journalist into the liberated areas of Arabia, to report on Britain's secret colonial war.
Atter years of armed swuggie, une conspiracy of silence has been broken.
To expose this war, we are printing a special analysis of imperialism and revolutionary movement in the Gulf. Britain claims to have been the first country in the world to abolish slavery; yet in Muscat and Oman she is fighting a criminal war to protect a slave-owning Sultan. Britain claims to have a socialist government; but in the oil fields of her Arabian protectorates she has killed and imprisoned hundreds of workers and denied the rights to workers' unions and to strike.
British Gulf policy rests on two pillars bloody military repression in the Gulf itself, and ideological repression back home. In Dhofar the RAF and British officers are DECLARATION TO THE BRITISH PEOPLE protect the approaches to India, then to guard its oil interests clients mened, armed pasted Bets po British presence country and the prisons units of the zone. In Oman plantations and staff his bodyguard. supporting.
Britain has sole aim of this army is political opposition. Britain aims to continue her rule by ready to suppress any opposition.
In addition reactionary monarchies backed by America, all of suppressing the peoples of the Gull.
Since June 9 1965. the Occupied Arab Gulf, have against British imperialism and her local clients, to liberate the whole of the Gulf from imperialism and oppression.
territory and driven the British into a defensive position. Using RAF British officers, attack on the economic life smash the liberated areas. In the rest of the Gulf Britain is attacking the workers and intellectuals who oppose and the rotten clique of Sheikhs and Emirs Britain is using. There has never been Guit single elecon in any of Britain's colonies. Yet she is now planning to hand over control to the so-called Union of Arab Emirates. a group of petty tyrants who would have disappeared long ago but for the support of British troops.
This military repression in the Gulf is backed by ideological repression at home A gigantic hushup has been carried out to stop news of the Dhofar war from getting out. No journalists are allowed into the Sultan's realm. There is some occasional publicity on the showpiece actions of the Gulf tyrants, but this is always shrouded in complacent imperialist myth. It was only the For over a century Britain has ruled the Arabian Gulf, first to he Gulf itself British rule has involved direct occupation of the area. In Muscat and Oman her rule has been indirect, through the The is formally independent but is in fact a British suppression of all movements that threaten Britain and her local servants, or that try to overcome the underdevelopment and misery of the people. The local people have been exeluded from the polities of their Gulf are full of democrats who oppose this system. Britain has artificially preserved the separate there are no schools or medical services and the Sultan has over 5,000 private slaves to work his This is the regime Britain is Britain claims she will leave the Gulf in 1971. This is a fraud.
grouped her client sheikhs into a Union of Arab Emirates which will pretend to be an independent state. Yet it will continue to protect British interests and and it will be preserved by a mercenary army commanded and supplied by Britain. The "internal security"—i.e. suppressing Moreover in Muscat and Oman Britain's position will not alex. all since she claims that the Sultan is afready independent. Her bases, planes and military personnel will remain there and will be American imperialism is expanding its influence in the area and hopes to replace Britain as the dominant power. The of Iran and Saudi Arabia are being them intent on controlling and we, the Popular Front for the Liberation of been fighting an armed struggle In the Dhofar province of Oman we have liberated over two-thirds of the planes and Pakistani mercenaries commanded by Britain has replied to military defeat by a brutal liberated area. They have by saying: "There is a British businessman in the Gulf who claims that the only difference after the British forces leave will be that you will not be able to get a good dance band any more" (March 3 1969).
Now, after decades of workers resistance and after five years of armed struggle, the defeat of has begun. liberated area now exists, and the Popular are waging only large-scale people's war in the world that is directly aimed at British imperialism. They must be given our fullest and most consistent solidarity.
This special section of The Black Dwarf aims to provide the basic facts required for such a solidarity. It is to be studied and kept. The silence of the past must be converted into a thunderous opposition to Wal criminals and social-imperialists bombed and shelled our herds and the villages, pastures and wells where our people work. British officers have tortured prisoners and innocent citizens, and have personally ordered many of our villages to be burnt or bombed.
We are fighting against both national and class against the oppression of our nation by against Saudi Arabia; reactionary despots of the Gulf. fronts: a military fight against British intervention, and a social fight against the backwardness that imperialism has preserved in this area; that is against illiteracy, tribal division and the subjection of women. The liberation of Dhofar is only the first step to the liberation of the whole Gulf We demand the complete and immediate withdrawal of Britain from all areas of the defense ties with the Sultans, propping up for so long. We denounce both the Tory and Labour Parties for Moreover complete ignorance of these facts by a tight censorship and in Dhofaular by the refusal to permit independent observers to visit Our struggle is part of a imperialism and against exploitation by capital. We are one with the heroic people of Vietnam and with the we stand with the peoples of Rhodesia and like us are fighting disguised forms of British colonial rule.
