1.
SOUTH ARABIA
SECRET
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The Committee considered a memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (OPD(67) 66) on the situation in South Arabia, to
which was attached the draft of the statement which it was proposed
should be issued that day by the High Commissioner for South Arabia.
The
THE FOREIGN SECRETARY said that the policy of the present
Administration in respect of South Arabia had been gravely complicated
by the situation which they had inherited from their predecessors.
nature and composition of the Federal Supreme Council had not been in
accord with the policy which the present Administration wished to follow
in the Middle East, but it had not been practicable to take the
initiative in changing the Government of South Arabia. Now, however,
events had led to its disintegration and our hands were no longer tied
by our earlier commitments. The National Liberation Front (NLF) had
effectively taken over power in all except one or two of the states of
the Federation outside Aden, while the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) only had pretensions to political influence
in a few districts, in part of Aden itself and in a section of the South Arabian Army, which otherwise appeared to be overwhelmingly sympathetic
to the NLF. The political realities of the situation required us to
accept that the NLF was the strongest group in the country and the only
one able to form an effective government. This change in the relative
influence in the NLF and of FLOSY over the course of the last year no
doubt arose in considerable degree from the decline in the influence of
President Nasser of the United Arab Republic, with whom FLOSY had throughout been associated.
In the course of his own discussions during the previous weekend with the High Commissioner, the Minister without Portfolio (Lord Shackleton) and the Minister of Defence (Administration) it had been agreed that the
Government should take a clear initiative to seize the opportunity now
presented, which was unlikely to recur, to bring into power in South
Arabia a government representative of the real pattern of power and almost
certainly of the wishes of the majority of the people. That initiative
must be unqualified and show that the Government was prepared to
negotiate with the nationalist forces; in practice this would mean dealing with the NLF and disregarding FLOSY and the South Arabian League (SAL)
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