University of London

Oman and the West: State Formation in Oman since 1920

A thesis submitted to the London School of Economics
and Political Science in candidacy for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy

Francis Carey Owtram
1999

UMI Number: U126805

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bLOSiLZZLLdABSTRACTThis thesis analyses the external and internal influences on the process of state
formation in Oman since 1920 and places this process in comparative perspective withthe other states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It considers the extent to which theconcepts of informal empire and collaboration are useful in analysing the relationshipbetween Oman, Britain and the United States. The theoretical framework is thehistorical materialist paradigm of International Relations. State formation in Oman
since 1920 is examined in a historical narrative structured by three themes: (1) theinternational context of Western involvement, (2) the development of Western strategicinterests in Oman and (3) their economic, social and political impact on Oman.

The incorporation of the Arabian littoral into the security sphere of the British empire
in India separated the Imamate in the mountainous interior of Oman from the Britishbacked Sultans in Muscat. This culminated in the Treaty of Sib in 1920 following
which the government of the Sultanate was restructured by British officials. The
discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 marked a new phase in the incorporation of the
Arabian peninsula into the capitalist world-system. In south-east Arabia this led to theoccupation of the interior in 1955 by the British-supported forces of Sa’id bin Taimur.
The coup of 1970 in which Qabus became Sultan allowed the development of a proWestern rentier state and the defeat of the rebels in Dhofar. British imperial withdrawal
from the region was completed with the relinquishment of its bases in the Sultanate of
Oman in 1977. The development of a strategic relationship between Oman and theUnited States in the 1980s enhanced American military deployment during the Kuwait
crisis of 1990-1991. In the aftermath of this conflict Oman faces the challenge ofpolitical development in an environment of diminishing oil reserves.

Table of Contents
Abstract
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes to the Reader

i
ii
iii
iv
v

Introduction

001

Chapter 1

The Literature Review

018

Chapter 2

Oman and British Imperial Expansion 1798- 1920

053

Chapter 3

Informal Empire in Oman 1921 - 1931

084

Chapter 4

The Expansion of the Sultanate 1932 - 1955

108

Chapter 5

The Consolidation of the Omani State 1956 - 1977

145

Chapter 6

Western Strategic Interests in the Contemporary
Omani State

206

Conclusions

273

Appendices
US government documents
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D‘English Interest in Possible Oil Deposits in the
Arabian Peninsula’, 1931
Visit of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman to theUnited States‘Information on the Sultanate of Muscat andOman
and his country’, 1938
Current Information on Muscat, 1949

291
296
299
308

UK government documents
Appendix E
Appendix F
Appendix G
Appendix H
Appendix I‘Muscat and Oman’, 1960
‘Muscat Annual Report for the Year 1965 ’
Operation Fate, 1966
‘Security - Muscat and Oman’, 1966
‘Persian Gulf Annual Review for 1967’

314
335
346
347
352

Japanese Bank document
Appendix J

Request for political risk assessment

363

Bibliography

365

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank people who have helped me with this project in various ways. I
first discussed the topic of Oman and the West with Dr David Pool at the University ofManchester. At the London School of Economics Professor Fred Halliday has
supervised this thesis with interest and encouragement and I have benefited from his
incisive comments. I valued my conversations on Oman and Aden with my fellow PhD
students at the LSE, Abdul Malik al-Hinawi and Christian Lekon. The input from theexaminers of the thesis, Dr Charles Tripp and Professor Tim Niblock, considerably
sharpened various aspects of the study.

I would like to particularly thank my parents, Peter and Jane Owtram, without whose
help this thesis would not have been completed. I would also like to thank Michael
Owtram for his contribution. The rest of my family encouraged me in this endeavour inmany ways. Finally, I would like to thank Corinne Lynne for all her support.

ABBREVIATIONS
AOC
AW AC
BATT
BFAP
CID
DLF
EEIC
FO
GCC
IPC
MOFF
MR
MT$
NCO
NLF
NFR
ORM
PDO
PFLO/AG

PGSC
PRO
RAF
RDF
SAF
SAS
SOCAL
SOAF
SGRF
UAE
USAAF
USCENTCOMAir Officer Commanding
Airborne Warning and Control System
British Army Training Team
British Forces Aden Protectorate
Committee of Imperial Defence
Dhofar Liberation Front
English East Indian Company
Foreign Office; Foreign Office Records in the PRO
Gulf Cooperation Council
Iraq Petroleum Company
Muscat and Oman Field Regiment
Muscat Regiment
Maria Theresa Dollar
Non-Commissioned Officer
National Liberation Front
Northern Frontier Regiment
Oman Revolutionary Movement
Petroleum Development (Oman) Ltd
Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman; previously Popular
Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf or Popular
Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf
Persian Gulf Sub-Committee of the CID
Public Records Office (London)
Royal Air Force
Rapid Deployment Force
Sultan’s Armed Forces (Oman)
Special Air Services (British)
Standard Oil of California
Sultan of Oman’s Air ForceState General Reserve Fund
United Arab Emirates
US Army Air Force
US Central Command

NOTES TO THE READER

The Harvard system has been used for references to books in the text. The author’sname and the date of publication are given in the text, while the full reference is givenin the bibliography. A numbered footnoting system, however, has also been employed where elaboration is made of points in the text or where the reference is to material in amedia source or unpublished primary sources.

Transliteration of Arabic words and names has generally followed that used in theInternational Journal o f Middle Exist Studies.

The conflict involving the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait 1990-1991 is termed the Kuwait
War.

v

Introduction

The genesis of this thesis was in an interest in the reasons for the military involvementof Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, in the Persian Gulf area
since World War Two. Oman provided an interesting country for an examination of
one particular case in depth. Thus the main focus of the thesis is the development ofWestern strategic interests and military involvement in Oman in the 20th century.
Engagement with Oman on this basis led to an exploration of the historical origins andcontext for this Western involvement and its impact on Omani society. Study followedof the way in which Omani society had developed, given its ecology and geographicalposition, and of concepts and theorisation which could explain the relationship between
Oman, Britain and the United States. Theories of state formation and informal
imperialism have been chosen for the theoretical framework of the thesis. The attention
paid to Western strategic interests and military involvement is justified with regards to
its relevance to the analysis of state formation as military support to the Sultanate has
been the most significant support given by the West; without it the Sultanate would
most likely not exist. This thesis analyses, therefore, the external and internal
influences on the process of state formation in Oman in the period since 1920 during
which Oman developed from part of Britain’s informal empire to a state in thecontemporary international system.

The thesis aims to address three central questions on informal empire and state
formation in the case of Oman. (1) What factors have been most significant in theprocess of state formation in Oman in the era of modem Middle East politics? (2) In
comparative perspective, what is it about state formation in Oman that makes Oman1

different from the other GCC states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and theUnited Arab Emirates? (3) To what extent are the concepts of informal empire andcollaboration useful in analysing the relationship between Oman and the West?

With regard to the first question the thesis advanced is that the modem Omani state has
been produced by the process of interaction between imperialism, that is, external
domination or intervention in some form, and anti-imperialism, that is, the internal
resistance, as expressed in the repeated rebellions of Omanis. The external intervention
at every stage in the process of state formation in the modem era was based not on
economic interests intrinsic to Oman but for strategic and foreign policy reasons
relating to economic interests external to Oman. Thus it has been Western strategicinterests and Oman’s geopolitical strategic importance in the broad context of Persian
Gulf policy which have most influenced the evolution of Oman’s contemporary statefrom the pattern of Oman’s ‘traditional’ political dynamics - those pertaining prior to
the impact of the West and the incorporation of Oman into the world capitalist market.
The impact of capitalism on the Omani political system was mediated twofold,externally and internally. Externally it was mediated by British imperial strategicinterests in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf area. Internally it was mediated by the
pre-existing economic, social and political institutions of Oman. These external andinternal influences on state formation in Oman and the interaction between them are theanalytical themes of this study.

In comparative perspective state formation in Oman, whilst sharing a number ofsimilarities to the rest of the oil monarchies of the Gulf, also displays a number ofdistinct differences. These are in the nature of Oman’s political identity, geographical2diversity and at the level of the ruling family. Sultan Qabus is alone at the apex of thepolitical system far more than is the case in the other GCC states.

It would be hard to find a better example of informal empire than Oman - it represents
an interesting case of the relationship between an imperial power and a peripheral
society and the crises of collaboration that constituted this relationship. The
relationship between Oman and Britain between 1798 and 1977 can be seen as divided
into a number of historical stages, each representing a particular type of collaborative
alliance between Muscat and Britain; each of these periods was marked off by particularcrises of collaboration. Around 1800 Britain became more than just one of theEuropean powers operating in the Indian Ocean. The Sultan of Muscat formed analliance with the British to advance his own aims although the British were wary of
becoming drawn into internal Arabian conflicts. Over the course of the 19th century thisalliance turned into a relationship of domination as the actions of the British
undermined the political and economic basis of the Sultans’ rule (see chapter two). The
British-sponsored separation of the African and Arabian A1 Bu Sa’id Sultanates
indicated increasingly direct British arbitration in Omani affairs. Following the
Imamate’s taking of Muscat in 1868 the British helped to restore the Sultan to power in
1871 and Muscat became a de facto protectorate; there followed a number of armed
interventions by British warships in defence of their client Sultans against attacking
tribal forces (Halliday 1974:272). In 1886 a formal guarantee was given to Sultan Turkito uphold him against unprovoked aggression. From the 1890s the British instituted a‘forward policy’ in the Gulf which ever more tightly controlled the foreign relations of
the Sultanate. This was signified by the 1891 British-Muscat treaty in which the Sultans
promised never to cede any territory to a third power. This was the closest Oman came3

to being formally a part of the British empire (Peterson 1978: 141). In the 1920s the
British became more involved in the running of internal government as well as thecontrol of the external relations of Muscat. This constituted informal empire which wasmaintained, Sa’id bin Taimur’s efforts notwithstanding, until 1970. The ending of
informal empire is by definition not as distinct as formal colonial withdrawal. The
returning of the airbases at Salalah and Masirah to the Omani government in 1977 canbe designated as the final end of British informal empire in Oman. At this point the
British, having prevented another Aden, withdrew and turned to other means to secure
their interests, namely, by means of influence in the Omani ‘post-colonial’ state which
the British had helped to construct.

These arguments on the process of state formation in Oman will be advanced using ahistorical narrative structured by three interrelated themes: the international context of
external involvement, the nature of that involvement and its impact on Omani society.

Theme OneThe context of the relationship is identified as the world wide expansion of thecapitalism and its accompanying social relations and state system. The impact of
capitalism on the Middle East and specifically Oman was mediated by the agency of
British imperial expansion. Part of this broad historical process has been theascendancy of Britain followed by imperial decline and de-colonisation, the rise of theUnited States and the Cold War, the development of Arab nationalism, and the collapseof the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

4

In terms of Oman’s relationship with the West since 1920 three inter-related
developments have been of most importance. Firstly, the change in the basis of Westerninterest in the Arabian peninsula from its place in the security of the British Raj to theoil reserves lying in the strata of the peninsula itself; secondly, the gradual replacementof Britain by the United States as the predominant Western power in the Middle East;and thirdly, the resulting change in responsibility for the security of the Gulf.

However, there has been an underlying constant in Oman’s place in this changing
context: Oman’s key importance to the West has always been strategic (Halliday 1974:
265); specifically, its role in protecting an economic interest external to Oman - be it the
Raj or the vast oil reserves of the Saudi Arabia - described by American diplomats in1945 as ‘one of the greatest material prizes in history’ (quoted in Stork 1980c: 24). This
is not to underestimate the considerable Western economic interests in Oman but rather
to emphasise that placed within the overall context they are relatively less significant.

Theme Two

This wider context of economic interest, foreign policy and defence strategy has createdstrategic interests in Oman and an ensuing involvement to protect those interests. In
1920 these strategic interests were such that Oman was a ‘safe and static link’ in British
schemes for Indian Ocean security (Halliday 1974: 265). By the 1990s these interests
had developed so that Oman had played a vital role in Western military intervention toprotect the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Not surprisingly, first Britain andthen the United States have been concerned that there should be a social order in Oman
conducive to the maintenance of these interests. Essentially, this was achieved through5the creation and maintenance of a client relationship with the A1 Bu Sa’id dynasty until
the 1970s. This necessitated periodic interventions to either support A1 Bu Sa’id rulers
or, alternatively, to depose or undermine individual rulers when required.

Theme Three

The third theme is the consequences of Western involvement for Oman. The pattern of
economy, social order, government and external relations have all been fundamentallyaffected by the impact of the West. For this describes the consequences for Oman of its
integration in the modem state system that has resulted from the world wide expansionof capitalism.

The period since 1920, while it has sub-divisions in it, forms a distinct period in therelationship between Oman and the West in terms of the three narrative themes
employed. (1) From the 1800s to the First World War British strategic interests inOman were defined by the place it held in the British perception of the security of the
Raj. With the discovery of oil in significant quantities in and around the Persian Gulf
just prior to World War One came the realisation that the Arabian Peninsula could holdoil bearing strata. It was the subsequent development of these vast oil reserves that was
to replace the British Raj as the economic interest framing Western strategic interests in
Oman. (2) The development of air routes along the Arabian littoral in the 1920s to
facilitate air communications and the application of air power led to the creation ofimportant new strategic interests in Oman. (3) The granting of oil concessions by
Sultan Taimur in the 1920s marked the beginning of a new phase in the incorporation of6Oman into the world capitalist market and state system. It started with the firstprospecting for oil and concomitant need to define the form and boundaries of the state,through to the first exports of oil and subsequent development of a rentier state.

Use of primary sources

The primary sources used in this thesis consist of documents from the Foreign Office371 series and the Cabinet Office series. The use of primary source material is confinedalmost entirely to chapter five on British government documents from the 1960s which
had recently been released under the ‘thirty-year’ rule. The decision was taken by the
researcher to concentrate available financial resources for research on primary sourceson newly released documents of the 1960s as these were most likely not have been
considered before by other studies. It was the opinion of the researcher that the existing
work of Peterson, Bierschenk and Wilkinson, based on archival research, was ofsufficient extent and quality to provide the material for this study of state formation
over a relatively long historical period. One way in which this study could be
developed would be to undertake further archival research on the period covered bychapters two, three and four. A further development of the study would be to undertakearchival research on Arabic sources and collections of archives in the United States.

The British government documents included in the appendices are significant in thatthey demonstrate the development and implementation of British policy towards Oman
at different levels of government: Cabinet level, regional level and in the Sultanate
itself. The 1960 Note by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Appendix E) issignificant in that it demonstrates how discussion took place at Cabinet level of the7direction of policy toward the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman. To the researcher’s
knowledge it has not been used before in any academic study on Oman. It is significant
in that it illustrates how British government policy towards Oman was placed in thewider context of British economic and strategic interests in the Gulf as a whole, notably
Kuwaiti oil. A number of possible courses of action towards the Sultanate were
outlined including strategic disengagement and an official security guarantee.
Ultimately these were discounted in favour of a continuation of the 1958 policy of
supporting the economic and military development of the Sultanate and that this policy
should be enhanced with the increased resources necessary to achieve its goal.

At regional level the ‘Persian Gulf: Annual Review for 1967/1968’ (Appendix I) was
written by the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf. This is significant in that it
highlights the Political Resident’s perception of the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War
and the ending of colonial rule in Aden on the Persian Gulf. Sir Stuart Crawford notedthat the impact of the latter was particularly pronounced in the minds of the Rulers.
Whilst the Sultanate in his view was not much affected by the Six Day War the UK
withdrawal from South Arabia affected the Sultanate more than the other rulers in the
Persian Gulf. The potential for these developments to intensify the rebellion in Dhofar
was anticipated. The Muscat Annual Report 1965 (Appendix F) gives an insight into
the view of the Sultanate held by the Consul-General, particularly the effect of thedevelopment programme initiated after the Jebel Akhdar War and its relationship to
anti-government activity in Oman and Dhofar. With this consideration of the sources
used we can now highlight two significant ways in which the empirical material has
been ordered in the study: in the phases of state formation identified and the applicationof theoiy.

8Phases of state formation in Oman since 1920

From 1798 to 1920 state formation in Oman is defined by the requirements of the
British link with India. State formation in Oman in the period since 1920 can bedivided into the following stages: 1920 - 1931, 1932 - 1955, 1956 - 1977 and 1978 to
the present. The period 1920 -1977 is the era of British informal empire in Oman
which saw a particular form of British imperial influence. It will be argued that in eachof these stages up to 1977, the decisive factor was British strategic interest in thecontext of an international environment that was subject to continuous change.

British informal empire in Oman 1921 - 1931

This phase is defined by the outcome of the First World War. Britain’s greater
involvement in the Middle East required a greater degree of supervision and control in
the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the period immediately after the 1920 Treaty of Sib
represents the high point of British supervision of the government of Oman. Sultan
Taymur bin Faisal (r. 1913 - 1932) as we shall see later, was unwilling to ‘rule’ in thesituation Britain presented him with and absented himself from Muscat. Therefore aCouncil of Ministers (1920 - 1932) ‘governed’ with British advisers and effectively
British control of the customs revenue. Also during this time the development of newWestern strategic interests in Oman in the form of air routes and oil prospecting began
to increase the strategic importance of Oman.

9The expansion of the Sultanate 1932 - 1955

The next chronological phase can be termed the expansion of the Sultanate; this phase isdefined by the impact of the oil leases following the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932
and the development of air routes around the Arabian peninsula. Sultan Sa’id bin
Taimur (r. 1932 - 1970) sought to take an active part in the government of Oman; hisinterest in obtaining any revenues from oil coincided with the interest of the British
government and oil companies to gain access to that resource rather than allow
American companies this opportunity. The outcome was the overturning of the de facto
division of the coast and the interior. This was achieved by the British financing andstaffing of armed forces which occupied Nizwa and ousted the Imamate in 1955.

The consolidation of the Omani state 1956 -1977

This phase of state formation in Oman is marked by the impact of Arab nationalism andradicalism on the British position in the Arabian peninsula. The Suez crisis of 1956
marked the end of European attempts to act in the Middle East in opposition to theUnited States and was followed by ineluctable British withdrawal from the region. In
Oman this finally took place in 1977 when the British vacated their bases at Masirah
Island and Salalah having defeated the left-wing rebellion in Dhofar and secured apolitical order Oman conducive to Western strategic interests. Sa’id bin Taimur had
retreated to Salalah following his triumphant tour of the interior in 1955 and absented
himself from Muscat. The Dhofari rebellion against his regime and the threat this posed
to British interests meant that the modernising Qabus was allowed to become Sultan in10

1970. The reforms undertaken then with the benefit of oil revenues signalled theconsolidation of the Omani state into its newest form: the Sultanate of Oman.

Western strategic interests in the contemporary Omani state

The final stage is that of the contemporary rentier state. The development of significant
oil revenues enabled Qabus to embark on a vast development programme for Oman
which enable important groups to be co-opted. Qabus and the Royal Family andassociates were able to keep a close grip on power whilst initiating various institutionsof consultation. In terms of Western strategic involvement, whilst British personnel andinfluence remained significant in military matters there followed far greater American
financial and political involvement following the 1980 US-Oman Access Agreement on
military facilities. This reflected the Western strategic interest in Oman in planning forthe deployment of military forces to secure Western access to Gulf oil; these planningarrangements were put into practice in the Kuwait War 1990-1991 and subsequent
policy of dual containment.

Oman and the West: the application of theory in case-study research

The phases of state formation described above constitute the chronological ordering of
this case-study of the process of state formation in the Arabian peninsula - a case-study
which involves an attempt to apply Bromley’s general theory of state formation to
Oman. Although the case-study method has been criticised it remains the most usedmethod of investigation in political science and international relations. Whilst the casestudy method of research has a number of drawbacks it also has a number of advantages11

in contributing to comparative research. Firstly case researchers can accept complexity
and multiple causation as the key characteristic of their research rather than attempt toeliminate them as appears in variable oriented research. Additionally, the case-study
attempts to locate its findings in a particular historical and cultural environment rather
than in isolation. Therefore the case-study can examine directly the sequence of events
that led to an outcome and not just the outcome; this allows comparison over time. The
focus of case studies on process can enhance one type of understanding although it may
not be the best basis for making generalisations. However, a number of case studies canbe accumulated from which to develop a theoretical whole from seemingly disparate
parts (Peters 1998: 141). In order to enhance the value of case-study research it isimportant that the researcher is aware of the methodological issues surrounding thismethod, particularly those concerning the application of general theory to the individualcase. This passage will indicate the problems which arose in this study and sets themfirst in the context of such difficulties which relate to the application of general theory
in all case-studies.

