“Keep the dogs hungry, they will follow you”. The rule of Sultan was so strict that all the people were treated as slaves in his period. He was always surrounded by the slaves to do help to the Sultan. Many cruel conditions were put forth by the Sultan on the people. The blog about Sultan details the rules being pushed into the people. Such was in essence, the ruling theory of Said bin Taimur, sultan of Oman and Muscat, the last feudal monarch of Arabia. And during the long reign of the seventh sultan of the Al Bu Said dynasty, the so called dogs, his subjects, were hungry indeed, and obediently followed their master.

In this country of more than 80.000 square miles — the second largest Arab country east of Suez after Saudi Arabia — with 750.000 inhabitants, the clock of history was stopped somewhere in the Middle Ages. Everything, it seemed was forbidden. The inhabitants of the coast were forbideen to travel inland, and those of the inland valleys could not go to the coast, or even from one valley to another. No one was allowed to go to Dhofar, in the extreme southwest.

There were, in all Oman and Dhofar, three primary schools and not a single secondary school. Students who wanted to pursue their studies had to leave their country illegally and start a long life of exile in the Persian Gulf or Kuwait. It was forbidden to build new houses, or to repair the old ones; forbidden to install a lavatory or a gas stove; forbidden to cultivate new land, or to buy a car without the Sultan’s permission.

No one could smoke in the streets, go to movies or beat drums; the army used to have a band, but one day the Sultan had the instruments thrown into the sea. A few foreigners opened a club: he had it shut, “probably because it was a place where one could have fun”, says one of his former victims. Three hours after sunset, the city gates were closed.

No foreigner was allowed to visit Muscat without the Sultan’s personal permission, and sailors on ships anchored at Muscat could not land. Not a single paper was printed in the country. All political life was prohibited and the prisons were full. Sultan Said was surrounded by official slaves in his palace at Salalah, where time was marked in Pavlovian fashion by a bell which rang every four hours. Everything in this world has limits. That too in the case of people who are soft will become more than what they think if their level of elasticity is disturbed to a greater extent. The cruel things done by the Sultan are many and one can check here for more information. Many attempts were taken to assassin the Sultan. But one day the dogs got too hungry, and they tore the Sultan almost to death.

A fragile rule

The first assassination attempt took place in April 1966, during a parade. Some Dhofaris, who along with his slaves made up the Sultan’s private army, suddenly started shooting at their master. They failed to hit him, and when the ringleader jumped on him, one of the Sultan’s slaves cut the throat of the would-be killer. The Sultan was splattered with blood, but was unharmed. Six people were dead.

After this attempt, the Sultan no longer left his palace except for rare trips to London; he governed from Salalah and through three advisers.

But a triple menace threatened the Sultan:

– In Dhofar, the Marxist rebels of the Liberation Front of Dhofar vicrtually controlled the hills, mountains and even the small coastal villages. The Sultan controlled nothing but Salalah, which had become an entrenched camp.

– At home, where the population had already revolted against the Sultan with the help of the Saudis during the mid-1950s, insecurity was greater than ever.

– Abroad, in 1966, one of the Sultan’s own brothers, Tariq bin Taimur, self-exiled for several years, launched a movement aimed at overthrowing Sultan Said and restoring democracy,.

Born of a Turkish mother, married to a German, speaking five languages fluently, Tariq had friends in the Western embassies in Kuwait and Beirut, and was thinking of raising a mercenary force to remove Said from power. So trouble was brewing. But quite surprissingly, the coup which brought the 36-year reign of Said bin Taimur to an end and opened the last medieval country of Arabia to the outside world came from the most unexpected source: Salalah itself, where the Sultan’s son, Qabus bin Said, had been living virtually under house arrest since 1964.

According to the official version of the coup, soldiers won to Qabus’ side surrounded the old palace one early morning last July and, after a brief clash with the Sultan’s forces, took charge. The old Sultan himself suffered five wounds but survived to be deposed.

A few weeks earlier, most observers in the Persian Gulf and Beirut thought the fall of Sultan Said was only a matter of time: “When the oil revenues reach £50 million ($120 million) the British will remove him and put a Tariq in power”, said one well-placed source in Abu Dhabi last June. Said bin Taimur was the sick man of Arabia; intervention was imminent, and Tariq was thought of as the surgeon.

Why did the British choose to let Qabus’ coup succeed? Was it, as a British diplomat in Muscat had the audacity to say, because “it (British policy) is not to interfere with the local affairs of the natives”? Or, as other say, was it because Tariq was too involved abroad or because of his idea of democracy, which would give the Sultan a largely honorary role? Or did the new Sultan really impose himself?