We appeal to all progressive forces in Britain to cause, and to oppose this savage and secret war being fought by Britain to protect her oil and her slave-owning Sultan. We shall continue our fight till the whole of the Gulf has been liberated and until British imperialism has been finally driven from the area. Long Live the Unity of the Anti-imperialist struggle in the World!
British and American Imperialism out of the Gulf! Long Live the 9 June!
The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf, Dhotar 12-2-70.
PFLOAG PO BOX 5037, Maala, Aden, South Yemen.
Tory collaborators, in these crimes. This is Labour's Vietnam.
The victory of the revolutionary struggle in Aden in 1967 swept British influence and Britain's stooges out of power. Now even more dangerous, in the oil-rich Gulf defeat is looming as Britain in lans to set ed her puppet "Union" in The armed of the revolutionary people of the Gulf will be the only way to defeat Britain ana ner local chents, le acmieve liberation, and the expulsion of the big oil monopolies.
The revolutionaries in the Gulf are fighting Britian's military repression. For us the task is to overcome the ideological repression, the silences and the myths. A united struggle against a common enemyBritish capital- -that must be our goal oppression; Britain and Iran, and and against the class oppression of the are also fighting on two Gulf, and the renunciation of all British sheikhs and emirs she has been their identical policies of oppression in the area. we know that the British people have been kept in world-wide movement against people of Palestine and Northern Ireland who support our
The Black Dwarf 23rd March 1970 Fred Halliday and Gulf IN THE LIBERATED AREAS Dhofar is the western-most province of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, and is separated from Oman proper by 500 miles of desert. It is a mountainous forrested and tropical area, with around 250,000 inhabitants, most of them shepherds or fishermen. Crops are so short that cattle are fed on dried sardines.
Dhofar's history and its present condition are astounding. In the 1820s it was ruled by a pirate called Sheikh Mohammad who once captured an American ship, the Essex, and butchered the whole crew but for the ten-year-old cabin boy This boy grew up to be a Muslim, Abdullah Lord, and himself grabbed the area when Mohammad was shot in 1829. Dhofar remained independent till the 1880s when Britain urged the Sultan of Muscat to seize it, and prevent Turkish influence from growing there.
Despite tribal risings, the Sultans held on. In the 1950s, when there was a rising in the mountains of Oman itself, the Sultan got on an oil tanker and sailed down the coast to set up house in Salala (pop. 15,000) the capital of Dhofar.
extort taxes, and hand over fertile land to his tavourites. One of these is a Persian quack called Ahmad Shofig who is the only 'doctor' in notar, and- -curiously-the only man allowed to ride a moped.
EXHAUSTION IS A PAPER TIGER I visited the liberated areas with three Arab comrades. We were accompained by an armed bodyguard. All travel is on foot and we lived in the caves and wattle huts of the peasants. We killed a few British officers, including a Colonel would rise at sunrise, about 5.30, and after a cup of tea would set off for a few-hours further Walk across the mountains. They would say to us 'Exhaustion is a paper tiger'. At lunchtime, as we were special, and rare guests, a goat or sheep would be slain and cooked on a charcoal fire. There would be camel, cow or goat milk to drink, and to my surprise, there was also popCOrI Although comrades there were very bitter about Britain, they always insisted on the need to build political ties with the British left. We met militants in the army training camp, several members of the 25-man High Command and many of the inhabitants of the area. All were consumed with a revolutionary enthusiasm to crush impertansn Since last August the western province, which I visited, has been totally controlled by the Popular Front, and they are now carrying out a comprehensive social programme. Land reform has been carried out. Literacy classes have been set up in all villages. As many of the mountain people speak a pre-Arabic language, Himyarite, inese classes also teach Arabic. i visited one attended by about thirty-five women, aged between eight and thirty. They were in the first half of the course, three months daily study for two hours, but would soon progress to the second half, when there would be classes twice a week. These literacy classes also serve as political education classes, and the basic reading text is the Little Red Book.
Dhofari women are less oppressed than other Muslim women-they are unveiled, can divorce, can inherit, smoke and carry arms—, but the inequality of women is a major problem. Traditional forms of oppression like female circumcision and marrying off young girls to old men are still found. The Front has set up a Women's Organisation to mobilise women and to carry out comrades special education courses for them Marriage without the consent of the girl is now banned, and Imet a platoon or girls in the military camp who were undergoing the full training course with the men, and would go on to join the People's Liberation Army.
