British, Soviets Resume South Yemen Evacuation

DJIBOUTI —  British and Soviet ships began evacuating most of the estimated 1,200 foreigners still trapped in South Yemen on Wednesday as Marxist rebels appeared to be on the verge of routing forces loyal to President Ali Nasser Hasani from Aden, the capital.

Reports trickling out of Aden from refugees and other sources indicated that fierce fighting is continuing in the southern and northeastern sectors of the city. While these reports were sketchy and often contradictory, they appeared to support earlier information that the rebels are in control of most of the country.

Diplomatic sources cautioned, however, that a rebel victory in the capital, which has reportedly been devastated by extremely heavy fighting, would not necessarily mean an end to the civil war.

“The fighting is degenerating from an ideological conflict and a power struggle between rival Marxist factions into a tribal war that could unravel the whole country,” one diplomat monitoring developments from Djibouti said.

As the fighting appeared to be reaching a peak, an all-out effort was under way to evacuate about 1,000 of the foreigners, many of whom are assembled near an oil refinery at Little Aden, 15 miles west of the capital.

A spokesman for the British Defense Ministry, who arrived in Djibouti earlier in the day, said the royal yacht Britannia had taken on 209 evacuees from Little Aden on Wednesday evening and that other ships were loading several hundred more.

Shortly before the evacuation started, British officials provided the estimate of 1,200 foreigners trapped in South Yemen, not including Soviet citizens. The Soviet Union, which has already brought out roughly 4,000 of its own nationals, maintains a large military and civilian presence in South Yemen, a Marxist state.

Of the 1,200 non-Soviets, at least 800 were said to be gathered in either Aden or Little Aden. Until Wednesday, heavy fighting had prevented them from reaching either of the two designated evacuation sites at Little Aden and Khormaksar, site of the Soviet Embassy, in the northeastern part of the capital.

However, on Wednesday, negotiations with the rebel forces controlling Little Aden, most of the capital and the territory in between apparently resulted in a local cease-fire that lasted long enough for many evacuees to make their way in convoys to Little Aden, diplomatic sources said.

Most Transferred to Yacht

The British Defense Ministry spokesman said that about 1,000 people, who may include some Soviet nationals, had made it to Little Aden by the afternoon. By late evening, when the evacuation was called off until morning, all but about 350 people had been ferried out to the ships waiting offshore, he said.

The Britannia was spending the night a mile offshore and will attempt to rescue the remaining evacuees today, the spokesman said.

The other evacuation site at Khormaksar is reported to still be unusable because of heavy fighting in the area, diplomatic sources said.

Meanwhile, heavy fighting was reportedly raging within Aden itself between Hasani’s beleaguered forces and rebel troops loyal to former President Abdul-Fattah Ismail and to Vice President Ali Ahmed Antar, the two key figures in the bloody efforts to topple Hasani.

Diplomatic sources in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain said it appeared that the rebels controlling most of the capital have succeeded in driving a wedge between Hasani loyalists holed up in the southernmost old section of the city, known as the Crater, and Abyan province to the east of Aden, where most of the president’s tribal support is based.

Rebel-Held Areas

The rebels apparently now control four of South Yemen’s six provinces and all of the capital except for the Crater district and pockets around the international airport near Khormaksar, which was still coming under heavy rebel artillery fire, diplomatic sources said.

The 10 days of fighting, involving the 27,000-man armed forces as well as heavily armed political party militias and various tribal factions, has reportedly claimed as many as 10,000 lives, according to estimates by diplomatic sources in the Persian Gulf region.

Evacuees arriving here in Djibouti, 200 miles southwest of Aden across the Red Sea, have spoken of hundreds of bodies lying in the streets and of chaotic fighting not only between supporters of Hasani and the rebels but also among the rebels themselves.

“The battles are vicious, and the confrontation lines are all overlapping. In some suburbs the fighting has been raging from house to house,” a diplomat who was in touch with his country’s embassy in Aden was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. “Decomposing corpses are everywhere, and almost all houses in Aden have either collapsed or are pockmarked with bombs and bullets.”

‘Corpses as Barricades’

Maki Galaf, a Kuwaiti evacuee who arrived in that Persian Gulf emirate, said he saw combatants “using corpses as barricades. It’s a sight that I will never forget.”

The fighting erupted Jan. 13, when army and air force units loyal to Ismail and Antar attempted to overthrow Hasani after what was reported as a gun battle involving the president and several other officials during a meeting.

Reports of fighting have been confused and consistently conflicting since then, however. Both Ismail and Antar were initially reported by Radio Aden to have been executed after the coup attempt. However, a rebel radio station, which began broadcasting after the government radio went off the air, subsequently asserted that Ismail was alive and leading the revolt. Antar’s fate is not known, although army tank units loyal to him were said to be participating in the fighting.

Hasani at one point fled the country, flying first to Ethiopia and then to Yemen, but his whereabouts over the past several days remain unknown. Some reports said he has returned to South Yemen and is trying to rally his remaining forces in Abyan. Other reports said he is still in neighboring Yemen.

The fighting initially appeared to have been ignited by ideological differences between Hasani and Ismail, on the one hand, and by a personal rivalry between the president and Ali Antar, on the other.

Ismail, a doctrinaire Marxist who returned from five years of exile in Moscow last fall, was said to be the leader of a faction within the ruling South Yemeni Socialist Party that opposed Hasani’s attempts to pursue more flexible economic policies and to improve South Yemen’s strained relations with neighboring anti-Communist gulf states. Antar was described by diplomatic sources in Djibouti as being more personally ambitious and covetous of the presidency than ideological.

Rebels Also Split

Complicating matters is the fact that Ismail and Antar are also mutually antagonistic. The rebel radio station broadcasting for the last week has made repeated references to the new “collective leadership” that it claims is running the country, without mentioning individual names.

This has led diplomats monitoring events from Djibouti to speculate that no one person or faction has yet emerged on top of the fighting, which they say can consequently be expected to continue.

The longer it does so, the diplomats added, the greater the danger that it will degenerate into a tribal conflict that will be difficult to end.

The fighting has deeply embarrassed Moscow, which Western diplomats believe made a grave miscalculation in sending Ismail back to South Yemen. At the time, his return was seen by diplomats as an effort by Moscow to check Hasani’s attempts to expand economic relations with conservative gulf states.

“However, the Soviets seem to have tragically underestimated the fragility and complexity of the balance of power in South Yemen and its underlying tribal nature,” a Western diplomat said.

The diplomat added that the fighting seems to have caught Moscow by surprise and that, for all its reputed influence in South Yemen, it has been unable to control it.