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Arabia, the Gulf and the West

among the tribes, and their first instinct in any quarrel is to put it to the
arbitrament of the sword. Wealth, and the jealousies it provokes, is more likely
to sharpen than to soften that instinct.
The external dangers that the UAE faces are chiefly those of subversion by

Iraq, acting alone or with Russian encouragement, and of subjection by Saudi
Arabia or Persia. Since Britain’s departure at the close of 1971 the UAE has
been without any guarantee of protection from a power strong enough to make
such a guarantee effective. There seems to be little will among the federal rulers
to face the problem of the federation’s external security. Instead they appear
largely to have ignored it, believing that they will be able, each in his own way,

to surmount any crisis that may arise. Only Zayid seems to be oppressed by a
consciousness of the latent dangers which exist, just as he is the most anxious of
the federal rulers to keep the federation in being. Yet he has no prescription to
offer for the (JAE’s foreign and defence policy beyond the adoption of what he
calls ‘Arab solutions’ for the federation’s problems - in other words, appease­
ment, after the precedent set by Kuwait.

He himself has applied this technique to the resolution of his frontier
difficulties with Saudi Arabia. The question of the Saudi Arabia-Abu Dhabi
frontier, it may be recalled, was still unsettled at the time of the British
withdrawal from the Gulf, when King Faisal made it clear that while his
territorial demands upon Abu Dhabi remained unsatisfied he would not recog­

nize the existence or legitimacy of the UAE. Occasional exchanges over the
issue took place between Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi between 1972 and 1974,
and then in August of the latter year a compromise was apparently reached
between them. What exactly was contained in the agreement signed on 21

August 1974 is not certain, for the details of the agreement were never made
public by either side. It would seem, however, that Zayid gave the Saudis
nearly everything they wanted - a corridor to the sea, west of the Sabkhat
Matti, separating Qatar from Abu Dhabi and affording Saudi Arabia an outlet
to the lower Gulf; a goodly slice of the western part of his shaikhdom; and, in
the south, the bulk of the Zarrara oilfield. By capitulating to the Saudis in this
way, Zayid in effect set aside the concessionary rights he had awarded earlier to

foreign oil companies in the surrendered territories, including the Abu Dhabi
Petroleum Company’s rights to the Zarrara field, of which only a token portion
was left in the company’s concessionary area. In return, Zayid secured Faisal s
recognition of the UAE and the withdrawal of the Saudi claim to the Buraimi

oasis and the corridor of territory leading to it, a claim that was, in fact, as
baseless as Faisal’s claim to the western and southern areas of Abu Dhabi
which Zayid had seen fit to concede.
If Zayid had forgotten what he and previous rulers of Abu Dhabi had learn
from grim experience of Saudi ways - or perhaps had deluded himself into
believfng that these had changed - he was to be given a sharp reminder less tha
two yeafs later. In the late summer of 1976 the construction company whi