Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

During the 1950s there were a number of uprisings in the north of the
country, which were put down by British forces. Both the SAS and the
RAF were critical to the success of these counter-insurgency operations.
Between July and December 1958, for example, the RAF flew 1,635
sorties, dropping 1,094 tons of bombs and firing 900 rockets at the
insurgents, their mountain-top villages and irrigation works. This was
more than twice the weight of bombs that the Luftwaffe dropped on
Coventry in November 1940.
In 1966, a new rebellion broke out in the south of the country, among
the people of Dhofar province. The following year, after surviving an
assassination attempt, the sultan and his Dhofari wife retired to his
palace on the coast at Salalah. He was so rarely sighted that many of his
subjects became convinced that he must have died, and that the British
were concealing that from them.
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For the new Labour government, the close relationship with the client
sultanate presented an ideological problem. The Labour party had
been elected in 1964 on a manifesto that included a pledge to wage a
new “war on want” in the developing world, and to fight for “freedom
and racial equality” at the United Nations general assembly. It would
cause the most excruciating humiliation were it to become known more
widely, at home and abroad, that Oman was the last country on earth
where slavery remained legal. The sultan owned around 500 slaves.
An estimated 150 of them were women, whom he kept at his palace at
Salalah; a number of his male slaves were said to have been physically
deformed by the cruelties they had suffered.
SEPTEMBER 2016