Middle East: Long Breath in Yemen

“There is an end to everyone’s patience, even ours,” steamed Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. “In the past few years, the Saudis have trained Yemenis to enter Yemen and ambush Egyptians. We left Saudi Arabia alone. But today our policy is different. If aggression is carried out in Yemen, or if there is infiltration into her territory from Saudi Arabia, then we shall strike at the bases of that aggression and occupy them.”

Tempting Target. Thus did Nasser, in a breast-beating May Day speech, serve notice last week that the 45-month-old battle for Yemen was entering a crucial new phase. The Egyptian-Saudi truce signed last August is clearly dead. Nasser refuses to pull out of Yemen, as promised. And the Saudis refuse to stop pouring in aid, as promised. Saudi arms and supplies are flowing back again to Imam el Badr’s Royalists through the southern Saudi towns of Najran and Qizan, and from the South Arabian town of Beihan al Qasab. Almost nightly, planes drop supplies over Royalist areas by parachute, while camel caravans, moving under the cover of darkness, plod silently across the Saudi border into Yemen. On top of a previous $400 million arms deal with Britain and the U.S., Saudi King Feisal announced fortnight ago that he is buying twelve British-built Hawker Siddeley jets, and plans a military airfield near Qizan, within ten miles of the Yemen border.

“We can destroy those twelve aircraft in five minutes,” Nasser scoffed in his speech last week. For his part, Nasser is launching what he calls his “long-breath strategy.” He is paring his army from 70,000 men to 40,000, withdrawing from exposed positions in eastern and northern Yemen, and tightening his hold on the parts of Yemen that really count: the Red Sea coastline; a northern boundary that takes in the well-fortified town of Hajja and the capital, Sana; and the border with the South Arabian Federation, which becomes independent in 1968 and offers a tempting target for further Nasser expansion toward Aden.

Force if Necessary. As for attacking Najran, Qizan and other “bases of aggression,” Nasser was acting as if he meant business. “After all,” he reasoned last week, “these were originally Yemeni towns, which the Saudis usurped in 1930.” Toward week’s end, some 5,000 Egyptian troops were massing along the border only a few miles south of Qizan. About the same time, Republican Yemen issued a formal statement, claiming Qizan and Najran as Yemen territory and pledging to “regain—by force if necessary—these usurped areas.”

As positions hardened on both sides, the U.S.’s Raymond A. Hare, Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia, flew in for talks with both Feisal and Nasser. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Hare urged Feisal to cut off Royalist aid and give Nasser a chance to pull back without losing face. Feisal seemed willing—if he could be sure of Nasser. In Alexandria, Nasser refused, even though by doing so his country risks losing part or all of a new $150 million U.S. food-distribution program, and another $100 million worth of industrial-development aid that Nasser badly needs.