Page 90 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 87

they were still under an obligation to defend him. The Foreign Office, how­

ever, had provided against this contingency by pointing to the absence of any
explicit commitment in the existing treaties to defend the integrity of the
shaikhdom. That such a commitment implicitly resided in the trucial system,
that it had been acknowledged in the past, and that it had been confirmed by
precedent and practice, was of no consequence in the brave new world of

!970-71. Not only did the Foreign Office make it plain that there was not the
slightest chance that any assistance would be forthcoming if Zayid were so
foolish as to provoke Faisal’s wrath, but it even went so far as to express
indignation with him for having placed the British government in ‘an acutely
embarrassing position’ in May 1970 by failing to respond with sufficient
alacrity to Faisal’s ultimatum over the cessation of ADPC’s drilling operations

below the 23rd parallel, ft is not too much to say that there was at the beginning
of 1971 a disposition among officials at the Foreign Office - though not, to their
credit, among al! those concerned - to contemplate Zayid’s predicament with a
certain degree of relish. There was even an attempt at suggestio falsi by hinting
that Zayid may well have given unspecified undertakings to Faisal when he

visited him in Riyad, undertakings which he had not communicated to the
British government and which he had afterwards gone back on. In this case, it
was primly observed, since he had originally been cautioned by the Foreign
Office against making the visit, Zayid had only himself to blame for what had
subsequently befallen him.

The atmosphere of the suq also hung over the Foreign Office’s transactions
with the Persians at this time. Muhammad Reza Shah was determined to exact
a price for his acceptance of the UAE, yet he had, through an accident of
timing, already used up his major bargaining counter - the withdrawal of his
claim to Bahrain. Annoyed at his own miscalculation, and alarmed that he

might miss his share of the spoils after the election of a Conservative govern­
ment, he had, as we have seen, done a good deal of huffing and puffing about
the impossibility oi the Conservatives’ reversing the policy of withdrawal. His
alarm, needless to say, was unfounded: the Conservatives were only too willing
to placate him, and the only question that concerned them was how they might
do so without antagonizing his Arab neighbours across the Gulf.

Fortunately, the shah’s requirements seemed to be modest - the transfer to
Persia of three small islands, Abu Musa and the Tunbs, which lay just; inside
the entrance of the Gulf, roughly equidistant from the Persian shore and the
northern Trucial Coast. According to the shah, his reason for wanting posses­
sion of the islands was to safeguard the Gulfs main shipping channel, which,
e said, would be endangered if hostile forces, especially Arab revolutionaries,

were to seize the islands and fortify them. There was only one slight impedi­
ment to the extension of Persian sovereignty over the islands and this was that
bu Musa had hitherto been regarded as a dependency of the shaikhdom of