Pro-soviet Take-over in South Yemen

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"A very bad business for the United States" was the reaction of a Republican congressman in Washington to last week's dramatic events in the Arab Republic of Yemen (North) and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South).

In these events the Presidents of both countries were killed.

On June 24 the North Yemeni head of state President Lt.-Colonel Ahmed ,. El Ghachemi died in an explosion which, according to the North Yemen authorities was caused by a booby-trapped brief-case carried to his office and opened by a personal erisary from the President of South Yemen, Salem Robaya.

But by the following Wednesday, the accused President was no longer alive to answer the charges.

He was '"executed" in an internal coup in South Yemen led by Ali Nasser, a rival member of the ruling trium. virate of the National Liberation Front.

Not known The fate of the third member of the triumvirate, Abdel Fattah Ismail, the Secretary General of the NLF, is not known.

At the end of last week Aden radio was continuing to broadcast communiques in his name.

But some press agency reports say he was killed in the fighting between sections of the army and the people's militia which followed the coup.

The death of Ghachemi in North Yemen does not seem to have affected the extremely reactionary nature of that regime.

It has continued to broadcast denunciations of South Yemen "which has espoused communist ideology which offends moral values and denies the existence of God"

But in South Yemen the coup seems as if it might resolve a real dispute within the National Liberation Front.

Ali Nasser, the new supreme leader, clearly represents the most pro-Soviet wing of the Naval Salem Robaya had made overtures to Saudi Arabia, probably to the imperialists and to China in order to undermine Yemen's close economic ties with the USSR, which uses Aden as a naval base.

Salem Robaya's "execution"' was necessary, according to the Ali Nasser regime, because he had tried to "monopolise power" and to "collaborate with imperialist and reactionary circles"

The South Yemen government has also implied that the North Yemeni accusation that Robaya had been responsible for Ghachemi's assassination was correct.

They have condemned him for wanting "to lead our people into a new fratricidal war with North Yemen"

In the years since 1968, when South Yemen won independence after a long and bitter armed struggle against British colonialism, virtually the whole of the economy has been and military protection of the enemies of socialism in the Kremlin.

If the coup has halted plans for new individual compromise with imperialism, it has probably brought South Yemen into closer involvement with the Soviet bureaucracy's world-wide counter-revolutionary strategy.

These contradictions can only be resolved through the struggle of the masses, under the leadership of Trotskyist parties, against both imperialism and the bureaucracies in the workers' states.

In Bucharest, Romania, at a meeting of the council of the economic body of Comecon-the body for economic cooperation between the East European countries, Cuba and Mongolia-Alexei Kosygin, Soviet Prime Minister, called for closer co-operation between the countries involved.

He recognised

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SOC. LIST PRESS, Wednesday 5 July, 1978