Introduction
The literature analyzing the relationship between migration and popular protest on the Arabian peninsula conventionally argues that endogenous processes of oil-related capitalist development and/or modernization increasingly provoked contentious collective action by local workforces and their allies on secular, liberal, nationalist, and increasingly Leftist lines from the 1930s to the early 1970s. In view are the constitutional movements in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Dubai in 1938; the strikes at the Bahrain Arab Petroleum Company (BAPCO) of the same year; labor protests in Saudi Arabia in the 1940s and especially during 1953–1955; nationalist and liberal protest in Bahrain, 1954–1956; demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes in Kuwait in the 1950s and 1960s; republicanism, socialism, and nationalism in North and South Yemen in the 1960s; and the Dhufari rebellion in Oman of the 1960s to early 1970s. Standard accounts suggest that the subsequent, partly deliberate, and greatly increased importation of migrant labor, often from the Far East, during the oil boom of the 1970s—especially once local labor had won some rights—worked to defeat these protest movements, which diminished from the 1970s onward. Migrants were culturally “alien,” temporary, divided among themselves, segregated from local populations, reluctant to interrupt the flow of remittances, forbidden from unions, and deportable at the first sign of activism. Their presence thus worked to fragment and undermine the cohesion and efficacy of working-class activism and associated liberal, secular, and Leftist protest.Footnote 1 This negative association between migration and workers' activism is familiar in labor and working-class history more generally.Footnote 2 Labor migrants, dragooned into the service of capitalism, are more likely to be seen as “new helots” than as organizers and activists.
This article adopts a different perspective on the relationship between migration and protest. It revisits the most important twentieth-century wave of pan-Arab, secular, republican, and socialist protest in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf—that of the 1950s and 1960s—and highlights the positive contribution that migrants actually made. Migrants were not just quotients of labor-power but interpretive and political subjects. Protests owed as much to transnational processes (including migration), ideology, and politics as they did to local social and economic change. Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, and Iraqis, along with return migrants and circular migrants within the region, together with exile politics, visits, and exchanges, transmitted pan-Arab and Leftist ideas, built activist organizations (clubs, underground political parties, and unions), and participated in a variety of contests (demonstrations, strikes, and armed struggle). I will suggest that the conventional wisdom on the relation between protest and migration, influenced as it is by a form of endogenous socioeconomic determinism, needs to be rethought.
Background in the 1920s and 1930s
New forms of migration started to impact opposition movements in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf after the First World War. Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Iraqis found employment in the 1920s and 1930s as administrators, teachers, translators, and so on in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain for the first time and began to transmit their ideas.Footnote 3 These migrants came from cities and regions shaken by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of direct colonial rule and Zionist settlement and marked by the rise of nationalism and popular movements. The Arab revolt of 1916–1918, the Egyptian uprising of 1919, the Iraqi uprising in 1920, the Syrian revolts from 1920 onward, the example of Turkey, and the increasingly intense Palestinian struggle against dispossession were intensely discussed, along with a labor upsurge in Egypt, the growth of worker protest in the Mashriq and Palestine, and the appearance of a class-inflected peasant-guerrilla movement in Palestine during 1936–1939.
In some cases, migrants taught new forms of activism directly. This was a factor in one of the first strikes in Bahraini history. In 1929, the Syrian headmasters of the two main boys’ schools in Muharraq and Manama organized a teacher-student strike in protest against British interference. For several days, classes ceased and boys from both schools participated in processions and demonstrations, conducted, according to the British, in an “Egyptian manner.” “Afterwards,” the adviser went on, the boys “admitted [that such tactics] had been taught to them by the masters[.]” Both headmasters were deported in 1929, a move condemned in the press of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt.Footnote 4 Skilled Indian workers were also reportedly a source of “much irritation” to Bahrain Petroleum Company officials in the 1930s and 1940s because of their threatened strikes.Footnote 5
Nor were less-educated migrant workers docile. Most significant here was the activism of the Bahrain pearl-divers, who were mostly deeply indebted Baluchis, Najdis, south Persians, and Africans.Footnote 6 The British and the Al-Khalifa ruling family imposed new regulations on the diving trade in 1923. The regulations may have aimed to free the divers from debt, but their only immediate impact was greatly to reduce the advances on which they and their families relied for subsistence during the diving season. Divers were therefore not simply the duped hirelings of the merchants,Footnote 7 but had good reason to stage collective protests from the mid-1920s onward—successfully obtaining from the ruler on at least two occasions (much to the disapproval of the British adviser) a higher advance than originally decreed.Footnote 8
Students from the Gulf studying abroad started to return in the 1930s from the capitals of the Mashriq. They were active alongside other Arab migrants in the increasingly politicized cultural clubs of Bahrain, played a subordinate role in the constitutional movement of 1938 in Kuwait and Bahrain, and started to get involved in the organization of workers at BAPCO.Footnote 9
In parts of southern Arabia, long linked to the Indian Ocean, return migration transmitted ideas and activism not from the Mashriq, but from anti-colonial struggles in Southeast Asia. In South Yemen the first nationalists were Hadramis who had spent time in Indonesia, “influenced by the Indonesian nationalism that grew in the 1920s and under the Japanese occupation[.]” In the 1920s and 1930s, they organized committees and conferences, both in Mukalla (on the coast of Yemen) and in Singapore.Footnote 10
Kuwait and Bahrain
