Page 227 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

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The Emergence of the United Arab Emirates 193

Oman also had certain claims on it, albeit weakly exercised—as
demonstrated by the fact that in 1938 a Petroleum Concessions
party of exploration failed, despite authorisation from the sultan,
to gain access to the oasis. Britain finally decided to give Buraimi
town and Ilamasah, controlled by the Na‘im and Al-bu-Shamis,
respectively, to Muscat, the rest to Abu Dhabi. The most important
village granted the latter was Al-Ain; hence the name given to
the oasis by Abu Dhabi today. Saudi Arabia never formally acknow­
ledged the rights of Abu Dhabi and Muscat in Buraimi, and the
boundary was not accepted by the Saudi Government until recently;
it was principally owing to their disagreement on this score that
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had previously had
no diplomatic relations with each other.
The core of the Buraimi dispute was the recognition that the
eastern coast of the Arabian peninsula possessed one of the largest
and richest oilfields in the world. After the discovery of oil in
Bahrain in 1932, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar were the next
in line; the revelations of the quantity of the precious mineral
exceeded the companies’ wildest dreams, and production there began
shortly after World War II. On the Trucial Coast, the process
was slower, and the first discoveries were ofF the shores of Abu
Dhabi. In 1950 Shakhbut, in pursuance of his earlier stand with
the oil companies, and aware of the post-war concept of the ‘continen­
tal shelf’,5 granted the Superior Oil Company a concession for
working his continental shelf. Petroleum Development Trucial Coast
(PDTC) contested the validity of the concession, so the matter
was put forward for arbitration: the decision reached was that
Shakhbut had had every right to conclude a separate concession
for his continental shelf, since there had been no reference to
it in the 1939 concession. In 1952, however, Superior relinquished
its concession, and D’Arcy Exploration, after acquiring it, formed
Abu Dhabi Marine Areas Ltd (ADMA); of this company the Com-
pagnic Fran^aise des Petroles owned one-third, and British Petroleum
(formerly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) two-thirds.
195^ was the principal turning-point in the modern history of
the Trucial Coast, for it was then that oil was struck off Abu
Dhabi by the ADMA.6 Two years later, the PDTC found oil
on the Abu Dhabi mainland, and as a result it changed its name
to the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Company (ADPC).7 Soon after, it
abandoned its 1937 concession from Dubai in order to concentrate
on production in Abu Dhabi. Oil was discovered ofT Dubai in
1966, but in nowhere near the same quantity as the oil found
off Abu Dhabi; Dubai Marine Areas Ltd, originally formed with
the same structure as the ADMA, held the concession there. The
remaining shaykhdoms have shown themselves eager for the benefits