abstract
The war in Dhufar that lasted from 1965 until 1976 is still seen in military circles as a great British success story. It was a war where the British showed their counterinsurgency expertise to good effect, defeating a Communist insurgency. And it came complete with a great heroic episode, the battle of Mirbat in July 1972, where the SAS demonstrated its prowess against the revolutionary hordes. If before you had wanted to go beyond the celebratory literature, there really was not much more than the various works of the late Fred Halliday, excellent though they were, published back in the 1970s. At last we have an outstanding English-language study of the Dhufari revolution from the rebel point of view: Abdel Razzaq Tikriti’s Monsoon Revolution.
Takriti’s purpose is easily stated: he is concerned to show ‘how Omani men and women, through the difficult craft of popular mobilization, created their own history’, and the task is superbly accomplished. The revolution went down to defeat, with the British successfully installing a royal absolutism in place, but the struggle deserves, indeed needs, to be remembered today as a demonstration of what is possible, even though victory eluded the brave men and women who took up arms against the Sultan. The fact is that it was the Marxist revolutionaries of the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) who led the popular insurgency that still remains ‘the most significant internal threat to the modern Gulf structure’ yet to emerge.
The armed struggle against Sultan Said bin Taimur began in Dhufar in 1965. It was a rebellion against a corrupt, obscurantist regime that regarded its subjects with loathing, did not abolish slavery until 1970 and was really only kept in power by British support. The readiness of both Conservative and Labour governments to prop up a regime where the country’s ruler was also its largest slave owner is as good a testimony as one can get for Britain’s traditional ‘unethical’ foreign policy. Once he was confronted with rebellion, the Sultan’s response was a complete reliance on repression, assuming that the British would provide whatever forces were necessary to crush the challenge. This might have been true once, but by the mid-1960s the situation in the Middle East was changing. British power was very much in retreat and the insurgents were inspired by and looked for support from Arab nationalists across the region and from the Soviet Union and China. The British withdrawal from South Yemen towards the end of 1967 saw a government take power there that was to give considerable support to the Dhufari rebels. As Takriti puts it, ‘South Yemen sacrificed a vast amount of treasure, diplomatic energy and military effort to the Dhufari cause’.
In the circumstances, the British did not feel able to commit large numbers of troops to crush the insurgency and instead looked to the Sultan to make concessions that would hopefully divide and weaken the rebel forces. Increasingly, the Sultan came to be seen as an obstacle to progress in the war. At the end of 1967, a British report complained that the Sultan ‘has so far failed to take steps to make his rule in Dhofar more acceptable to the people there. Thus, the rebels rather than the SAF (Sultan’s Armed Forces) enjoy the sympathy of the local population’. The decision was taken to remove the Sultan and replace him with his more compliant son, Qaboos. The people of Oman, of course, had no say in any of this. It was all to do with the convenience of the British. The coup was staged in July 1970. There is no ambiguity about this whatsoever: the British chose the country’s ruler. Moreover what they proceeded to put in place was a modern absolutism.
Although Qaboos is generally presented as a moderniser, as the saviour of his country, at the time the British regarded him with a fair amount of contempt. One reason for this was his profligacy at a time of war: in 1971 some 20 per cent of the country’s oil revenues were spent on building new royal palaces, with even more going on other extravagances.
Nevertheless, the removal of Said bin Taimur did allow the British to successfully suborn and detach some elements within the rebel camp and incorporate them into the Sultan’s forces as an armed militia. By 1974 there were perhaps a thousand of these firqa fighters. At the same time, the SAF was expanded from just over 5,000 men in 1971 to over 10,000 by 1975. Its troops were fighting it out with a rebel force of about 800 fighters supported by a thousand-strong part-time militia. Increasingly, the British portrayed the war as one between the forces of Islam and godless Communism. As Takriti points out, one widely circulated pamphlet argued that the rebellion was all part of a Jewish conspiracy as outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!
The regime’s corruption and mismanagement forced it to turn for help to other dynastic rulers in the region. In 1975, the Saudis provided massive loans to keep the regime afloat and Jordan and Iran sent troops to reinforce the Sultan’s army. In the end, the PFLOAG was overwhelmed by the weight of forces arrayed against it.
One of the great strengths of Takriti’s account is the attention he pays to the rebel camp, in particular his chapter on ‘Revolutionary Culture’. As he insists, for eleven years, ‘a substantial percentage of the population lived independently of the Anglo-Sultanic authorities, controlled a large territory, created their own institutions, instituted social reforms and implemented radical change’. And as he points out, the rebels supported women’s equality, although as he observes while the PFLOAG’s commitment to this principle was absolute on a theoretical level, in the areas under its control, ‘its practical translation was gradual and partial’. There were women enrolled in the rebel army although the number is not known. He quotes estimates of between 5 and 30 per cent of the rebel fighters being women.
Altogether, this is an invaluable book that deserves a wide readership. Let us end though with one British dissident who Takriti identifies and who deserves remembering. In late 1970, one Sergeant Major Knibb arrived to conduct interrogations. The British commander, John Graham, complained that after a few days ‘he refused to conduct interrogations for us. He claimed that his experiences in Aden had led him to sympathise with the Arab “freedom fighters” to the extent that he no longer wished to be involved in any form of operation against them. He was of course sent back to the UK for medical or disciplinary treatment’.