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Qatar Territorial Disputes
Before the oil era, the gulf states made little effort
to
delineate their territories. Members of Arab tribes felt
loyalty
to their tribe or shaykh and tended to roam across the
Arabian
desert according to the needs of their flocks. Official
boundaries meant little, and the concept of allegiance to
a
distinct political unit was absent. Organized authority
was
confined to ports and oases. The delineation of borders
began
with the signing of the first oil concessions in the
1930s. The
national boundaries had been defined by the British, but
many of
these borders were never properly demarcated, leaving
opportunities for contention, especially in areas of the
most
valuable oil deposits. Until 1971 British-led forces
maintained
peace and order in the gulf, and British officials
arbitrated
local quarrels. After the withdrawal of these forces and
officials, old territorial claims and suppressed tribal
animosities rose to the surface. The concept of the modern
state-
-introduced into the gulf region by the European
powers--and the
sudden importance of boundaries to define ownership of oil
deposits kindled acute territorial disputes.
Iran has often laid claim to Bahrain, based on its
seventeenth-century defeat of the Portuguese and its
subsequent
occupation of the Bahrain archipelago. The Arab clan of
the Al
Khalifa, which has been the ruling family of Bahrain since
the
eighteenth century, in turn pushed out the Iranians in
1780. The
late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, raised the Bahrain
question
when the British withdrew from areas east of Suez, but he
dropped
his demand after a 1970 UN-sponsored plebiscite showed
that
Bahrainis overwhelmingly preferred independence to Iranian
hegemony. The religious leaders of the Iranian Revolution
revived
the claim to Bahrain primarily on the grounds that the
majority
of Bahrainis were Shia Muslims. Iranian secular leaders
subsequently renounced the claim in an attempt to
establish
better relations with Bahrain.
In 1971 Iranian forces occupied the islands of Abu
Musa, Tunb
al Kubra (Greater Tumb), and Tunb as Sughra (Lesser Tumb),
located at the mouth of the gulf between Iran and the UAE.
The
Iranians reasserted their historic claims to the islands,
although the Iranians had been dislodged by the British in
the
late nineteenth century. Iran continued to occupy the
islands in
1993, and its action remained a source of contention with
the
UAE, which claimed authority by virtue of Britain's
transfer of
the islands to the amirates of Sharjah and Ras al Khaymah.
By
late 1992, Sharjah and Iran had reached agreement with
regard to
Abu Musa, but Ras al Khaymah had not reached a settlement
with
Iran concerning Greater Tumb and Lesser Tumb.
Another point of contention in the gulf is the Bahraini
claim
to Az Zubarah on the northwest coast of Qatar and to Hawar
and
the adjacent islands forty kilometers south of Az Zubarah,
claims
that stem from former tribal areas and dynastic struggles.
The Al
Khalifa had settled at Az Zubarah before driving the
Iranians out
of Bahrain in the eighteenth century. The Al Thani ruling
family
of Qatar vigorously dispute the Al Khalifa claim to the
old
settlement area now in Qatari hands as well as laying
claim to
the Bahraini-occupied Hawar and adjacent islands, a
stone's throw
from the mainland of Qatar but more than twenty kilometers
from
Bahrain. The simmering quarrel reignited in the spring of
1986
when Qatari helicopters removed and "kidnapped" workmen
constructing a Bahraini coast guard station on Fasht ad
Dibal, a
reef off the coast of Qatar. Through Saudi mediation, the
parties
reached a fragile truce, whereby the Bahrainis agreed to
remove
their installations. However, in 1991 the dispute flared
up again
after Qatar instituted proceedings to let the
International Court
of Justice in The Hague decide whether it had
jurisdiction.
(Bahrain refused the jurisdiction of the court, and as of
early
1993 the dispute was unresolved.) The two countries
exchanged
complaints that their respective naval vessels had
harassed the
other's shipping in disputed waters.
As one pretext for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
Saddam
Husayn revived a long-standing Iraqi claim to the whole of
Kuwait
based on Ottoman boundaries. Ottoman Turkey exercised a
tenuous
sovereignty over Kuwait in the late nineteenth century,
but the
area passed under British protection in 1899. In 1932 Iraq
informally confirmed its border with Kuwait, which had
previously
been demarcated by the British. In 1961, after Kuwait's
independence and the withdrawal of British troops, Iraq
reasserted its claim to the amirate based on the Ottomans'
having
attached it to Basra Province. British troops and aircraft
were
rushed back to Kuwait. A Saudi-led force of 3,000 from the
League
of Arab States (Arab League) that supported Kuwait against
Iraqi
pressure soon replaced them.
The boundary issue again arose when the Baath (Arab
Socialist
Resurrection) Party came to power in Iraq after a 1963
revolution. The new government officially recognized the
independence of Kuwait and the boundaries Iraq had
accepted in
1932. Iraq nevertheless reinstated its claims to Bubiyan
and
Warbah in 1973, massing troops at the border. During the
1980-88
war with Iran, Iraq pressed for a long-term lease to the
islands
in order to improve its access to the gulf and its
strategic
position. Although Kuwait rebuffed Iraq, relations
continued to
be strained by boundary issues and inconclusive
negotiations over
the status of the islands.
In August 1991, Kuwait charged that a force of Iraqis,
backed
by gunboats, had attacked Bubiyan but had been repulsed
and many
of the invaders captured. UN investigators found that the
Iraqis
had come from fishing boats and had probably been
scavenging for
military supplies abandoned after the Persian Gulf War.
Kuwait
was suspected of having exaggerated the incident to
underscore
its need for international support against ongoing Iraqi
hostility.
A particularly long and acrimonious disagreement
involved
claims over the Al Buraymi Oasis, disputed since the
nineteenth
century among tribes from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and
Oman.
Although the tribes residing in the several settlements of
the
oasis were from Oman and Abu Dhabi, followers of the
Wahhabi (see Glossary)
religious movement that originated in Saudi
Arabia had
periodically occupied and exacted tribute from the area.
Oil
prospecting began on behalf of Saudi oil interests, and in
1952
the Saudis sent a small constabulary force to assert
control of
the oasis. When arbitration efforts broke down in 1955,
the
British dispatched the Trucial Oman Scouts to expel the
Saudi
contingent. After a new round of negotiations, a
settlement was
reached whereby Saudi Arabia recognized claims of Abu
Dhabi and
Oman to the oasis. In return, Abu Dhabi agreed to grant
Saudi
Arabia a land corridor to the gulf and a share of a
disputed oil
field. Other disagreements over boundaries and water
rights
remained, however.
The border between Oman and Yemen remained only
partially
defined, and, as of early 1993, border clashes had not
occurred
since 1988. Improving relations between Oman and the
People's
Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, also seen as South
Yemen)--
which was reunited with the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR, also
seen
as North Yemen) in 1990--offered some hope that the border
would
be demarcated. Earlier, the physical separation of the
southeern
portion of Oman from its territory on the Musandam
Peninsula (Ras
Musandam) was a source of friction between Oman and the
various
neighboring amirates that became the UAE in 1971.
Differences
over the disputed territory appeared to have subsided
after the
onset of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980.
Data as of January 1993
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