These prewar patterns of migration politics developed greatly after 1945 all over the region. The pan-Arab and nationalist leaderships that emerged in Kuwait and Bahrain displaced the more conservative merchant nationalists of 1938 as the leading sources of opposition to the Al-Khalifa ruling family in Bahrain, the Al-Sabah in Kuwait, and their British advisers. These groups were linked in both countries to underground political parties, the clubs, and the press, and were involved in organizing workers and popular demonstrations. In Bahrain, the core leadership was based in Bahrain and ‘Uruba clubs in Manama and Muharraq. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these groups launched an ambitious program of “Arab enlightenment,” “rejecting sectarian politics, opposing colonial rule and the tribally controlled regime, and championing the cause of the popular classes[.]” The clubs—often fronts for illegal parties—organized public lectures and had their own weekly press.Footnote 11
Return migrants played a leading role in these organizations and contests. A formative political experience for an important generation of Kuwaitis and some Bahrainis was their study in the Mashriq and Egypt between the 1930s and the 1950s. Campuses there—from the American University in Beirut (AUB) to the Egyptian Law School—were buzzing with new ideas associated principally with Arab nationalism, Ba‘thism, and communism. The catastrophic dispossession (al-nakba) of the Palestinians in 1948 had a particularly dramatic impact. Returnees founded underground branches of the political parties they had joined abroad (the Movement of Arab Nationalists founded at the AUB was the most important) and established cultural clubs and newspapers, maintaining contacts with their cohorts across the peninsula.Footnote 12
These educated activists linked up with politicized elements among migrants from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, who were working in Kuwait in increasing numbers and to a lesser extent in Bahrain as teachers, civil servants, journalists, professionals, and technicians, as well as in semi- and unskilled labor. Return migrants, migrants, and those who had never left associated in clubs, schools, student organizations, underground parties, and the press. Nasserism after 1952, communism, liberalism, the ideas of the Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party and of the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) were transmitted and exchanged in these milieux.Footnote 13 Arab migrant workers already had experience of communism. They “brought with them their experience of labor organization and a … progressive political consciousness” that put them at loggerheads with receiving-country governments and their British advisers.Footnote 14
In these circles, attitudes toward mass mobilization, unionization, and labor, Arab and non-Arab, flowed from prevailing ideologies. Foreign and non-Arab companies—above all the oil companies—were attacked for exploiting their Arab labor. Arab migration—even the abolition of passports—was encouraged as an important element in the pan-Arab project.Footnote 15 The rights of Arab migrants were championed in the press.Footnote 16 In Kuwait, “appointing Palestinians [in large numbers] came to be viewed as a national obligation,” during a “honeymoon period” for both communities, who were “swept up in the Arab nationalist fervor of the time[.]”Footnote 17 Return migrants, visiting activists from the wider Arab world, and migrants themselves—through the MAN, cultural clubs, workers’ committees, the press, and even in the Kuwaiti National Assembly—championed the right of Arab workers to form labor unions in Bahrain and Kuwait.Footnote 18 MAN activists and Palestinian exiles (based in both Kuwait and Egypt), for example, started to organize Palestinian workers in Kuwait at Ford, Mercedes, Fiat, Pepsi-Cola, the municipality, and the Ministry of Public Works in 1959.Footnote 19
Non-Arab migrants, on the other hand, were seen in harshly negative terms. Iranians were depicted as pawns of the shah's imperial schemes, and migrants from India and Baluchistan as a menace to Arab identity.Footnote 20 Although South Asians did organize and even went on strike occasionally, they received little local support.Footnote 21
It would be a mistake to exaggerate migrant connections in regard to the demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts that peaked in Bahrain in 1954–1956, but border-crossers certainly played a role. Labor activists deported to Bahrain from Saudi Arabia during the strikes at Aramco in 1953 joined protests in Bahrain.Footnote 22 The tactic of spreading nails and tin-traps on the roads to stop strikebreakers during the bus and taxi strike of September 1954 may have been “learned from Lebanon.”Footnote 23 The Bahraini leadership met with Nasser when he stopped over in 1955 on his way to Bandung, securing a student-exchange program with Egypt. At this point, the pro-Nasserist press started to cover the movement sympathetically.Footnote 24 Egyptian activists (based in Kuwait) gave speeches in Bahrain during the crowd actions of March 1956.Footnote 25 Egypt hosted a key Bahraini exile—Abd al-Rahman al-Bakir—and aired his speeches on the influential radio broadcast Voice of the Arabs.Footnote 26
In Kuwait, demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes broke out first in support of Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in August 1956 and then to protest the military attack by Israel, Britain, and France on Egypt at the end of September. A similar round of mobilization in Kuwait in February 1959 celebrated the first anniversary of the United Arab Republic. Among the organizers and participants were Palestinians, Arab migrants, and Kuwaiti return migrants.Footnote 27 The young Kuwaiti police chief who refused to disperse by force the crowds of August 1956 was a return migrant who had been trained in police college in Egypt, graduating in 1952.Footnote 28 His public denunciation of the tyranny of the ruling family in 1959 cost him his job and passport.Footnote 29
In Kuwait and Bahrain, then, migration politics played a role. Opposition was situated in the underground political parties, the clubs, the opposition press, and union organization and was stitched together by pan-Arab, secular, liberal, and Leftist ideas. And it contested the political arena primarily through demonstrations and strike action. This movement won concessions for Arab and national workers, expanded the possibilities for those exercising civil rights, played a role in the fraught growth of representative institutions, and forced concessions on pan-Arab issues in foreign policy. Return migrants, migrants, exile politics, visits, and exchanges played a part in building this oppositional assemblage—although rather more so in Kuwait, arguably, than Bahrain, where their numbers were smaller. Migrants transmitted ideas that might not otherwise have been diffused, they acted in leadership and rank-and-file positions in growing organizations, and they engaged directly in contests.
