Aden: Back to Colonialism

The thin red line of empire was still unraveling last week. This time the scene of the fray was Aden, at the southern tip of Arabia, a barren 75-sq.-mi. crown colony that owes the relative prosperity of its 250,000 citizens largely to the fact that it is the second largest of Britain’s dwindling overseas bases. That is at least one too many for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who for two years has backed a resistance movement to heave the British out.

Nasser’s efforts have been not without success. Last week, because of the “rapid deterioration of the security situation in Aden,” Whitehall suspended the colony’s two-year-old constitution, fired Chief Minister Abdul Qawee Mackawee, 46, and his 23-man Legislative Council, and turned control back to Her Majesty’s High Commissioner Sir Richard Turnbull.

Activity by the main rebel group, the National Liberation Front, which operates out of nearby Yemen, had been on the upswing ever since August. It was then that a London conference to prepare plans for a South Arabian federation, which is due to gain independence in 1968, broke down in disagreement.* On Aug. 29, a British police superintendent was assassinated, the eleventh Briton to die by rebel violence in the past 21 months. Two days later Sir Arthur Charles, the British Speaker of the Aden Legislative Council, was shot and killed as he was leaving his tennis club at sundown.

As the incidents increased, British security forces arrested 29 suspected terrorists and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Last week schools were shut down when students tried to demonstrate, and newspapers were forbidden to “carry news that might incite people.” British troops patrolled the streets, exchanging occasional fire with snipers on the rooftops. For good measure, the carrier Eagle and the frigate Lowestoft steamed meaningfully into the Gulf of Aden.

Ex-Chief Minister Mackawee, declaring that Britain “has gone mad and lost all her sense of proportion,” flew to Cairo for consultations with a certain party. This week he flies on to New York to plead his case for independence at the U.N. Back home, Aden’s powerful (22,000-member) Trades Union Congress, led by one of Nasser’s fondest admirers, called for a general strike “by every laborer, merchant, student and farmer—a day for remembering our martyrs and hailing the exiled”—and at week’s end police were forced to quell striking rioters with tear gas. In London the idea of restoring colonial control was repugnant to a Labor government. But back to colonialism went Prime Minister Harold Wilson. As one official put it: “Damned to Nasser. Our aim is independence for South Arabia in 1968, Nasser or no.”

* Britain wants to link Aden itself with 16 semifeudal and poverty-stricken sheikdoms, sultanates and emirates that form the Aden Protectorate along the South Arabian coast. Mackawee will have none of the proposed federation, possibly because (as the British explain) he is afraid of the terrorists—or possibly because he doesn’t fancy being outvoted by 16 sheiks.