Page 230 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

1 C)() The Origins of the United Arab Emirates
Iraq and Libya reacted strongly to the occupation, the former
severing its diplomatic relations with Britain, the latter nationalising
the Libyan assets of British Petroleum, Saqr received little real
help. The occupation having occurred one day before British with­
drawal, he fell between two stools.
On 2 December 1971, the United Arab Emirates came into
being. The next day, the UAE signed a Treaty of Friendship
with Britain that cancelled and replaced all previous British treaties
with the member shaykhdoms. The bitter-sweet remark of one senior
British official thus acquired further reality:
Now all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre,
and the Lord God of Hosts, with a pardonable sense of realism,
appears to be on the side of the big battalions to the cast
and west of us, as we arc reduced again to being an island
ofT the north-west coast of Europe, leaving our memorials scattered
around the world and our language as the means of Asian com­
munication.10

The UAE, having been removed from British protection, thus became
a fully independent state, with membership of the Arab League,
the United Nations and all their affiliated bodies.
One of the UAE’s first tests came about a month after its birth.
In January 1972, Saqr bin Sultan of Sharjah, who had been living
in exile in Egypt since his deposal in 1965, attempted to regain
power by killing Khalid bin Muhammad, who had signed the
traitorous agreement with Iran. But the government of the UAE
refused to allow Saqr to succeed in the old manner, and intervened
immediately. Although Khalid and a number of others had already
died, the government decided to bring in Khalid’s brother Sultan,
a young graduate in agriculture from Cairo University, as ruler,
at the same time sending Saqr back into exile. The next month
Saqr bin Muhammad of Ras al-Khaimah, by then fully aware
of his weakness in isolation, joined the UAE.
Despite these positive moves, the future course of the new state
does not promise to be an easy one. Although it is unusually
well-endowed financially, it has to cope with innumerable problems,
for it is undergoing the reverse of the usual process of decolonisation:
economic independence was achieved before de facto political indepen­
dence. It can easily afford to allocate a large share of its vast
financial resources for social investments in order to develop its
public administration and its health, educational and other welfare
services. But the structure of a state takes longer than four years
(1968 to 1971) to come into being, especially as the withdrawal
of British forces was a completely unilateral move undertaken as part

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