Use of theory in case-studies

In case-studies theory can be applied in different ways. Peters (1998: 148 - 149)
summarises the theoretical use of case-studies. Theory can be used as a framework toorder the empirical material of the case in which an attempt is made to illustrate ageneral hypothesis; this constitutes a ‘disciplined-configurative study’. Secondly a case
can act as a ‘plausibility probe’ to try out a proto-theory. Thirdly, a case can performthe function of a ‘crucial case’ as a means of testing a theory: if a theory works in asituation in which it might be considered a difficult test then a researcher can have12

greater confidence in the theory. In whatever way theory is applied it is important torealise that all cases are constructed and defined by the researcher. That is, if the study
is to be of utility then the material must be adapted to the theoretical frameworks of thediscipline. However, not all frameworks are equally valid: in adapting the case to thetheoretical framework attention should be paid as to how the single case can be best
adapted to more general theoretical analytical and theoretical concerns. Care should betaken to avoid premature disclosure, that is, assuming that the case conforms mostclosely to a particular theoretical framework. There is a danger that the case will besqueezed into the theoretical and intellectual baggage of the researcher. The‘theoretical baggage’ which a researcher could bring can be classified into three broadtypes of theory.

Three types of theory

It is first important to distinguish the different kinds of theory that may be applied in acase-study. Theory can be classified into three broad types depending on the level ofanalysis to which they aspire: general or macro-theory, middle-range or meso theory,and micro-theory. General theory attempts to explain using a high level of abstraction
and at the level of the system. Middle-range theories are concerned with thefunctioning o f specific institutions, processes and groups of countries and could
function as the building blocks for more general theories. Micro-level theories focus on
the individual as the level o f analysis. A key difference amongst these theories is on
their position on the structure-agency problem, that is, whether social scientists shouldlook for explanation of political behaviour at the level of large-scale economic andsocial structures or at the level of agency - social groups, classes and individuals.

13

Whenever a notion of social, political or economic causality is constructed, however
tentatively, then an appeal is made to conceptions of structure and agency either
explicitly, or more often, implicitly (Hay 1995: 180). Hay concludes that in attempting
to render explicit the model of structure and agency underlying attempts to explain
processes of social and political change it is vital to consider the ‘contextualisation of
agency’ and the ‘strategic selectivity of structure’ (Hay 1995: 205). By this he meansthat in attributing political causality it is vital that we ask ourselves constantly how
processes external to the immediate development of the events we are interested in havean impact upon the context and the strategies, intentions and actions of the agents
directly involved. Equally the structures researchers identify are both enabling andconstraining, defining the range of potential strategies and opportunities available todifferent actors.

This consideration of the methodological issues relating to case-studies has identified
three points. Firstly it affirms the value of the case-study approach particularly tostudies of process. Secondly it emphasises that a researcher in the social sciences must
be aware as to what is the particular purpose of their case-study in theoretical terms, thatis, in what way does the study use theory. Thirdly, it stresses that the researcher must
make explicit what kind of theory they are utilising and what particular position thiswill imply on the key issue of structure and agency. We now reflect on how these
considerations figured in this study of the process of state formation in Oman.

14Oman and the West: problems with applying general theory

Following from the comments above we can first identify what kind of theory has beenused in this case-study and the way in which it has been applied. The study has usedboth general theory (Bromley on state formation) and middle-range theory (Robinson
and Gallagher on collaboration and informal empire). In terms of the way in whichthese theories have been applied the study has illustrated these theories through theirapplication to one particular case. This conforms to the ‘framework’ use of theory
where the theory is used to ‘map’ the international landscape. With reference to thestructure/agency problematic it can be said that in Robinson and Gallagher’s work on
the interaction of imperial powers and peripheral societies an expanding international
economy is taken as given and is not the focus of explanation. Thus, their theory can be
set in the wider context of Bromley’s theoretical framework of state formation in the
expanding capitalist system. This combination of a general theory and a middle-range
theory helped to overcome the problem of applying a general systemic theory to anindividual case, that of identifying what the role of agents is in the political explanationand how their actions related to structure. The structure posited constrained and enabled
the various actors very differently. Thus, in this study of the relationship between Oman
and the West the strategies of the agents - the British officials, Omanis and A1 Bu Sa’id
Sultans - have been set, or ‘contextualised’, in the structure of an international system as
depicted by Bromley - the international capitalist state system.

15

There are a number of problems involved in the ‘framework’ application of theory in acase study particularly theory which is placed in that category of general theory such as
Bromley’s. The aims and structure of work on general theory are very divergent tothose of work on particular cases. In a general theoretical work the researcher ranges
across debates in social theory and a wider variety of empirical cases in order to develop
their theoretical arguments. In a case study using general theory as a framework thegeneral theory can remain rather ‘disconnected’ and so it possible for the researcher toassume the theory is explaining the case without actually proving it. A further potential
problem with the ‘framework’ approach to the application of general theory is that it
can lead to insufficient critical engagement with the theory. Bromley’s theory has been
criticised for being too economically deterministic in its focus on the relations of
production and for therefore being unable to address issues such as the politics ofidentity. This study had a further problem with trying to develop Bromley’s research
agenda or to test his hypotheses in that it constituted a sample of one - more studies ofmore countries are required to develop his research agenda systematically.

Structure of the thesis

The structure of the thesis is as follows. Chapter one first offers a review of theliterature on imperialism, state formation and historical and theoretical work on therelationship between Oman and the West. It proceeds to make explicit themethodological approach of the thesis and highlights the way in which theory is
employed. State formation is a historical process. Therefore, five empirical chaptersorganised chronologically then follow on each stage of state formation identified. The
thesis concludes on the most significant factors in the process of state formation in16

Oman and how this compares with the other GCC states. It also considers theusefulness and applicability of theories of informal imperialism in understanding therelationship between Oman and the West.

17

Chapter One: The Literature Review

The purpose of this literature review is to review and assess the work which has been
carried out so far relevant to the topic of state formation in Oman and to relate it to theresearch questions which have been posed. Literature will be reviewed under thefollowing categories: literature on Oman, literature on imperialism and informal empire
and literature on state formation. The review of the literature on Oman, to which we
now turn, is divided into two sections: firstly, a broad survey of literature on Oman froma range of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, political science andinternational relations and, secondly, a closer focus on two selected works which havean explicit theoretical perspective.

Literature on Oman: a broad survey

Literature in this section will be reviewed under the three narrative themes of the thesis:(1) the international context of Western strategic interests in Oman, (2) Western
strategic and military involvement in Oman and (3) the impact of the West on Oman.

(1) The international context of Western strategic interests in Oman

Hoskins (1947) sketches the process by which Britain ‘sealed ofF Arabia in the 19th
century. Kelly (1968) outlines the British role in the Persian Gulf 1795 - 1880 from a
British imperial perspective whilst Busch focuses particularly on Anglo-Frenchcompetition in the Gulf. Peterson (1986) traces the development of security
arrangements for the Arabian peninsula since the 1920s. Louis (1977 and 1984) details

18American policy and British decolonisation in the Middle East 1941 - 1951. Darby(1973) examines British defence policy East of Suez in the period from Indian
independence to the official British withdrawal from the Gulf. Balfour-Paul (1991)
reflects on the end of empire in the Middle East and the transition of the Trucial States
to United Arab Emirates.

Halliday (1980, 1988) analyses political change in the Gulf in the two decades after
1960 and factors affecting the foreign policy of the Gulf states since independence.
Cordesman (1984,1986, 1987) details the strategic situation in the Gulf in the 1980s
and makes policy suggestions as to how the US can best develop military forces tointervene in the area. Saify (1991) examines US military intervention in the Gulf 19871988. Hoogland (1990) analyses the likely Gulf policy of the Bush administration
based on an assessment of its first nine months. Kunniholm (1993a, 1993b) surveys the
US experience in the Persian Gulf prior to the war for Kuwait and US policy in theregion thereafter.

(2) Western strategic interests and military involvement in Oman

Diplomacy 1920 - 1950s
Bhacker (1992) shows how British curtailing of Omani trade in East Africa and theIndian Ocean laid the foundations for British domination of the Sultanate in the second
half of the 19th century. Omani-British relations 1888 -1920 are recounted by alMousawi who focuses on the question of a Muscat protectorate, the arms trade, therebellion of 1913 and the Treaty of Sib. Documents from US archives on Oman and the19Persian Gulf from 1835 - 1947 are published in J.D. Porter (1982). Hurewitz (1979)
contains information on the use of airfields in Oman during World War Two by theUnited States. Burrows (1990) gives his account of the Gulf and Oman in the 1950sfrom the perspective of the first Political Resident to reside on the Arabian side of theGulf. Henderson (1992) sheds light on the activities of the Iraq Petroleum Company inthe area, notably the manner in which it negotiated with the tribes of the area in defianceof the express wishes of Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur (see also the secret memorandum on
security in Muscat and Oman written by Henderson in 1966 and reproduced in appendix
I). Innes (1987) recounts his experience as Minister for Foreign and External Affairs in
the Sultanate during this time. The negotiations and diplomacy relating to the signingof a treaty between Washington and the Sultan in 1958 are covered in detail by Joyce(1994).

The Imamate rebellion and Jebel Akhdar campaign

Smiley (1975) recalls his experiences as the first commander of the Sultan’s Armed
Forces and the Jebal Akhdar campaign. Information on RAF actions during the
Buraimi crisis and the Imamate rebellion are given in Rawlings (1984). Sultan Sa’id’s
progress from Salalah and subsequent tour of the interior is described by Morris (1957).
Much information on the activities and role of British organised military forces in Omanin the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s is given in Mann (1994) and Lunt (1981). The firstaccount of the events of the 1950s to be based primarily on archival sources is to befound in Timpe (1991), placed in the theoretical framework of clientelism.

20

The Dhofar war

The Dhofar war and its denouement and its place in Western strategy are discussed inHalliday (1974, 1977). Behbehani (1981) and Halliday (1989) examine the nature of,respectively, Chinese and South Yemeni (PDRY) support for the PFLOAG, whilst Katz
(1986) concentrates on the Soviet attitude to the Dhofar conflict and relations with
Oman thereafter. John Duke Anthony (1975) reflects on the contribution of outside
powers to the successful containment of the insurrection whilst Pimlott (1985) outlines
how the Dhofar campaign became a model of a counter-insurgency operation. In ajournalist’s account Bloch (1983) identifies various British agencies and individuals
operating in Oman and also informs us that the author of one account of the Dhofar war,
Price (1975), has a background in the Information Research Department - a branch of
British intelligence. A large number of accounts of the role of the SAS in Oman havebeen written by military personnel including Ladd (1986), Jeapes (1980), and Fiennes(1975). De la Billiere (1994) also gives information on this role in both the Jebal
Akhdar campaign and the Dhofar war. Akehurst (1982) gives his account of how the
war in Dhofar was won. Geraghty (1980) has a chapter on the SAS in Oman. The
revolutions in South Arabia and the British withdrawal from the Gulf are reviewed froma historian’s perspective by Kelly (1976,1980). He is severely critical of the British
decision to withdraw and the ‘loss of will’ this indicated. Halliday (1987) assesses thesystem of news management employed by the British authorities in connection with theconflict in Dhofar.

21

The 1980s and 1990s

Rigsbee (1990) focuses on the military and economic interests of the United States inOman following Britain’s vacating of its base on Masirah Island in 1977, whilst
Anthony addresses Anglo-American tensions over influence in Oman. The strategic
importance of Oman is focussed on by Graz (1982) and Cordesman (1997). Calvin H.
Allen (1984) looks at the sources of instability in the Qabus regime and the issues thisraises for the development of the Omani-American relationship. Charles Allen (1991)
provides details on the use of Omani facilities by the RAF during the war for Kuwait.

(3) The impact of the West on Oman

Calvin H. Allen (1987) provides a broad overview of Omani history from the beginningof Arab settlement to the 1980s. Bathurst (1972) outlines the influence of Imamate
government and maritime trade on Omani history to 1728. Wilkinson (1972, 1977,
1987) has set out his view of the geographical imperatives of existence in south-east
Arabia, the form and pattern of social organisation to which it gave rise and theconsequences of British actions on this.

The impact to the 1920s

Kelly (1972), Peterson (1977) and Kaylani (1979) survey tribes, religion and politics inOman concentrating on the A1 Bu Sa’id era. Risso (1986) and Allen (1979) discuss theshifting of political authority from the interior to the coast in the first half-century of A1

22

Bu Sa’id rule and the subsequent expansion of Muscati authority in the Gulf and East
Africa. Al-Rashid chronicles Saudi relations with eastern Arabia and Oman 1800-1870.
Landen (1967) places the impact of indirect British rule and the resulting stagnation of
Oman in the context of ‘modernisation’. Speece (1989) examines the economic
organisation of the interior and coastal regions in the century before 1930. This period
is identified by Calvin H. Allen (1978) as a distinct period in Omani economic history.

Oman during the reign of Sa’id bin Taimur

Various themes in Omani politics in the 20th century and challenges to the Sultanate arepresented in Peterson (1978). The role Britain played in the demarcation of stateboundaries on the Arabian Peninsula is elucidated by al-Shamlan (1987), Wilkinson(1991) and Walker (1994) who was a British Foreign Office official involved in theattempts in the 1960s to determine the boundaries in south-east Arabia. The transition
from Imamate and to Sultanate and issues of political authority and legitimacy are
considered by Peterson (1984, 1987) and Eickelman (1985). An analysis of the sametransition but with the explanatory emphasis on external factors is advanced by
Biershenk (1984,1989). The developments changing the Arabia which had been
cocooned by the British were recorded by Holden (1965). Skeet (1974) gives a
description of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman in the final years of the era of Sa’id
bin Taimur.

23

The Qabus regime

Following the 1970 coup the economic requirements for development were set out by
al-Mukallah (1972). Clements (1980) and Hawley (1977) offer accounts that stressed
the difference between the Qabus regime and that of Sa’id bin Taimur, whereas incontrast, Pridham (1986) highlights the similarities. Townsend (1977) describes theevolution of government institutions in the first five years of the Sultanate of Oman.
Graz (1992) and Skeet (1992) cover issues and events in Oman in the first two decades
under Qabus and Said Zahlan (1989) affirms the ‘paramount importance’ ofinternational forces in forming the contemporary Gulf states and Oman. Due to its
unbalanced choice of material, omission of reference to key works and the absence of atheoretical framework Joyce’s work (1995) on Omani history has been severely
criticised in the periodical reviews.

Problems of development

Problems, most notably rural decline, arising from the form of development instigatedin Oman are analysed by Birks and Sinclair (1980). The decline of the irrigation systemand the impact on village life concerns Wilkinson (1980) whilst Bulloch and Darwish(1993) address the potential for conflict over water resources. Dutton (1981), however,expresses optimism for future rural development modelled on the Duraham University
Khabura project supported by Petroleum Development Oman. Christine Eickelman(1993) gives an insight into change in ‘inner’ Oman, social attitudes to fertility andpopulation increase. Chatty (1996) and Janzen (1982, 1986) examine the impact of24

development on nomadic groups on the Harrasis and in Dhofar. Scholz (1994)
investigates the Capital Area in Oman as an example of urban poverty in the oil
producing countries of the Gulf. Melamid (1986) informs us that the previously
nomadic tribes of the interior have migrated to Muscat and Matrah and form a large
portion of the shantytown population there.

Political Development

Oman’s ‘constitutional’ development since 1970 has been examined in a number ofworks. The remit, composition and significance of the State Consultative Council isassessed by Eickelman (1984) and J.E. Peterson (1989). Al-Haj (1996) analyses the
Omani Consultative Council whilst Siegfried (1998) concludes that the constitution of‘hereditary Sultanate’ promulgated by Qabus in 1995 does not help Oman to develop a‘civil society’.

Literature on Oman: theoretical perspectives

From the above I intend to focus particularly on two works that analyse the relationshipbetween Oman and the West in distinct theoretical frameworks: that of Timpe (1991) on‘clientelism’ and Bierschenk on ‘world systems analysis’ (1989).

Timpe and ‘clientelism’

G. Lawrence Timpe has analysed the relationship between British officialdom and the
Omani Sultans, particularly Sa’id bin Taimur, using the theoretical framework of25

‘clientelism’. This framework, which is developed from psychology, anthropology andsociology, is characterised by Timpe as a ‘middle-level theory’1 which has traditionallybeen employed in the study of partisan politics and landowners/landlord - peasantrelationships. Three fundamental characteristics of such a relationship are identified:dependence, reciprocity and personalisation. Timpe seeks to generalise thecharacteristics of clientelism as defined in the literature relating to peasants/landlords
and apply them to the discipline of International Relations (1991: 76). Timpe identifies
the following features of clientelism that apply in both the ‘traditional’ application ofthis concept identified above and that of an International Relations context, in this case
Britain and Oman. In a traditional patron/client (landlord/peasant) relationship theclient lacks capital, is educationally ill-equipped, and endures arbitrary injustice. The
patron acts as a moderator and gatekeeper and the client goes to the patron for problem
resolution. A face-to-face presence is maintained between the client and the patron.
Timpe identifies a number of parallels in the British-Oman relationship where the client
is Oman or specifically the Sultan and the patron is the British or specifically Whitehall.
Firstly, Britain fostered economic dependence whilst the client’s general population(the Sultan’s ‘subjects’) were uneducated. The Sultans suffered many British actions insilence and went to the British for military assistance as a form of problem resolution;
Sa’id bin Taimur used Britain to moderate the Buraimi dispute at the United Nations.
The way the British decided how Oman’s military forces and economy were to be
developed parallels the ‘gatekeeping’ function. The British maintained the Political
Agent system as a form of face-to-face contact. A final similarity identified by Timpe

1 Timpe cites Howard Wiarda who defines such theory as ‘significant and useful but notnecessarily global and all encompassing; theory at [this] level is similarly more modest
in its pretensions, concentrating on a single region...rather than encompassing the entire
universe o f nations’ (1985: 6).
26

is that a traditional clients engages in anxiety reduction behaviour and in the same way
the Ibadhis have the concept of hitman which refers to the concealment of the Imamate(1991: 306).

Timpe also identifies three further characteristics of the relationship of Britain andOman that differ in this international relations context from that pertaining in thecontext of landlord and peasant (1991: 307). Firstly, in the ‘traditional’ relationship, if
the client wants the patron to resolve a problem, the problem can remain localised. In
contrast, Britain’s decision making process was multi-layered and framed in the wider
context of Britain’s interests in the Gulf as a whole and not just Oman. If the resolutionof the problem in Britain’s interest coincided with that of the client then that was good
but not ‘paramount’. Following from this was the possibility that if the British believedthat the resolution of the problem required the deposition of a ruler (perhaps the client
who brought the problem to the patron in the first place) that was acceptable, if it
contributed to the maintenance of the British position in the region and furthered British
interests (1991: 308). The third additional aspect is the need for secrecy in many
aspects of the patron’s dealing with the client. Timpe believes that this transfer of thetheory of clientelism to the discipline of International Relations may be able to be
applied to other relationships between industrialised nations and their various clients in
the Arab Gulf region, Africa, South East Asia and even to the Pacific Trust Territories(1991:78-79).

