Word: tribesmen
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...days when might was still right in the Middle East the British invented a technique for dealing with recalcitrant Arab tribesmen. The R.A.F. would drop leaflets on Arab villages demanding that they give up fugitive criminals or be bombed. Usually the trick worked, and the wanted man would be expelled from the threatened village, pursued through the desert, shot down or captured. On other occasions the population would flee the village, which the R.A.F. would then destroy. A fortnight ago in Britain's Aden Protectorate, which has been under desultory attack by the Imam of Yemen, the old technique...
...village of Danaba (pop. 120), a border hamlet of mud and stone huts. Danaba was warned by leaflet that it would be bombed. Promised the R.A.F. officer commanding the operation: "The fearsome sight will frighten the Arabs . . . a terrific explosion will echo up the hills. The tribesmen will be somewhere watching the show...
...fighter pilots followed up, pouring 72 rockets into the village; for best effect the operation was spaced over six hours. The demonstration left British observers cold. Said the London Times correspondent: "Curiously obsolete . . . and bound to provide the Yemen with handsome propaganda." But somewhere up in their hills the tribesmen had seen an air show unique in its time: a performance which cost the R.A.F. $85,000, but demolished only ten of Danaba's 15 houses...
...Russian technicians (trickling into Yemen in twos and threes, ostensibly to service arms received under the 1956 Yemen-Soviet pact) have told the Imam how oil enriches Saudi Arabia. Claiming sovereignty over the neighboring protectorate, whose borders he has never formally recognized, the Imam has collected several thousand tribesmen, a dozen or more disaffected sheiks and sultans, a few embittered pretenders to the various petty thrones, and is waging a fugitive war on the British. The turbaned Yemeni guerrillas are a barefoot rabble carrying unoiled Mausers, curved knives, and wearing knee-length skirts of plaid material like kilts. The headquarters...
...audience after audience of backwoods illiterates. "Long live Nehru," shouted the crowds, pleased and happy to have had a glimpse of the great man. To many of them, India, the Congress Party and Nehru were one and the same thing; in tiger-plagued Orissa an election crowd of loinclothed tribesmen and their nose-ringed women startled political reporters by referring to Nehru as the King...