Thirty years ago this week, the last British forces in Aden abandoned Britain's Middle East headquarters and the territory became independent, as South Yemen. The two-year independence struggle in Britain's only Arabian colony cost hundreds of British and Arab lives. But many more people were to meet a violent end in the years which lay ahead. Brian Barron, who was the BBC's last correspondent in Aden, has just been back, and says the British withdrawal was one of the country's shabbiest retreats from colonialism.

There can be few more evocative names than Steamer Point. Here for well over a hundred years the world's shipping - from rusting old tubs to the sleekest liners afloat - put in for fuel. Aden is just four miles off the busiest east-west trade route. Once it welcomed more ships than Singapore or Rotterdam. Generations of sailors, among them Joseph Conrad, have come ashore at Prince of Wales pier in the shadow of Little Ben, a colonial clocktower that today has fallen on hard times. Beside the tower and its clock-face without hands is a ruined house, pockmarked with bullet and shell holes, a reminder of the half a dozen civil wars that have punctuated thirty violent years of independence.

The back streets of Steamer Point are choked with hundreds of tons of uncollected rubbish - for Aden's goats, it is paradise. The souvenir shops that once prospered from steamship passengers are barred and shuttered. Only the Aziz bookshop is open. Mr Aziz, calm and collected in late middle age, sits in the doorway clutching a large radio tuned to BBC World Service. "All the other shopkeepers have gone," says Mr Aziz. "They left because of the troubles. Because very few ships come here. They've gone back to India and Pakistan and the Gulf."

A mile away is Mallaa Main Street dubbed by Fleet Street headline writers in the 60s as Murder Mile. Often the Arab nationalists in the independence struggle didn't differentiate between soldiers and civilians. One of my friends, a young English civil servant at the start of his career was shot in the back getting into his car. What a waste. What a pointless action. To be fair, the British forces were not paragons either.

One steamy morning in the Crater district I arrived to find Colonel Colin Mitchell - known to the media as Mad Mitch because of his gungho style - directing a group of squaddies who were stacking, like a butcher's delivery, the corpses of six Arabs on the pavement. They'd been shot as they tried to ambush a patrol. "It was like shooting grouse," said the Colonel. "A brace here and a brace there. It was over in seconds."

A totally different version of such tragedies is displayed in Aden's Military Museum. Scattered throughout the dusty rooms are clapped out bits of military hardware from the independence struggle and oil paintings depicting British brutality. The faded black-and-white photos of the stalwarts of the uprising, all in their twenties, all members of the NLF, the National Liberation Front, are the images of dead men.

Thirty years ago I watched them disembark at Khormaksar airbase just hours after the last British forces had left by helicopter. The NLF leadership had flown in to inherit their kingdom. Little was known about them except that they were Arabs from outlying provinces who'd been trained by George Habash and other Palestinian radicals in Lebanon.

Within minutes the new regime was talking about scientific socialism. Soon we realised that Britain's blunders had ushered in the Arab world's first Marxist state named the People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen. For a while the comrades were hailed as liberators. In fact, they'd liquidated the only other Arab faction which posed a threat. In the two decades that followed they fell out and murdered each other one by one - a classic example of a revolution devouring its children.

With such a burden of recent history you might think that Aden would have had enough. A new course would be in order. In fact they have tried but with only mixed results.

The opportunity came when the Soviet Union collapsed. Moscow had turned South Yemen into a client state. When the roubles ran out the handful of surviving Aden revolutionaries were bankrupt and friendless. They sold their country's independence to their cousins across the border in North Yemen; the two countries were united as the Yemen Republic. It was an unequal alliance because there are six times more northerners than southerners. Three years ago the unhappy south tried to secede and civil war was the result. After besieging Aden the northerners finally won.

Today Adenis seem sullen. One Arab journalist told me: "This is not unity it's occupation. There is an incredible amount of resentment against northerners who've come down here and bought up prime buildings and commandeered what they want." He finished with a warning: "If nothing is done there's going to be an explosion." And explosions there have been in recent weeks: a series of bomb blasts blamed on southern dissidents. The secret police have rounded up scores of suspects.

Beneath the towering dark red walls of an extinct volcano nestles the Crater district. Bored men sit and squat in doorways. Women swaddled in black veils hurry past. Islam is ascendant, Marxism reviled. Apart from the soaring chorus of the calls to prayers five times a day, not much is going on here. Unemployment could be 70%. For decades the communist authorities bought the acquiescence of the people by employing them in a vast, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Private enterprise was banned. Now work is hard to find.

The one glimmer of hope is a major project to redevelop Aden Port with international help. It has become the forgotten destination of the seven seas.

Today, older Adenis look back on British rule with affection. The failure to provide durable institutions, the ugliness of the last two years of Pax Britannica, the indecent haste of the evacuation, all are excused or forgotten. No doubt 23 years of murder and tyranny, followed by seven years of tension and another civil war, are enough to gild the colonial era. But of all our Imperial farewells, this still seems the shabbiest by far.
 

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