Page 403 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

400 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

committed to the Syrian battlefront) but because she felt that such measures
were not sweeping enough. Al the OAPEC meeting in Kuwait the Iraqi oil
minister, Saadun al-Hammadi, had argued passionately for the expropriation
of American oil interests in every Arab country and the withdrawal of all Arab

investments in the United States. When this was rejected the Iraqis went their
own way, increasing their oil production during the period of the embargo and
cut-backs, and selling it for whatever prices they could get. They even man­
aged a further feat of pious larceny by ‘nationalizing’ Royal Dutch Shell’s
share of the Basra Petroleum Company, allegedly as a punishment for Dutch
support of Israel.

The seizure of Shell’s assets, which took place on 21 October, was prompted
by the action of Algeria the previous day in banning the shipment of oil to the
Netherlands. Kuwait scrambled to follow suit on 23 October, and before the
month was out all the other Arab oil states had joined in. Ostensibly the reason
for the embargo on the shipment of oil to the Netherlands was the ‘hostile’

attitude of the Dutch to the Arab cause, especially as demonstrated by their
allowing volunteers on their way to Israel to travel via Schiphol airport, and by
the contributions made by Jewish diamond brokers in Amsterdam to the
Israeli cause. But a more pertinent reason was the function of Rotterdam as one
of Europe’s principal ports of entry for crude oil and the site of a great complex

of refineries, which made it a major source of petroleum products for Western
Europe. To impede the flow of oil through Rotterdam would make the effects
of the restrictions upon production felt more quickly throughout the countries
of the European Economic Community. Political calculations of a similar kind
underlay the decision, first taken by Saudi Arabia on 20 October and later by
the other oil states, to cut off oil supplies to South Africa. Such a move, it was

confidently believed, would help persuade the black African states to take the
Arab side in the conflict, particularly if it were to be accompanied by a liberal
disbursement of funds, something the oil states could now well afford. The
confidence was not misplaced: the dual appeal to prejudice and venality
sufficed to obscure the centuries-old record of Arab spoliation in Africa and to

unite the black African states in denunciation of Israel.
The same aim lay behind the grandiloquent announcement in early
November that Portugal was to be included in the embargo, as much for her
wickedness in holding on to her colonial possessions in Africa as for her perfidy
in permitting the Azores to be used as a staging point in the American airlift of
arms to Israel. There was one other state on the Saudi Arabian ‘black list
coupled with South Africa in the instructions given by Yamani to ARAMCO
on 21 October - and this was the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Why such a rabid supporter of the Palestinian cause, which had armed,

succoured and given refuge to all manner of Palestinian terrorists, should have
been put under the ban of Riyad appears, at first sight, something of a mystery.

But when it is recalled that the embargo, like the cut-backs, had as muc