Page 84 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

rain Shaikh in the Zabara enclave. Perhaps the reason for this non-commit­
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Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach?
Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare
N of ‘The Zabara Affair’. It ranked higher in the eyes of the
o story about Bahrain would be complete without an account
Shaikhs than any other political issue and it took up more time
and presented more difficulties than any of the problems with which I had
to deal. The individual attitudes towards the Zabara Question of the long
string of Residents and Political Agents who came and went during my
thirty-one years in Bahrain coloured the relations between the Shaikhs
and the British authorities throughout the whole of my time there. To
the outer world it was an affair of no importance, as someone in London
said, ‘Just another of those little border disputes which occur so frequently
in the East’, but to the Shaikhs of Bahrain it was a matter affecting their
dignity, prestige and honour, and it was this which made it so difficult to
arrive at any sort of agreement.
During the long reign of Shaikh Isa, throughout Shaikh Hamcd’s
reign and during the time of Shaikh Sulman, the present Ruler, the dis­
pute between the Khalifah and the Qatar Shaikhs about the ownership of
Zabara, the ancestral home of the Khalifah, on the coast of the Qatar
peninsula, which lies to the east of Bahrain, had been the cause of in­
cessant friction which sometimes led to fighting and bloodshed. For a few
years the matter would be quiescent, then some incident would stir up
the quarrel between the two states. For many years the British authorities
have dealt with the disputes between the Shaikhdoms in the Persian
Gulf, settling many of them by arbitration, but in this case the British
Government, both in the days when the India Office dealt with the
affairs of the Gulf and recently when these duties were taken over by the
Foreign Office, appeared to be averse to taking definite action or giving
a ruling about the ownership of Zabara or the special rights of the Bah-
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tal attitude was because the British Government was reluctant to antagon­
ize one or the other of the parties to the dispute. British representatives
in Bahrain wore inclined to think that the feeling about Zabara was an
idiosyncrasy of a particular Ruler, not a matter about which three
generations of the Khalifah had held identical views, nor did they
appreciate the bitter feelings which were caused by their vague and
sometimes contradictory statements.
If thirty or twenty or even ten years ago this dispute had been settled
once and for all by a definite statement by the British Government, then
the British representatives in Bahrain would have been spared the endless
complaints and recriminations to which they were subjected by the
Bahrain Shaikhs about a piece of barren, salty, waterless land containing
the ruins of what had once been a little town, a few crumbling walls of
an old fort and a mosque which was rapidly falling to pieces, inhabited
by a handful of Arabs who owed allegiance to the Shaikhs of Bahrain. In
these days boundary disputes in the Gulf are usually connected with oil,
but in the case of Zabara Bahrain had declared chat in the most unlikely
case of oil being found there she waived all rights to it.
The roots of the matter are embedded in the history of the Khalifah
family. Early in the eighteenth century they moved down the Gulf from
Kuwait and settled at Zabara, opposite Bahrain, on the desolate Qatar
peninsula which was then inhabited by a few wandering Arab tribes
whose opposition to the Khalifah was soon suppressed. Even two years
ago the population of Qatar was estimated to be not more than 25,000
persons—with an income of about sixteen million pounds a year! The
Khalifah built a little town at Zabara and from Zabara, in 1783, they
invaded Bahrain, drove out the Persians and made themselves masters of
the islands which they have held ever since. In [Sir Zabara was attacked
and destroyed by Muscat, but it was recovered by the Khalifah and rebuilt.
Meanwhile a family of merchants, known latterly as Al Thani, the
ancestors of the present Shaikh of Qatar, began to acquire influence and
naturally resented the presence of the Khalifah at Zabara, who used it
sometimes as a place of refuge when Bahrain was at war. In 1874 the
Naim tribe, who were adherents of the Khalifah living partly at Bahrain
and partly at Zabara, were besieged in Zabara by the Qatar Arabs but
the attackers were driven off with help from Bahrain. In 1895 the Turks,
supported by the Thani family and a tribe of dissident Arabs from
Bahrain, occupied Zabara but were ejected by the threat of bombardment
by the British Navy. From that time Zabara gradually ceased to be a
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