Page 209 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

206 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

dwindled, and their place has been taken by Pakistani, Jordanian and local
Arab officers. Much the same has happened in the Abu Dhabi Defence
Force, which formerly was officered almost exclusively by British officers,
most of them on contract. The penultimate stage in the severance of the
British connexion was reached in 1975, when the task of preparing the
ground for the eventual amalgamation of the UDF with the ADDF and

other local forces was entrusted to Egyptian army officers.
Amalgamation, however, has proved easier to decree than to achieve - and
even the decision to amalgamate provoked a good deal of acrimonious discus­
sion in the federal supreme council. Again the cause of the acrimony lay in the
military and financial preponderance exerted by Abu Dhabi. Agreement on

the proposed amalgamation was at last reached, at least on paper, in
November 1976. Effective control of the unified armed forces was to be
shared by Shaikh Rashid’s son, Muhammad, the federal minister of defence,
and Shaikh Zayid’s eldest son and putative heir, Khalifah, the designated
deputy commander of the federal forces. Fifteen months later, in the first
week of February 1978, Zayid issued a presidential decree while on a visit to

Pakistan, ordering the implementation of the merger and the transference of
control over the armed forces from their respective governments to the
federal defence headquarters in Abu Dhabi. At the same time he promoted
his twenty-five-year-old son, Sultan, from colonel to brigadier and appointed
him commander of all the federal armed forces. Such was the uproar that

greeted his action in Dubai (where Rashid was furious that he, as acting
president in Zayid’s absence, had not even been consulted beforehand) that
Zayid had to hasten back to restore a semblance of tranquillity. It is a fairly
safe prediction that a fully integrated command of the federal and local armed
forces will never be achieved while shaikhly pride and local sensibilities remain

as prickly as they are.
How reliable the several defence forces may be, in terms of both their
military capacity and their loyalty, is another question. The potential dan­
gers that the UAE faces are internal as much as external, whether they be
subversion within an individual shaikhdom or dissensions among the
shaikhdoms themselves. Fighting broke out between Sharjah and Fujairah in

the vicinity of Khaur Fakkan and Dibba in the summer of 1972, and was
successfully suppressed by the UDF and ADDF acting in co-operation. A
year later both forces were found to have a number of supporters of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman in their ranks. Most of the soldiers
who enlist in the two forces, and in the Dubai Defence Force, are Omanis,
Dhufaris or other tribesmen from outside the UAE. The majority of the

officers now, as we have seen, are Pakistanis, Jordanians or other Arabs,
some of local origin. That they, and more particularly the last, may cherish

nolitical ambitions, either of their own or on behalf of others, is far fro
unlikely in view of what has happened in most Arab countries over the past