It is useful to consider how this framework of clientelism contrasts with that ofRobinson’s concept of collaboration (1972) which we will examine shortly? Timpe uses
the term collaboration noting that ‘the patron-client relationship is at once an offensive

27

and defensive attempt to improve one’s condition in life. A mutual interest incollaboration is necessary for this voluntary association to be successful’ (1991: 76). A
slightly different emphasis is to be found in the work of Robinson, with its focus on‘collaborating or mediating elites’ (1972: 120) with the recognition of the threat offorce, either direct or implied that brought about such ‘voluntary association’.
Clientelism and collaboration both address the interaction between expanding European
powers and peripheral societies but at different levels. In some senses clientelism is‘micro’ theory: it throws light on the psychological process of the client-patron
relationship with its reference to anxiety reduction behaviour. Collaboration is clearly a
middle-range or partial theory. It focuses on the interaction between the metropole andperipheral societies and its relation to politics, taking an expanding Western or capitalist
economy as a given variable. The work of Bromley (1994), which we will examine
shortly, is an attempt at grand theory - it seeks to explain the motor of expansion within
Europe and also the insertion of capitalist economic and social relations in the peripheryand their subsequent development, and how this can be related to strategic policy.

Bierschenk and ‘world systems analysis’Bierschenk (1984, 1989) has produced important work on state formation in Oman. Of
greatest relevance for this study is the evidence he marshals from oil company archives
and British government official records to support his view that it was British strategicinterests in the Gulf as a whole which prevailed over the essential indifference of the oilcompany as to with whom it signed oil concessions. Referring to the Imamate/Sultanate
conflict of the 1950s he concludes:28Thus the British and American oil companies can be seen to be moving forces
behind the international conflict in the Gulf region as well as the vehicles of the
USA’s and Great Britain’s imperial interests. However, the precise politicalstructures and institutions which emerged did not necessarily correspond directly
to the economic interests of the international oil companies. Rather, the changes
in world market conditions initiated by the rise of oil, created a general need for
new political structures, the definite institutional forms of which were also
determined by the strategic interests of the USA and Great Britain. Theinternational border conflicts and the internal civil wars in Southeast Arabia
after World War II were to decide who of several potential aspirants - the Sultan
in Muscat or the Imam in Oman (or possibly also the ruler of Saudi Arabia) would take over the political function of controlling the potential oil production
areas in Oman. The oil companies were essentially indifferent towards theresult of the conflict, provided oil prospecting and production were notinterfered with. In fact, the Petroleum Concessions oil company at one point
entertained serious thoughts of coming to a separate agreement with the Imam,and tried to gain the British Government’s permission to do so. (1989:219)

The central thrust of Bierschenk’s analysis is convincing in respect to the significanceof British strategic interests in the Gulf as mediating the impact of capitalism on Oman.
In his article in 1989 he explicitly places his analysis of the impact of world market
forces on Oman in the context of Wallerstein’s framework o f ‘world systems’,something which he does not do in his earlier book-length work.2 A number ofproblems can be found with Wallerstein’s analysis - perhaps most notably its
determinism (Brown 1997: 57); indeed Bierschenk uses the word determinism in theabove extract. Thus, in this thesis, while Bierschenk’s argument and evidence on therelative importance of various factors in state formation in Oman is accepted, the impactof the West on Oman is placed in a different theoretical framework, that of Bromley(1994) which will be examined in the review of the literature on state formation. First,
we turn to the review of the literature on imperialism and informal empire.

29

Informal empire and collaboration: Robinson and Gallagher’s theory ofimperialism

The concept of ‘informal empire’3 was developed in modem times initially by Ronald
Robinson and John Gallagher in their celebrated article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’(1953). The central thrust of this article, on which all their subsequent work (1961,
1972, 1986, 1994) was based, was their argument emphasising the continuity of British
imperial policy in the nineteenth century in contrast to the sharp break that had been
identified by the proponents of the ‘New Imperialism’thesis (see Doyle 1986: 141).
The ‘New Imperialism’ thesis was first developed by Hobson at the turn of the century
and held sway until the World War Two. Hobson defined imperialism in terms of theseizure by the European powers of formal political control in territories in Asia andAfrica, which took place in the last part of the nineteenth century due to financial
developments in Europe. As H.L. Wesseling comments: ‘with Hobson, we have adefinition, a periodisation and an explanation* (1986: 1). Of fundamental importance
was the seizure of territory in the last quarter of the nineteenth century which wasdeemed a fundamentally new development. For Lenin, imperialism was a particular
stage in the development of capitalism: the monopoly stage. Notably, all proponents ofthe thesis shared a perception that the causes of the extension of empire in the last three
decades of the 19th century were to be found within Europe itself - either politically,
economically or socially.

2 There is no reference to Wallerstein’s work in the bibliography of Weltmarkt,
Stammesgesellschaft und Staatsformation in Suedostarabien (Sultanat Oman), (1984).
3 Robinson and Gallagher note (1980: 1) that the term ‘informal empire’was first given
authority by C.R Fay in the Cambridge History o f the British Empire ( 1940: 399).
However, in terms of its modem usage W.R. Louis, commenting on their attribution of30

In contrast, Robinson and Gallagher attacked what they saw as the artificial watershed
imposed by the ‘New Imperialism’ thesis between a Mid-Victorian era of anti­
imperialism and a late Victorian era o f ‘New Imperialism’ including the ‘scramble for
Africa’. Instead, they posited a continuity in British imperialism from its heyday of midVictorian economic and commercial hegemony (Wesseling 1986: 2). This continuity
was to be explained by the central dynamic they identified in Britain’s empire, which
they characterised as a ‘free trade empire’. The adage they coined to characterize British
imperial policy in terms of a free trade empire was ‘trade with informal control if
possible; trade with rule when necessary’ in contrast to the previously accepted dictumo f ‘trade not rule’ (Gallagher 1980: 15). Thus formal and informal empire were notentirely different phenomena but were rather two sides of the same coin. To illustrate
their central argument on imperialism4 and to identify the mistake they believed the
advocates of the ‘New Imperialism’ had made they used the metaphor of an iceberg to
depict the relationship between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire. Just as you should notmeasure the size of an iceberg by equating it with that which is visible above the surface
so should no-one equate the extent of the 19th century British empire with the area ofworld maps of the time coloured red to indicate British colonies. In Africa and theVictorians (1961) they further criticised the idea that all colonisation could be directly
accounted for by processes in European society. They argued that the scramble for
Africa had been precipitated not by economic developments within Europe but for

the term to Fay, notes that ‘it is no exaggeration to say that it now has passed into the
vocabulary of imperial history as a Robinsonian and Gallagherian concept’ (1976: 43).
4 This term is of course, subject to much debate and theoretical contest. For generalsurveys see Mommsen (1980) and Kemp (1967).
31

strategic reasons issuing from a local crisis in Egypt that was due to a failure ofcollaborative arrangements between Britain and her local allies in Egypt.

Robinson and Gallagher had given their redefinition of the nature and period ofimperialism but the question remained of how they were to account for the timing of theseizure by the European powers of vast swathes of territory in Africa and Asia in thelater part of the nineteenth century - most famously the ‘scramble for Africa’. In an
attempt to answer this Robinson further developed his views on the essence ofimperialism in his article ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch
for a theory of collaboration’ (1972).

The Concept of Collaboration

Robinson argued that European imperialism and empire depended on collaborating or
mediating elites in the societies of Africa and Asia . Without the voluntary or enforced
cooperation of their governing elites, economic resources could not be transferred,
strategic interests protected or traditional resistance to change contained. In most AfroAsian countries this process of collaboration went through three stages. First, Europe
attempted to lever local regimes into the collaboration necessary to open their countries
to trade and commerce. Secondly, the breakdown of indigenous collaborationnecessitated deeper imperial intervention though still using native collaborators to seethat its policies were carried out. The choice of indigenous collaboration - whether it
was a Sultan, Imam, Emir or King - determined the organisation and character ofimperial rule. Thirdly, as the imperial rulers ran out of indigenous collaborators theyeither chose to leave or were made to go. A key point to note is that these transitions in

32

imperialism were governed by the need to reconstruct and uphold a collaborative
system that was breaking down. Robinson further developed his ideas on imperialism
in the article ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire’ (1986). H.L.
Wesseling contends that in contrast to earlier versions of Robinson’s thought onimperialism the ‘excentric idea’ is a general model of power relations which can beapplied to all periods of history. Wesseling believes it is better to leave the terms
imperialism and empire to that of a particular period - the expansion of Europe (1986:
9).

In summary, for Robinson and Gallagher empire could be formal or informal. In boththese forms imperial rule depended on maintaining a collaborative system voluntarily or
through coercion. The shifts in the relationship between the West and what were to
become known as ‘Third World’ countries could be accounted for by the changes incollaborative alliances which produced a transition from powerful ally to imperial rule,
formal or informal and then to independence.

Defining informal empire

One problem here is that Robinson and Gallagher did not offer a detailed definition or
description of informal empire. Juergen Osterhammel (1986) has identified the key
features of ‘informal empire’ as a classification or ideal type. In a situation of power
differentials a strong country (S) possesses an effective veto over a weaker country (W)whilst avoiding direct rule. The stronger country has the capacity to impose basic
guidelines on the foreign policy of the weaker country. S maintains a substantial
military presence in W and brings influence to bear through aid and advisers. In the33economic and financial realm W is entrenched in those sectors of the economy of S
which shows above average rates of growth. W is a net recipient of capital andinvestment. The hold of S over W is aided by the collaboration of indigenous rulers and‘comprador’ groups (Osterhammel 1986: 297-298).

All these characteristics are found in the relations between Britain and the Sultans ofMuscat and Oman from 1920 - 1970. It is important to note that in this thesis thedefinition of informal empire employed excludes the Aden Protectorate and the Trucial
States from that category. Rather they are placed in the category of formal empire. In
legal terms Al-Bahama (1967: 80) notes that under British constitutional law
protectorates differed from colonies in that they did not constitute part of the ‘British
Dominions*. In all British protectorates foreign relations were controlled by the ‘British
Crown’; however the amount of power reserved internally differed between ‘Colonial
Protectorates’ and ‘Protected States’. In ‘Colonial Protectorates’ the amount of power
exercised by the ‘Crown’ was not that much different from that exercised in colonies.
Powers of the ‘Crown’ in them were obtained through tribal chiefs agreeing to place
themselves under the sovereignty of the British monarch. The Aden protectorate was ofthis type. Under the Aden Protectorate Order in Council, 1937, the British Governor of
the Aden Colony was at the same time Governor of the Aden Protectorate. In British‘Protected States’ the British government recognised the sovereignty of the local rulers
who retained their independence with regard to internal administration. In legal terms
the powers reserved to the ‘Crown’ in external affairs were based on treaty obligations.
The first official reference to the Trucial States as ‘British Protected States’ was in the
British Protectorates, Protected States and Protected Persons Order in Council, 1949.
The ‘Persian Gulf States’ were, together with the states of Malay, Tonga and the34

Maldive Islands classified in the Second Schedule as ‘British Protected States.’ The
First Schedule of the Order named all the African territories under British protection,
including the Aden Protectorate and Zanzibar as ‘Protectorates’ (al-Bahama 1967: 82).
In contrast, in legal terms a case could be made out that the Sultanate of Muscat andOman was a fully independent and sovereign state which had accepted some limitations
on its external relations (such as the 1891 agreement on non-cessation of territory)
through treaty arrangements with Britain.

Ultimately, however, this legalistic approach does not explain anything (Halliday 1974:271). It was power and the dynamic of the collaborative process which was enabling
and forcing the British to became more involved in the internal, as well as the externalaffairs of its areas of influence in Arabia regardless of the constitutional position. Thus
the same process took place in the Aden Protectorate, the Trucial States (British control
of foreign relations through treaty) and the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman (legally fully
sovereign in both internal and external affairs). In examining this process we need to
pay attention to a number of factors involved in influencing the particular form ofimperial influence and empire that took shape, be it formal or informal.

Doyle on empire and imperialism

Michael Doyle’s study Empires (1986) argues that to explain empires and understandimperialism we need to combine insights from several sources. Both the opportunities
that give rise to imperialism and the motives that drive it are to be found in a fourfold
interaction among metropoles, peripheries, transnational forces, and international
systemic incentives (1986: 19). In a multipolar system empire tends to be formal, in a35

bi-polar system it tends to be informal. It is possible to highlight three useful
distinctions made by Doyle. Firstly, he offers a succinct definition of empire, formal
and informal and its connection with imperialism. He adheres to a behaviouraldefinition of empire which he defines as effective control whether informal or informal
in which one state, that of the imperial society, controls the effective politicalsovereignty of the subordinated society. Imperialism, he contends, is simply the processof establishing or maintaining an empire (1986:30). Informal imperialism can thus havethe same results as formal imperialism: the difference lies in the process of control,
which informal imperialism achieves through the collaboration of a legally independent(but actually subordinate) government in the periphery (1986: 38). These definitions,
he argues, have considerable significance. They distinguish empires from the rest ofworld politics by the actual foreign control of who or what rules a subordinate polity.
They imply that to explain the existence of a particular empire the existence of control
must first be demonstrated, and also why one party expanded and the other submits or
fails to resist effectively (1986: 45-46). Secondly, this allows him to distinguishbetween an era of empire and imperialism and an era of international inequality.
Thirdly, Doyle draws a distinction between the impact of European imperial expansion
on tribal and patrimonial societies in the periphery. In the first the interaction leads toformal empire, in the second to informal empire. This is because in a tribal society theeffect of the metropolitan impact is far more disruptive of local political structures
which tend to lack an organised hierarchy with which networks of collaboration can beestablished. In contrast patrimonial society is more differentiated socially and there are
more opportunities for metropolitan commercial enterprise to engage with theperipheral society without automatically conflicting with religious ritual, social
hierarchy or political procedure as is the case with tribal societies (Doyle 1986: 204).

36

Of particular relevance to this thesis Doyle examines the case of Zanzibar as an
example of the interaction of a patrimonial society with British imperial power. Overthe course of the 19th century this relationship changed from alliance to one ofdominance (this will be examined in more detail in chapter two). This was because
when the British forced Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan (r. 1806 -1856) to ban the slave trade
they undermined the political and economic basis of Sultan Sa’id’s patrimonial
authority. In the case of the Sultanate of Zanzibar this eventually led to it becoming
absorbed into Britain’s formal empire through the declaration of a British protectorate
in 1890:

British aims, both during and for a while after the protectorate was formallyannounced in 1890, were to control Zanzibar’s foreign relations, leaving
domestic politics intact. The British planned a hegemony to avoid Zanzibar’s
falling to another European state. But a hands-off policy proved impossible, andinevitably the sultan’s regime became more unstable and British power in
Zanzibar grew. When Britain changed its international relationship with
Zanzibar from alliance to hegemony, it began to change the relationship of theruler of Zanzibar to his people, from autocratic patrimon to foreign-supported
puppet. Before this new relationship could become informal empire, however, amore reliable mechanism of influence was needed to supplement British naval
power and commercial influence. (Doyle 1986: 359)

Where does the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman figure in this process? The British
interaction with the rulers of Muscat (who until the splitting of the Zanzibar and Muscat
Sultanates was the same ruler) comes in the same category: the interaction of a patrimon
with an imperial power. Muscat society in the 19th century was a patrimonial one incontrast to the tribal society of the interior. Why was the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman
not absorbed into the British formal empire as a protectorate? This thesis proposes that
it was because of great power competition (international systemic factors) and will be
examined in more detail in chapter two. At this point suffice it to comment that37

ultimately the proposal in 1896 to create a Muscat protectorate was not followed
through because of the legalities of the 1862 Anglo-French agreement to maintain the
independence of the Arabian sultanate following the British-arranged separation of thesultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar. Instead British concern to control the foreign
relations of the Sultan of Muscat were reflected in a number of treaties culminating in
the 1891 commitment by the Sultan never to cede any territory to any other power apartfrom Britain. This followed French interest in the Sultanate in the 1890s (see Busch
1967) and was enforced with threats of naval bombardment of the Sultan’s palace; thus
the granting of a coaling station to the French was revoked. There was at this point no
British interest or necessity in becoming involved in the domestic government. The
Sultanate of Muscat and Oman (with its power limited to the coast) remained an
unofficial protectorate until 1920. However, as with the sultanate in Zanzibar, British
actions undermined the political and economic bases of the Sultan’s patrimonial
authority leading to ever greater crises. To use Robinson’s term these were crises ofcollaboration, requiring greater imperial intervention and involvement in domestic
government. Informal empire is concerned with control of both foreign relations anddomestic government and can result from the interaction of an imperial power and apatrimonial society. In the case of Muscat informal empire came about with the British
instigated reforms in government of the 1920s. The Sultans’ authority had been so
undermined by the British that a deepening involvement in Muscati government was
required to prevent the coming to power of forces hostile to British influence, such as
the Imamate forces of the tribal interior, and thus safeguard British strategic interests. It
could be argued that this may apply to the 1920s but not to the relations between Sa’id
bin Taimur (r. 1932 - 1970) and the British.5 Did he not abolish the British-created

5 Thus Balfour-Paul with reference to the 1960s comments: ‘The only counter38

Council of Ministers when he became Sultan in 1932 and otherwise not accept any
British advice or involvement in what he regarded as his affairs? In other words can
British-Muscati relations 1932-1970 be termed informal empire? It will be argued thatthey can - Sultan Sa’id had a limited amount of room for manoeuvre but in the end his
regime depended on the British who allowed him to rule as he liked providing theirinterests were not threatened (Halliday 1974: 271). Ultimately it was this threat to theirinterests that pushed the British to remove Sa’id bin Taimur in 1970. It has been seenthat the category of informal empire and the process of collaboration are potentially
useful in understanding the relations between Britain and Oman. However, as Doyle
has indicated it cannot fully explain the dynamics of the relationship. In order to do this
we must look elsewhere for an understanding of the expansion of the international
capitalist system. One candidate explanation lies in that tradition of thought situated in
Marx’s idea of historical materialism.

Informal empire and collaboration: a partial theory in need of a context

In his survey of Marxist theories of imperialism, Brewer, whilst identifying Robinson
and Gallagher as being non-Marxist theorists, finds nothing in their work that is
incompatible with Marxist interpretations and considers that Marxists can learn fromtheir work (1990: 256-259). He criticises the distinction between explanations ofimperialism in economic or non-economic terms. Rather he argues that what is required

observation offered here is that if Muscat and Oman was ever a colony even in
Halliday’s de facto sense, it had certainly ceased to be so by the period we areconcerned with. Any British representative (the author was one) who sought in that
period to tender advice to Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur on the governing of his country soon
found how constitutionally (in both senses of that word) impermeable he was (1991:
199).
39

is to trace the interconnections between economic and political development and toaccount for different forms of economic and political domination in history. Such an
explanation would be a theory of the capitalist world system, a theory which in the mid1980s Brewer felt did not exist (1986: 325). If it could be developed Brewer believed
such a theory would usefully augment Robinson and Gallagher’s ideas on forms ofpolitical control in the periphery. This political control has to be placed in a context ofpolitical, economic and social structures in both the centre and the periphery (1986:
330-331). As Robinson and Gallagher would concede, their theory is a partial theory indeed for this reason it has been made use of by both Marxist and non-Marxist
scholars. It is no surprise therefore, that we must look elsewhere for theories whichavail of greater explanatory potential to supplement their framework. One suchcandidate theoretical framework is that of the historical materialist account of the
expansion of the capitalism and its state system developed recently by Rosenberg(1994), Halliday (1994) and Bromley (1994). Thus Bromley in discussing the thesis
advanced by L. Carl Brown and Fromkin of a Middle Eastern Question within the
Middle East argues that such a thesis overlooks the continuities in the forms ofimperialist control and notes the contribution of Robinson and Gallagher in identifying
imperialism as the political moment of the process of incorporating new regions into the
expanding international capitalist economy (Bromley 1994: 85).

Informal empire and collaboration: conclusion

From this review of the literature on informal imperialism it is clear that we must
distinguish between relations in an era of imperialism and an era of international
inequality between states. With this distinction in mind we can thus integrate the40insights of informal empire and collaboration into the broader theoretical framework of
the historical materialist perspective on state formation in the Middle East provided byBromley which will be examined next. Furthermore we need to be aware that although
the concept of collaboration and the typology of informal empire give an adequate
account of the interaction between the metropole power and the peripheral society they
do not address the dynamic of the context in which this interaction took place. This was
the development of the imperialist construction of the capitalist world market and its
linked sovereign state system (Bromley 1994: 85). We can now turn to the review ofthe literature on state formation.

