Page 423 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

420 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

by the French minister of finance, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, and the Persian

minister of economy, Houshang Ansari, was to be taken at its face value
Contracts initially worth $3,000 million, and potentially $5,000 million over a
ten-year period, were to be placed by the Persian government with French
industries. Five nuclear power stations would be built, along with desalination
plants, a gas liquefaction plant, a fleet of liquid-gas tankers, a petro-chemical
complex, a giant steel mill and a natural-gas pipeline to Europe. Though oil

supplies were not specifically mentioned, the whole purpose of the elaborate
charade - which even referred to joint Franco-Persian ventures in oil explora­
tion and exploitation in third countries - was to ensure a flow of oil to France.
What was more remarkable than these dreams of cloud-capp’d industrial
Xanadus arising in the Middle East was that the French, after their recent

experience in Algeria of the fragility of agreements of economic co-operation
with Middle-Eastern governments, should have sought so eagerly, and with
such haste, to repeat their mistakes. Perhaps, if the truth were known, they did
not in their hearts believe that anything substantial would ever eventuate from
these hurried transactions. Whatever the explanation, their behaviour was all

too representative of the frenzy which gripped the governments of Western
Europe and Japan in the early months of 1974. Along the golden roads which
led to Riyad and Tehran, Kuwait and Baghdad, the dust swirled in unending
clouds over the heads of Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, Italians, Japanese,
Belgians and others, hastening in their thousands to attend at the courts of the

oil dynasts. Vast and chimerical projects were floated in the shimmering air
over these distant, sun-baked capitals - nuclear reactors generating limitless
power, huge industrial complexes spewing forth steel and cement and
aluminium, giant desalination plants ceaselessly gushing oceans of water to
transform the deserts into gardens of Eden, great refineries and petro-chemical
works, huge dry-docks and splendid harbours, where glittering argosies

freighted with the world’s treasures rode at anchor under the ensigns of old,
Umayyad red and Abbasid black and Alid green — all conjured up b} the
gulli-gulli men of the industrial West and East for the delight and diversion of
oriental princes, in whose hands lay the power to reward with streams of yellow

gold from their overflowing treasuries and torrents of black gold from t eir
capacious reservoirs.
Not all the Western ministers, officials, industrialists, merchants an eiyr^
preneurs had to undertake the lengthy journey to remote parts to pay t ei
respects to the new arbiters of their destinies. For some the road led mere

St Moritz, where the ‘Shadow of God upon earth’, Muhammad Rezab a ,
taken up residence in early January, to enjoy the skiing, as was isc‘
and, on this occasion, to play the Grand Sophy receiving the homage 0 of the

and timorous Europe. One after another the legates an e™s all with
defeated powers came, the West Germans, the Frenc ’ 1 . h>’goodwill
deferential step and anxious countenance. None sought the shan