Page 88 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 85

said, he had emphasized that he was not interested in further sources of
revenue but only in recovering his ancestral territory.
Much the same kind of fanciful suggestions were made with regard to the
western areas of Abu Dhabi. The Saudis, so the Foreign Office told Zayid,
wanted possession of the Sabkhat Matti and the coast region to the west of the
salt flat so that they could run a pipeline up from Shaiba and the other oilfields

on the northern rim of the Rub al-Khali to the coast, where they proposed to
build an oil-loading terminal. Zayid countered this argument by repeating an
offer which his elder brother, Shaikh Shakhbut, had made when he was ruler
of transit rights for an ARAMCO pipeline across Abu Dhabi territory to
ADPC’s terminal off Jabal Dhannah. The offer was rejected by the Saudis
because, it was said, of the difficulties they and ARAMCO had encountered in

the operation of the Trans-Arabian pipeline (TAPline) through Syria to the
Mediterranean. When, in reply, it was pointed out to them that the coastal
waters to the west of Jabal Dhannah were too shallow to allow tankers of any
size to load there, the Saudis simply ignored the argument. They also ignored it
when it was applied to their ostensible reason for wanting possession of Khaur

al-Udaid, viz. to build a port and naval base there. What they really wanted, as
everyone involved knew, was an outlet on the lower Gulf which would enable
them to counter Persia’s growing influence and extend their own influence
over the emergent Union of Arab Emirates (UAE).
The Foreign Office came up with other suggestions for the western frontier
of Abu Dhabi, all of them designed to give the Saudis Khaur al-Udaid and the

adjacent coastline. None of the suggestions was accepted by either side. In
December a Saudi delegation arrived in London, led by two of Faisal’s
brothers, the Amir Fahad and the Amir Nawwaf. Although they had come
ostensibly to discuss a whole range of questions affecting Anglo-Saudi rela­
tions, they soon made it obvious that they were interested only in the frontier

dispute. Nawwaf ibn Abdul Aziz also made it abundantly clear, in language of
a kind not normally heard in the decorous corridors of Whitehall, that his
government intended to have its way over the frontier, and that if the territory
it was demanding was not made over to it promptly, it would revert to the far
more sweeping 1949 claim. No hint of the roughness of the amir’s discourse
was vouchsafed, however, in the communique issued by the Foreign Office at
the end of his visit, which spoke, in accents of surpassing banality, only of the

common desire of the two governments for peace and stability in the Gulf.
If the Foreign Office’s conduct smacked of the methods of the bazaar, or suq,
it was no more than an accurate reflection of its underlying attitude to the
frontier dispute. ‘It will not be a question of rights and wrongs but a suq
argain , was how one official in the late summer of 1970 defined the character

o the frontier negotiations. Though the Foreign Office professed to see itself in
Ah r°nk°f hones* broker in the haggling that went on over bits and pieces of
u Dhabi territory, honesty was hardly the outstanding feature of its