The Yemens
Neither migration processes nor popular mobilization played much of a role in the republican coup d'état that deposed Imam al-Badr (ruled 1948–1962) in North Yemen on September 26, 1962. The eighty officers whose tanks rumbled into San‘a' were following the model of republican coup made famous by Nasser and the Free Officers in Egypt in 1952, and some had been trained by Egyptian advisers. They certainly had the backing of a number of North Yemeni exiles. The officers had some links through visits to Nasser's Egypt, saw themselves as Nasserists, and appealed to the people as the repository of sovereignty. The coup was greeted by various cheering crowds and a measure of “mass spontaneous approval.”Footnote 30 But these officers had no links to any popular organizations or movements in this isolated imamate of North Yemen—where secular schools, the press, clubs, underground political parties, unions, and labor movements were largely absent. These military men—with connections to the commercial class and tribal leaders—were “both a representative of the masses and a displacement of them, profoundly suspicious of the people and unwilling to organize, educate or rely on them[.]”Footnote 31
But the coup resulted in the first republican government on the peninsula, and because an eight-year civil war with Saudi and British-backed royalists ensued, it also led to the military involvement of Nasser on the side of the officers. The new Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) was now open to the influences of secular, pan-Arab, and Leftist politics—and migration processes and popular mobilization started to become important. Political exiles returned home apace, above all from Aden and Egypt. The press developed, the underground political parties of the Mashriq started to operate, clubs opened, and union organizing began. The Movement of Arab Nationalists in North Yemen founded a cultural club in Ta'iz, established a union, organized strikes and protests, and developed a base among the workers. In some countryside areas, they also organized in the name of social reform and union rights, forming peasant leagues (Lijan Fallahiya) around Ta'iz, Ibb, and Radah. The MAN represented the left wing of the republicans and increasingly came into conflict with Nasserism after 1964. Their movement, which became the Revolutionary Democratic Party, was defeated by 1968 but not before they had received support from migrant Chinese engineers who repaired bridges on the road to republican Sana‘a' in February 1968, allowing the siege to be lifted.Footnote 32
More significant were the exile politics to which North Yemen—as the first republican and Nasserist regime in the region—now played host. The National Liberation Front (NLF)—the main force behind the making of the People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen in 1967—was formed by militants from South Yemen who flocked to North Yemen after 1962. Once in the YAR, away from the apparatus of repression controlled by the British in South Yemen, these South Yemeni militants began to meet, organize, and broadcast their positions in 1963.Footnote 33 These activists also maintained links to Cairo and Beirut. The NLF, for example, sent representatives to an important MAN congress in Beirut in 1964. From their base in the YAR, the NLF developed their campaign against the British, which now adopted armed struggle and incorporated the hinterland for the first time. The NLF was linked to the hinterland in turn partly because some of its cadres were rural-urban migrants (initially to Aden), workers, and students with links to the countryside.Footnote 34
The South Yemeni migrant activists of the NLF were often return or circular migrants. They included “army officers who had been serving as mercenaries in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, workers from Aden and the Gulf, intellectuals from the hinterland who had been studying in Aden[.]”Footnote 35 Their most important component was the South Yemeni branch of the MAN, which had been founded in the 1950s in Aden by South Yemeni students returning from Beirut.Footnote 36
Beyond this, the rise of nationalist and Leftist opposition in South Yemen, along with the vibrant labor movement there, can hardly be understood without taking into account the impact of migration. Early reformist nationalists grouped around clubs and newspapers linked to the Adeni Association (established in 1950) and who agreed to contest the first elections to the tiny Legislative Council in 1955 included in their ranks many merchants of Indian origin, Hadramis, and merchant exiles from North Yemen.Footnote 37 A more radical coalition with support from the unions—the United National Front (UNF)—gathered to demand British withdrawal and reject electoral participation in the unrepresentative and weak council. The UNF included “Sheikhan al-Habshi, a Hadrami lawyer who was believed to have been a member of the Indonesian Communist Party,” an editor working with Egyptian subsidies, and others who had studied in Britain and in Egypt.Footnote 38
The UNF in turn played a role in organizing the trade union movement in Aden and the strike action that burst onto the scene in March 1956 and continued for five weeks. About 7,000 port workers and others joined thirty-three strikes demanding changes in working conditions and protesting colonial employers' dismissal of fellow workers for union involvement. In June-July and August-December, up to 18,000 workers came out on strike in a series of about forty protests both linked to local issues and in solidarity with Egypt, which had nationalized the Suez Canal and faced the Tripartite Aggression in October. More than a quarter of the total working population of Aden actually participated in the strikes, and 210,000 working days were lost to employers—and won for the popular movement.Footnote 39 The British tried and failed to model Adeni trade unions on the lines of the apolitical and anticommunist British Trades Union Conference (TUC) and were suspicious of trade unions “interfering” in politics. But figures such as Abdullah al-Asnaj—a younger member of the UNF in 1956 and a future leader of the Adeni Trade Union Congress (ATUC)—saw politicized union organizing not as a crime but as a basic element in a nationalist movement capable of organizing exploited workers and winning concessions for them. D. C. Watt argues plausibly enough that workers did not cooperate with leaderships because of shared worker identity. Educated leaders were not proletarians and were not seen as such. The articulation was instead based on both personal relations—the belief that with leaders' help, pay and conditions could be improved, and anticolonial national and Arab identity.Footnote 40
The British sought North Yemeni labor to work the docks in Aden for political reasons: to avoid disrupting the social structure of the hinterland and hence the rule of the sultans, and to deploy a migrant workforce that they assumed would be quiescent.Footnote 41 But these migrants were far from docile. Tens of thousands of them proved their militancy in Aden in 1956, 1958, and again in the early 1960s.Footnote 42 Their semiproletarian status, far from making them a cheap subsidy to capital paying below subsistence wages, meant instead that during strikes they could actually rely for survival (in the absence of strike pay) on their access to alternative means of subsistence through tribes and families. This enabled rather than hobbled strike action, especially in regard to strikes that lasted up to three months, and sometimes longer, as in the early 1960s. Even a number of important ATUC leaders in the early 1960s were of North Yemeni origin.Footnote 43
But, just as in Bahrain and Kuwait, an exclusionary approach to South Asian skilled (especially clerical) labor in Aden intensified. The nationalist and pan-Arab view was that the British employed these groups to divide and rule the colony. Their employment was also resented by those active and educated elements in the labor movement most likely to be competing with them directly in the labor market. They were identified with British imperialism and heavily stigmatized as a result. The ATUC pressed “very strongly therefore for control of [South Asian] immigration,” and Indians suffered verbal and physical attacks.Footnote 44
The People's Republic of South Yemen was proclaimed at the end of November 1967 after the ouster of the British. The radical Left elements of the NLF in the new republic definitively broke with “petty bourgeois” Nasserism and sought a revolutionary state run by democratic councils of “workers, poor peasants and partisans.” This current—especially strong in the Hadramaut—was influenced by new transnational connections. In the Arab world, there were linkages to radical Left currents in the MAN, as well as with the PFLP and the DFLP. An overlapping but wider transnational geography included the Soviet Union, China, and the Third World (especially Vietnam and Cuba). “The radicalization of the NLF was greatly encouraged politically by the small communist group operating in Aden, the Popular Democratic Union[.]”Footnote 45 There was an important visit to China for NLF training in 1967. One of the brigades of the new regular army was named Che Guevara, reflecting the inspiration of the revolution in Cuba.
