The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968
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The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Orkaby, Asher Aviad. 2014. The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12269828 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-1968 A dissertation presented by Asher Aviad Orkaby to The Committee on Middle Eastern Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History and Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2014 © 2014 Asher Aviad Orkaby All rights reserved. III Dissertation Advisor: Roger Owen Author: Asher Aviad Orkaby The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68 Abstract The deposition of Imam Muhammad al-Badr in September 1962 was the culmination of a Yemeni nationalist movement that began in the 1940s with numerous failed attempts to overthrow the traditional religious legal order. Prior to 1962, both the USSR and Egypt had been cultivating alliances with al-Badr in an effort to secure their strategic interests in South Arabia. In the days following the 1962 coup d'état, Abdullah Sallal and his cohort of Yemeni officers established a republic and concealed the fate of al- Badr who had survived an assault on his Sana’a palace and whose supporters had already begun organizing a tribal coalition against the republic. A desperate appeal by Yemeni republicans brought the first Egyptian troops to Yemen. Saudi Arabia, pressured by Egyptian troops, border tribal considerations and earlier treaties with the Yemeni Imamate, supported the Imam’s royalist opposition. The battleground between Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and al-Badr was transformed into an arena for international conflict and diplomacy. The UN mission to Yemen, while portrayed as a symbol of failed and underfunded global peacekeeping at the time, was in fact instrumental in establishing the basis for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Bruce Condé, an American philatelist, brought global attention to the royalist-republican struggle to control the Yemeni postal system. The last remnants of the British Middle East Empire fought with Nasser to maintain a mutually declining level of influence in the region. Israeli intelligence and air force aided royalist forces and served witness to the Egyptian use of chemical weapons, a factor that would impact decision-making prior to the 1967 War. Despite concurrent Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets IV appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history as it oversaw the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East. V Acknowledgements I consider myself fortunate to have received the wisdom and guidance from three pillars of the academic community throughout the course of preparing this dissertation. Professor Roger Owen instilled upon me the wisdom of decades of experience in the field of Middle East History. Professor Erez Manela meticulously and thoughtfully read through many drafts, helping me look beyond the empirical analysis to the much broader world of international history. Professor Steven Caton served as a constant reminder that as international as this story became, it was at its core about Yemen. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard and my mentor Susan Kahn helped me grease the wheels of university complexities, ensuring that I was always funded and on track to finishing my dissertation on time. Both Clive Jones and Jesse Ferris have worked on aspects of the Yemen civil war and offered invaluable help at each stage of international research and writing. My colleagues from the Government Department, over three years as a Weatherhead Center Fellow in the Program for Global Society and Security, helped me think about my topic from an international relations perspective. The number of archivists and academics who have helped me along the way in Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia, the US and Yemen are too numerous to list individually, hardly a justice for those who have given me a great deal of personal attention themselves. This globetrotting research could not have been accomplished without the generosity of the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Bradley Foundation, the Harvard Davis Center, the Institute of Historical Research, the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Canada Program, and the LBJ Presidential Library. VI All the research funds and advisers in the world would not have allowed me to finish this dissertation without my sons’, Binyamin, Eitan, and Naftali, nightly reminders that there are more important things to life than a dissertation. But mostly, without my loving wife Ariela, who probably knows more about the 1960s in Yemen by this point, I would have lost my sanity long ago in some dimly-lit archive halfway across the world. VII TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 THE ANGLO-EGYPTIAN RIVALRY ................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER 2 INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE AND THE ORIGINS OF SEPTEMBER 1962 ................... 43 CHAPTER 3 RECOGNIZING THE NEW REPUBLIC ............................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 4 LOCAL HOSTILITIES AND INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY ...................................... 125 CHAPTER 5 THE UN YEMEN OBSERVER MISSION (UNYOM) ........................................................ 170 CHAPTER 6 NASSER’S CAGE ................................................................................................................. 212 CHAPTER 7 THE BRITISH AND ISRAELI CLANDESTINE WAR AGAINST EGYPT ...................... 251 CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 291 1 Introduction “There were three different stages to the Yemeni Civil War. For the first few months, it was genuinely a war between Abdullah al-Sallal and his republican regime and Imam al-Badr and his royalist tribal supporters. Within half a year of Nasser’s arrival, the Yemeni republicans faded into the background and the Egyptians continued the war against the royalists. By 1965, however, the Egyptians were left with only themselves to fight.” - Recounted, while chewing a mouthful of qat, by General Abdullah Al Sana’ani, a former Yemeni General and current curator of the Yemen Military Museum in Sana’a, May 2013. General Abdullah al-Sana’ani’s observations reflect the dominant Yemeni opinion of a revolution that began on September 26, 1962. The 1962 revolution was the last in a series of attempts to overthrow the Yemeni Imamate, which had begun with the assassination of Muhammad al-Badr’s grandfather, Yahya in 1948. Historically, when a small military contingent or political rival overthrew the Imam, he would escape to the northern highlands of Yemen and gather tribal allies. The tribes were promised a free hand in plundering the capital city as payment for their military service in aiding the Imam’s return to power. This somewhat simplified scenario had held true for hundreds of years in Yemen and continued during the revolts in 1948 and 1955. Why, then, did the Imam’s counterrevolutionary historical scenario fail in 1962? How and why did this Yemeni revolution differ from prior episodes in Yemen’s history? What impact did this have on the future of the Yemeni state and the Middle East in general? In the days following the shelling of Imam al-Badr’s palace and the outbreak of hostilities, Abdullah Sallal and his republican followers managed to convince Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to support the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). At the same time, Yemeni Prince Hassan, al-Badr’s uncle, assumed the role of Imam in al- Badr’s absence and secured aid commitments to the royalist opposition from Saudi 2 Arabia. The involvement of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the Yemeni conflict was both a manifestation of earlier strategic agreements with Yemen and a consequence of political intrigue surrounding the falsely reported death of al-Badr. Over the course of the next six years, Britain, Canada, Israel, the UN, US, and USSR would join Egypt and Saudi Arabia to assume varying roles in fighting, mediating, and supplying the belligerent forces. The first few days of the conflict transformed a local regime change into a global struggle that would impact both the Yemen civil war and multiple international rivalries. The Global and Arab Cold Wars – New International History A collective analysis of the American, British, Egyptian, Israeli, Saudi, and Soviet