Page 401 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

398 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

phrased it, ‘any friendly state which has helped or will help the Arabs in □
fruitful and effective manner’.

They will continue to be supplied with the same quantities of oil they used to obtain
before the reduction. The same special treatment will be given to every state which
adopts an important measure against Israel to persuade it to end its occupation of the
usurped Arab territories.

Everything about the communique, including the way in which it was
issued, was muddled and obscure. Only one copy of it was made available to
the newspaper reporters crowding the Kuwait Sheraton Hotel where the

meeting was held, and this was handwritten in Arabic, with phrases crossed
out and others inserted in pencil - including the reference to the rights of the
Palestinians. No translation into any other language was offered: indeed, the
OAPEC secretariat refused outright to produce an official English version,
either of the communique or of the actual resolution passed by the OAPEC

ministers. It was a pity that the two documents could not have been compared,
for there was an interesting discrepancy between them. The original resolution
stated that the recurrent 5 per cent cut in production every month would
continue

until such time as the international community compels Israel to relinquish our
occupied territories or until the production of every individual country reaches the
point where its economy does not permit of any further reduction without detriment to
its national and Arab obligations.

There was no mention of this last prudent reservation in the communique. In
its place was a piece of flim-flam about the ‘economic sacrifices’ the Arabs had

been making for the sake of the rest of the world in ‘producing quantities ot
their valuable oil wealth in excess of what is justified by the economic factors in
their states’.
The obfuscation surrounding the communique was to some extent calcu­

lated, so as to create bewilderment and disquiet in the West. But it was also a
reflection of the oil ministers’ own turbulent state of mind as a result of
developments on the fighting fronts in the previous forty-eight hours. The
fortunes of war were now turning steadily in favour of Israel. Israeli forces ha
cleared the Golan Heights and were well into Syria, where their forwar
*
elements were only twenty-five miles from Damascus. On the night of 15- ,
October Israeli troops launched a counter-attack across the Suez Canal, an y
the 17th Israeli armour was over the Canal in strength. As Egyptian arms
suffered progressively severe reverses from this point onwards, the measures
taken by the Arab oil states to raise oil prices and restrict supplies came

appear less and less like bold and resolute strokes in the tumult 0 war, a
more and more like peevish requitals for Arab defeats on the fie e
even, perhaps, as an underhand attempt to exploit the fortuitous ci
of war as an opportunity to fleece the West.