In sum, while the 1962 coup in North Yemen owed something to visits and exchanges with Nasser's Egypt and MAN contacts built there before 1962, migration politics was less at stake. In South Yemen various kinds of migration—above all exile politics (the NLF in North Yemen), migration (North Yemeni workers in Aden), and return migration (the development of the South Yemeni MAN)—significantly shaped the role of the NLF in shaping the armed struggle, and the labor strikes that severely disrupted the functioning of the Adeni colony in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the visits and exchanges in the Third World sphere after 1967.
Oman
An important consequence of the revolution in South Yemen was that now the full support of the People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen—which bordered Dhofar in Oman—swung behind the revolutionary Dhofari guerrillas in Oman.Footnote 46 The origins of the guerrilla movement in Dhofar themselves were fed by circular migration. Fred Halliday argued that “the dominant political experience of many Dhofaris had been their period as émigré workers in the Gulf[.]”Footnote 47 After the Second World War, “[h]owever hard they tried, the British and the Sultan could not completely insulate Oman … [and] although all migration was banned, up to 15,000 Omanis had left their country to work in the oil-fields of the Gulf[.]”Footnote 48 Indeed, “[m]en from Dhufar had left their homes in search of employment in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.” They worked in oil companies, construction, and especially comprised a significant component of the police forces (especially in Qatar and Kuwait), where they became well-trained, but “were gradually edged out of such employment when the locals of these states grew to resent their presence[.]”Footnote 49 Dhofaris, having been in contact with nationalist political movements, often returned home during the monsoon period to help with the harvest.
In 1962, a group of Dhofaris in the MAN joined with other exiles to form the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF). Starting in exile, they set up an undercover organizational base in Oman. The Dhofari MAN then merged with DLF, the former bringing “political expertise and contacts with the Egyptians[.]” These groups were joined by a third—the Organization of Dhofari Soldiers—a loosely coordinated group of cells among Dhofari soldiers in the Saudi armed forces, the Trucial Oman Scouts, and the police forces in the Gulf. The DLF also had an office in Cairo permitted by the United Arab Republic and received a little military support. Iraq trained 160 cadres in 1964 and continued aid until 1968.Footnote 50 Consignments of arms and gunpowder reached Dhofar via Kuwait.Footnote 51 Some of the Dhofari fighters were actually migrants from outside Dhofar and even Oman. A Yemeni working as a sweeper at Aramco, for example, had been drafted into a Saudi unit to fight against both the People's Republic of South Yemen (PRSY) and the Dhofari forces. But he then deserted to the side of the guerrillas.Footnote 52
Linkages to the PRSY and to China after 1967 and the weakening of the connection to Nasserism also had their impact on the political direction of the rebellion. In September 1968, the DLF changed its name to the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) and declared its guiding ideology to be scientific socialism and its key opponents to be imperialism, neocolonialism, and oligarchic regimes. As Halliday testified following his visit to Dhofar in the early 1970s, “[w]hereever we went we saw people wearing Mao and Lenin badges, reading socialist works and discussing. Through the transistor radio the people were in touch with world events[.]” He noted that Chinese journalists (but not officers) had visited Dhofar, and dozens of militants had visited China and had been trained there. “When I went there [China] I was a nationalist,” one Dhofar militant told Halliday. “Now I am a Marxist-Leninist[.]”Footnote 53
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, the desert kingdom dominating the Arabian peninsula in terms of size, population, and, eventually, wealth, can be contrasted with South Yemen and Oman in that a sustained armed rebellion never broke out. Nor did Saudi Arabia witness a republican coup, as in North Yemen, or a socialist takeover, as in South Yemen. Saudi Arabia can also be contrasted with Bahrain and Kuwait in that the kinds of continuous activism surrounding clubs, underground parties, the press, union organizing, and the resulting fragile establishment (and suspension) of civil liberties and representative institutions never took place. Although various organizations did come into existence in embryonic form, their activities were generally repressed before they could really establish themselves on a continual basis. But republican, liberal, Leftist, and labor opposition, fertilized by migration processes, developed in different ways in the Hijaz, the oil fields, and the armed forces.
