Sawt Al-Thawra

Sara Kazmi — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 07:53:13 +0000

Sawt al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) was a weekly bulletin published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), or Jabha al-Shaʻbīya li-Taḥrīr ʻUmān wa-al-Khalīj al-ʻArabī in Arabic, from 1972. The PFLOAG was a Marxist-Leninist organisation engaged in armed revolutionary struggle in Dhufar, Oman, against a counterinsurgency commanded by British officers with the assistance of Iranian, Jordanian and other forces. The 9th of June 1965 was declared as the first day of the Dhufar revolution which continued until the formal end of the war in 1976, although revolutionary activities, including in the cultural sphere, extended beyond this date. Sawt al-Thawra was a key periodical which articulated the PFLOAG’s revolutionary conception of the world, placing the Dhufar revolution within the global constellation of revolutionary Third World, leftist and anticolonial networks. Sawt al-Thawra was written, edited, and published in Aden, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), which was the main support base of the revolution. Its pages are filled with news items, articles, reports and interviews concerning not only the revolution, military operations, the counterinsurgency and its collaborators, but connections with and mentions of global revolutionary movements and progressive and socialist states across the world. This Teaching Tool considers the periodical as an important archival source and offers a detailed and contextualised exploration of how Sawt al-Thawra constructed an internationalist revolutionary worldview through analysis of key themes: connections with the transnational left in the Middle East including the Palestinian revolution and the Iranian left; references to various national liberation movements and figures from Cuba to Vietnam; attention to women’s liberation in the PFLOAG’s project of social transformation; and engagement with solidarity and support committees in the global New Left. Beyond its abundant expression of a politically situated and imagined revolutionary subjectivity, Sawt al-Thawra presents a window into the material transnational and transregional links between the Dhufar revolution and the tricontinental world in the long 1960s.

Oman – Revolutionary Papers

Sawt Al-Thawra