Theoretical perspective on state formation

The central focus of this thesis is the process of state formation in Oman in the era ofmodem Middle East politics, since the end of the First World War.6 It will examine theexternal and internal influences on the formation of the modem Omani state and assess
their relative weight and the specific nature of their interaction in that process.
The broad perspective7 from which this thesis is written is that of ‘world capitalism’,specifically that form of historical materialist analysis of international relations

6 This definition of the era of modem Middle Eastern politics conforms with Halliday(1996:25), Bromley (1994:4), Owen (1992:9) and Yapp (1996).
Owen and Sutcliffe have commented on the way in which case studies of concrete
historical situations relate to theories of imperialism thus: ‘In the first place theory is
seen as suggesting a pattern which events in any area are more or less expected tofollow. It provides in other words a paradigm train of events and motives against which
an actual situation can be matched. Here, therefore, the concern is with the consistencyof the actual set of events and motives with those implied in the paradigm. In thesecond place, a theory of imperialism provides a way of organising what factual
historical material is available; and in this way it gives a pattern to the events. So there
are two approaches: on the one hand, facts are being used to test the theory; on the other
hand, the theory is being used to organise the facts’ (1972: 193) Hence, in this study of41

developed by Halliday (1994), Rosenberg (1994) and most specifically with reference
to the Middle East that of Simon Bromley in his work Rethinking Middle East Politics(1994).

It is first necessary to make explicit what is meant by the term ‘state’ and thus withwhat an analysis of the process of state formation is concerned. Accordingly thissection reviews selected writings which have addressed differing conceptions of thestate employed in the discipline of International Relations (IR) (Halliday 1994),
discussed the question of the relationship between state and society (Owen 1992) andformulated a theory of state formation (Bromley 1994). It concludes with a summary of
the particular aspects of state formation to be examined in this study of the case of
Oman.

Malcom Yapp (1996: 35) has noted that differing conceptions and usage of the terms‘state’ and ‘regime’ have led to much confusion in writing on the Middle East and thesame point can be made for IR in general. Fred Halliday has highlighted, in identifying
two conceptions of state commonly used in IR, that much discussion of the state has
ignored other theoretical development on the state in sociology and within Marxism.
This work has centred on the historical and contemporary centrality of the state andinstead of examining its supercession has sought to uncover its relations to social
classes (Halliday 1994: 76). The question of the relationship between state and society
is also alluded to in Roger Owen’s succinct treatment of definitions of state in his State,
Power and Politics in the Making o f the Modern Middle East (1992). He first asserts

Oman and the West theory is being used to define and organise the ‘facts’ - or in Ngaire
Wood’s term, theory is being used to ‘map’ the ‘international landscape’ (1996: 13).
42

the applicability of ideas of state derived from Western political thought and considers
two definitions: ‘the notion of the state as a sovereign political entity with internationalrecognition, its own boundaries, its own flag and so on; and the notion of the state as thesupreme coercive and rule making body’ (Owen 1992: 3). He argues that these two
definitions are essentially about claims to sovereignty and authority which first have tobe established and then constantly re-justified and that the success of such a project
would be dependent largely on the resources available to those controlling the central
administration. He further adds that the claims made by any state have to be examinedin concrete historical situations and at various levels.

Turning to the question of how to analyse the relationship between state and society
Owen offers three broad points of departure for analysis (Owen 1992: 5-6). Firstly themodern Middle Eastern state was being created at a time when Middle Eastern society
was itself subject to many of the same processes of transformation to be found at workthroughout the non-European world. These involved a type of capitalist development
which was dissolving old social solidarities and led to the formation of new kinds ofsolidarities based on class. Secondly he notes that the separation between state andsociety often described as the distinction between the public (sphere of the state) andprivate (sphere of society) is a modem characteristic. His third point is that theconstruction of the relationship between state and society takes place at the same timeas the creation of the national consciousness.

Bromley commends the analyses of writers such as Owen (1992) and Halliday (see1996: chapter one ) which locate the development of states in the Middle East in terms
of processes which took place throughout the Third World, in contrast to those accounts

43

of political development which identify a particularity of the Middle East in terms ofideology (Islam) or geology (oil). However, commenting on the work of Halliday,
Owen and Zubaida (1989) he contends that they do not address the basic theoreticalquestions involved in giving an adequate account of dependent state formation andhence political change in the Middle East. Merely to shift analytical attention to theprocess of state formation does not of itself solve substantive problems of explanation.
He argues that many accounts of state formation, for example Owen’s to a large extent,
note the imposition of Western state forms in the colonial and mandate era, and thenproceed to argue that subsequent political activity is patterned largely by this fact.
Although this is useful as a generalisation Bromley submits that the variation in social
forms found in the non-European world prior to the colonial impact tend to be relegatedto a relatively minor role. These forms, often themselves products of an earlier
encounter between local pre-capitalist arrangements and European informal
imperialism, have been very diverse and often influence the subsequent process of state
formation (Bromley 1994: 99).

Bromley seeks to develop some determinate qualitative criteria concerning the characterof modem state formation. He notes that much recent theorising on state formation in
the Middle East and elsewhere is based on the influential essay by Michael Mann ‘The
Autonomous Power of the State’ (1984) which identifies the means by which a state
could potentially act autonomously from its society.

Bromley perceives a major

problem with the formulation of Mann, and the work of Giddens (1985) which, from asimilar standpoint, criticises realist and neo-Weberian views of the state. He argues that
their project of constructing a general theory of the state in terms of its infrastructural(or administrative) power is bound to involve a reification similar to that identified by44

Marx in attempts to derive the forms of capitalist production from the feature of‘production in general* (Bromley 1994: 102). For this reason Bromley contends that an
analysis of the process of state formation must also examine the establishment of newsocial relations which facilitate the form of surplus appropriation which is dominant inany given society (1994: 102-103).

Bromley then outlines how the nature of dependent state formation in the Middle East
allowed of two models which both provided only a social basis for authoritarian rule incontrast to the possibility of liberal capitalist democracy. In the first model, preemptive
state formation in a pro-Western fashion necessitated the repression of nationalist andLeftist groups in the domestic sphere. In the second, nationalist mobilisation against
foreign influence made it difficult to sustain open competition between domestic forces.
Thus, dependent development, whether for or against the grain of the international
system supported an authoritarian form of state (Bromley 1994: 104).

Following on from these considerations Bromley offers three guidelines forinvestigating the process of state formation in order to avoid the polarity of external‘imperialist* or internal ‘Islamic* determinations which characterises much analysis ofMiddle Eastern political development (Halliday 1996: 219). Firstly, it must relate thedevelopment of state apparatus to the changing nature of social relations. This is not todiminish the importance of the state apparatus but to place institutions of administrationand coercion in their social context. Secondly, it must relate the process of state
formation to the position of the state in the world market and the indigenous response tothis. This also involves the relationship of the state with the dominant powers in theinternational system. Thirdly, if the process of state formation is to be understood in45

historical terms attention must be paid to the conflict of social forces involved in the
struggle to reproduce and control the relations of appropriation and command (Bromley
1994: 105). Bromley uses these guidelines to sketch out the main trends of external
involvement with the Middle East since the end of the First World War and the way inwhich the external involvement related to political and social development within theregion; within this context he tests his hypotheses against his selected case studies(Bromley 1994: 106-114). This study of state formation in Oman utilises the second andthird of the guidelines which Bromley identifies. We now turn to review literature
which has focused exclusively on state formation in the Arabian peninsula.

Monarchy, imperialism and oil: state formation in the GCC states

Two recent works by Gause (1994) and Jill Crystal (1990) have provided comparative
studies of state formation in the GCC states. Gause argues that the American
conventional wisdom - that the basis of politics in the Gulf monarchies is characterisedby the unchanging characteristics of Islam and tribalism - is not so much incorrect as
outdated (1994: 10). He finds that these factors are significant but not in the way whichis commonly attributed to them. They are significant in the way in which the symbols
and rhetoric of Islam and tribalism have been used as legitimising ideologies for the ruleof these regimes. He identifies the political characteristics that these monarchies share
as a result of their rentier character which is the central concern of Crystal’s work Oiland Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar, (1990).

In a focused study of Kuwait and Qatar Crystal (1990) identifies the process in which
the historical relationship between ruling families and merchants is transformed by the46

impact of oil revenues. Before oil, politics was dominated by a ruling coalition between
the ruler, or shaikh, and the trading families. The ruler depended on these merchants forrevenues in the form of customs dues, and personal loans. The merchants entered therealm of politics in order to protect their economic interests. After the advent of oil themerchants withdraw from the formal political realm to protect those economic interests
in a compact with the ruling families which sees them relinquish participation in thedecision making process in return for the rulers non intrusion on business activities.
This represents a tacit arrangement - a trade of wealth for formal power (1990: 1). The
merchants’ withdrawal was accompanied by new relationships between the ruler andmembers of the ruling family through new political and bureaucratic roles and between
the ruler and the population through the provision of social services. As oil revenues
decline the rulers’ ability to keep the original bargain with the merchants diminishes andthe merchants begin to question the original arrangements. With growing
dissatisfaction the merchants return to political life through the back door of thebureaucracy. She argues that this process is found in all the oil dependent states which,apart from Kuwait and Qatar, she names as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United ArabEmirates, thus curiously omitting the Sultanate of Oman (1990: 2).

Both these studies focus on the key feature common to all the GCC states - theirdistributive character. These are states whose prime role, in contrast to the historicaldevelopment of the state in Europe and the United States, is to expend rather thanextract revenue. This is due to the nature of the oil industry in which external rent is
paid for a commodity - oil - which in contrast to other Third World commodities, suchas cotton and coffee, involves very few linkages to the society where the substance isfound in order to facilitate its development. Rather it results in the payment of external

47

rent first in the form of concession payments from multinational corporations and thenin revenues derived from direct integration into the world oil market. Hence they are
rentier states of an extreme kind.

Al-Naqeeb (1990) develops an analysis based on economic dependency arguments to
explain the process of state formation in the GCC states that has led to authoritarianism.
Linking pre- and post-oil eras he identifies three periods (Crystal 1997: 308). The first,
which lasted until the end of the 17th century was based on speculative trade which
linked cities and tribal hinterlands to trade networks outside the Gulf. Central politicalpower in the form of the Ottoman state was weak and locally power was shared bytribal and urban settled leaders who were balanced in their power by merchant groups.
The economy on which this system was based was destroyed in the imperial period
when Britain, in the guise of eliminating piracy and the slave trade, imposed a European
dominated economy and fragmented the region into distinct familial states kept in place
by British force. Resistance to this came from the hinterland in the form of, forexample the Wahhabi movement and the Ibadhi Imamate. The third era is that ofcontemporary authoritarianism and began with oil. Oil revenues concentrated power inthe state which was at first benignly bureaucratic but increasingly expanded to absorb
independent social institutions. This created opposition from the old labour force of
bedouin and pearl divers who had become educated middle class bureaucrats. Initially,
the state sought to buy these groups off but al-Naqeeb contends that as oil revenues
increasingly will not be able to postpone the day of reckoning the state will resort toWestern supplied instruments of force to contain this pressure. According to al-Naqeeb
modern authoritarianism in the GCC states belongs to a group of authoritarian outcomes48

resulting from colonialism but in the GCC are distinct in that they also are characteristicof oil economies. On this last point Crystall comments that al-Naqeeb:

links the older dependency-based writing to the new and growing body ofliterature on the rentier state, a literature which argues that oil, by freeing rulers
from their dependence on domestic revenue sources, frees them from thedemands for democratic participation that accompany the provision of taxes.
The result is a movement away from democracy: no taxation, hence norepresentation.
(Crystal 1997: 308)

Summary

Following from this survey of selected writings on state formation it is possible tosummarise and restate three points of particular relevance for state formation in Oman
which will shape the study to follow. Firstly the need to pay particular attention to thepre-colonial society prior to the encounter with the West and the way in which
indigenous social and political forms in Oman prior to the modern era of Middle East
politics since World War One were very much the outcome of their interaction withinformal imperial influence. Secondly, whilst much of the process of state formation in
Oman is concerned with territorial delimitation it is important to relate this to theeconomic changes of the period, principally but not exclusively the prospecting for anddevelopment of oil resources in Oman, and the change in social and political relations
that ensued. A final point is to relate the existence of a ‘sultanistic regime’8 to the social

8 This term is used in Al-Haj (1996) drawing on Linz (1975). Linz (1975: 259)
describes ‘sultanistic regimes’ as those ‘based on personal rulership with loyalty to theruler based not only on tradition, or on him embodying an ideology, or on a uniquepersonal mission, or on charismatic qualities, but also on a mixture of fear and rewards
to his collaborators. The ruler exercises his power without restraint at his own
discretion and above all unemcumbered by rules or by any commitment to an ideology
or value system. The binding norms and relations of bureaucratic administration are
49

basis of authoritarianism rather than by reference to any concepts such as ‘traditional’and ‘modern’ states. Before we turn to examine the relationship between Oman and theWest it is first necessary to consider the methodology used in this thesis.

A Note on Methodology

A thesis in the discipline of International Relations (IR) must be methodologically
explicit; it must also be aware that issues of methodology in IR are not any different tothose of other social sciences (Halliday 1994: 23). It is from this basic assumption thatthe following comments on the methodology of the thesis are offered. My starting point
for considering these issues is the classification of different types of theory in IR andtheir uses by Ngaire Woods (1996). Types of theorising she distinguishes are ‘concepts
and definitions’, ‘maps or perspectives’, ‘formal theories’, ‘quantitative methods’, and‘reflectivism’. She makes use of the distinction drawn by Steve Smith and Martin
Hollis (1990) between ‘Explaining’ and ‘Understanding’ in the social sciences. Hollis
and Smith contend that the social sciences are based on two intellectual traditions: one
is founded on the triumphant rise of natural science since the 16th century and the otheris rooted in 19th century ideas of history and the writing of history from the inside.
‘Explaining’ is the key term in the first approach, and ‘understanding’ is the key in thesecond (Hollis and Smith 1990: 1). Woods summarises the distinction they are making
thus:

constantly subverted by personal arbitrary decisions of the ruler, which he does not feelconstrained to justify in ideological terms. In many respects the organization of power
and of the staff of the ruler is similar to traditional patrimonialism as described byWeber.’
50

Explaining is concerned with identifying what caused a particular event or stateof affairs. Scholars interested in explaining adopt a comparative approach togenerate hypotheses and to identify the independent variable. In contrast
understanding is concerned with the meaning of a particular event or state ofaffairs rather than a set of cases. In this approach scholars investigate history tocreate a narrative which allows a greater appreciation of the origins, evolution
and consequences of an event. If the insights of an historical approach can be
combined with the rigourous appraisal sought by the explainers thanunderstanding and explaining become truly complementary. (Woods 1996: 11)

Historical narrative and social science

The above statement contends that the historical narrative of the ‘understanders’ insocial science is a less scientifically rigorous method than that used by the ‘explainers’.
However, also in Explaining International Relations Since 1945 John Lewis Gaddis(1996) argues that many social scientists have based their view that the historian’s
method is not scientific on an outdated view o f what science is (1996: 39-44). Thesesocial scientists are still working with a model of Newtonian science with its
determinism and seek to model themselves on what they perceive as the precision ofphysics. Gaddis notes that new developments in science such as chaos theory mean thatsuch a model is flawed. He argues that social scientists would do well to emulate thegeological and biological sciences - these sciences are sciences of process concerned tosee how multiple causes intersect, patterns overlap with singularities in a framework of
passing time. In this respect the historical narrative conforms to these features of ascientific model.

This thesis uses a historical narrative in a framework of comparative enquiry to examine
the historical process of state formation in the case of Oman. With its use of a historicalnarrative the thesis is located more in the approach o f ‘understanding’ than ‘explaining’.

51

In this study of the relationship between Oman and the West theory is used primarily todefine and organise the facts - or in Ngaire Wood’s terms, theory is being used to map
the international landscape. We now turn to examine the nature of Omani society prior
to its encounter with the West and the outcome of its interaction with the expanding
capitalist powers up to 1920.

52

Chapter Two: Oman and British Imperial Expansion 1798-1920

Introduction

The phase of state formation in Oman from 1798 to 1920 is defined by the impact of the
British links with India which required British maritime supremacy in the Indian Ocean.
After 1798 the British started to become something more than another foreign trading
partner with the Omanis: during the nineteenth century the British relationship with the
Omanis changed from important ally to dominant imperial power. This change
manifested itself in increasing involvement with the Omanis and influence over the
Omani position in the Indian Ocean. Through the arbitration which led to the separationof the Zanzibar and Arabian sultanates, the banning of significant Omani trading
activities in slaves and guns and their financial and military support of the Muscat
sultans the British reduced the A1 Bu Sa’id rulers of Muscat from a significant maritime
power to foreign-suported clients. This culminated in the British defence of Muscat
from 1913 to 1920 without which the Imamate would have been restored. The British
links with India required only a residual interest on the Arabian peninsula, mainly to
exclude rival imperial powers and contain regional threats; it was not until thedevelopments that followed World War One that the British were to become more
directly involved in Omani internal affairs; this will be examined in chapter three. This
chapter is structured by the three narrative themes that are to be used to examine theexternal and internal influences on the process of state formation in Oman in the period
1798 - 1920: (1) the international context of external involvement, (2) the nature of thatinvolvement and (3) its impact on Omani society.

532.1: The international context 1798-1920

The Sultanate of Oman lies on the south-eastern comer of the Arabian Peninsula. The
northern part of the Sultanate has two main geographical features: a mountain range anda coastal plain. The range of mountains of the interior extend from the MusandamPeninsula in the north, running in an arc until finally petering out on the coast of the
Indian Ocean at Ras al-Hadd, the eastern most point of the Arabian Peninsula. Lying
inside the arc of the mountains is the Batinah coastal plain which extends from Shinas
in the north to al-Seeb, just before Matrah and Muscat, in the south. Together they form
an ‘island’ - bounded on one side by the Indian Ocean and on the other by the trackless‘Empty Quarter’. Lying a thousand kilometres across the Jiddat al-Harasis, a gravel
plain, is the southern province of Dhofar.

The word Oman has been used to describe different areas in different times reflecting
the historical development of the Omani state and indeed those of the lower Gulf. One
meaning has been the reference to the core area in the mountainous interior centering on
Nizwa and Rustaq. This meaning was reflected in the name of the Sultanate until 1970:
the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman.1 The process of state formation in the area has
meant paradoxically that what had been known as coastal Oman (sahel Oman)
developed into Trucial Oman or the Trucial States and subsequently the United ArabEmirates. In contrast, Dhofar, an area always considered separate from Oman, both
geographically and culturally, has been incorporated (although not without difficulty)
into the contemporary state - since 1970, the Sultanate of Oman.

1 In this study if the intent is to distinguish between the coast and the interior thenquotation marks will be used i.e. ‘Muscat’ and ‘Oman’.
54

The origins of British involvement in Oman and the Gulf as a whole lie in trade which
commenced in the early seventeenth century through the activities of the English East
India Company (EEIC). At this point in time the maritime outlets of the Indian Ocean
were controlled by the Portuguese although they were now having their maritime
supremacy and their control of trading challenged by the British, Dutch and French(Peterson 1978: 137). The Portuguese ran a ‘protective costs system’ for trade in the
Gulf and Oman similar in essence to that operated by the previous Omani and Persian
powers when they had controlled the area (see Bhacker 1992: 214 and Wilkinson 1977:9). With the expulsion of the Portuguese the form of European influence on Oman, theGulf and the Indian Ocean was to take a new form, different in nature to that of militaryconquest and the exacting o f ‘tribute’.

