Page 72 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 69

Arabia were resumed and intensified. The California Arabian Standard Oil

Company (CASOC), the affiliate set up by Standard Oil of California to exploit
its concession in Saudi Arabia, had been enlarged by the accession of the Texas
Oil Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony Vacuum (Mobil) as
partners, and renamed the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). On
the eve of the war CASOC prospecting parties had made a swift reconnaissance

of the region at the foot of Qatar and further east, at about the time that the Iraq
Petroleum Company was awarded a concession by the shaikh of Abu Dhabi.
Following the war, ARAMCO surveying parties again began probing east of
Qatar and beyond the Sabkhat Matti. At the same time the Arabian research
division of ARAMCO at Dhahran embarked upon an intensive study of the

topography, tribes and history of the southern coast of the Gulf and its
hinterland, and of the sultanate of Oman as well, with special attention being
paid to past Saudi contacts with these regions.
The not unexpected upshot of these activities was the assertion by the Saudi
government in October 1949 of a new frontier claim. It was vastly different

from the Red Line put forward by Ibn Saud in April 1935, not so much in
relation to Qatar as in what it implied for Abu Dhabi. For the new Saudi
Arabia-Abu Dhabi frontier began on the coast only sixty miles west of Abu
Dhabi town, whence it ran south-west for some fifteen miles, then east and
north-east to end just north of the Buraimi oasis (see map p. 70). The claim was
tantamount to a demand for the forfeiture to Saudi Arabia of four-fifths of the

Abu Dhabi shaikhdom, including areas which in 1935 Ibn Saud had
specifically recognized as belonging to Abu Dhabi, notably the Liwa oasis, the
ancestral home of the ruling Al Nihayan shaikhs. All too clearly, the new claim
had less to do with any actual accession of authority to Saudi Arabia in the

region since 1935 (there had been none), or, alternatively, any diminution in
the effectiveness of the jurisdiction exercised there by the shaikh of Abu Dhabi
(again, there had been none), than with the renewal of oil prospecting in the
western areas of Abu Dhabi and the environs of Buraimi by Petroleum Con­
cessions Limited, the IPC subsidiary which held the concessionary rights for
the shaikhdom.

The British government’s initial response to the new Saudi frontier claim
was to dismiss it as totally unrealistic. It was recognized, however, that an early
settlement of the frontier question was highly desirable in view of the increased

operations of the oil companies in eastern Arabia, especially as a settlement
would be so much more difficult to obtain if oil were discovered in any part of
the region in dispute. Exchanges took place between the two governments,
therefore, to try to reach a measure of agreement on the constitution of a joint
commission to determine the frontiers, and the principles upon which such a
commission would operate. It was in the course of these exchanges that the

oreign Office, in an attempt to make a placatory gesture to the Saudis, and
particularly to the Amir Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz, Ibn Saud’s son and foreign