Page 257 - UAE Truncal States

Chapter Six

activities there, the demand for domestic slaves in al Hasa grew. The
economic situation in the Trucial States in the 1940s was going from
had to worse, general security outside the towns was low, and some
unscrupulous individuals were tempted to snatch Baluchis, ex­
slaves, and even Arabs, and sell them through the channels which
soon opened up. Thesiger recounts that while he stayed in al 'Ain in
October 1949 a well-known slave dealer from al Hasa, 'Ali al Murri,
had recently started trading between Hamasah and al Hasa, and
Thesiger’s companions claimed that when 'Ali al Murri visited a well
just before Thesiger’s parly arrived there, he had forty-eight slaves
with him.70
Many incidents of kidnappings of Baluchis, Persians and negroes
and their being transported from or via the Trucial Slates to al Hasa
are reported during the period before the Saudi force was evicted by
the Trucial Oman Levies in October 1955, thus ending a dispute
which had hindered the oil company’s activities. During the late
1950s the patrols of the Trucial Oman Levies, who were in 1956
renamed the Trucial Oman Scouts, made the transport of any sort of
contraband difficult.* however, the quickening pace of the economic
development concentrated the minds of people on the new opportu­
nities at home on the Trucial Coast, and the supply of slaves from the
Trucial States to al Hasa dried up completely.
While these activities were flourishing in periods such as during
the pearling boom and at the beginning of the oil industry in Saudi
Arabia, the individual outlaw or the beduin raider who kidnapped
immigrants and tribal people alike made a quick profit out of selling
them to the few inveterate dealers. The “unfortunate victims’’, as they
were usually called in British documents, were not necessarily all
that unfortunate. During the 1920s the Baluchis who arrived on the
Trucial Coast had fled from strife and famine at home to seek work,
food and shelter, all of which were usually more securely provided if
they belonged to a master than if they tried their luck on their own in
the rough-and-tumble of the expanding pearling ports. As for the
individuals who ended up as domestic servants in a Saudi household
or working in one of the newly established farms in al Hasa during
the 1940s and early 1950s, most were more comfortable there than
they would have been in the then depressed shaikhdoms of the
Trucial Coast. This is the gist of a number of accounts, for when
relatives succeeded in tracing their kidnapped kin to where they
were living, by then usually as free members of a well-to-do

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