The Jibalis of Southern Oman.

ARABIA'S WILDEST TRIBE

National Day in Oman has always been a colourful event but most recently the weeklong festivities were held in the Indian Ocean port of Salalah. The town, which was once the focus of Oman's long-running Dhofar rebellion, was inundated with tribesmen from the surrounding hills. Known as the Jibalis, these fierce hill people have only recently emerged from centuries of isolation.

Stripped to the waist beneath a blazing sun, a thousand Jibalis jostled and pushed, kicking up the dust with their bare, hardened feet. Whooping and shouting, they thronged around a military truck from which one overworked Omani soldier was handing out automatic rifles. As each tribesman got his hands on a weapon he would rush to one side, point the muzzle in the air and cock the rifle again and again, ever faster, as if trying to outdo his neighbour. A pulse of excitement was coursing through the ranks of these martial people. The Jibalis were on parade and today they had come down from the hills to show off before thousands of fellow Omanis, not to mention His Majesty, Sultan Qaboos.

An enormous tribesman approached me, his eyes looking curiously effeminate due to the ritual kohl make-up that is common in mountainous Arabia. "We are proud to be Dhofari", he told me, in Arabic tinged with an accent I had never heard before. "And we are proud to be here today with His Majesty and the townspeople as well as the Bedouin from the desert". He looked it too, with his long hair flowing back over massive shoulders and a ceremonial khanjar dagger tucked into his indigo cloth waistband.

But the loyalties of his tribal province of Dhofar were once far from assured. From 1965 until 1982 Dhofar was the scene of simmering rebellion against the government in Muscat. Backed by the communists of South Yemen, the Dhofar Liberation Front proved to be a persistent thorn in the government's side. For years the Marxist rebels were able to take advantage of Dhofar's rugged terrain, crossing and recrossing the 288-kilometre border with Yemen and ambushing Oman's forces from cave-riddled wadis.

Sultan Qaboos, who took over a repressed and primitive country from his father in 1970, called for help from both the Shah of Iran and from Britain's SAS. For Britain, busy withdrawing from 'east of Suez', it would have been politically unacceptable to deploy large forces in southern Arabia. Instead the SAS recruited bonds of loyal Jibalis, known as firqats, who knew their own territory backwards. "The firqats were excellent fighters", wrote General Sir Peter de la Billiere in his autobiography.

"They fought well without shoes and with ancient rifles".

But even in peacetime the Jibalis have learnt to live with some unpleasant natural hazards. At 4,000 feet above sea level, their cattle-rearing upland of Jebel Qarra is home to four species of particularly venomous vipers and cobras. In a village high above the plains I found o group of turbaned Jibalis crouching over a prostrate form, practicing the ancient ruboul - the medicine chant. The Jibalis have always been deeply superstitious and the ruboul, like so many mountain traditions, has been passed on through the generations. While one man sucks out the poison from a snakebite the others join a chorus of chants to drive the evil spirit from the body of the victim.

"The most dangerous things here are the snakes", one of the village elders, Ahmed Ali Jarbu, told me. "In the old days if you went into the valley and a snake bit you then you would die for certain - many people succumbed that way. But nowadays, as long as you can get to a road you can reach the hospital and you will survive, Inshallah, God willing".

But it is those very life-saving roads which have also brought the modern world, with its unaccustomed changes, to the Jibalis' doorstep. For centuries their horizons have been largely limited by the Indian Ocean to the south and the burning sands of Arabia's Empty Quarter to the north. Now, not even the rolling hills and plunging wadis of Dhofar are too remote for Oman's programme of modem infrastructural development. With access to concrete breeze blocks from the provincial capital Salalah, no one bothers to build the old traditional roundhouses any more. In place of these stone and wood structures where whole families would once gather around the fire beside a central tree trunk, most Jibali villages have become ramshackle collections of concrete and corrugated iron.

Down on the coast at Mina Raysut an enormous new container terminal is being built with tempting opportunities for young Jibalis to move away from their mountain homes. A duty free zone has been set up on the Yemeni border near Al Mazyunah and tourism is now being actively encouraged in Dhofar. Although most Jibalis I spoke to were full of enthusiasm for the pace of development in their country, some of the tribal elders feared for the future. "We are Omani but we have our mountain ways", one told me. "What will happen to our villages if the young all go away to work on the coast? Who will look after our cows then?"

To this day, no one knows for certain where the Jibalis first came from. Some say Yemen, others say northern Arabia and some even whisper that they were descended from the Jews. But with the modern world fast encroaching on their culture few could predict either where they are now heading.