In any case, four days after the coup of Salalah, the outside world learned that Tariq was only to be prime minister and that Qabus would succeed his father to become the eighth sultan of a dynasty which has been in power since 1749. His first decision was to call himself Sultan of Oman — and not of Oman and Muscat, phraseology which summons up the country’s everlasting division. His second decision was to visit Muscat, where his father had not been seen since 1958.

Born in 1940, the new Sultan lived all his childhood in virtual seclusion at his father’s palace, in Salalah. He was not allowed to talk with his teachers about anything but his lessons, and although he spent many years literally yards from the sea, he never played in it or learned to swim.

At 16, Qabus was sent to England, where he studied with a private tutor, then went to Sandhurst. He was stationed for a time in Germany after becoming an officer. The only other major event in his life was a round-the-world trip on which he was chaperoned by a British major.

For six years, Qabus lived the life of a prisoner, except that he could have all the books and records he wanted, but he was desperately lonely. His father ignored him. At the time of the coup, Qabus had not seen his father for 14 or 16 months, though they lived next door to each other.

Despite this bizarre upbringing, Qabus gives every appearance of being very much in control of the situation. He is a man who studied in the Western world but never forgets that he reigns, in the full meaning of the word, over the last feudal country on the Arabian peninsula.

“I am a man with one foot in my country — backwards as it is, with its tribal customs, its life dominated by Islam — and the other in the 20th century. I must be vert careful to keep my balance”, Qabus said recently in a two-an- a-half-hour interview.

No Instant Democracy

And as far as the political organisation of his country is concerned, Qabus will not upset the tribes. “You cannot run before you walk”, he said. “Most of the population that lives in the interior of the country still does not live with its time. What these people want before anything else is education and health. As long as we provide them with these fast enough, there will not be any problem”.

Qabus first task since the take-over has been to lift all the feudal personal restrictions and to set up the beginning of a government. As of now, there is a prime minister — Tariq — and five ministers: education, health, interior, justice and information. But as far as the writing of a constitution or the formation of a parliament is concerned, Qabus is blunt.

“”It would be a mistake, a big mistake. Most of the people do not even know what a vote is… In these conditions to draft a constitution, to set up a parliament would be like building a huge dome without either walls or foundations. It might perhaps give a nice impression to the outside world, but it would be nothing but a big show. Look how people vote in Egypt. They are driven to the polls in army trucks. If there were a parliament now, I would have to choose its members among the sheikhs and a few others. What would be the significance of such a body”?

“My mission is not to interfere with daily government but to give a direction, an orientation, and also to keep an eye on the ministers to see that they do not usurp too much authority and to prevent corruption.”

This constant attention to corruption comes out even in Qabus’ ideas about the press, which are perhaps not too liberal by Western standards. “There will be,” says Qabus, “An official gazette anda weekly, maybe a monthly with local news and columns. I am not against newspapers; I have nothing to hide, but I do not want any of these newspapers which only want to make money and are not good for the people. I do not mean politically, but morally.”

Theoretically, the Sultan’s mission and the prime minister’s job are well defined. Qabus has every intention of governing his country effectively, with his prime minister there only to execute the details of a policy initiated by the Sultan. But things are not as simple as they look, first because the prime minister’s personality is at least as strong as Qabus’ and also because the prime minister has been playing his own political game for a long time.

Born in July, 1921, in Bombay Tariq lived from the time he was 2 with his Turkish mother in Istanbul, where he went to the American school. Later, he left for Germany where his uncle, a surgeon in the Turkish army, had retired. Tariq was 16 when he came to Muscat for the first time. Later he served in the Muscat infantry regiment, at home and in India.

In 1945, Tariq came back home and was a popular figure, but relations with his brother, the Sultan Said, deteriorated quickly and he was virtually under house arrest in1962 when he decided to go into exile. From then on, Tariq, dividing his time between Beirut, Kuwait and Istanbul, tried to set up an organization of Omanis to overthrow his brother and in 1966 published his manifesto against Said.

Everything in his background has led Tariq to become an advocate of the Western concept of democracy – and in this matter, his ideas do not alway suit Qabus’. For example, when speaking of a parliament, Tariq says, “As I see it, it’s a matter of months.” There is quite a gap between this declration and Qabus’ statement.

Tariq also wants to convene soon a “committee of Omanis who, with the help of two foreign experts, will draft a constitution. The experts will not write the constitution – they will listen to what the Omanis want – and draft it in legal constitutional words.”

“In this constitution,” says Tariq, “the Sultan will not be only a figurehead – he will also hold some executive power”. This “some power”could quickly give rise to a conflict of authority beween the prime minister and a sultan who intends to rule and not to be dismissed as a merely honorary head of state, even if, as Tariq says, “he is new – he has not had much opportunity to learn his job – for him also this is an experiment period.”