This new conduit of influence was the East India Companies of Britain, France andHolland; these companies were the means of the expansion of capitalism in the Indian
Ocean. The Portuguese brought to the east new arms, ship designs and navigational
skills (Risso 1986: 11-13). However, they failed to restructure Asian trade - 60 to 80 per
cent of Asian exports to Europe continued to come overland in 1600 - and ultimately
Portugal was unable to sustain its Eastern investment. The restructuring of Asian trade
was undertaken by the English and Dutch East India Companies and the overland routefor trade became insignificant thereafter. Although during this time Europe still ran a
trade deficit with the east, the East India Companies were becoming involved in the
inner Asian trade and ultimately a growing penetration was to create these areas asmarkets for European manufacturing goods (Bromley 1994: 57). The East India
Companies were the bearers of new innovation:

55

The organisation of the English and the Dutch East India Companies into jointstock companies exercising separation between the ownership of capital andmanagement by a professional class of merchants and salaried administrators,
was a new and unique phenomenon in commercial organisation.
Trans-continental trade was no longer the exclusive preserve either of royalmonopoly, as had been the case of the Portuguese-Spanish crown or ofindividual merchants or partnerships operating as separate entities and covering
vast trading areas such as that between the Italian ports and the ports of India.
(Bhacker 1992:28)

The establishment of the East India Companies and their emerging patterns of long
distance trade can be regarded as the beginning of a ‘world economy’ and preceded thedominant role of industrial capital and the social transformations of the early nineteenth
century (Bhacker 1992:28). The English East India Company was granted a charter by
Parliament in 1600; it made treaties, organised armies2 and fought wars: an interestingcase of the franchising by government of political authority. Initially, it was in the
shadow of the Dutch East India Company but gradually surpassed it in the latter part ofthe seventeenth century. Thereafter the main challenge came from the French East
India Company until its collapse in bankruptcy due to massive war debts in 1769 (Wolf
1982: 129). The English East India Company was abolished after the Indian Mutiny of1857 and the resulting reorganisation of British rule in India.

Britain, India and the Gulf

The value of Gulf trade declined gradually in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and by the end of the eighteenth century it had virtually disappeared (Peterson 1986: 9).
The continued presence of the Bombay marine could only be justified by the protection56

of the minor ‘country trade’ from India. It was not until the end of the eighteenth
century that an interest developed that was to remain a key Western interest in Oman tothe present day: Oman’s strategic importance to an external economic interest. In 1798
Napoleon invaded Egypt and easily defeated the Mamluk rulers. In British eyes hisgoal was India; this suspicion was confirmed by the interception of letters from
Napoleon to the rulers of Muscat and Mysore. The ensuing defeat of Tipu Sultan andexpulsion of the French from Cairo in 1801 by a British-Ottoman alliance madeimpossible any attempt by Napoleon to threaten India and also established British
supremacy on the subcontinent. It also had the effect of making the Arabian littoral anextension of the security frontier of British economic interests in India. The British
plunder of India allowed Britain to buy back the national debt from the Dutch and in thenineteenth century Indian surpluses allowed Britain to create and upkeep a global
system of free trade (Wolf 1982: 261). After the EEIC acquisition of extensive
territorial holdings in India at the end of the eighteenth century the British did
everything they could to prevent any local, regional or Western power from challenging
either their political or commercial hegemony in the Indian Ocean area (Bromley 1994:
67). The protection of British interests in India was the underlying factor in theevolution of British security policy in the Indian Ocean until the earlier part of the 20th
century:...British actions in the eighteenth century, designed to exclude other European
states from activity in the Indian Ocean were based on different priorities thanthose of the nineteenth century, when the predominant need was to protect thelines of communication to India, or the twentieth century with the necessity of asecure cordon around the subcontinent. (Peterson 1978:137)

2 By 1805 the English East India Company’s army numbered 155,000 men and was one

57

Consequently, until 1947 British policy in the Gulf was decided in India rather than
London. The British Governor (Viceroy) of India appointed British representatives in
the Gulf who reported to the British Resident Persian Gulf (PRPG). For example, at theend of the nineteenth century the government of India initiated a ‘forward policy’ ofIndian defence as a result of Lord Curzon’s view of the strategic importance of the Gulf
(Peterson 1986:9). A British commentator of the late 19th century, T. Bent, stated thisclearly: ‘like all the rest of the Persian Gulf, Masqat is really an outlying province of ourIndian empire... as long as you are on the shores of the Gulf you are, so to speak, inIndia’ (quoted in Bierschenk 1989:207) It was not until the emergence of oil as a key
factor in the world market just before and during the First World War that India’s placein defining British policy in the Gulf began to change (Biershenk 1989: 206).

2.1: Conclusion

Britain’s overriding interest in the Gulf and Oman from 1798 to 1920 can therefore bedescribed as ‘maritime peace’, that is unchallenged British supremacy of the seas andthe exclusion of rival Western powers from significant influence on the Arabiancoastline. To achieve this required action against local and competing Western powers
Local trading powers were subjugated economically and as part of this process certain
Arab maritime activities were curtailed. The traditional protective costs trade system

of Europe’s largest standing armies (J. Brown 1994: 49).
58

<1and competition thereafter was termed piracy, and sea war and slave trading were
progressively eliminated. Whilst there were some ‘humanitarian’ factors involved in
the campaign against slave trading the most significant motivation was to undermine
this source of Arab wealth (Halliday 1974: 269). British paramountcy was also
challenged by Western rivals, principally France, and Britain had to guard against
attempts to undermine her position. This was only finally achieved for a couple ofdecades after World War One when all challenges receded and the Gulf became ineffect, a British lake. The specific impact of this broad context for British involvement
in Oman will be considered next.

2.2: British involvement in Oman 1798 -1920

The nature of Britain’s involvement with Oman that followed from this context can bedivided into three broad periods up to 1920 in which Britain’s dominance of the rulersof Muscat became progressively greater: 1798-1856, 1857-1871, and 1872-1920.
Within these periods there were often sharp changes in British attitude towards theMuscat rulers which reflected shifts in the British perception of their commercial andpolitical interests in the area. Before we consider these three broad periods it isnecessary to examine the specific origins of British involvement with Oman.

Origins of involvement: the East India Company and the rulers of Muscat

In 1624 the port of Muscat, which at that point was under Portuguese control, came tofeature in the commercial policies of the English East India Company (Bhacker 1992:

3 For a repudiation of this depiction of Arab sea activities see al-Qasimi (1986).
5931). Following the expulsion of the Portuguese from Sohar in 1643 contacts between
the Omanis and the EEIC were initiated in 1645 by Imam Nasir bin Murshid alYa’aribah who formally invited the Company to trade at Sohar and Sib, though not at
Muscat which still remained under the Portuguese. Imam Nasir was keen to develop
contacts with European traders other than his Portuguese enemies and in 1646 a treaty
was made between the Imam and the EEIC representative, Philip Wylde. One writer
has commented that the Wylde Treaty embodies, albeit in a tentative form, the conceptsof currency convertibility (clause one), exemption from customs duty (clause three),anti-trust and retail price maintenance (clause four), religious toleration (clause five),and extraterritorial jurisdiction (clause six) (Skeet 1974: 211). It can also be added thatclause eight seeks to exclude other European competitors.

Following this agreement contacts further developed between the Ya’aribah and the
EEIC which clearly appreciated Muscat’s strategic location, both commercially andmilitarily (Bhacker 1992: 32-33). In 1651 the Ya’aribah offered a house in Muscat to
the Company as a factory (in this context a trading post). During the Dutch Wars
Muscat was perceived by the English as ‘a port in these parts as that wee might call ourowne...as wee are at present and are like to bee if these wars continue.’ In 1659
negotiations were started for the establishment of a factory at Muscat but which came tonothing due to the death of the English negotiator. In the 1660s the EEIC came toconsider the possession of a fort at Muscat as desirable from a military strategic point ofview: ‘Twill be a very beneficial place and keepe both India and Persia in awe.’
However the EEIC was to actually obtain neither a factory nor a fort at Muscat,complaining that the ‘King [who at that time must have been Imam Sultan bin Sayf alYa’aribah] had gone back on his word.’ M. Reda Bhacker (1992) speculates that for the60

Ya’aribah ‘the memory of their great struggle and the eventual expulsion of thePortuguese after more than a century of occupation must have been too fresh in theirminds.’ Although trade actually increased between Oman and the EEIC the A1 Bu
Sa’id maintained the Ya’aribah’s wariness and it was not until 1798 that a treaty was
signed giving the Company extensive trading rights but still no factory or fort. What
was the change of circumstances that led to the Muscat rulers to sign a new treaty andwhat motivation did Britain have for securing this? M. Reda Bhacker contends that thesigning of the treaty was ‘the first nail in the coffin of Omani independence.’ It is withan examination of the context of this treaty that we start our consideration of the firstbroad period that has been identified in British-Omani relations.

1798-1856: British limitations on Oman

It is clear that the EEIC had always appreciated the strategic benefits of the port ofMuscat to themselves or other powers. In 1798 an Anglo-Omani treaty (Persian:
qalnamah) was signed by the Persian representative of the EEIC and Sayyid Sultan bin
Ahmad in response to apparent French interest with the ruler of Muscat. The British
ignored the extent of Oman’s association with France in East Africa; Bhacker contends
that the British perhaps conjectured that Sultan bin Ahmad would never put hiscommercial dealings with India at risk. In 1800 this treaty was confirmed and British

61

representation was established in Muscat; the ratifying agreement declared that thefriendship of the British and Omanis would ‘remain unshook till the end of time, and till
the sun and moon have finished their revolving career’ (Risso 1986: 220). However,
the realities of relations were somewhat less poetic. In 1803, in the words of the British
chronicler Lorrimer ‘it was directly intimated to Sultan more than once, that, were he tothrow in his lot with the French, the British government would have no alternative but
to place his dominions under a commercial blockade from the side of India’ (quoted in
Bhacker 1992: 41). In the same year, with the end for the time being of the Frenchthreat to India, the British agency in Muscat was closed down although it was reopenedin 1805 when there was a renewed threat from the Qawasim of the Gulf to British
shipping. This British ambivalence to the cultivation of an enduring relationship with
the A1 Bu Sa’id continued. In the ongoing struggle for power at Muscat following
Sultan bin Ahmad’s death, the British were compelled to take into account internal
Omani disputes in their dealings with the Arab power for the first time in the history of
British-Omani relations. At the beginning of Sa’id bin Sultan’s rule (r. 1806 - 1856)
the British, in the absence of any direct threat from a Western power to their position,refused to become involved in his internal disputes. Indeed, in 1806 Britain evenrejected Sa’id’s offer of an alliance which, until then, had been sought for over ahundred years. Renewed French activity (an alliance was concluded with Persia in1807) meant that Britain reluctantly moved closer to Sa’id as it recognised the value ofhis port to the defence of British interests in India; however, the loss of lie de France(Mauritius) in 1810 meant the final demise of Napoleonic ambitions in the Indian
Ocean. At this point, however, a further threat to British naval supremacy allowed acontinuation of the British-Muscat alliance in the furtherance of a mutual interest.

62

Britain, Oman and the Saudi-Qasimi threat

Following Sultan bin Ahmad’s death Britain began to take on the role hitherto playedby Oman: the control of the high seas against depredations on cargo-laden shipping or‘piracy’ as the British now termed it. In the early years of Sa’id bin Sultan’s rule a
British-Muscat alliance developed through a coincidence of interest: a shared opposition
to the actions of the Qasimi seafarers. Sa’id had long sought to involve the British inhis battles with the newly expanding power of the Saudis and their militant doctrine of
Wahhabism but the British had no particular interest in his fate in internal Arabianstruggles.4 However, the maritime activities of the Qawasim in the lower Gulf did
threaten British interests and it was this that led to the joint Muscati-British expedition
to Ras al-Khayma in 1809-10. For Sa’id it was a chance to enforce his authority on
outlying parts of geographical Oman. After a number of campaigns against the
Qawasim culminating in the 1819-1820 expedition the British imposed a General Treatyof Maritime Peace in 1820 which was renewed at intervals until a Perpetual Treaty of
Maritime Peace was signed in 1853.

British actions and the subordination of the A1 Bu Sa’id rulers

In the late seventeenth century the ruler of Muscat was the dominant political andcommercial power in the west Indian ocean area (Boxer 1969). By the late eighteenth

4 Sa’id did manage to persuade the British to get involved with one internal campaign
later in his reign. The disastrous 1819 expedition against the Bani Bu Ali of Ja’alanfollowing British accusations of piracy resulted in a near massacre of British troops andnecessitated a punitive revenge raid the following year and the court martial of thecommanding British officer for having involved British forces unnecessarily in a
campaign in the interior of Arabia (Allen 1987: 147).
63

century it was still the case that Sultan bin Ahmad (r. 1796-1804) felt able to mountmilitary campaigns in the Gulf independently of the British. It is significant that
following the brief interlude of Badr bin Sayf (r. 1804-1806), Sa’id bin Sultan (r.18061856) felt it necessary to write to the British authorities in Bombay requesting
recognition - a recognition that was not forthcoming for a year as the British were waryof committing themselves to different contenders for power in Omani politics (Bhacker
1992). However, thereafter the British, through a variety of measures, came toprogressively dominate the rule of Sa’id bin Sultan who gradually found his room tomanoeuvre progressively eliminated as he struggled to maintain his independence. At
the same time that Britain benefited from its alliance with Sa’id bin Sultan it was taking
actions that undercut his position and eventually made his successors completelydependent on Britain. This was achieved through two measures: firstly, the removal of
Omani claims to tribute in the Gulf and, secondly, the curtailing of Arab commercial
activities such as slaving and trading in guns. In Sa’id’s father’s lifetime Oman had lostits economic interests in India to the British. The 1820 General Treaty of Maritime
Peace between Britain and the tribes of the lower Gulf removed any hopes of re­establishing Omani dominions in that area. With the British capture of lie de France
Britain lost interest in Oman or its overseas territories. Nevertheless, the only two
actions of note in Omani-British relations in the 1820s had the effect of further
undermining Sa’id bin Sultan (Bhacker 1992).

The slave trade from East Africa formed a substantial part of the economic base of the
Omani empire. The Moresby Treaty of September 1822 was signed by Sultan Sa’id inMuscat and prohibited the sale of slaves to Christians in Zanzibar. The protection given
to the Mazru’i of Mombassa by Captain Owen in February 1824 remained in force until

641826 although it was protested against by Sa’id and quickly repudiated by the British
government. British interest in the activities of the Muscat ruler was rekindled in 1833
when Sa’id signed a treaty with the Americans. This was perceived by the British as athreat to their position in the area and motivated them to sign in 1839 a Commercial
Treaty with Oman and Zanzibar. Cogan, who negotiated the treaty, saw its primaryobjective as to offset American commercial encroachment in the Indian Ocean area
(Sheriff 1994:317). In 1845 Sa’id assented to a stronger treaty by which he agreed toprohibit any slave trade between his possessions in East Africa and Arabia andconferred on the East India Company the right to search and seize vessels. This trend
was to culminate in the 1873 treaty which absolutely prohibited the importation ofslaves into Oman and instigated the closure of public slave markets in Oman.

1857-1871: British arbitration in Omani affairs

The progressive severity of these treaties indicates the degree to which the British wereincreasingly dictating to the A1 Bu Sa’id. This change in the nature of the A1 Bu Sa’idBritish relationship first became obvious with the arbitration of the succession disputeafter Sa’id bin Sultan’s death in 1856. Following the Coghlan Commission, the Britishmediated Canning Award of 1861 presided over the division of the African domains
from the Arabian lands which the A1 Bu Sa’id ruled. It confirmed the existing
separation and that the two rulers would now be officially addressed by the British as65‘Sultans’ like the Ottomans (Bhacker 1992: 191). The richer Zanzibar sultanate under
Majid bin Sultan was to pay a subsidy o f40,000 Maria Theresa dollars (MTS)5 a year to
the Muscat sultanate ruled by Thuwaini bin Sa’id. When Majid ‘defaulted’ on thispayment he was at first pressured into its payment with arrears and later theGovernment of India took over the payment of the actual money from its coffers. The
Zanzibar subsidy, as it became to be known, was the first step towards the Muscat
sultanate’s financial dependence on the British. Furthermore, the withholding of theZanzibar subsidy, as with the withholding of British recognition, became a powerfulmeans of arbitration in Omani succession disputes without involving Britain in direct
administration (Landen 1967: 201). The most notable demonstration of this was thecollapse of the Imamate 1868-1871 after the British withheld the Zanzibar subsidy anddemonstrated their decisive influence. In the late 19th century the British implicitly
ordained succession by primogeniture and the designation of an heir apparent so that thefamily had to accept the choice of the Government of India as Sultan and so avoid
succession disputes (Peterson 1978: 97).

1872 - 1920: Muscat - a de facto protectorate

In this period Muscat became a de facto British protectorate. This was the result of the‘forward policy’ of the Government of India in the late nineteenth century and was
expressed in a number of British-Muscat ‘agreements’. In 1891 Sultan Faisal bin Turkipledged himself and his successors never to transfer Omani territory except to the

5 The Maria Theresa dollar was a silver coin first minted in Austria but then reproduced
for use in the Arabian Peninsula but always with the date of 1780. At the turn of thetwentieth century Sultan Faisal bin Turki adopted the Indian rupee for circulation in the66

British government; this was enforced in 1899 when, under threat of a British
bombardment of his palace, Sultan Faisal withdrew his agreement to a French coaling
station at Bandar Jissah. In 1895 the British undertook to protect the Muscat-Matrah
area from future tribal attack. As a result Indian Army troops were dispatched toMuscat in 1913 and defended the town against besieging Imamate forces 1915-1920.
On the accession of Taimur bin Faisal (r. 1913 -1931) in 1913 the British secured his
commitment to seek British advice on all important matters (Peterson 1987: 8). The
British official pretence that the Sultans were fully independent rulers crippled theMuscat regime.6 The British held a view of the ideal Sultan: he would not be afinancial liability, would maintain peace and order amongst his subjects and would ofcourse take British ‘advice’ on matters involving British interest. However, as has been
noted already, British actions inevitably made the Sultan dependent on the British bothfinancially and militarily. The outcome was the notable tendency in Sultans from Faisal
to Sa’id bin Taimur (r. 1932-1970) to want to abdicate or live away from Muscat.

France, the United States and Oman

territories under his control although the MT$ remained valid for the territory of the
Imamate in the interior of Oman (Peterson 1978: 25).
6 In certain circumstances the usual euphemisms were used for public consumption:
Oman was an independent countiy which Britain ‘advises’ and ‘assists’ under treaty
obligations (Halliday 1974: 271). However in their private dealings with the Sultans theattitude of the British could be different. For example, in the preamble of the 1937
concession agreement signed by Sa’id bin Taimur with Petroleum Concessions Ltd theword ‘Independent’ before ‘Ruler’ was deleted at H.MG’s suggestion (Wilkinson 1987:
276). In March 1970 the junior Labour Defence Minister declared to the House ofCommons: ‘The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman is a fully sovereign and independent
state.’ Halliday comments: ‘The pretence of Omani ‘independence’, like the‘complexity’ of the relationship, is meant to hide the what is in fact a pellucid
arrangement. Britain supports the Sultan and has told him what to do when it needed to;otherwise it has allowed him to rule as he likes, provided he keeps Oman tranquil anddefends British strategic interests. The Sultans are British collaborators’ (1974: 271,
280).
67

Apart from occasioning greater British involvement the death of Sa’id bin Sultan had
also stimulated interest from other Western powers in the fate of the A1 Bu Sa’id
dominions, particularly the French who were taking a renewed interest in Indian Ocean
affairs. In 1862 Britain and France signed an agreement in which both pledged torespect the independence of the two, now separate, sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar.7
A commercial treaty arranged through the auspices of the British was signed with the
Netherlands in 1877 (al-Musawi 1990: 93). The Americans, as has been noted, signed
their first treaty with an Arab power when they concluded negotiations with Sa’id in
1833 (Halliday 1974: 269). The United States, conducting an active trade in dates,
opened a consulate in 1880. However, these burgeoning contacts with a number ofWestern countries came to an end in the last decade of the nineteenth century, as the
Arabian littoral became ever more firmly integrated into the British Indian imperial
frontier. This integration meant that Britain became more involved in internal affairs aswell as external affairs:

In 1862 the official - and usually the actual policy of Britain in the Gulf was oneof supervision of the foreign affairs, but one of non-interference in the internalaffairs of the various local states. By 1900, however although the official policy
remained unchanged, few Gulf rulers could escape without consulting British
representatives when they considered important decisions concerning theirinternal administrations.
(Landen 1968:163)

The position of a Sultan in Muscat became an onerous one, without freedom of
manoeuvre in either external or internal affairs. The Sultans had no illusions about their

7 In 1891 the Zanzibar sultanate became a British protectorate; following independence
in 1964 a nationalist revolution overthrew the A1 Bu Sa’id and the ruling Arab caste(Halliday 1974: 298).
68independence and neither did Western powers other than the British. In 1915 the US
consulate closed and the French consul was not replaced after the death of its occupant
in 1918. Britain’s strategic interest was only that other powers be excluded; theisolation of Muscat meant that her once busy port suffered depopulation and became
stagnant. This was the making of Muscat’s ‘long sleep’:8 however, it was not a natural
sleep bom of exhaustion but one induced by the smothering effect of British action in
the Indian Ocean. The main focus of this section has been on British motives, policy
and actions in Oman; we now turn to a more detailed look at the impact of British
imperialism on Oman’s economy, society and political organisation in the period up to
1920.

