Washington Report, January 10, 1983, Page 4

Meanwhile, in Yemen ...

However gloomy the prospects look elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.S. Administration sees signs of growing stability in the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula.

What is making some U.S. officials cautiously optimistic are two major developments that went virtually unnoticed by the Western media during the closing months of 1982.

For one thing, North Yemen won a war against Marxist guerrillas who had occupied as much as 20 percent of the country as recently as last summer. The remnants of the rebel force have been driven into a remote mountain range where they are no longer effective. The rebels had originally been supported and then abandoned by the Marxist government of South Yemen—the country generally regarded in the West as the most anti-American and pro-Soviet of the region.

The next thing that happened was that South Yemen signed a peace agreement with its pro-Western neighbor Oman after 15 years of unrelenting, and frequently violent, hostility. South Yemen in effect recognized the Sultan of Oman's regime for the first time, and pledged to drop its support for the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman," which it had permitted to cross the border into Oman to carry out raids. South Yemen has begun implementing its pledge by closing down the Front's anti-Oman radio station on South Yemeni soil, and as far as is known there have been no guerrillas crossing into Oman since the agreement was signed last October.

Other countries of the Arabian peninsula played key roles in both events. It was the Gulf Cooperation Council which took the initiative to get Oman and South Yemen together, with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates acting as mediators. Saudi Arabia provided logistical support to the North Yemeni government in its victory over the rebels.

Just what happened to cause South Yemen to pull in its horns?

As some observers see it, financial limitations were a principal factor. South Yemen's big patron, Libya's leader Muammar Qadhafi, has been acutely pressed for funds since the oil glut began to take hold, and curtailed his aid to the South Yemen regime. In addition, South Yemen's economy, never very robust, was critically affected by unusually severe flooding—also unreported in the Western press—which took place last spring. Assuming a less aggressive posture with its neighbors would not only cut expenses but could entice the Gulf countries into providing increased financial assistance.

However, there are more than just economic reasons for South Yemen's shift in direction, these observers believe. Ever since the regime of President Ali Nasser Mohammed took over two years ago from his fiercely pro-Soviet predecessor, Abdul Fattah Ismail—who is now living in Moscow—there has been an attenuation in the dogmatic internal policies of the state and a visible attempt to improve relations with a number of non-Marxist countries, including some in Western Europe. President Mohammad has had to fight off challenges from more extreme leftists while making his shift, and it is not regarded as a coincidence that the withdrawal of support from the rebels in North Yemen came not long after he thwarted such a challenge from his Defense Minister, who was the leading partisan of the rebels.

None of this means that South Yemen is about to become a "pro-Western" country. In fact, President Mohammed has recently paid a visit to Moscow—possibly to convince the Soviets of that fact, if they needed convincing. But Washington believes that the less aggressive exposure of South Yemen is a positive development favoring stability within the region.