Starting from Scratch

The outcome of such a conflict ppears evident. The population is fully behind the Sultan, and the army, still controlled by the British, would not unmake a sultan it has just made. In any case, such an extreme conflict is not foreseen.

Otherwise Tariq and Qabus are in broad agreement on matters domestic and foreign. At home, this means concentration on economic development and expanded education, adherence to Islamic laws, “and in no case will a Communist Party be allowed,” according to Tariq.

Oman will send diplomatic envoys to Britain (one of Tariq’s brothers), other Arab and Moslem states and the United Nations. The U.N delegate, Tariq says, will handle relations with the United States. Both leaders hope Oman will be admitted to the U.N., largely to benefit from development loans and the assistance of technical experts from such specialized agencies as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We will always maintain our neutrality” in foreign policy, Tariq says. And despite the presence of a British base on the offshore island of Masirah, and the fact that the army is almost totally run by detached British officers, Tariq says: “We do not want any British forces in the area, not even in the neighboring sheikdoms” after 1971, when Britain is scheduled to pull all its regular forces out of the Persian Gulf region.

Although Masirah is officially described as a “staging point” for the Royal Air Force, it also includes a training range, and a squadron is more or less permanently based there. Tariq does not know when the lease of Masirah expires. “The Sultan has the document,” he says.

Surrounded by an old wall, the city of Muscat, which looks more Indian than Arab, has no more than 3.000 residents, of which about two-thirds live outside the old city walls. A few miles away stretches Matrah, the commercial city with a market surrounded by a large slum,with about 15.000 inhabitants.

The housing crisis in the towns is so acute that Qabus himself must live temporarily in the house of his father’s former adviser, Maj. Chauncey, while Premier Tariq “camps” – that is the only appropriate word – in the house of another ex-adviser to the deposed sultan. In his own words, Tariq is a prime minister “without baggage” and practically without a personal staff. And his five-man cabinet is hardly functional, lacking premises for its own staffs.

But in his efforts to modernise Oman, Tariq has one trump card: a fairly large pool of educated Omanis who were forced to live in exile during the reign of Said. There were at least 3.000 of them with university degrees scattered from Persian Gulf countries to Cairo to Europe, and many are ready to come home and form the backbone of a modern native administration.

The government has decided to act immediately i n two fields – education and health – and has started the study of a new town for 20.000 people. In the eight main cities of Oman, the government will build soon – probably before 1972 – complexes of 40- to 50-bed hospitals (20 dispensaries will be built within six months), a power plant, a school and a water upply center. A 500-bed general hospital and 500-bed maternity hospital will be built within three years near Nizwa, in the interior, which is expected to become the capital.

The health situation is nearly catastrophic. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world. An estimated 90 per cent of the population is stricken with malaria; tuberculosis, trachoma and malnutrition are also very severe.

In education, too, the government starts from almost nothing. About 20 new schools have been opened since last August – the first school for girls was inaugurated Sept. 1 at Muscat – and about 7.000 children now go to school in all of Oman, a minuscule number in a total population of 750.000 Omanis.

Still, the minister of education, Sheik Ali al Khalili, is the most popular minister in the government, perhaps maybe because his budget is “open,” as he says, but more likely because the people have appreciated that he lent his own house in his native village of Sumail as a school, ordered the teachers to start instruction right away in the mosque and requisitioned other private and/or buildings.

Short of Money

The government is thinking of returning the capital to Nizwa, in the interior, to balance the projected development of a new town near Matrah, on the coast not far from Muscat. But the official in charge admits that, so far, it is hardly a new town even on the paper. He has no preliminary studies of the estimated cost, or the method of financing.

The government’s caution is understandable. With so much to be done, the country’s total income is just over $100 million, nearly all of it from oil revenue. And on the surface at least, there is no prospect for an early increase. The petroleum reserves of the country’s three oil fields are limited, and the Oman Petroleum Development Co. has not yielded to pressures to increase its output of 320.000 barrels per day.

The oil firm, owned mostly by Shell, is continuing to explore several areas, but a German consortium has suspended operations at least temporarily.

But these economic facts of life are not readily accepted by many of the young returned exiles, especially those who have studies in Cairo or in Eastern Europe. Typical of this group is ‘Ali’. Now 30, he became an exile at 15 when he stowed away on a ship that landed him in Kuwait. Ali, and many like him, found the only places where he could get a subsidized education were cities like Prague, Moscow or Dresden. There, they became doctors, engineers, chemists, without paying fees.

