مجموعة ٤/٦(٢) "عسير: العلاقات بين المملكة العربية السعودية واليمن." [ظ‎‎٥‎٥] (٧٩٦/١١٧)

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8. I have no further news regarding Saudi military preparations. The
three barges are still lying peacefully off Jedda. The most significant pieces of
information given me by Fuad Bey were that, when war seemed imminent, it wa;S
intended to send the Amir Feisal, the King’s son, to the fi’ont, and that
Ibn Rubaiyan, the Ateyba leader, had marched south. You will have seen froip^.
the Koweit intelligence reports that this chieftain was, m the autumn, supposeu
to be more than half-hearted, but eventually decided to obey the King. Early
in the month it was widely rumoured that the Ateyba at Taif were in a rebellious
mood and were even creating disturbances in the town. Whate\ei the facts, the
Amir Feisal has gone personally to Taif two or three times since the beginning of
January. It may well be that Ibn Rubaiyan s Ateyba have latterly been not so
much disaffected as impatient for action.
9. I am sending copies of this despatch and enclosure to His Majesty’s
Ambassador in Rome and to the Commissioner at Aden.
I have, &c.
ANDREW RYAN.
Enclosure in No. 1.
Note respecting the Saudi-Yemen Situation.
FUAD BEY HAMZA called on me this morning. We had a long conversa
tion, parts of which were rather involved. The following, though not an exact
record, gives the gist of what passed :—
Fuad Bey confirmed what he had told Mr. Calvert yesterday afternoon about
his proposed journey to Abha to meet a representative of the Imam. I asked
whether this was to be the actual conference which had been foreshadowed or
merely a preliminary. Fuad Bey said that, in the intentions of his Government,
it was to be the conference. He added in reply to a further question that he would
have colleagues, but he did not name them; nor did he appear to know of any
Yemeni delegate other than Seyyid Abdullah Ibn Wazir, the general who has been
in command at Haradh and who has now been called to Sana. News of this gentle
man’s departure for Abha was awaited, and Fuad Bey would then proceed. He
was to go from Mecca by car via Bisha. He hoped to vary his route coming back
and to do some geographical work, but sounded doubtful as to whether he would
venture as far as Najran for this purpose.
I told Fuad Bey that I had been completely mystified by the apparent
discrepancies between the Umm-al-Qura article of the 16th January, and what he
had told me. I said that I now reduced the areas in dispute to three, although
there might be more. Firstly, there was Asir Tihama. Here Ibn Saud was in a
strong position, and my only difficulty was that we had never been told what the
inland boundary of Asir Tihama was. The Saudi Government appeared to be
unwilling to supply this information, though I had given him frequent
opportunities of telling me the effect of the Saudi Idrisi Treaty of 1920. Inverting
the geographical order, I next took Najran, both the history and geography of
which were doubtful. If Fuad Bey was becoming a geographer, I was becoming
an historian, and I could not discover that either of the disputants had really held
Najran in recent times. That was why I favoured the idea of its being made a
neutral area.
Between these two areas I said there was a mountainous region, partly Asir
Tihama and partly Asir Surat, though I could not say wdiere they met. I inferred
from the L 1 mm-al-Qura article that the Beni Malik and Abadil, who appeared to
be now an important bone of contention, were in the highlands of Asir Tihama.
I explained why the account of events in the Umm-al-Qura article had so
baffled me. It almost read as though the Amir Saud had gone off on his own,
though this was in itself incredible. Why, for instance, had so important a
personage got no wireless ?
Fuad Bey observed that if there were any discrepancy between statements of
his and a newspaper article, his own statements must naturally be preferred. He
did not seriously pretend that the article was anything but inspired, but he
intimated that some of the dates might not be quite right. His main line of
defence was, however, that the Imam s actions were quite at variance with his
words. The fact was that at some time before the 9th January the Imam’s
activities among the Beni Malik and Abadil had gone the length of invasion and