Buraimi
The Struggle for Power, Influence and Oil
in South-eastern Arabia
by Michael Quentin Morton
Hardback:
304 pages, 26 b+w photographs, maps
ISBN: 9781848858183
"Somewhere out there in the
sleepy south-eastern desert of the Empty Quarter, east of Riyadh and west of Muscat, was a territory rich in oil. The Bedouin moved their flocks
from one grazing area to another as they followed the rain, caring nothing for what lay beneath the ground apart from water.
They owed their allegiance to the strongest leader and had no concept of property ownership in the Western sense. Defining
territory on a map was meaningless to them, since the range of
their grazing and the sway of their rulers, rather than lawyer’s talk or the stroke of a pen, determined the frontiers
of this land."
Buraimi is a non-fiction book about the Buraimi Dispute, a quarrel between Britain
and Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi Oasis, a collection of nine villages in south-eastern Arabia. The Buraimi Dispute was
a quarrel that determined the boundaries - and destinies - of the lower Gulf states and Oman.
The
seeds of the Buraimi Dispute were sown in 1933 at Jeddah when the government of Saudi Arabia granted an oil concession
for Eastern Arabia without precisely defining the geographical limits of the concession area. Matters came to a head in 1949
when Saudi Arabia made a claim to territory that included the Buraimi Oasis, which was believed to be “floating on a
sea of oil.” The Saudis based their claim on the earlier invasions of southern Arabia by religious warriors known
as Wahhabis.
They followed up this claim by occupying one of the oasis villages, Hamasa, in 1952. Britain, on
behalf of Oman and Abu Dhabi, resisted their claim. Despite various attempts to settle the dispute, arbitration proceedings
in Geneva failed; and in 1955 Britain and her allies reoccupied the oasis. The United States, defending
its oil interests in Saudi Arabia, was put on a collision course with the British Government. With the Suez Crisis a year
later, the dispute undermined the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries and redefined Britain’s
relationship with the Arab world.
The Buraimi Dispute continued to rumble on into the 1960s with
the question of the frontiers and refugees unresolved, and rebellions in Oman threatening to destabilise the region. Finally,
after the British withdrew from the Gulf in 1971, the dispute was apparently settled between the rulers of Saudi Arabia
and Abu Dhabi in 1974.
On one level, Buraimi
is a story of diplomatic subterfuge and high intrigue, of nations seeking to gain hegemony over the oil-rich territories of
the Arabian Peninsula. On another level, it is the story of oil explorers struggling against the harsh conditions of the desert
and the bullets of hostile tribesmen. The book brings these strands together against the stark beauty of the
Empty Quarter, one of the most desolate - yet oil-rich - regions of the Earth.
Buraimi: the Struggle for Power,
Influence and Oil in South-eastern Arabia is being published by I.B. Tauris Ltd. To visit the publisher's
website, please click here.