Hijazi regionalism had been a source of opposition to the Al-Saud even before the founding of the Saudi state in 1932. Many in the Hijaz had reasons to chafe at their conquest by the Al-Saud. The claims of the Hashemite family, whose scions had directed the Arab revolt against the Ottomans and now occupied the thrones of Jordan and Iraq (the latter until 1958); the holy cities and sites of Muslim pilgrimage from the world over of Mecca and Medina; and the relatively cosmopolitan and wealthy merchant city of Jidda on the Red Sea coast, with migrant networks stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, all served as bases for regionalism. As a British security memo put it in 1969, “sophisticated” Hijazis resented their “rough” Najdi conquerors.Footnote 54
Return migration of Hijazis obtaining education in the Mashriq and Egypt from the late 1930s onward also played a role in the growth of new forms of opposition linked to ideas current in Egypt and the Mashriq—nationalism and republicanism and, after the Second World War, Nasserism, Ba‘thism, and Arab socialism above all. Return migrants published their views in the press. They were joined by the journalists and politicized elements in the sizeable community of Arab migrants—especially Egyptians and Palestinians—who started to work in numbers from the late 1940s in Saudi and the Hijaz in the oil industry, education, journalism, and administration. These different kinds of migrants writing in the press worked to link together a pan-Arab consciousness, as well as ideas of administrative reform, representative institutions, and socioeconomic development.Footnote 55 Especially between 1958 and 1960, in addition to pamphleteering by opposition organizations, the Saudi press, “dominated by Egyptians and the Hijazi intelligentsia,” openly defied censorship and frequently published articles promoting Arab nationalism—and indirectly attacking the regime.Footnote 56 Until the early 1960s, furthermore, the airwaves were ruled by the Nasserist Voice of the Arabs, broadcasting from Cairo.
The importance of this kind of press and radio can be glimpsed in a telling remark to a British diplomat made in Jidda in 1962 by Ziad Shawwaf, a Saudi official and legal adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Saudi official and the Briton had apparently argued “from midnight till dawn,” with the former defending a series of anti-imperialist positions on Palestine, Muscat, and other issues. An Englishman present wrote: “I had decided to put Ziad in the anti-British category … when he concluded: ‘I enjoyed our talk. You must remember that we know nothing about these places, apart from the Cairo brain-washing of the past ten years.’”Footnote 57 Whatever the intent of Ziad's remark, it was a significant indication of the role of the Nasserist media in shaping political perceptions in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Indeed, Faisal (ruled 1964–1975) took several measures to repress, control, and reshape the media in 1962 and after, including the dismissal of critical Egyptian and local nationalist journalists.Footnote 58
The al-Hasa region (part of the Eastern Province) had a sizeable population of poor Shi‘a peasantry and contained a rather small coastal area where the major oil towns (Dammam, Dhahran, and Al-Khobar), work camps, and oil installations (especially the refinery at Ras Tanura) were situated. This was another key region of opposition to the dynasty. Building the refinery at Ras Tanura in mid-1940s had involved “thousands of … skilled and unskilled men from al-Hasa, Basra, and Bahrain[.]”Footnote 59 Palestinians and other Arab migrants, for example, worked in building commercial port facilities in Dammam or on the Dammam-Riyadh railway, which employed 15,000 migrant workers at one point.Footnote 60 In the early 1950s, Aramco employed 20,400 people, including at least 3,000 workers from the Arab world, the Mediterranean, or Africa.Footnote 61 In 1949, in something of a socioeconomic sop to the Palestinian cause, Abd al-Aziz al-Saud “informed ARAMCO of his desire that the company should employ at least a thousand Palestinian refugees[.]” Aramco sent officials to Beirut, and by 1950, it employed more than 800 Palestinians.Footnote 62 By the end of 1953, this number had risen to around 3,000, as Aramco actively sought out Palestinians as foremen because of their skills, their English, and their knowledge of Arabic and Arab customs.Footnote 63
The first strikes and crowd actions at Aramco over pay and conditions of June and July 1945 are accompanied by references to Iraqi “trouble-makers”—read activists—deported before the July strike at Aramco over pay and conditions. There was also apparently a consensus among the Americans as to the role of “the better-educated Hijazi clerks” in organizing strike action in July 1945.Footnote 64 A strike over pay and conditions by 1,700 Italian migrant workers followed on July 30, winning some concessions. Then, on August 4, “the entire force of 9,000 Arabs employed in Dhahran, Ras Tanura, and the outlying worksites”—with the support of some of the merchants in Al-Khobar who were contributing to a strike fund—“defied the Amir and resumed the strike against ARAMCO[.]”Footnote 65
The most important round of worker mobilization (petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes) in Saudi history began at Aramco in March 1953 and continued until June 1956. Thousands of workers—most of the Aramco workforce—appear to have participated. The first period lasted from May to October 1953, and the second dated from May 1955 to June 1956. The main demands articulated by the leadership referred to pay, conditions, equality with American workers, living conditions, the right to elect worker representatives, an end to discrimination against the Shi‘a, a more equitable distribution of oil revenues, and closing the American air force base in Dhahran.Footnote 66 Such demands combined social and economic issues with nationalist and pan-Arab politics. The leaders among the Aramco employees appear to have been the educated or skilled elements (one was a teacher, for example), although employees of all status and skill levels were involved. A Worker's Committee emerged during May-June 1953, but it never quite achieved official recognition as a representative of the workers, although at points Saudi officials directed Aramco to negotiate with it. Unions, indeed, were strictly banned in 1953. But the workers were not completely alone. Links to underground political parties and clandestine organizations came into existence at least in embryonic form during these years. There was some sympathy in the local press and more in the Arab world generally. There was also sympathy from the existing Shi‘a population in al-Hasa. Nationalist and Leftist ideas circulating in the camps supported the workers' cause and linked them to events and personalities in the wider Arab world. The timing of this cycle of contention, moreover, overlapped considerably with the protests in nearby Bahrain, which may have been a source of inspiration to protesters. There were sympathetic figures in the Saudi administration, including in the Ministry of Finance, which dealt with the workers.Footnote 67
Al-Rasheed conducted an interview with a Saudi worker who was a rank-and-file participant in the strikes of 1953. Such evidence is rare and worth quoting in full:
