When Friends Fall Out

On his way to Moscow for the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Abdullah Sallal, the President of Republican Yemen, stopped off in Cairo to see his erstwhile benefactor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He could hardly have expected a warm reunion. Nasser had grown tired of propping up the unpopular Sallal, whose refusal to make peace with the Yemeni Royalists had cost him the support of even his own followers. Even so, Sallal was unprepared for the reception he got. In a brief and chilly meeting, Nasser advised him to resign and go into exile.

Sallal refused to take Nasser's advice; moreover, he declined to heed the implicit warning. Instead of returning home to fight for his job, he flew off to Baghdad, hoping to round up support from other Arab Socialist friends. Hardly had his plane left the runway of Cairo Airport, when Nasser fired off a cable to the Yemeni capital at San'a. The cable did not actually tell the Republican army to overthrow Sallal, but it instructed Egyptian troops still in Yemen not to block a coup--just in case the army might be planning one.

Heroic Sniff. With such encouragement, the Yemeni dissidents lost no time. Supported by Republican tribesmen called down to San'a from the hills, they moved four tanks into the city's dusty squares, took over the Presidential Palace and, in a matter-of-fact broadcast over the government radio station, announced that Sallal had been removed "from all positions of authority." Not a shot was fired; not a single Yemeni stood up to defend Sallal. In Baghdad, Sallal asked for political asylum, sniffing heroically that "every revolutionary must anticipate obstacles and difficult situations."

The army immediately turned over power to a Republican Council of three civilians--ex-Premier Ahmed Mohammed Noman, 65, and former Acting Presidents Abdul Rahman Iryani, 67, and Mohammed Ali Othman, 65. All three had recently returned to Yemen after a year of political imprisonment in Cairo, where Nasser had held them at Sallal's behest for demanding peace talks with the Royalists. Speaking for the triumvirate, Iryani made it clear that the new regime intended to get together with the Royalists. He pardoned more than 3,000 political prisoners, called a conference of all major Republican tribes to discuss ending the five-year civil war, and promised that the conference would be followed by long-sought talks to which Royalist representatives would be invited.

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