Page 315 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

312 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Monroe Doctrine for the Gulf, he equally and more frequently denied that any
outside power had the right to maintain a naval presence in its waters. This
right, he asserted dogmatically, belonged to Persia alone. According to a
statement made by his prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveida, in April 1973,
‘two considerations of paramount significance have governed and will continue
to govern’ Persia’s policy in the Gulf.

Firstly, that the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman constitute our southern bordersjand,
secondly, that they form the artery through which daily over five million barrels of
Persian oil pass today and more than to million barrels will pass by the 1980s. ... We
cannot and we will not tolerate any subversive activity that would endanger the security
of the Straits of Hormuz or the freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf. This artery
must remain open to international commerce and we in Iran have the determination and
the capacity to see that it does.

The sentiments rang rather hollow when tested against Persia’s failure up to
that time to subscribe to any of the conventions on the law of the sea which had
been concluded in 1958. They sounded even more hollow when set against the
record of Persian intransigence and mischief-making in the Gulf over the past
two centuries, the latest instance of which had been the shah’s occupation of
Abu Musa and forcible seizure of the Tunbs at the close of 1971. Theobject of
this move had been to enlarge the extent of Persia’s maritime sovereignty and
with it her rights to the submarine shelf and any oil deposits it might contain.
At the same time, the acquisition of Abu Musa and the Tunbs brought the

main track of Gulf shipping, for a distance of too-150 miles west of the Straits
of Hormuz, wholly within Persian territorial waters. In so doing, the shah
ignored, or brushed aside as of little consequence, the fact that the straits were
also a major outlet to the world outside for the other Gulf states, none of which
was anxious to see them under exclusive Persian domination.
Nor would the world at large have necessarily benefited, as the shah would
have it believe it would, from Persian control of the straits. The straits are an
international waterway, through which the ships of all nations have right of
passage without let or hindrance, a status which has been established, as the
whole corpus of international law has been established, by the nations of the
West, almost invariably against the opposition, or at least without the acme
assistance, of the states of the East. There have already been dangerous
indications on the part of some Middle-Eastern countries of a desire to exert t e
kind of command over the narrow seas adjacent to their coasts which is
incompatible with international rights of free passage. (Perhaps the best

known instances are the closure of the Straits of Tiran by the
government in 1967, and the attempted closure of the Straits of Bab al-Man a
by the government of South Yemen at intervals before, during and a ter
October 1973 war.) It is the interest as well as the responsibility of the ma)^
maritime powers of the world to resist this tendency, particularly in an ar*a
such singular economic importance as the Gulf. While the shah reigne ,