During the second war we almost starved in Qasim. Members of my family were poor peasants who looked after the palm groves of a wealthy local. We had already heard from people that nasranis [Christians] were offering jobs in Hasa for cash. My father decided that I should go and try my luck. I travelled with a Bedouin caravan to “American Camp” and was offered a job to carry goods and material. I did all sorts of jobs. For the first time in my life I found myself with other tribesmen from ‘Utayba, Shammar and Qahtan, each had their stories and dialect. We worked together. I met people from ‘Asir and other parts of Najd. It was amazing. … The food was awful. But the Najdis would not say anything. They were shy; they would not complain. They would not ask for more money or food. They just left the Indians to eat there. Later in the 1950s they began to demand things from ARAMCO. When al-lajna al-’ummaliyya [the Workers' Committee] told us to ask for more cash and better food, we did not respond. People are not beggars. But when they told us to ask for political rights, we all responded and joined the strikes in 1953. I sent money to my family. All I wanted to buy for myself was a radio. I wanted to hear about what was going on in Palestine and Egypt. Palestinian workers told us about their problems. We listened to the news together.Footnote 68
The most striking part of this testimony is the way that demands related to money and food were framed as begging, whereas the demand for political rights was not. It would appear that manly honor, precluding an undignified and money-grubbing focus on mere cash, was important. Such orientations, arguably, meshed well with the very political demands of pan-Arabism, Nasserism, and the like. And it is clear that the speaker was seeking to hear news via the radio of Palestine and Egypt—and his pan-Arab interests here were stimulated and reinforced by mixing with Palestinian migrants. The encounter between Saudi nationals and certain Arab migrants operated here among the rank and file to politicize the former and to involve them in strikes. Migration articulated Saudis with the Arab cause, which, in turn, far from being a distraction from the “real” bread–and-butter issues, actually drove forward strike action by articulating with pre-existing notions of Arab dignity and honor. In this sense, migration was a driver of protest at the grassroots. Indeed, the politicization of Saudi's best-known labor activist, Nasir al-Sa‘id (1923–1979), may have derived from his contact with Arab workers.Footnote 69
Migration processes were arguably relevant at every level of the mobilization. Many of the activists were Saudi return migrants. The lead name on the petition that started the protests in May 1953 was Abd al-Aziz Abu Sunayd. In 1949, he began work as a teacher's assistant at Aramco. He was promoted in 1951, and in March of that year he taught at an employee's training camp in Long Island in the US. He then spent the summer of 1951 at AUB—the year when the MAN was being formed amid the political ferment there. He then became a teacher at Dhahran Training Center—one of the Aramco-linked schools that was to acquire a reputation for radicalism over the following decade and a half. All six of the other Saudis who presented themselves as spokespersons at the first meeting with the company on June 30, 1953, had been sent to Beirut to study in either 1951 or 1952.Footnote 70 Abu Sunayd was deported to Iraq in late 1953. He then went to Beirut, worked for a Leftist newspaper, and made his way back to Dammam by 1956 to work at the Labor Office in the Ministry of Finance.Footnote 71 Another Aramco employee, a teacher trainee in his twenties named Sayyid Abdallah al-Hashim, somehow got himself into the position, much to Aramco's discomfort, whereby he read out at least one workers' petition directly to King Saud in Dhahran in November 1955.Footnote 72
But Palestinians, Bahrainis, Yemenis, and others were also probably involved as activists. Due allowance must be made for regime paranoia about “outside agitators,” and arrests, imprisonment, and deportation may have been in error. Nonetheless, Aramco had an intelligence bureau and informants in the workforce. The Saudi security services were developing a reputation for effectiveness through these decades—at least to judge by the internal comments in the British embassy archives. Given that in the 1950s, at least, the Saudis were just as likely to deny foreign involvement as to proclaim it, it cannot be said that arrests and deportations were always for show or in order to engage in scapegoating. This is particularly so because the Saudis often kept their repression quiet. Moreover, Aramco opposed the arrests and deportations of their economically valuable Palestinian workers.Footnote 73 Finally, whether or not Aramco believed that “outside agitators” had no business in their work camps, migrants themselves had more cosmopolitan ideas about who could be an activist. Deportations of migrant workers from Aramco in November 1953 included “three Palestinians, a Bahraini, and a naturalized Saudi citizen from Aden … who was stripped of his citizenship before being exiled[.]”Footnote 74 By the end of 1954, more than 160 Palestinian workers had been arrested and deported, and another 100 were arrested in 1955—for “unauthorized political activity.” After 1955, “the number of Palestinians allowed to work in sensitive installations and in the oilfields was reduced considerably[.]”Footnote 75
Al-Rasheed writes that in 1953 Saudi Arabia had its own timid Nasserites, Arab nationalists, and communists, “all bred near the oil fields and inside ‘Sa‘udi Camp.’”Footnote 76 A measure of this is that crowds in both Dhahran and Riyadh turned out to give Nasser a hero's welcome in 1956—while virtually ignoring King Saud.Footnote 77 These ideas were linked to clandestine organizations of various kinds, capable of putting out leaflets and inspiring action. One such leaflet with a hammer and sickle at its head, calling for a workers' democracy and an end to the American “pigs,” the “days of the Cadillac,” and the corrupt and reactionary royal family was scattered on the streets of Al-Khobar in August 1954.Footnote 78 The National Reform Front was formed in late 1953 and early 1954 by the leaders of the 1953 strike (most notably Nasir al-Sa‘id), who were in turn linked to the small Najdi intelligentsia. This socialist and secular group claimed members in the Hijaz and in the armed forces, and was active in the Aramco workforce in 1954 and 1955, before the imprisonment of its leaders in that year.Footnote 79 A description of a number of clandestine parties operating in Saudi Arabia and in exile is given in Al-Hurriya, the MAN paper in 1968.Footnote 80
These ideas and embryonic organizations were linked to migrants. Abir notes that the National Reform Front was influenced by contacts with Palestinian Arab nationalists.Footnote 81 And while the authorities publicly dismissed any idea that outsiders had been involved in the protests at Aramco, they privately expressed fears that communists were present, citing “tracts in some of the rooms” and the fact that “the terms and phrases used by the most articulate had Moscow (via Beirut) written all over them[.]”Footnote 82 It seems that the 100 or so Palestinians arrested in May 1955 were under suspicion of belonging to the Parti Populaire Syrien and the Ba‘th Party.Footnote 83 The connections here between AUB, the MAN, the Palestinians taken on by Aramco, Saudi return migrants, and pan-Arab and Leftist ideologies circulating in the Arab world at the time do not seem too hard to draw. They had very little to do with any conspiracy from the Kremlin, but they certainly linked the workers' mobilization to the kinds of migration processes focused on here.