THEIR QUESTIONS The political consciousness of the militants and peasants was the most exhiliariting experience of all. The very first question I was asked at the military training camp was what I thought of the bruso communist lary. i was ascea what i thought of Betrand Russell, why Wilson had gone to Washington, if I thought women were freer in England or in China, why the Labour Party was playing an imperialist role in the Gulf if it claimed to be socialist, and many other similar questions. The Dhofari comrades are very conscious of the way way the imperialist and Arab press has kept silent about their struggle; as one woman said to me: You come from the government that is oppressing us. Tell the British people what is happening here. Yet The Sultan did nothing for the country, except • one was urged again and again to tell the truth and not to exaggerate tne situation The British presence is clear. I visited a de•serted government camp at Madhoub which had been commanded by British officers; according to documents captured by the Front, one was a Capt. Carter. In the middle of the camp were a group of stone emplacements with neat little paths laid out between them. Inside were heaps. of beer tins, the charred remains of the radio code (in English), and an old Sunday colour supplement. This had been the British HQ in the western province. The Front say they have Carter, killed in the middle province while commanding troops at Wadi Nahiz in January 1966. They also claim to have shot down about seventeen British planes, and I have brought back a chunk of one of them.
Salala itself is surrounded with a barbed-wire fence, and the only escape is by sea. I met the former chief scribe in the intelligence service, an ex-slave called Amir Ali, who had been the assistant to the head of the intelligence service. an illiterate court favourite called Nazar. Amir and ar's son had escaped with six other friends on a tyre last year. He told me that the slaves in Salala were not allowed to go outside their houses, or marry or learn to read without permission; and his main job had been to check on the movements of other slaves. Though he had worked in the Sultan's palace for four years, and had been in a jeep behind the Sultan during in 1965 assassination attempt, he could not say if the Sultan was alive. He said that five chamberlains would come from a remote part of the palace each day claiming to have received orders from the Sultan. He also said that the Sultan,s palace was full of British officers, and a frequent visitor was the British Political Resident in Bahrein, Sir William Luce.
Government troops seize and torture people they suspect. The war hit the people very hard. I met a peasant, Said Kanail, who is now in the Liberation Army but had been arrested by patrol with British officers while he was in Salala and had been tortured under interrogation. The RAF and artillery have systematically tried to de stroy the economic life of the liberated areas. Herds, wells and pastures have been strafed and bombed. I met women and men whose villages and cattle had been burnt by government patrols. I myself visited a pasture, at Kheirfut. which still bore the marks of a RAF bombing raid. All buildings are attacked: when visiting Rakhyou I saw the houses of a peasant, Dawil Sad, and of his son, which the RAF had sinashed in a Januarv raid. Since the tall of Rakhyout in August, the air attacks on the libecated areas have been stepped up and include the use of incendiary bombs.
THE FRONT No-one really thought they were fighting the Sultan. The real enemy was British imperialism Originally the Front was called the Dhofar Liberation Front, and was a separist and pro-Egypt organisation. But at its Second Congress. September 1968, the Front changed its name and its aim: it became the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf. It is now politically Marxist-Leninist. All members of the Front get a solid political education, including a study of Marx and Lenin In the military training comp political education takes three hours every day and the People's Liberation Army is firmly under the control of the Party. The very key theoretice! influence is Mao. He is always referred to a "comrade Mao', and his Quotations can provide some living and relevant answers to the problems of combat and social progress faced by the Front. Many people wore his badge, and oneday as we were leaving a village British arms captured at Madhoub PLA garrison in mountain Peoples Liberatio the local party secretary came running after us shouting to us to stop: had forgotten my cop of the Little Red Book. On the other hand Nasser is abominated, and one of the Front's slogans is Down with the Petty lavourie Bourgeoisie'. Even kids of seven would chant it. Another favourite is down with Revisionism'. THE WAR RAF planes fly around on reconnaissonce and bombing missions, and I saw them bombing the town of Rakhyout, on February 6th. British boats patrol the sea, and the big bases in Salala have probably around two hundred British officers in them. The Sunday Times of February 15th 1970 confirmed that a British officers mess dinner had recently been broken up when the air base in which it was held was shelled by the People's Liberation Army. I met a forme cook from the British officers' mess at the infantry base of Umm al-Qawarif, and he told me there were around twenty officers in his camp, then for general commanding duties and ten to train the troops. But most he said, were in the separate RAF base The Sultan's army is commanded by British army officers, but its rank and file are either Omani tribesmen or Pakistan mercenaries. They have been badly defeated over the past five The Governor of Rakhyout under arrest village
Army The Black Dwarf 23rd March 1970 Page 9
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This special section on the Gulf was prepared by Fred Halliday the first British correspondent to visit the Liberated areas