Page 69 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

66 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Saudis access to Khaur al-Udaid, and preserved the land bridge between Qatar
and her neighbour, Abu Dhabi. Ibn Saud rejected it within twenty-four hours
of its being proposed to him. There were two reasons for his rejection - Jabal
Nakhsh and Khaur al-Udaid. Jabal Nakhsh was a low hill in the southern part
of Qatar which was suspected of forming part of an oil-bearing structure, and
Ibn Saud was determined to have it for this reason. He wanted Khaur al-Udaid
for strategic purposes - to gain access to the coast east of Qatar, thereby
separating that shaikhdom from Abu Dhabi and placing himself in a position to
put pressure upon both, as well as upon the Trucial Shaikhdoms as a whole. It
was for these very reasons that the British government had rejected his pro­
posed frontier and put forward the Riyad Line instead.
No further discussions on the frontier took place for more than a year. They
were resumed in March 1937, by which time the British attitude had under­
gone a change. The Foreign Office was worried about the deterioration of
Britain’s position in the Middle East as a consequence of increased Italian and
German diplomatic activities and the Arab rebellion which had broken out in
Palestine in 1936. The officials of the Eastern Department of the Foreign
Office, having convinced themselves that Ibn Saud was a figure of some
consequence on the Middle-Eastern stage, were anxious to remain on good
terms with him, in the hope that his influence might be brought to bear to help
to resolve the difficulties into which Britain had got herself in Palestine. To
procure his goodwill the Foreign Office suggested to the Iraq Petroleum
Company, which held the oil concession for Qatar, that it might consent to
surrender that part of its concession which included Jabal Nakhsh to Ibn Saud
and SOCAL. IPC flatly refused to do so, so the Foreign Office turned its
attention to Khaur al-Udaid as a means of appeasing Ibn Saud. Here it ran into
firm opposition from the India Office, which had charge of British relations
with the lesser Gulf states as well as overall responsibility for the British
position in the Gulf. Khaur al-Udaid, the Foreign Office was informed, was
indisputably Abu Dhabi territory, and had been formally recognized as such
by the British government on more than one occasion. The objection did not
strike the Foreign Office as insurmountable, and so throughout the latter half
of 1937 and much of 1938 it continued to press the India Office to reconsider its
stand on the issue.
The arguments it advanced in support of its aim are of some interest and
importance, for they were to be used again in 1970-71 in an endeavour to
persuade Abu Dhabi to gratify Saudi Arabia’s territorial claims. According to
the Foreign Office, it was as much in Abu Dhabi’s interest as it was in Britain’s
to reach a settlement on the frontier. Within a few years the situation in eastern
Arabia might well have changed radically, Ibn Saud’s authority could have
spread among the various tribes inhabiting the disputed areas, and Abu Dhabi
would be in a much weaker position to resist what would probably be a much
larger territorial claim. If Abu Dhabi refused to accept the logic of this line of