Yemen: Trouble for the Sons of Saud

Cairo newspapers derisively called him a ghost. But the ousted Imam of Yemen, Mohamed el Badr, seemed very real last week. Badr’s enemies had repeatedly reported him dead ever since September, when rebel tanks commanded by Strongman Abdullah Sallal ringed the palace in San’a and opened fire at point-blank range. But the royal troops held out until the next day, when the Imam darted through a breach in the wall. A woman in a nearby house helped him replace his fancy clothes with a common soldier’s khaki tunic, and Badr safely made his way to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Dressed in the same clothes, and wearing a bandolier of bullets across his chest, Badr told of his escape to a group of 16 newsmen who huddled on mats in a camel-skin tent at an encampment a few miles inside Yemen near the Saudi Arabian border. While dagger-wielding, shouting followers raised a din outside, Badr cheerfully predicted that he would be back on the throne in a few weeks. He claimed to command 20,000 tribesmen.

As for Sallal’s “republican” regime, Badr said scornfully: “It seems all you need to make a government these days is a broadcasting station and a declaration that you have formed a government.” Furthermore, said the Imam, who has never been much interested in women himself, the new regime has the wrong attitude toward sex: “It encourages the unveiling of women, adultery, alcoholism, and every other kind of sin.”

Foreign Threats. Tiny, primitive Yemen may not be much to fight over, but it has become a symbolic object of contention between the Middle East’s two most powerful Arab factions. On one side is Nasser’s Egypt, which supports the Sallal regime. On the other side is feudal Saudi Arabia, which backs Badr. Allied with Saudi Arabia’s King Saud is Jordan’s young King Hussein, 28, who believes that “if Saud goes, I go too.”

Egypt has poured 10,000 troops into Yemen since Sallal’s September revolt, and is reportedly spending $20 million a week to supply them with Soviet-built tanks, jets and other armaments. Nasser’s navy shelled Saudi Arabian towns along the Red Sea; his pilots attacked five villages across the border.

Yemen in turn is loudly threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. Although the little country has no qualified flyer (its one pilot survived three crash landings and has not yet received a license), the Sallal regime boasts that it will return enemy attacks “as far as Amman,” the Jordanian capital. With Nasser’s belligerent backing, Sallal proclaimed a new “Republic of the Arabian Peninsula,” laying claim to about three dozen kingdoms, sheikdoms and sultanates near Aden, most of which are under British protection.

Domestic Fears. The threat of a land grab, however, may be merely Sallal’s bargaining maneuver to win diplomatic recognition for his regime from Britain and the U.S.. which have withheld it out of deference to oil-rich Saudi Arabia. There have been signs that London and Washington may eventually reverse their stand, on the theory that if they do so, the Saudis could use the decision as a face-saving way to back down, end support for the Imam, and concentrate on their own serious internal problems. Last week the U.S. flew six F-100 jets over Saudi Arabia in a show of strength that seemed intended as a warning to Nasser not to get too rough with the Saudis.

Meanwhile, the Egyptians mercilessly attack Saudi Arabia’s rulers as corrupt and sybaritic. One member of the Saudi royal house hired a French movie crew to photograph his gambols with girl friends. Prince Mansour delights bartenders in

Beirut by paying $25 for a $1 shot of Scotch. Mansour’s father, King Saud, 60, communes with his concubines four times a day: before morning prayers, after lunch, before dinner, and at night. Saud, apparently frightened of a Yemen-style coup, has for weeks slept each night in a different bedroom of his palace. He has put top military men under house arrest, is surrounded by 200 of Hussein’s Jordanian guards, dressed in Saudi uniforms, because he considers them more reliable than his own Saudis. His air force has been grounded since September, when seven pilots defected to Egypt.

Saud’s long-term hopes for the survival of his monarchy depend on his brother, able, austere Crown Prince Feisal, whom Saud installed as his new, trouble-shooting Premier. Feisal set jp a new Cabinet, promised free medical care and education, abolished slavery. He also planned new public morality committees to back up the religious police run by Moslem mullahs. “It is high time.” he says, “to introduce some fundamental reforms. But who is more worthy than we, the sons of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, to handle the affairs of our country?”