2.3: Impact of British Imperialism on Oman to 1920

British involvement had profound and fundamental consequences for Oman. British
imperialism interrupted the historical pattern of Omani politics. This pattern reflectedcertain realities of life on the south-eastern comer of the Arabian peninsula which will
be briefly examined in order to assess the consequences of British imperialism for
Oman.

Geography and Ecology of Oman

8 ‘The Long Sleep’ is the heading of a chapter on Oman in David Holden’s Farewell to
Arabia (1966).
69

The starting point is the physical geography of Oman.9 Oman has been likened to an
island on which two traditions developed: that of the mountainous interior (dakhiliya) ‘Oman* - and that of the coastal plain - ‘Muscat’. The interior tradition is dominated bytribal politics and Ibadhism whilst the coastal tradition is that of sea faring andmaritime trade. Research has often focused, depending on the individual researcher’s
preference, on either the interior or the coastal regions (Wilkinson 1987: ix). As aresult, for a long time in the academic literature, the society of the interior and coast
were seen as entirely separate.

A consensus has now emerged that the two traditions

are very much interconnected.10 J.C. Wilkinson expresses it thus:

So whilst we can conceive of ‘Muscat’ as the focal point of contact between
outward and inward looking Oman, we should never think of Muscat and Omanas separate entities; rather as two sides of the same coin. (Wilkinson 1987:68)
He perceives the relationship between interior and coast as historically having a
dynamic so regular as to be cyclical: its constitutes the ‘Imamate cycle’ (Peterson 1991:
1440). The constituent parts of this cycle and their relationship to the physicalgeography prior to the impact of the West will now be examined in more detail: thetribal system, Ibadhism and the Imamate, and maritime trade.

9 For a detailed examination of the geography of Oman and its influence on Oman’ssocial organisation and history see J.C. Wilkinson (1977 and 1987). For an analysis
which counters what it sees as Wilkinson’s geographical determinism in his work Water
and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia (1977) see Thomas Biershenk (1984),
Weltmarkt, Stammesgesellschaft und Staatsformation in Suedost Arabien.
10 Wilkinson notes how his through his discussions with Calvin Allen he came toappreciate the importance of overseas links for the society in the interior on which he
had hitherto concentrated: ‘Increasingly I had become aware that the dichotomy
between Muscat and Oman was more apparent than real and that overseas activity was
not just the domain of a seafaring merchant class and a few emigres from the Sharqiya,
but was fundamental to the whole society in which I was interested’ (1987:ix).
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Tribes and confederations
Life in the interior was dictated by the imperatives of the level of agriculture permitted
by the ancient irrigation system (Persian: qanat; Arabic: aflaj) - probably first
constructed by the Persians during the Archaemenid occupation (Allen 1987: 23). The
Arab tribal system of Oman had its origins in the migration of Arabs to the area startingin around the first century A.D. and which occurred in two successive waves. The two
tribal confederations of the Hinawi and the Ghafiri are, according to custom, based on
the original areas they came from: the first from the south, the second from the north.
In addition, a correlation between Hinawi and adherence to Ibadhism and conversely atribe’s membership of the Ghafiri confederation with Sunnism, is often posited toamount to a fundamental dichotomy.11 M. Reda Bhacker contends that such a view isseriously flawed. Rather, he argues, we should focus on the way that ‘the tribal-cumreligious system of Oman, religious affiliations and dubious genealogies based on
mythical ancestors have never played as significant role in this dichotomy as have thepolitical ambitions of the major tamimas within each confederation’ (1992:19). This
became particularly significant for the election to the Imamate from the eighteenth
century, a period to which we will return later in this section. It is first necessary toconsider the distinctive version of Islam in Oman - Ibadhism - and its institution of the
Imamate.

Ibadhism and the Imamate

71The fundamental characteristic of life in the mountainous interior was its autonomy.
This was reflected in the successful implantation of Ibadhism in the eighth century.
This represented an ‘anti- centralising ideology’ well suited to the needs of a tribal
society hostile to a distant imperial capital (Halliday 1974: 267). Ibadhism rejectedboth the prescriptions of Sunni and Shi’a Islam concerning the proper leadership of theIslamic community (Allen 1987: 9). It held that the original pure Islamic state had beencorrupted by Uthman and sought to restore that community. In theory the leadership of
this Islamic community was to be decided by an election in which any able bodied
mature male of proper religious standing could stand. It was even possible in certain
political conditions, such as an external tyrant (jababira), for the Imam to be concealed
following the Ibadhi concept of secrecy (hitman) or even for there to be no Imam at all(Wilkinson 1987: 9; Bathurst 1972: 106). The Imamate had a minimalist form ofgovernment according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. A standing army wasforbidden and if an Imam departed from true Islamic principles then the community had
a right even a duty to depose him.

In practice, however, the Imam was chosen from certain families and tribal groups andtended to ‘degenerate’ into dynastic power. These dynasties often lost interest in thetribal politics of the interior and concentrated on the other tradition ‘Muscat’. This was
the maritime tradition of Oman centring on the ports of the Batinah and concerned withthe trading and commercial opportunities of the Indian Ocean littoral which periodicallydeveloped into overseas dominion. The tensions that this set up constitute theunderlying dynamic of the ‘Imamate cycle’ to which we now turn.

11 M. Reda Bhacker cites J.E. Peterson (1978:112) among other Western and Arabic
sources.
72

Summary of the Imamate cycle

To start at one point of the cycle: at various times in history Ibadhi ideology has
provided the basis for a unification of the tribal forces of the interior into a form of‘nation’. This allowed the Omanis to take control of their coast and benefit from thewealth accruing from the trading opportunities of the Indian Ocean and overseas
territories. However, at this point the Imamate would degenerate into ‘temporal’ power
and turn its back on the tribal politics of the interior. This would arouse the discontent
of the interior forces who sought under Ibadhi ideology to depose the corrupt Imam.
The ensuing conflict often resulted in an outside power occupying the coastal plain andeven interior Oman, either at the behest of one of the parties or through an opportunistic
appreciation of the situation. Faced with this external tyranny the interior tribes would
again unite under Ibadhi ideology to elect a good and true Imam to free the country of
the foreign power. This represents a full turn of the cycle. It was this cycle that was to
be interrupted by the impact of British imperialism - that is the incorporation of the
Arabian littoral into the Indian defence orbit and the resulting protection of the A1 Bu
Sa’id who, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, were to become client rulers. Let
us now turn to a brief and selective overview of the history of this cycle prior to theelection of the first A1 Bu Sa’id Imam.

Imamate history to the first A1 Bu Sa’id Imams

73

There have only been five dynasties of any lasting importance: the Julanda, theYahmad-Kharus, the Nabahina, the Ya’aribah and the A1 Bu Sa’id (Wilkinson 1987: 9).
For our purposes the al-Ya’aribah dynasty is significant in that it led to the expulsion of
the first Europeans to dominate the coast of Oman, the Portuguese, and furthermore
they inaugurated what has been termed ‘Oman’s imperial age’ of expansion anddominion in the Gulf, India and East Africa (Allen 1987: 35). It was this Omani empire
that was to be dismembered by Britain.

The Portuguese in Oman

Portuguese control on the coast of Oman had been established in brutal fashion by
Alfonso de Albuquerque who, in 1507, arrived off the Omani coast and explored fromRas al-Hadd to Sur, laying waste the town of Quriyat. Eventually the coast of Oman
from Sur to Khor Fakkan was added to the Portuguese Indian Ocean empire and Muscat
developed as the centre of their maritime and commercial operations. This required
defending against the Arabs, Persians and Ottomans and it was during this time that theimposing forts of Jalani and Mirani, which still stand today, were built. The Portuguese
were content to leave the Arabs and their Hormuzi overlords to their own devices aslong as their annual tribute was paid. However, there were many Omani rebellions
against the Portuguese control with varying degrees of success but it was not until the
beginning of the Ya’aribah dynasty that the Omanis were able to unite sufficiently toexpel the Portuguese from Oman for good (Allen 1987: 32-34).

The Ya’aribah Imams (1624 - 1749)

74

Nasir bin Murshid al-Ya’aribah (1624-1749) was one of the many contenders forcontrol of Oman in the early seventeenth century.12 With the backing of the ulema, hegained election to the office of Imam and thereafter imposed his authority in the face of
opposition of rival warlords on Oman and the lower Gulf coast. Having established his
position in interior Oman he proceeded to take on the Portuguese who were still incontrol of Muscat and the Batinah coast. The final expulsion of the Portuguese,however, was to fall to his son, Sultan bin Saif al-Ya’aribah; the Portuguese were
harried out and replaced by the Omanis from India to East Africa. The result was that
Oman became the most formidable maritime power in the western Indian Ocean area
and the period of the first three Ya’aribah Imams was a time of great prosperity for
Oman.13 Gradually their hereditary and outward-looking regime became increasingly
suspect to the Ibadhi religious leaders, especially when there was no threat of foreign
domination and on account of their great wealth. By the reign of Sultan bin Saif II(1711-1714) dissent had begun to become rife in the Omani polity. The issue came toa head with the election of a new Imam on the death of Sultan bin Saif, with rival
candidates being backed by the religious leaders and the tribal chiefs. This became acivil war of the Omani tribes polarised around the Hinawi-Ghafiri divide, in which the
Ghafiri-backed candidate invited in Persian support. Rather than an alliance, thePersians became a force of invasion and occupation. This occupation came to an end in
1744 when the Persians sought to withdraw and were slaughtered by the governor ofSohar, Ahmad bin Sa’id al Bu Sa’id, who had given them a guarantee of safe passage(Allen 1987: 35-38).

12 This account of the al-Ya’aribah dynasty is drawn from C.H. Allen, Oman: The
modernisation o f the Sultanate (1987: 35-38). For a detailed study of the dynasty see
R.D. Bathurst, The al-Ya ’aribah Dynasty o f Oman (1967).

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The Al Bu Sa’id dynasty

The Al Bu Sa’id dynasty was founded with the election of Ahmad bin Sa’id to theoffice of Imam in 1749 as a result of his role in resisting and expelling the Persian
forces which had occupied the Batinah in the civil war which followed the decline of
the Ya’aribah dynasty. Although Ahmad did not come from a traditional Imamatefamily he governed from the old Ya’aribah capital of Rustaq. Following his death afamily power struggle ensued over the succession the outcome of which has been thesubject of different interpretations. Calvin Allen contends that Ahmad’s son, Sa’id bin
Ahmad, held the title of Imam and resided in Muscat, whilst his son, Hamad bin Sa’id
took control of Muscat and showed no interest in claiming the title of Imam or inestablishing himself with the tribes of the interior (Allen 1978; 1982; 1987: 41). In
contrast, he used the title of Sayyid which holds no connotations of religious authority
and turned his attentions to the trading opportunities of the Indian Ocean. He
characterises this as amounting to the establishment of an independent state. M. Reda
Bhacker, in contrast, contends that this depiction is erroneous; he points out that the titleof Sayyid was not an Al Bu Sa’id innovation but had been used by the Ya’aribah as arespectful form of address and does not possess the same religious significance in
Ibadhism as it does in Shi’a Islam. Furthermore, he adduces evidence to show that
Sa’id helped Hamad to take over Muscat and that they remained in close contact as‘they acted in concert in their effort to safeguard their own commercial interest faced asthey were with persistent intrigues from other members of the Al Bu Sa’id.’ Following

13 Nasir was followed by Sultan bin Saif I (1649-1679) and Balarab bin Sultan (16791692). See Allen (1987:37).
76

Hamad’s early death from smallpox Sa’id did not involve himself with Muscat affairs as
his brother Sultan successfully challenged him for control of the city. There thenfollowed an agreement between the three principal sons of Ahmad bin Sa’id which
recognised Sultan as in control of Muscat, Qays in Sohar and Imam Sa’id to bepensioned off to Rustaq where his authority held sway, whilst the authority of othertribal leaders ran in their own tribal areas (Bhacker 1992: 25-26). Sultan continued the
traditional attempts to exercise power in the Gulf, conducting campaigns to gain
recognition of his right to tribute from the Utub of Bahrain and to counter the Sa’udi
backed Qasimi foe. His death at their hands on the return from negotiations with the
Ottoman pasha of Basra led to predictable upheaval in Oman (Allen 1987: 25-25).
Sultan bin Sa’id came to power in 1806, having assassinated the Sa’udi sympathiser
Badr bin Saif, and sought to develop his power base. Ultimately, he was forced, due tothe growth of British power, to concentrate on the development and preservation of the
Omani dominions in East Africa and to absent himself from Muscat.

Oman and East Africa

The turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century sees not only the development of
the British into something more than a trading power but also the first manifestations of
the expanding Saudi power and their doctrine of Wahhabism (Wilkinson 1987: 54; seealso al-Rashid 1981, chapter 3). With the coastal areas of the lower Gulf coming underthe British Trucial system in the 1820s and the expansion of Wahhabi power in theinterior Sa’id had but one option: expansion in East Africa (Wilkinson 1987: 54-58).
Ironically, it was the development of British protection in Oman that allowed Sayyid
Sa’id to concentrate fully on this and develop his ‘African policy’ beginning in the77

1820s and culminating in the de facto transfer of his capital to Zanzibar. It would,
however, be a mistake to see this in isolation to developments in the rest of the world.
Thomas Bierschenk has characterised the expansion of Omani commerce in East Africa
in the first part of the nineteenth century as a ‘a secondary regional distribution centre ina world market increasingly dominated by Britain’(1989:20) and M. Reda Bhacker
comes to a similar conclusion.14 It was these same forces which had led to thedevelopment of Omani commerce in the first half of the nineteenth century - the spreadof capitalism under its ‘pioneer’ of British imperialism - that dictated its decline
thereafter.

Oman’s economic decline

Following the Indian Mutiny British economic penetration o f India gained pace and theBritish position in India became pivotal in Britain’s world-wide empire (Bromley 1994:
67). The British sponsored separation from Zanzibar deprived the ruler of Muscat fromthis source of wealth and put into stark relief the economic consequences of otheraspects of British action in the Indian Ocean area - in short, British paramountcy which
had been designed to safeguard the economic wealth deriving from the Raj. These were
the growing curtailment of slaving and gun trading, the opening of the Suez Canal and

14 Bhacker puts it thus: ‘...the nineteenth century commercial development of Oman
owed its genesis, in the final analysis, to the Industrial Revolution of the West. While
the Omani economy (together with its East African component) was being increasingly
integrated into the international economy, the suppression of the European slave tradegave it an added stimulus as the ensuing surplus slave labour was exploited locally for
agricultural and commercial purposes. The demand for commodities such as ivory andcloves from Africa and textiles from Arabia, produced using traditional tribal andcommunal labour, rose as production was boosted by the increased availability of slave
labour. This trend coupled with a corresponding decline in the prices of imported

78the introduction of steam ship technology which reduced Muscat’s role as a stopover
port. Furthermore, as the British domination of trade in the Indian Ocean area deepened
commerce shifted from the silver to the gold standard; Oman’s Maria Theresa dollar
was based on silver and currency drained from Oman when silver prices fell in the late
19th century. Most significant was the elimination of the Omani cotton weaving
handicraft industry at the hands of the European and British-sponsored Indian
manufacturing - a force with which Oman could not compete. The result was that by theend of the century Oman, although still within the Indian Ocean trading area, had
become relatively insignificant economically with a volume of trade that could only
allow prosperity for a few merchants.15 C.H. Allen advances the argument that thepoverty of the ruling Al Bu Sa’id should not be correlated with a decline of trade in the
19th century; rather that trade passed into the hands of the Indian merchants, theBanians (1978: 6). Whatever the case may be it is indisputable that the
impecuniousness of the Al Bu Sa’id Sultans was to both increase the hostility o f theinterior tribes and the Sultans’ dependence on the British either through the provision of
military protection against the tribes or in the bailing out of their debts with the Indian
merchants. Tribal resentment grew against the British-backed Sultans on the coast whoneither allowed the development of traditional sources of revenue nor provided any
largesse. We will examine the relations between the Sultanate and Imamate up to 1920
next.

manufactured goods, provided the dynamics of an enormous commercial expansion inboth Omani-controlled localities (1992: 195).
15 See Speece (1989: 501). Halliday notes that ‘trade fell in 1874-4 to £426,000 - aquarter of its 1830 level’ (1974:269).
79

Sultanate and Imamate

The term Sultan was first given to the rulers of Muscat by the British.16 The term is ananathema to Ibadhis with its negative association with secular tyranny. In the normal
course of the cycle the Al Bu Sa’id would have been swept away; it was only due tointerventions by the British - militarily or through the intervention of subsidy - that the
Al Bu Sa’id were restored after Imamate forces took control of Muscat 1868-1871.
With the collapse of the Omani empire in the 1860s the tribes of the interior no longer
saw the position of the Al Bu Sa’id Sultans on the coast as benefiting them. As inprevious times they started to espouse a ‘pure Islam’ and elected an Imam, forming ananti-coastal alliance headed by the al-Harathi tribe. In 1868 this alliance led by Azzan
bin Qais Al Bu Sa’id, representing a collateral branch of the Al Bu Sa’id, descended
from the mountains, captured Muscat and drove out foreign merchants and all signs ofalien corruption such as coffee houses (Halliday 1974: 270). This hostility to theoutside world threatened British interests. In 1871 the British helped Turki bin Sa’id
financially and militarily to expell the Imam from Muscat (Imam Azzan was killed inbattle outside Mattrah) and re-installed this branch of the Al Bu Sa’id as Sultans - theswitch from British alliance to British hegemony had occurred and Muscat became a defacto protectorate.17 With this development also came the change in the relationship of
the Sultans with the population from autocratic patrimon to foreign-supported puppet.

18

The beginning, as with the end of informal imperialism, is not as clearly defined as

16 Wilkinson (1987:68)notes that this nomenclature came into use after the CanningAward of 1861 whilst Allen (1978:4) says that the rulers were entitled Sultan after
1865.
17 A protectorate is a formal declaration that a country has responsibility for the conductof another country’s foreign relations (Doyle 1986: 359).

80

formal colonial annexations. The overthrow of the Imamate in 1871 and the restorationof the Sultan can be taken as the start of British informal imperialism in Muscat andOman - a situation that was to last for the next hundred years. From 1871-1919
Muscat was a de facto protectorate with British control of its foreign relations. As weshall see in chapter three, with the greater involvement of the British in internal
government from 1920, Muscat then became part of Britain’s informal empire.

