Yemen: Arabia Felix

In San’a, Yemen’s mud brick capital, the forces of the revolution last week passed in review. Tribesmen galloped through the streets, wearing brass-trimmed bandoleers, with curved, wide-bladed djambias thrust into their brocaded belts. They were followed by camel troops, native levies in skirts and armed with muskets dating back to Napoleon, and new army recruits in crumpled khaki uniforms. From the second-floor window of his headquarters, the architect of the revolution, Brigadier General Abdullah Sallal, cried: “The corrupt monarchy which ruled for a thousand years was a disgrace to the Arab nation and to all humanity. Anyone who tries to restore it is an enemy of God and man!”

The turbaned, gun-toting crowd shouted: ”We are with you, Sallal!”

Silent Refuge. General Sallal last week seemed firmly in control of Yemen. His coup had originally been aimed at the feudalistic regime of the Imam known as Ahmad the Devil, who, aged 71, died of natural causes in mid-September before the conspirators could kill him. Ten days after Ahmad’s son, Seif el Badr, ascended the throne, General Sallal surrounded the royal palace in San’a with 4,000 troops and began blasting away with tank guns. At first, the rebels believed that the new Imam had died in the ruins, but belatedly they learned that Badr had escaped, reportedly disguised as a Bedouin woman, and made his way to the safety of Saudi Arabia, whose King Saud, together with Jordan’s King Hussein, pledged men, money and munitions to the overthrow of Sallal.

As ruling monarchs, Saud and Hussein were worried that revolution in Yemen might easily spread to their own lands.* Two armies of about 1,000 men each, most raised from Yemenite tribesmen in Saudi territory, invaded Yemen, but Sallal swiftly assembled his ragtag Yemenite army and, with the help of Soviet arms and Egyptian planes, drove the royalists back across the border into Saudi Arabia and Britain’s Aden Protectorate. Twenty-five nations, from Russia to Indonesia, promptly recognized Sallal’s regime. The U.S. and Britain, trapped between their alliances with the remaining Arab monarchies and their concern for the oil-rich regions of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, took refuge in silence on the question of recognition, and appealed for “nonintervention” by everyone.

Meanwhile. Yemen is opening up to the outside world. TIME Correspondent George de Carvalho last week found Strongman Sallal in his San’a home, sitting shoeless on a mattress, surrounded by fellow officers, adding an occasional cigarette butt to the litter of orange peels on the mosaic floor. Sallal offered a justification of his coup, which turned mostly on reminiscences of the incredibly corrupt and backward rule imposed on Yemen by the gross, 300-lb. Ahmad the Devil.

Erotic Gadgets. Ahmad governed by means of spies, subsidies and the executioner’s ax, decapitating more than a thousand enemies. He was a man of enormous appetite: he would do away with an entire roast lamb at a single sitting and then gulp down a pound of honey as a between-meals snack. He had three wives and 40 concubines, but in the last years of his life his potency declined, and he had unsuccessful recourse to rejuvenation treatments by a Swiss doctor. His luckless harem consoled itself with sorties into lesbianism and erotic gadgets sent from Japan. Like many Yemenites, Ahmad chewed qat, a narcotic shrub similar to marijuana, and switched to morphine in 1953—heroically breaking the habit six years later.

Ahmad did his best to carry Yemen back to the 10th century instead of forward to the 20th. He grabbed choice lands and houses that struck his fancy, and jailed those owners who complained. He handled all the state funds, but never kept accounts or made a budget. The country had no daily newspaper, no long-distance phone, no credit system—not even a Coca-Cola plant. As nearly as anyone can estimate, Ahmad’s annual income was about $16 million, his expenditures about $21 million. He raised money by adding charges to customs duties and levying internal tariffs on trucks and caravans. In times past, fertile Yemen, known as Arabia Felix, was the granary of Arabia, but it now must buy wheat and butter abroad. Exports of Yemen’s top-grade Mocha coffee dropped from 25,000 tons to 12,000, and last year to 5,000 tons. Starved and graft-ridden, Yemen’s 4,500,000 people began exporting themselves; some 500,000 emigrated. The religious as well as temporal leader, Imam Ahmad sternly forbade movies, stringed instruments and alcohol—anyone caught with liquor was publicly flogged.

Unpaid Hardware. But Ahmad could be generous. Following the Koran’s injunction on charity, he would spend hours daily under a tree in his palace courtyard receiving all comers, handing out money to widows, orphans, old soldiers, the halt and the blind. His several ramshackle palaces were filled with unworkable plumbing, gilt furniture, fading carpets and hundreds of clocks, all stopped.

In his own way, Crown Prince Badr tried to get the clocks moving again. An arms deal with Russia engineered by him brought T-34 tanks, Yak fighter planes and an arsenal of small arms to Yemen, although Ahmad cried: “I don’t need them—I have my sword!” He never paid for the Red hardware and was content to let it rust into uselessness. As fast as Badr brought in Egyptian teachers, Czech technicians and Yugoslav pilots and maintenance crews, Ahmad deported them. The Red Chinese built a showcase highway from the port of Hodeida to the capital, but after nine months of use, it is pot-holed and partially blocked by landslides.

Only 1% of Yemen’s population attended primary school—and 30% of this elite suffer from pellagra. Infant mortality up to two years of age runs 58%, one of the world’s worst. In all Yemen there are only three hospitals, two high schools and a primitive military academy, but the six-man Yemenite Foreign Office used to concoct reports to the U.N. of totally imaginary hospitals and schools, including a College of Aviation.

Outdated Qat. Against this regime, Sallal and his friends were plotting for 20 years, ever since he qualified for training at a military academy in Iraq. “In Baghdad,” he says, “I was dazzled by all the wonderful things that did not exist in Yemen. If I viewed Baghdad as progress, you can understand what Yemen is like.” Involvement in plots often landed Sallal in jail. He spent ten years as a prisoner, seven of them in solitary confinement in a dungeon at Hajjah, where he was chained to an iron ball. His stomach still suffers from the diet, and Sallal always keeps a bottle of BiSoDol near by. One of his first acts on getting power was to execute the Imam’s director of prisons.

Still unanswered is what kind of government Sallal will give Yemen. San’a was thronged last week with hopeful advisers—sleek Egyptians, close-mouthed Russians, eager Yemenite exiles home for a new start. Electric light and water went on and off irregularly, and the royal palaces and guesthouses were jammed with sheiks squatting on the floor smoking water pipes, barefoot soldiers with tommy guns and kohl-eyed women who had daringly torn off their veils. Sheiks who spat qat on the carpets were reproved: ”Yemen is now a modern republic!.”

Says Sallal: “I’m fighting against hunger, sickness and ignorance in Yemen. That is my goal, and you can label it anything you want to. I want a constitution within a year or two, and elections within five years. By then we should have done something worthwhile.” He adds with humor: “Western diplomats should help us—for them, Yemen must be the worst post in the world.”

* In Saudi Arabia, King Saud was so alarmed by the defection of four of his air force planes and their crews to Egypt that he resigned the office of Premier, turned it over to his brother, Crown Prince Feisal, a popular, able and tough-minded nationalist who believes in austerity and reform.