These young men became “Europeanized,” and in many cases have European wives. Some of them have come back to Oman, often at the invitation of the new sultan. Back home, they form an “expatriate elite.” They met in the evenings along the harbor, chatter away in German or Russian and ponder the implications of suddenly coming back to amedieval country with an absolute monarch after being educated in socialist universities.

“There are still many of us working abroad who are ready to come back if given a job,” says Ali. “We went to some socialist countries because we were obliged to, to study, but we are not communists. Those ho have particular political opinions forget them for the time being, because the country is too much in need of brain power for its development.”

Sultan Qabus is fully aware of these “particular opinions” when he says that “we will have to keep an eye on them, to see if their minds are not twisted.” But for the time being, as Ali said, the young men are just watching. “The Sultan was put in power by the British. We, the young people, would like to have a republic. But we are ready to give him some time, to see how he will act. After a while, if he does not do anything, we will shout very loud”.

But Qabus fears this shouting much less than another threat to his throne: the war in Dhofar.

A secret war

A dirty war, the war in Dhofar has also been a secret war. Even the inhabitants of Muscat were not allowed to go to Dhofar, and journalists were not allowed in Oman, still less in Dhofar, until recently. It is now possible to tell the story of the war in Dhofar — or at least part of it — since it has become possible for journalists to rove freely all over Oman and to go to Salalah.

It began in 1962 — the year of the revolution in Yemen — when a so-called Musallim bin Nufl, the historical leader of the rebellion, was sentenced to jail for some pecadillo. Bin Nufl fled to Damman in Saudi Arabia, where he met two of the leaders of the earlier revolt in 1955-58 — the former Imam Ghalib and his brother Talib. Bin Nufl said he was ready to start a movement in Dhofar, and Ghalib promised him support — and gave him money and arms, supplied by the Saudi officials as in 1955.

During its first few years, the war was sustained by Saudi Arabia alone, Bin Nufl shuttled back and forth across a thousand miles of desert to bring back small groups of Bedouin tribesmen trained in Saudi Arabia. The attacks against the main road and oil company camps did no serious damage, but sufficiently worried the old Sultan that he allowed his regular army into Dhofar in late 1964.

It was about this time that Iraq began to train recruits for Bin Nufl’s guerrilla army, and by mid-1965, British intelligence officers discovered that the rebels were operating on two fronts. Documents captured from suspect coastal smugglers led them to arrest 33 members of the “Salalah Front”, including three members of its “central committee”. The Salalah Front, they also discovered, was getting support from Egypt’s President Nasser.

Bin Nufl’s movement was still tiny when the British pulled out of Aden at the end of 1967. The new People’s Republic of South Yemen immediately gave active support to a militant off-shoot of Bin Nufl’s group, and in September, 1968, the movement became the “People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf”.

The supply route from Aden is a much shorter one, and from that point, the rebels became a real threat to Sultan Said. The rebels’ numbers had grown to more than 1.000, and the Sultan’s authority virtually ceased to exist in Dhofar outside the town of Salalah.

The rebels’ training and equipment improved. Armed with Soviet submachine guns, and with mortars and rockets, their units — called “Che Guevara and “Ho Chi Minh” — were solidly based in the hills overlooking Salalah.

A well-timed coup

In this setting, the palace coup of July 1970, was a masterpiece of timing. Qabus, who within a few weeks after taking over visited the entire country, thus showed himself to a population that had not seen its sultan for decades. He suppressed all the restrictions which had led many Dhofaris to join or help the rebellion, and proclaimed a nearly general amnesty. For all but the totally committed revolutionaries, the struggle had lost its meaning, and they rallied to the government. Now the Sultan’s army is bulding up its strength, increasing in numbers from 2.500 men earlier this year to 3.500 in September, with a goal of 4.600 by early 1971. The air force now has a fleet of Caribous and Sky Vans, and a strike squadron of Strike Masters equipped with rockets, plus a few helicopters and scores of new trucks.

But British intelligence officers are not relaxing. They have learned recently from interrogation of captured rebels that the National Democratic Front, a separate clandestine group, is linked with Palestinian guerrilla leader George Habache and the Baathist rulers in Bagdad, and is influenced by Moscow.

The former commander of Sultan Said’s forces likes to tell his visitors that Said once asked him to buy a book on how to defeat communism. “He was used to tribal wars, to attacks by Djebalis, not an ennemy which attacks the mind”, he said.

Yet even the new updated sultan with his well-trained British advisers and his small army of returning Omani intellectuals must still face a dilemma: how to continue buying planes and soldiers while trying to bring his country out of the Middle Ages. (Washington Post, December 27,1970; The Daily Star, Beirut, April 2, 1971; Jeune Afrique, 23 février 1971)