The British were also concerned that the Sultan might be overthrown from within; thisproblem highlighted one of the contradictions of imperial rule: while Britain benefited
from the destruction of the Omani empire and brought it about, this end of empire
weakened the Sultans internally who then required greater British intervention to
support them - a ‘crisis of collaboration’ in Robinson’s terms. The advent ofimperialism both exacerbated the conflict between the Omani interior and the coast anddid not allow of its resolution. The tribal uprising of 1868 and the occupation of Muscat
by the tribes of the interior began a long series of British interventions in defence of
their client sultans. After the restoration of the Sultan in 1871, and the intensification of
British involvement there were further clashes in 1877 and 1883 when British warships
bombarded and repelled tribesmen who were attacking Muscat (Halliday 1974: 271272).

In 1895, after a tribal attack on Muscat, the British issued a warning to the tribes thatthey would not tolerate the eviction of Sultan Faisal from Muscat (Peterson 1976: 172;
1987: 8). In 1913 a new Imam, Salim bin Rushid al-Kharusi, was elected by

18 Exactly the same change took place with the Zanzibar branch of the Al Bu Sa’id
dynasty (Doyle 1986: 359).
81

disgruntled tribesman and an Indian Army force was dispatched to protect Muscat frombesiegers 1915-1920. Flushed with success after some victorious skirmishes, Sultan
Taimur bin Faisal was keen to try and extend his authority but Viceroy Harding
preferred he seek some sort of settlement. A British threat of a punitive tax on dateexports from the interior brought Imamate forces to negotiation at Sib and a treaty was
signed under British auspices in 1920 at Sib.19 The Political Agent Muscat, Wingate
was deliberately vague on the issue of sovereignty in order to get an agreement between
the two parties (Bierschenk 1989: 211).

The Treaty of Sib

The Treaty of Sib defined relations between ‘Oman’ and ‘Muscat’ for the next thirty or
so years. Effectively it left the interior to its own devices - both sides agreed not tointerfere in each other’s affairs and allow free trade and travel. So, at this stage themain consequence of Western involvement in Oman was the ossification of the
Imamate cycle. The twentieth century Imamate was, in contrast to its predecessors,
actually very isolated from the outside world due to the impact of British imperialism
and the expansion of the capitalist system.20 It was not to be until capitalistic forces

19 For a detailed account of the Imamate siege of Muscat and the subsequent signingunder British auspices of the Treaty of Sib see J.E.Peterson (1976).
20 The relationship of the expansion of Britain imperial power and capitalism is put byBromley thus: ‘The establishment of British dominance, if not hegemony, within the
global system was thus both cause and consequence of the incipient generalization of
the capitalist market and the initial breakdown of the great Asian empires (1994: 59).
82

developed an interest in the interior, that the cycle -which for the time being had merely
been stopped - was to be dismantled, seemingly for ever.

Conclusion

By the end of 1920 and the settlement at Sib, Britain’s position in Muscat was
unchallenged by either other Western powers, Al Bu Sa’id aspirations of independence,
interior tribal forces, or Saudi intrigues. Britain had no direct interest in Oman and was
happy to ignore the interior as long as, as elsewhere in Arabia, its control of the littoral
was secure and free from disturbance. The attainment of this position was the result of
the incorporation of the Omani coastline into the imperial frontiers of British India - aconnection first made at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Thissituation was not to change until the 1920s when economic and strategic interests
intrinsic to Oman and the Arabian peninsula developed. The first prospecting for oiland the development of air routes and its effect on Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in Omanare examined in the next chapter.

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Chapter Three: Informal Empire in Oman 1921 - 1931

The collapse of the Ottoman empire and the creation of a new state system in the
Middle East which followed World War One had a significant effect on British policy
towards the Persian Gulf. The increased British involvement in the Middle East region
as a whole led to increased military and civilian communications. In this context British
strategic interests in Oman increased as a new air route was planned. American formal
diplomatic representation was the responsibility of their Consul in Baghdad following
the closure of its consulate in Muscat. However they showed great interest in
information pertaining to explorations for oil and the relationship of the Sultan ofMuscat to the British. British strategic interests were located in ‘Muscat’ territory; theSultanate’s administration was restructured to try and stop its reliance on the
Government of India for defence against Imamate forces. However, it was the lure ofoil that was to create new Western interests which would require control of Imamate
territory itself: the first incursions into the interior of Oman in the search for oil took
place in this period.

3.1: The international context 1921 - 1931

The introduction of air routes and the development of oil as a commodity meant theArabian peninsula was perceived as an area of increasing geopolitical importance in its
own right. The air age made its first impact on Arabia during World War One. Britain
supplied Ibn Saud with four de Haviland biplanes and crew to use against the rebellious
Ikhwan. This was mainly to pre-empt other European powers attempting to undermine
the British position. However, the introduction of air technology to the peninsula came84

about mainly through the uses of air power Britain found for its imperial interests. In
the 1920s one of the main uses was for ‘policing’ operations to subdue troublesome
tribesmen. The nascent RAF and its new strategy of air power faced considerable
hostility from the other services fearful of an erosion of their role. However, the easewith which an aerial display or bombardment could assert British authority won theinter-service argument. The other application of air technology in this period was thedevelopment by the British of air routes around the fringes of the peninsula.

Air routes and empire

Whilst the discovery and exploitation of oil was to prove the more lasting and importantWestern concern with the Arabian peninsula, the need to develop air routes and theapplication of air power was the focus of British concerns with the security of thePeninsula in the 1920s (Peterson 1986: 18). New air routes, civil and military, wereseen as buckling the British Empire together. These routes required the creation ofairstrips at regular intervals along the route where supplies could be left. This in turnrequired making arrangements with the relevant sheikhs and rulers.

Theoretically, there were four possible routes for a passenger and mail service by air
from Cairo to India. One was via the Red Sea to Aden and thence up the coast to
Salalah and Muscat; however this was the longest route, lacked facilities and could be
disrupted by the seasonal monsoon. Another was across the desert to Baghdad and thenacross central Persia to Quetta but this had operational as well as political problems.
Remaining were two routes: along the Persian coast and onto Karachi or taking theArab side of the Gulf to Oman and then over to the Makran coast. In terms of distance,85

climate and amenity to supply by sea the two routes were similar. However, the Persian
Gulf route had the advantage that the Indo-European Telegraph’s line was already inplace there. Furthermore, there were perceived to be additional problems with the
Arabian route: a political one of dealing with the various sheikhdoms on the Arab side,
and a technical one - aircraft capable of safely making the hop across the sea from theTrucial to the Makran coast were only to come into existence in 1932. Accordingly, thePersian route was the one that was initially developed. However, it always sufferedfrom serious problems relating to wider tensions in the Anglo-Persian relationship,
German and Russian influence in Persia and the Persian preference for the central route(Peterson 1986: 21). The last leg of the Imperial Airways Cairo-Karachi flight was
inaugurated along the Persian coast in April 1929 and continued on a regular basis until
October 1932 when it was transferred to the Arabian littoral.

Work on the Arabian coast alternative started in 1929 but surprisingly, given the
difficulties with the Persian route, the Air Ministry and Imperial airways only began togive it consideration in 1931( Peterson 1986: 64). Developing the air route involved
surveying which was carried out by the RAF’s No. 203 (Flying Boat) Squadron andnegotiating with the rulers along the route which was conducted by the Political
Resident Persian Gulf. Kuwait, Bahrain and Gwadur (under the jurisdiction of the
Sultanate of Muscat and Oman) on the Makran coast posed few political problems as
the rulers had long co-operated with the British. More difficult was Qatar and theTrucial Coast. Eventually, agreement was reached for a landing strip at Sharjah which
could be utilised by landplanes although the passengers would be accommodated at theresthouse at Dubai. Although there still remained the issue of emergency landing86

grounds (especially on the other side of the Ru’us al-Jibal from Sharjah) the civil air
route from Cairo to India switched to the Arabian side of the Gulf in late 1932.

In addition to this civil air route the RAF sought to institute a Basra-Aden route. Parts ofthis route were in place before the creation of the civil route but it was not finished until
the completion of the civil route. This apparently anomalous situation is explained inthat the RAF had long been active in Mesopotamia and around Aden and had laid down
fuel supplies where ever a Political Agent was located. With the transfer of
responsibility for the defence of Aden colony and the protectorate from the Indian
Government to the RAF in 1928 the need for a permanent air linkage between Basraand Aden became even more pressing. In 1929, as the civil air route on the Arabian sideof the Gulf was being developed, the Air Ministry instructed the Air Officer
Commanding (AOC) Aden to extend the chain of landing strips eastward. Doing this in
the protectorate was relatively easy as British authority was firmly established.
Likewise, the Batinah coast of Oman was secure for such development. Moreproblematic was the stretch of coast between Salalah and Muscat where the Sultan ofMuscat and Oman’s authority was purely nominal. The creation of this route in Oman
was finished by 1936 and will be examined in section 3.2.

Air Power and Policing in the Arabian Peninsula

The advent of the air age to Arabia was not confined to the creation of civil and militaryroutes (see Peterson 1986: 28-40). The applications developed from the use of aircraftin the First World War were applied to peacetime conditions in the expanded empire in
the Middle East. This included their use in ‘small wars’ and imperial defence, and in87

colonial policing operations against tribal forces in which the low cost of air power wasof particular appeal and used by the Air Command in the inter-service competition for
defence responsibility. The use of air power on Sur in Oman was one such instance andwas used by the Air Ministry to show the benefits of air power and this will also be
examined in section 3.2.

Oil and empire: Britain and the Middle East after World War One

By the beginning of the First World War it had become abundantly clear to the British
military that control of reserves of petroleum would be a key strategic component in any
future military conflict; this was brought home to the British government by the oil
shortages of 1917 and 1918. These reserves were to be found in the Middle East,
notably Persia and what was then known as Mesopotamia. Sir Maurice Hankey, thesecretary of the War Cabinet, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour that ‘oil in
the next war will occupy the place of coal or at least a parallel place to coal. The only
big potential supply that we can get under British control is the Persian andMesopotamian supply. * Therefore, Hankey said ‘control over these oil supplies
becomes a first-class British war aim’. In substance Foreign Secretary Balfour agreed
with Hankey; Balfour sought to achieve the same objective but without using
formulations that would appear to the Americans as unduly imperialistic and conflictwith Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination (Yergin 1991: 185188).

88

The United States and the Open Door Policy

The American perception that the British were attempting to create a zone of supremacy
in the Middle East and the consequences this would have for Americans motivatedAmerican policy in this period. As in Britain, the experience of petrol shortages during
the war had had a similar galvanising affect on American policy makers to ensure that
American oil companies were not shut out of Middle East oil (Yergin 1991: 194). The
mechanism by which the exclusion of the US companies might have been achieved was
the concessionary arrangement of the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraqi
Petroleum Company). Set up in 1912 this company, had been comprised of the AngloPersian Oil Company (later Anglo-Iranian), Royal Dutch Shell and the Deutsche Bankand had negotiated a concession with the Ottoman government to develop the potential
oil-fields around Mosul. The companies in TPC had agreed not to prospect for oil in thearea covered by the concession except under the aegis and conditions of the TPC; theboundaries of the concession were known as the ‘self denying clause’ of the ‘Foreign
Office Agreement’ signed March 14 1914 (Yergin 1991: 187-188). During World War
One this area was allocated to the French sphere of influence under the Sykes-Picot
agreements. With British occupation at the end of the war the British had persuaded theFrench to hand over the Mosul area in return for Syria and a French involvement in the
exploitation of the oil resources.

Although the Americans retreated into political isolationism at the end of World War
One the other part of American foreign policy at this time was a determination to break
open important markets and access to natural resources for American companies,
foremost of which was oil. Hence, the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 which denied89drilling rights to foreign companies to oil resources on American public land inretaliation for the restrictions of the Dutch in the East Indies and the British in
Mesopotamia. The Americans were determined to resist the ‘old- fashioned
imperialism’ embodied by the San Remo Conference and press for their ‘Open Door’
policy. Initially the British were sceptical of American concerns of oil shortage notingthat four fifths of world oil production was located in Texas; acrimonious diplomatic
exchanges ensued between the Foreign Office and the State Department (Yergin 1991:
195). Following American pressure the British decided that it would be better to havethe Americans within the concession of IPC rather than outside attacking it.
Furthermore the involvement of American finance would reduce the costs to the British
tax payer of setting up the new Iraqi state (Bromley 1994: 79). After hard negotiations
forced by the discovery of oil near Kirkuk in 1927, the concessionary area of the IPC
became known, after Calouste Gulbenkians’s pencil, as the 1928 ‘Red Line Agreement’comprising the interests of British, French and American oil companies and the
Armenian financier’s five per cent. It was to cover all of the major oil fields
subsequently discovered in the Middle East with the exception of Kuwait and Iran andrequired that no member could take up a concession within the ex-Ottoman empire
unless it was offered to the group as a whole (Yergin 1991: 205).

90

The Arabian Peninsula and the ‘Red Line Agreement’

The oil fields of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf were to prove the greatest of these oil fields;
however, in the 1920s this was not apparent. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company had little
interest in the area on the other side of the Gulf as the geological formations did notmatch up with the known oil-bearing strata of the time, but this did not mean that they
were keen to allow other companies to explore the area. Before the First World War the
British had inserted ‘nationality clauses’ whereby only ‘British interests’ could be given
oil concessions by the Gulf Shaikhs. Initially Gulf Oil acquired a concession to Bahrain;
however when Gulf successfully gained entrance to the Turkish Petroleum Company in1928 it became bound by the Red Line Agreement and could not prospect for oil in
Bahrain. It therefore gave up its option to Standard Oil of California (SOCAL) which
was not part of the TPC and so not bound by this agreement; however it ran into thebarrier of the ‘nationality clause’. There followed intense lobbying by the US
government. The British reflection that by allowing American resources into oil
development it would speed the development of resources for the Navy and reduce thedemands of the shaikhs for subsidy meant that in 1929 Socal was allowed to enter into a
concession with the Sheikh of Bahrain. This was on condition that all correspondence
between the company and the Sheikh went via the offices of the British representative.
The concession was awarded to a Canadian subsidiary set up by SOCAL to maintain thefacade that the concession was to a British company; drilling started in 1930. The
discovery of oil in Bahrain and its consequences will be further examined in chapter
four.

91

The increasing strategic importance of the Gulf

The development of strategic and civil air routes around the Peninsula reflected a
growing shift in British involvement predicated on air power rather than for maritime
reasons as had been the case earlier. Furthermore, with the discovery of oil in Persia and
Iraq British involvement progressively intensified, and increasingly the Arab Gulf
sheikhdoms were seen of intrinsic strategic importance rather than merely in terms of
the security considerations of protecting the route to India (Peterson 1986: 40). The
first major review of British policy in the Gulf in twenty years began in 1928 with thecreation of the Persian Gulf Sub-Committee (PGSC) by the Committee of Imperial
Defence (CID). The Sub-Committee agreed with the Chiefs of Staff that the‘maintenance of the British supremacy in the Persian Gulf is even more essential to thesecurity of India and Imperial interests at the present time than it was in the past’ and its
related conclusion that ‘it should be a cardinal feature of our policy to maintain our
supremacy in the region’.1

The Arabian Peninsula and the world market

In conclusion, whilst the Arabian littoral still continued to be placed in its ‘traditional’
strategic context of one hundred and fifty years - that of its strategic importance on theapproaches to India and a policy of minimal interference in the internal affairs of the1 This is the conclusion of the PGSC, minutes of the 5th meeting , 24 October 1928
quoted in Peterson (1986: 41-42).
92

Gulf sheikhdoms2 - the development of oil as a commodity of crucial importance in thecapitalist world economy and the changes this led to in the world market were to haveincreasing effects on the area. The region’s incorporation into the capitalist world
economy through the agency of British imperialism meant that the Arabian Peninsula
was vulnerable to the vagaries of the world economy such as the Great Depression.
Furthermore the oil companies had a need that had not existed in the traditional strategic
context: the need for sovereign rulers, that is, rulers who held authority and property
rights in a territory defined by precise borders. They would thus be able to negotiate
and sign concession agreements with the oil companies which would give thecompanies the right to prospect for oil in that area without hindrance.3 This issue ofauthority in a given territory also impinged on the creation of landing strips on theSouth Arabian route. We now turn to consider how this international context affected
Western involvement in Oman in the period 1921- 1932.

2 In 1931 the PRPG assessed the optimal outlines of British policy in the Gulf: ‘tomaintain the independence of the Arab Shaikhdoms so long as they preserve law andorder and maintain a system of administration that will satisfy or at any rate be tolerated
by their subjects, to avoid any greater degree of interference in their internal affairs than
is forced upon us but at the same time to prevent any other foreign power fromdominating them or obtaining any special privileges in the Gulf.’ He noted that London
was taking an increasing interest in the affairs of the Gulf. This was due to thedevelopment of imperial interests - air routes, oil, the Shatt al-Arab and relations with
Ibn Saud - as opposed to Indian Government interests, and also due to the fact that with
political developments in India it was deemed inevitable the day when the responsibility
for the Gulf would pass from the Government of India to H.M.G. in London (Peterson
1986:46).
3 Writing on state formation in Saudi Arabia Simon Bromley argues ‘the process ofstate formation in any recognisable sense only gathered pace when oil was discovered
and as oil rents began to enter the kingdom. The need of the oil companies for clear
property rights was the occasion for the precise settlement of borders in the region; it
was only access to oil wealth that enabled material development and with it theaugmenting of state resources; it was only these resources which solved the problems oftribal rivalry and permitted the bedouin and the merchants to be paid off; it was only bymeans of oil that the economy was linked into the world market; and it was only
because of the latter that this small and, therefore, relatively defenceless state attracted
the support of an outside power, the United States’ (1994: 143).
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3.2: Western strategic interests in Oman 1921 - 1931

The developments surveyed in 3.1 led to a growing British involvement in Oman in two
respects both of which reflected the consequences of the Treaty of Sib: the Britishorganised de facto division of Muscat and Oman. Firstly, the increase in the strategic
importance of the Gulf required the maintenance of authority and British prestige in the
coastal areas under the Sultan’s jurisdiction; ultimately British air power was to win theday. Secondly, an initial expedition to prospect for oil took place in this period andencountered the problematic nature of Sultanate authority in the interior.

British support for the Sultanate

After the Treaty of Sib the authority of the Sultanate in effect was limited to the Batinah
coastal plain, Muscat and Dhofar. Also deemed as part of Muscat territory but more
problematic was the Musandam Peninsula and the port of Sur. Consequently, British
military support for their client in the 1920s was required to put down a number of tribal
rebellions in these areas against the payment of Sultanate taxes or jurisdiction; ofparamount importance was the maintenance of British prestige at as low a cost as
possible which was achieved through gunboat diplomacy and sometimes naval
bombardment or the use of air power.

In late 1920 the Yal-Sa’d, the principal tribe of the Batinah staged an uprising against
efforts to establish a customs post; it was not until 1922 that the Muscat Levy Corps

94

supported by a British gunboat enforced compliance with the new taxation system.
Another instance was the imprisonment in 1930 of Taimur‘s wali in Khasab in the
Ru’us al-Jibal and the rejection of the Sultan’s authority. Again, British gunboats
bombarded Khasab and the rebellious shaikh fled, returning to accept Muscati authority
when he was unable to gain tribal support (Allen 1987: 62).

However, the most serious rebellion took place at the fishing village of Sur on thesouth-eastern tip of Oman by the Bani Bu Ali who had long bridled against the authorityof the Sultan of Muscat over them; as mentioned in chapter two Sa’id bin Sultan had
enlisted British support against them in the early nineteenth century. In 1923 the tribe
refused to pay customs duty to the Sultan and in 1928 they built their own customs
house in the suburb of al-Aqya hoisting a Saudi flag in an attempt to gain Saudi support.
Unless the Sultan took action the Imam of Oman threatened to send his men into thearea (Joyce 1995: 15). To lose control of Sur would halve the Sultan’s revenues.
However, the Sultan’s limited armed forces were inadequate to oust the renegades andhe requested British assistance (Peterson 1986: 38-39).

