Beyond the Arab Cold War by Asher Orkaby;

Author:Asher Orkaby;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

When the Norwegian mission to the UN approached UN diplomat Ralph Bunche for advice, he further dissuaded an Egyptian censure and expressed fear “that a resolution might only complicate the Middle East situation.”81 The Norwegian Foreign Minister John Lyng told George Brown that “the Scandinavians considered that their economic and political interests outweighed the moral issues.” Other NATO allies similarly shied away from taking an initiative. Delegates from Washington and London broached the subject with the Director-General of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Gunnar Seidenfaden, who explained that “the Danes would want to avoid any initiative directed against the UAR. Danish shipping and economic interests in the Middle East would in this instance be likely to outweigh any moral feeling about poison gas.”82 Dutch representatives at the NATO Disarmaments Experts meeting in September further justified these economic concerns to George Brown, recognizing that “in light of the passions aroused by the Arab-Israeli war it would be difficult to secure condemnation of a major participant for the use of gas in the Yemen.”83

MP Emanuel Shinwell then suggested finding a Latin American country to carry out a political censure against the UAR’s poison gas use, an idea that failed to take off, as the United States doubted that any of these countries would take the initiative.84 In what seems in retrospect an act of sheer desperation, Lee Dinsmore, the acting country director for Yemen in the US State Department, admitted that he was “approaching a number of ‘non Anglo-Saxon Nobel prize winners’ with a view to organizing a protest against the use of poison gas in Yemen.” He told his British counterparts that the approaches were being made indirectly and the State Department was very keen that their part in organizing the protest should if possible not be exposed.85

The State Department’s “Nobel scheme” was hardly unprecedented, as the British had attempted a similar tactic with South Arabian representatives appealing to the UN. The most willing collaborator to this scheme was Hussein Ali Bayoumi, the pro-British Adeni minister of defence and the secretary-general of the United National Party of Aden. When Bayoumi first learned of the Egyptian use of poison gas, he expressed concern for Egyptian colonialism and tactics following South Yemen’s independence from Britain, originally scheduled for 1968: “The people of South Arabia, who have struggled for so long to gain their freedom, are determined not to exchange the miseries of British colonialism for a life of slavery under the Egyptian imperialists.”86

Hillier-Fry suggested that the British use South Arabian petitioners, like Bayoumi, to publicize local concerns for Egyptian chemical weapons, as the imam’s royalist supporters did not have an official public voice. The token South Arabian could appeal to the UN for a mission to save them from the fate of their northern brethren at the hands of the Egyptian air force. Even in the worst possible scenario, if the UAR blocked Bayoumi’s petition, “we might be able to get a certain amount of publicity for the suppression of a legitimate petition merely because it criticized the UAR.

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