Finally, supportive officials in the Ministry of Finance were also return migrants to a greater or a lesser degree. Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muammar was director general of the Labor Office within the Ministry of Finance in Dammam. He was called variously a member of PPS, a Ba‘thist, and a communist. It seems he was behind the scenes in mobilizing workers for the 1955 bus boycott at Aramco in Abqaiq (and spent May 1955 to March 1956 in jail for his pains). He employed at the Labor Office the activist Abu Sunayd on the latter's return from Lebanon in 1956. Another of the leaders of the 1953 strike also worked there in 1956.Footnote 84 Ibn Muammar was a Najdi and a close confidant of Abd al-Aziz al-Sa‘ud. A nationalist, he criticized the American presence, corruption and extravagance by the royal family, and the lack of benefits from oil wealth to downtrodden ordinary citizens. He did have a copy of Marx's Capital on his bookshelf. A noteworthy point is that like so many other reformers and activists of his generation, he was a graduate of AUB.Footnote 85
Abdullah al-Tariqi (b. 1925) was the most famous reformer who was both a return migrant and then involved in exile politics after 1962. He was from the Najdi oasis of Zilfi but took his secondary education in Kuwait, and then most of his early higher education in Egypt, obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree from Fu'ad I University. From there he entered the Ministry of Finance. He then studied geology in Cairo and Texas and became oil minister in 1960 with the creation of the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.Footnote 86 His main endeavors surrounded his demand for the nationalization of Aramco and his activities in OPEC on the international scene. But he also supported unionization and criticized “the unfair wages paid his countrymen, the lack of opportunities for Saudi workers, and the firm's substandard native housing[.]” Vitalis notes that these latter positions stemmed partly from his visit to Venezuela in 1951.Footnote 87
South Asian labor, for its part, at least sometimes acted in coordination with other activist groups. At some point before March 1949, with a timing that coincided with a similar movement in Kuwait, Pakistani employees in Aramco “organized a union to press for improvements in pay and living conditions[.]” In that month, fifty Pakistanis were suddenly expelled. Once they reached home, they “began a campaign to publicize their mistreatment at the hands of the Americans[.]”Footnote 88 Nonetheless, it is clear that non-Arab migrants were unable to draw on the same kinds of material and resources in receiving countries as Arab migrants were—a crucial indication of the importance of the ideas, organizations, and alliances that enabled workers' protests to have a larger political significance or not. Migration politics very much depended on such “complex superstructures” and associated forms of articulation.
The third main site of opposition in Saudi Arabia, apart from the Hijaz and al-Hasa, was the military and the air force (but never the national guard, composed of Najdi tribesmen and villagers and a pillar of the dynasty throughout the period). There was an attempted coup by a small group of Free Officers in 1955, a number of acts of sabotage (such as the explosions of November 1966 to February 1967), several assassination attempts on leading members of the royal family, and at least one other serious coup attempt in 1969. In 1967, members of the armed forces and the police were accused of organizing, joining, or at the very least failing to prevent demonstrations and crowd actions. The British assessment from the mid-1950s until 1971 stated that a coup was a definite possibility and perhaps even a likelihood.Footnote 89
Three points commonly acknowledged at the time are worth underlining in regard to my argument. First, disaffection in the armed forces was generally among officers who had gone abroad (especially to Egypt) for training or come into contact with Egyptian and other Arab colleagues.Footnote 90 The first conspiracy among a “reform group” of Saudi officers was broken up in Ta'if in May 1955. Lieutenant Colonel Ganim Madhya Hadi and his comrades were planning to overthrow the royal family. “Most of those arrested had been trained in Egypt[.]”Footnote 91 The Annual British Defence Attaché report on Saudi Arabia of 1967 noted the levels of discontent in the army with regard to the slow rate of material progress, especially among younger officers, and noted that this came from education outside the kingdom.Footnote 92 Some years after executing Yemenis for the bombings of November-December 1967, the Saudis blamed Egyptian-trained Saudi officers for the attacks. Certainly Saudi measures to send the military in the 1950s and 1960s to Britain and the US rather than to Egypt were interpreted quite plausibly in MAN circles in Beirut (for example in Al-Hurriya in June 1968) as an attempt to isolate officers from Arab political influence.Footnote 93
Second, some of the organizations engaged in armed operations were made up of Saudis exiled either to North Yemen or to Egypt. The nationalist organization that claimed responsibility for the bombs of November-December 1966 was the Arabian Peninsula People's Union (APPU), operating out of North Yemen. This group was comprised not of North Yemenis but of Saudis claiming to represent all classes of Saudi (not North Yemeni) society.Footnote 94 They advocated a “Republic of the Arabian Peninsula” and supported the Arab movement for “socialism, liberty, unity and democracy.” They may have had links to the Egyptians, given the latter's role in North Yemen at the time. But by 1969, after the setback of 1967 (al-naksa), they had moved to Beirut.
