Page 159 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

8 Territorial Claims:
Saudi Arabia and Iran

The strategic location and vast petroleum resources of the Gulf
states are the principal reasons for their present overwhelming impor­
tance in international affairs. A brief glance at a map of the
region, however, reveals the consequences of this prominence: a
complex of neutral zones, undefined and disputed boundaries, and
territorial claims and counter-claims. The rapidity with which the
Gulf states have had to come to terms with the Western concepts
of territorial and even offshore limits has only added to the confusion,
for nothing is more alien to Arab society (bedouin and other)
than the permanent delineation of boundaries. The first time it
occurred in eastern Arabia was at the 1922 Conference of ‘Uqayr
between Percy Cox and Ibn Sa‘ud; it was then that Cox formulated
the concept of neutral zones as a solution to the problem of disputed
areas the exact ownership of which could not conveniently be settled
by negotiation.
It was during the interwar period that the Trucial Coast began
to experience the complications of attempting to define boundaries.
Oil exploration and the growing claims of Saudi Arabia and Iran
in the area were the principal factors behind these difficulties,
as manifested by the Buraimi dispute and the recent Iranian seizure
of the islands of Tunb and Abu Musa. The British authorities
did not adequately foresee and tackle these problems.
Furthermore, the arrival of geologists in search of petroleum
quickened the rulers’ own interest in their shaykhdoms’ inland boun­
daries, and caused them to re-examine their relationships with their
inland tribal allies. The result today is that the external boundaries

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