Page 78 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 75

abruptly asked him what proposals he had brought with him for ending the
frontier dispute. Zayid replied that he had brought none, since he had not
journeyed to Riyad to discuss the question. Thereupon Faisal produced his

own plan, which consisted of yet another version of the Saudi Arabia-Abu
Dhabi frontier and a proposal for putting the Saudi claim to sovereignty over
die Buraimi oasis to the test. The new frontier began on the coast at the eastern
edge of the Sabkhat Matti, ran south by south-west in a straight line to the 23rd
parallel, then eastwards along the parallel to the end of the zone of no oil
operations laid down in the 1954 arbitration agreement (see map p. 211). From
there it ran north by north-east to the terminal point of the Saudi 1949 claim,

travelled around the Buraimi circle and dropped down longitude 56° E. To
solve the question of ownership of the oasis, Faisal proposed that a plebiscite be
held among its inhabitants, after the manner of the plebiscite just held in
Bahrain. Before such a plebiscite could be held, however, it was essential,

Faisal insisted, that those tribesmen and their leaders who had fled to Saudi
Arabia in 1955, when the Saudi police detachment was expelled from the oasis,
should be permitted to return and resettle there.
To leave Zayid in no doubt about the seriousness of his intentions - or, for
that matter, about his motives - Faisal demanded that ADPC cease its drilling
operations on the Zarrara structure. Zarrara, he said, lay in Saudi territory.

ADPC had no right to operate in the Batin-Liwa or in the Kidan, i.e. below the
23rd parallel. If the company did not halt its activities between that parallel and
the de facto frontier (the Riyad Line) he would stop them by force. Zayid asked
for time to consider both the ultimatum and the new frontier claim. Faisal gave
him two weeks to halt A DPC’s operations, and two months in which to reply to

the frontier proposals. When Zayid pointed out that the sultan of Oman
exercised jurisdiction over part of the Buraimi oasis and would have to be
consulted, Faisal waved the matter aside as of no consequence.
What did the new claim imply? It was a retreat, certainly, from the sweeping
claim of 1949 and the only slightly less sweeping claim of 1967. But it still
proposed to annex to Saudi Arabia the westernmost portion of Abu Dhabi, i.e.

the Sabkhat Matti and the region west of the salt flat as far as Qatar. Saudi
Arabia and Qatar had more or less agreed upon their common frontier in
bilateral negotiations in 1965, but the settlement had not been recognized by
Britain because it infringed Abu Dhabi’s rights to the Khaur al-Udaid. Now,
by claiming the coast from the Sabkhat Matti up to and including the khaur,
Saudi Arabia was in effect cutting Abu Dhabi off from Qatar at a time when the

two shaikhdoms were trying to form a federation with Bahrain and the Trucial
Shaikhdoms. If the claim were conceded, the Saudis would acquire an outlet
on the lower Gulf from which to overawe the federation in the future, even to
isrupt its actual functioning. The claim also infringed the concessionary
rights over the western areas of Abu Dhabi held by ADPC and others
including Phillips Petroleum Company, ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi)’