Finally, those who volunteered for, were persuaded, or coerced into carrying out acts of sabotage seem often to have been Palestinian or Yemeni migrants. For example, an arms cache was discovered hidden in the king's palace in Riyadh in April 1957. A Palestinian confessed to having secreted them under the instructions of the Egyptian military attaché.Footnote 95 Sketchy details in the British documents of a plot to kill Faisal in January 1965 involved Palestinians.Footnote 96 The bombs of November 1966 to February 1967 were initially blamed on Egyptian-trained Yemenis, and seventeen Yemenis were executed publicly in March 1967.Footnote 97 The Saudis arrested and beat a number of Palestinians in the wake of a few explosions on June 2, 1967, at American targets in Jedda.Footnote 98 South Yemenis from the NLF and the Hadramaut, Egyptian military instructors, and a least one Lebanese were among those arrested during the clampdown following the coup attempt of 1969.Footnote 99
Conclusion
Overall, the foregoing argues against standard views that migrants were involved in significant ways during the 1950s and 1960s in secular and Leftist opposition to dynasty and (neo)colonialism in the region. Return migrants, migrants, circular migrants, visitors, and exiles made a contribution to the ideas, organizations, and contests of the 1950s and 1960s. Migrations of various kinds played a role in transmitting pan-Arab, secular, republican, liberal, and Leftist ideas and practices to the region; they participated directly and indirectly in the growth of forms of organization (unions, clubs, parties, and so on) and participated in demonstrations, strikes, crowd actions, and forms of armed struggle. Migrants and border-crossers linked the region internally and externally to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (the Arab “revolutionary” states), to exile politics in Jordan and Lebanon, and more distantly to China and the Soviet Union, and even Venezuela and Indonesia (the Third World) in ways that the movement of arms, capital, goods, and ideas alone could not. Migrants, visitors, and exiles could both escape the repressive apparatus of a given state and draw on the geopolitical support of one or another country outside (and sometimes inside) the region. They transmitted ideas that motivated action—and modes of organization and contests to sustain it. Certain kinds of migrants—above all Arabs in this case—could draw on material and affective support in receiving countries because of the links they built and the causes with which they were identified.
The evidence and argument presented here therefore challenges the conventional view of secular, Leftist, and labor protest on the Arabian peninsula, in which endogenous, socioeconomic processes associated with modernization and/or capitalism are seen as giving rise to opposition in a rather automatic fashion, opposition which is then diminished by the increased incidence of migration after 1967. The conventional view understates the role of migrants—especially Palestinians, Egyptians, and Yemenis—in the wave of protest during the 1950s and 1960s. And it overstates the role of migration in the demobilization of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, other forms of migration, associated with Islamists exiled from Syria and Egypt or with Shi‘a networks linking the Gulf to Iran and Iraq, for example, played a role in new kinds of religious activism from the 1960s onward.Footnote 100 The turn to Asian labor in the 1970s was demobilizing, not just because it involved migration per se, but because Asian labor fell outside the pale of pan-Arab identification and mobilization. Asians had been largely excluded from the oppositional forces of the 1950s and 1960s, and thus such forces were acutely vulnerable to the greatly expanded presence of Asian labor thereafter.
This article does not accept in the least the repressive, narrowly nationalist, and Cold War-oriented thesis of Aramco, local dynasts, and the US government that “outside agitators,” alien ideas, and regional geopolitics were responsible for “trouble-making” among otherwise docile labor forces who had no “real” (read socioeconomic) grievances. As we have seen, the narrow British insistence on recognizing only socioeconomic grievances in Aden—and their attempts to exclude politics from such grievances—in the style of the “patriotic” and anticommunist British TUC—was a colonial tactic designed to create an easily cooptable and apolitical form of economic unionism in a Cold War context. That it failed owed much to the insistence of oppositional forces—constructed by “outsiders” as well as “insiders”—that such grievances could not be separated from politics. This was linked to their refusal, as Watt put it, “to forget that they are Arabs.”Footnote 101 In other words, employers and the state do not have a lock on deciding who should be engaged in politics and according to which ideas. Popular politics, organizations, ideas, and contests, inside and outside the labor movement, can and have crossed borders, and migrants can and have played important roles in making this happen.
The implication of the foregoing is not that migration is or is not an inherently mobilizing force: Much depends on history and context. The political role of migration is not given in advance. The idea instead is that the forms of endogenous socioeconomic determinism that have often underpinned understandings of labor protest and social movements, in the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere, need rethinking. Indeed, in the perspective adopted here, social protest was deeply inflected, not just by the stage or extent of capitalist development or modernization, or by the objective forms of political exclusion and economic exploitation that migrants faced, but by cultural, ideological, and political forms at the regional and global levels—forms that were conveyed to and around the region by migrants acting not just as resources, manpower, or wage labor but as interpretive and political subjects within a larger transnational sphere. Similar factors were involved in transmitting a global radicalism to and from the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 102 They were also at work, as this article has tried to show, in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s.