The British were determined to show that rebellion did not pay. The Political Agent
Muscat recommended the posting of an Indian infantry battalion with the costs to be
recouped through the customs revenue; Whitehall considered this but the Governmentof India thought such a dispatch of troops unnecessary (Joyce 1995: 29). Instead thevice admiral, Commander in Chief B. Thesiger, sailed to Sur and discussed the situation
with Sayyid Sa’id, the Sultan’s son. A number of shots were fired on the isolated fort
from the sloop HMS Cyclamen which destroyed their target - thereafter the Saudi flag95

came down over Sur. The RAF levelled the fort in 1930 to demonstrate its capabilities
in the rivalry between the services (Peterson 1986: 39).

Prospecting for oil in Oman in the 1920s

Although the exploration for oil in Oman was not to gather pace fully until the
discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932, the 1920s saw a number of expeditions made in
Oman and also Dhofar. It was the beginning of what J.C. Wilkinson has termed the ‘oilgame’: the struggle in Oman for the control of its oil resources. The different parties inthis conflict were on one side the British oil company, the British government and their‘client’ the Sultan of Muscat and on the other, the American oil company, the US
government, the Saudis and the Imamate. The ‘end game’ in this dispute was to takeplace in the 1950s. The exploration process initially encompassed a number of features:the signing of agreements with imperial powers and oil companies, the delimitation ofboundaries and actual expeditions.

In 1923 Sultan Taimur gave an assurance to ‘...not exploit any petroleum which may befound anywhere within our territory and will not grant permission for its exploration
without consulting the Political Agent at Muscat and without the approval of the High
Government of India’(Wilkinson 1987: 274). This was similar to undertakings
procured earlier by Britain from the rulers of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the Trucial
States. The first exploration party in the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman took place in1925 when the d’Arcy Exploration company - effectively a subsidiary of Anglo-Iranian- obtained a two year exploration license. This document stated that ‘the company
recognises that certain parts of the Sultan’s territory are not at present safe for its

96

operations’ and that ‘the final decision on any attempt to enter an area lay with the
Political Agent Muscat.’ A geological party based on H.M.S. Triad, and accompaniedby the British financial adviser Bertram Thomas and Captain Eccles of the Muscat
Levies, made a number of excursions inland from the Batinah coast to look at likely oilbearing strata in the Western Hajar. They were unable to do much work partly becauseof the disturbed situation resulting from the dispatch of an Imamate force to investigate
the appearance of Saudi tax collectors in Buraimi for the first time in fifty years. The
concession was allowed to lapse and there was no significant exploration for oil until
the 1930s. The actual determining of boundaries would take place in the years after the
discovery of oil in Bahrain but the essence of the process had been defined: it would be
the extension by the British of the ‘authority’ of the Sultan of Muscat.

The American presence: missionaries and doctors

With the closure of the American consulate in Muscat in 1915 American involvement inOman at this time was limited to medical missionaries. It was the responsibility of theAmerican consul in Baghdad, John Randolph, to monitor news from Oman. To take up
his post in Baghdad Randolph travelled on the British India Steam Navigation ship
which stopped at Muscat for several hours; Randolph took the opportunity to meet theAmerican missionary Dr Sarah Hosman and discussed with her the difficulties she
experienced with buying land and travelling outside of Muscat. Randolph later wrote to
the Secretary of State that ‘This reported attitude of the British as regards the purchaseof land in Oman may be evidence that there is some truth in the report that, in return forthe handsome subsidy paid the Sultan of Oman, the British hold treaty rights to theeffect that no foreigners are to be permitted to purchase land in Oman. ’ The British

97

consul, Major Hinde, and the Sultan were not keen for her to visit areas even where she
had a guaranteed safe conduct and escorts from the shaikh. The reasons given by the
consul were that should anything happen to her it would necessitate a punitive
expedition ‘in order prevent a loss of prestige by the white man’(quoted in Joyce 1995:
26). After Randolph made representations to the British Consul and the Resident at
Bushire Hosman received permission from Hinde to briefly visit ‘Suwaik and Hazam’where she preached the gospel and gave out medicine. In her report which she sent to
Randolph she wrote ‘I never saw so many sick bad eyes in all my life.’ As she had tohurry back she only was able to perform one operation (Porter 1982: 25). Similar
restrictions applied to other American missionaries that worked in Oman. In 1932 an
American doctor slipped off to Dhofar without permission. The British Consul wrote to
the Sultan, ‘I trust that the American missionaries will realise the folly of their ways andrepent their very bad manners’ (quoted in Joyce 1995: 26).

Most significantly Randolph reported in March 1931 to his Secretary of State on thefollowing topic: ‘English Interest in Possible Oil Deposits in the Arabian Peninsula’(Porter 1982: 28-35). In this dispatch Randolph detailed his conversation with an
English financier Sir John Cadnam who, Randolph implies, had been seeking to obscure
the possibility of oil seepage in Bahrain. Furthermore, he reports on the reaction in the
English and American colony in Bahrain of the arrival in February of Bertram Thomason the island. Thomas evoked a mixed reaction in one conversation in which Randolph
was involved. The officer commanding the Bahrain police was critical of Thomas forleaving his office in Muscat in bad order. Mr Walker the agent for the Mesopotamia
Persia Corporation defended Thomas:

98stating that British officials stationed in the Persian Gulf were well aware of thefact that Mr Thomas had not been sent to act as financial adviser to the Sultan of
Oman solely, but that his main duties there were to explore the interior and to try
to locate for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company oil seepage reported to have been
discovered by Arab caravans in that section of Arabia. He added that British
official were also aware of the fact that an Anglo-Persian Oil tanker had picked
up Mr Thomas at Muscat and had landed him at Dhafur and that his journey
while ostensibly undertaken as an exploratory trip over an unknown portion of
Arabia was also taken to obtain all information possible for the Anglo-Persian
Oil Company. To these statements Captain Parke made no answer but
immediately changed the conversation, (see Porter 1982: 28).

The Americans were aware of the limitations on the Sultan’s independence and that the
Sultanate was part of Britain’s ‘informal empire’. The development of ‘informal
empire’ in Oman will be examined in more detail in the next section.

3.3: Impact of British interests on Oman 1921 - 1931

In this section we examine the impact of British strategic interests on Muscat andOman. Principally this was the re-organisation of government in Muscat. The Imamate
was confined to the interior under the Treaty of Sib.

Institutions of Government in ‘Muscat9

Following the Treaty of Sib the British instituted a series of reforms to government in
the Sultanate. Their motivation was the concern of the Government of India that if
something was not done then the Sultan would be removed by Imamate forces. The aim
was to institute reforms which would strengthen the ability of the Sultanate to be selfreliant and thus reduce its dependence on the Government of India (Peterson 1978: 91).
These reforms took place in the ordering of the Sultanate’s finances, institutions of99

government and military all of which became British-run. Until the 1920s the British
had been content to exert their influence of the Consul but now they became more andmore involved in the daily affairs of the Sultanate. The outcome was that in 1922 theBritish Resident in the Persian Gulf wrote to the government of British India: ‘We have
gradually but imperceptibly usurped the functions and authority of the State.’(Bierschenk 1989:209)

Finance was the immediate concern. We have seen how British actions in thenineteenth century - the separation of Zanzibar and the curtailing of slaving and gun
running - had impoverished both the royal family and Omanis. Therefore, theremaining sources of finance were various customs revenues,4 the religious tax (zakat)
and various subsidies from the British. The problem was that due to the costs ofmaintaining the royal family expenses always exceeded income so that the Sultans werepermanently in debt to various merchants. The solution as the British saw it was toclear the Sultan’s debts to these merchants and to institute a financial adviser (wazir) toensure the repayment of their debt.

The first finance minister was D. V. McCullum, previously a political agent in Kuwait.
His briefing from PAM Wingate was:

The very skeleton of reform of the administration is necessary. We only want tomake the state pay its way and our loan and if possible make it stand on its own
legs without continual propping from us. Make the customs pay and remove themore glaring faults and let the rest rip. Go very slow, be very tactful and try andremove any feeling the people may get that your coming is only the prelude to
4 The practice of farming out the customs had ended in 1913 and the collection put incharge of a Director of Customs directly responsible to the Sultan. See J.E. Peterson(1978) p.75.
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British occupation. In addition to the fact that this is not true such a rumour
cannot but have a bad effect on our policy and our prestige elsewhere. Pay thegreatest respect to local prejudices and above all to religion. It is not a difficult
matter nowadays to raise anti-Christian sentiment, and the Omani fanatics arenext door with whom we want to get some kind of agreement. (Peterson 1978:
76)

Wingate also created a Council of Ministers, ostensibly to assist Taimur but really togovern during Taimur’s long absences from Muscat. It was composed of the Sultan’s
elder brother, Nadir bin Faisal as acting Sultan in Taimur’s absence; the wali of Matrah,
Muhammed bin Ahmad al-Ghashsham, as head of financial affairs, Zubayr bin Ali alHuti, a Baluchi immigrant, as head of justice, and Rashid bin Uzayyiz al-Khubsaybi ashead of religious affairs. In practice the Council was ineffective and largely for show
and any major decisions were made by McCullum during the six months he stayed in
his post and thereafter by successive PAMs and financial advisers.5

By 1924 the Sultan was in arrears with his loan repayments and the Sultanate’s financial
position was continuing to decline (Townsend 1977: 50). An appointment was made toreorganise the Customs Department. Initially an Imperial Customs expert name Bower
undertook this on a temporary basis; however, it was recognised that a permanent
appointment was required to overhaul the system. Accordingly, Bertram Thomas wasappointed as Financial Adviser arriving in February 1925; he stayed in post for six years

5 Zubayr b. Ali al-Huti was the only one of the council who could read or write. In
addition the Council found many ways of putting off decisions. The Annual Muscat
Administration Report for 1923 stated: ‘It functions with delatoriness [sic] and during
the absence of His Highness to Dhofar found a new excuse for procrastination byreserving decisions in important matters pending his return. Saiyid Nadir the President
when remonstrated with averred that it was impossible for the Council to arrive at aunanimous decision as the second member, the Member for Finance, invariably opposed
any suggestion he made and the third member, the Minister of Justice, not being an
Arab is treated by the other three as a nonentity, but has to be tolerated by them as he is
the only one who can read or write.’ See Peterson (1978: 104).
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during which he devoted more time to his explorations. Despite this he acquired more
and more power in the politics of Muscat and received permission from the Governmentof India to use the title of wazir and to serve on the Council of Ministers. Eventually
the Government of India balked at Thomas’s crossing of the Rub al-Khali and he wasremoved from post. His replacement, S.E. Hedgecock, was not sufficiently capable up
and after a couple of months his duties were taken up by the military adviser, and often
acting PAM, R.G.E.W. Alban. When Alban was invalided back to Britain shortly after,
the new Sultan, Sa’id bin Taimur refused to accept a replacement. J.E. Petersoncomments ‘The period of direct British supervision over the Sultanate’s administration
had come to an inconsequential close’ (Peterson 1978: 78). Whilst Muscat remained
part of Britain’s informal empire with a British interest and involvement in both theinternal and external policy of the Sultanate, the particular character and approach of
Sa’id bin Taimur did have an effect on the relationship with the British which will be
examined in the next chapter.

Creation of the Muscat Levy Corps

The third area where the Government of India perceived reform was needed was themilitary (Peterson 1978: 90-92). The creation of the Muscat Levy Corps (MLC) in
1921 was part of the restructuring of the Muscati regime following the defence ofMuscat against Imamate attack in 1913 and the eventual settlement at Sib. Prior to the
MLC the Sultans had had resort to two types of military capability of their own (ofcourse, the forces of the British Empire had also been deployed for the defence of the
Sultans ‘rule’). These two forces were the garrisons of armed retainers ( ‘askari),frequently Baluchi mercenaries, and then for specific campaigns, the Sultans could call102

upon tribes traditionally loyal to the sultans. It was apparent that these were inadequate
to the task of maintaining the Sultanate against the interior. An initial proposal by PAM
L.B.H. Haworth in 1917 was for a force of a thousand men from the Baluch with
British officers in command, which would be able to take the attack to the interior. Thisaggressive policy went against the Government of India’s desire to ‘extricate’ itself
from the Sultanate’s affairs and so was turned down.

Instead, following the Treaty of Sib, the MLC was created when Captain E.R McCarthy
and the redundant Seistan Levy Corps, disembarked in Matrah, made their way to Bayt
al-Falaj and relieved the Indian Army troops there. The MLC was essentially a garrison
force of 200 - 300 men whose main tasks were the providing of arms for the Sultan’spalace, the British Political Agency and the Sultanate’s treasury. They also built the
Muscat - Matrah road. It remained the Sultanate’s only military force until the early
1950s.

The Muscat Levy Corps started the British organised development of Oman’s armed
forces and possessed a number of characteristics which were to be retained or repeatedin the rest of the century. Firstly, it was a force composed of foreign mercenaries with
British officers. Secondly there was an attempt to ‘Arabize’ the force which actually
resulted in the replacement of Seistan Baluchis with Gwadur or Batinah Baluchis.6 In
1917 the Government of India saw no need for a force capable of taking offensive
action into the interior. The development of the oil reserves of the Peninsula, whichshot to prominence with the Bahrain oil strike of 1932 was to change all this and6 See chapter six for details on the attempts to ‘Omanise’ the armed forces in the 1980s.
103ultimately led to the creation of more capable military force then the Muscat Levy
Corps. The impact of the oil strike in Bahrain is the starting point for the next chapter.

Government in ‘Oman’

The principal effect of British involvement and the development of informal empire inMuscat and Oman was the saving of the Sultan and the confinement of the Imamate to
the interior. After the de facto division of the coast and the mountainous interior
following the Treaty of Sib different forms of government developed in these two areas.
In the area controlled by the Sultan, which in effect was always dependent on British
power, the British set about restructuring the administration. In these areas in theinterior the institutions of the Imamate continued to function.

Functions of Imamate government

Under Ibadhi doctrine, government in all of the Imamates constituted a number offunctions not all of which were the sole responsibility of the Imam.7 For example his
duty was to administer concepts of justice emerging by consensus from the ulema, of
which he was one; but he was not, however, the mufti al-Islam and so could not
overrule the views of the ulema. J.C. Wilkinson defines the Imam’s role as ‘...theapplication and administration of justice, to rule by the laws of the community and toprohibit the disallowed, as he swears in his oath’( 1987:177). Encapsulating this role

7 This section on the functions of Imamate government is drawn from J.C. Wilkinson(1987: 177-190).
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there were four broad aspects of Imamate government: administration and consultation,
finance, military, and relations with outsiders.

The Imam is the custodian of the Muslim commonwealth and its treasury and is fully
empowered with its administration providing his acts are not injurious. He has a duty toconsult informally and governed with the aid of a judge (qadi) and governor (wali).
Sources of finance were booty (ghanima), residual estates, gifts and permitted taxes. As
it was the duty of every true Muslim to take up arms against the community’s enemies
there was no need for a standing army - only for a small force for internal security at
forts - the ‘askaris. Relations with the outside world were divided into relations withother Muslims (ahl al-qibla) and all non-Imamate rulers (jababira). The latter, J.C.
Wilkinson notes...has a subtle sense of gradation. In general it means tyrannos, an
unconstitutional ruler, and is the collective term used for all non-Imamate rulers.
Its predecessor in the earliest Ibadhi sources are the ahl al-ahdath, those who
ruled by other than what God had revealed. At one end of this grade are muluk,
usually local dynasts ruling like amirs outside Imamate control, at the other isal-Sultan (with the implication of Sultan al-jawr) who is almost inevitably aforeign ruler or occupier; it is not surprising that the A1 Bu Sa’id originally did
not like the application of this title to them by the British! In the Ibadi literature
jubbar tends to be local bad men but the genuine jababira often has theovertones of local rulers operating under foreign influence: the A1 Bu Sa’id in
the nineteenth century, for example.
(1987: 190)

In contrast to its predecessors the twentieth century Imamate, started in 1913, wasactually quite isolated from the rest of the world (Wilkinson 1987: 15-16). J.E. Petersoncomments ‘It is debatable whether the Imamate of the twentieth century should beconsidered a proper government in the same sense as the Sultanate’ (1978:101).

105

However, the Imamate’s contention that it was the legitimate government of its territory
which reached the climax in the 1950s started in this period. The Imam’s capital waswherever the Imam happened to be since central administration consisted of no morethan the Imam and his scribe and qadi. Under Muhammed bin Adullah al-Khalili theposition of qadi was held by Amir bin Khamis al-Maliki who died in 1928 and then by
Mansur bin Nasir al-Farisi. In the mid 1920s a counterpart to the Sultan’s Council of
Ministers was set up, composed of Sulayman al-Baruni as head, Sa’id bin Nasir alKindi, Amir bin Khamis al-Maliki, wali of Nizwa, and Majid bin Khamis al-Ibri. AlBaruni acted as financial director with the assistance of Muhammed bin Isa al-Harithi
until 1928 when opposition to his keen execution of his duties caused him to leave forMuscat (Peterson 1978: 102-103).

Conclusion: state formation in Oman 1921-1931

This period represents a distinct phase in the historical process of state formation in
Oman. Developments in the broader international context - the application of aircraft
technology and the development of the oil resources of the Middle East and theaccompanying intra-Westem rivalry - had their impact on Oman. Following theperception of British (Government of India) strategic interest in 1920, the Treaty of Sib
brought about the de facto division of ‘Muscat’ from ‘Oman’. In the interior, life
continued under the institutions of the Imamate. In the Sultan’s territory the authorityof the restructured administration rested on British military power. This represented a‘crisis of collaboration’ to use Ronald Robinson’s phrase: the constant British
undermining of the Sultans’ wealth and authority meant the Sultans could not andwould not govern necessitating greater British involvement to protect their interests.

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J.E. Peterson notes that the institutions that the British created in this time - financial,administrative and military - were to be the forerunners of the major building blocks ofpost 1970 society (Peterson 1978: 103). Thus the developments of the 1920s represent
the British imperial origins of the modem Omani state.

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Chapter Four: The Expansion of the Sultanate 1932 - 1955

This chapter examines the next chronological phase of state formation in Oman which
can be termed the expansion of the Sultanate. This phase is defined by the impact of oilleases following the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 and the development of airroutes around the Arabian peninsula. Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur (r. 1932 - 1970) sought totake an active part in the government of Oman; his interest in obtaining any revenues
from oil coincided with the interest of the British government and oil companies whowanted to gain access to that resource rather than allow American companies theopportunity. An important distinction must be made between the interests of oilcompany Petroleum Development Oman and those of the British government.
Essentially the oil company was ambivalent as to with which ruler it signed oilconcessions - all they required was a politically centralised state which would enable
them to exploit the oil resources which they hoped to find in the interior (Biershenk
1984, chapter 3; 1989) However, the British government’s perception of British
strategic and economic interests in the Gulf as a whole required that Britain back therulers with which it had formed relationships had been formed during the nineteenth
century - in Oman this meant backing the A1 Bu Sa’id ruler Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur.
The outcome was the overturning of the de facto division of the coast and interior. This
was achieved by the development of British financed and staffed armed forces which
occupied Nizwa and ousted the Imamate in 1955; the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman
became a reality. Thus, it was British strategic and economic interests which mediatedthe political impact on the Omani state of the search for a precious material resource tothe international political system, that of oil. This chapter is divided into twochronological parts 1932 - 1945 and 1946 - 1955.

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4.1: Oman and the West 1932 -1945

In the first part of this chapter we will examine the effect of the discovery of oil in
Bahrain, on British policy in the Gulf; the development of British and American
strategic interests in Oman during World War Two; and the way in which Sa’id bin
Taimur sought to extricate himself from British domination.

4.1.1: The international context 1932 -1945

The discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 and the resulting change in the Westernperception of the importance of the peninsula coincided with the declaration of the
Saudi state in its modem form. The issue of the definition of boundaries and oilconcessions became inextricably linked. It also involved the application of‘international law’ - the legal structure of the capitalist state system - to lands whichwere ordered according to the precepts of tribal law and custom. With the developmentof the air routes and the realisation of the oil potential of the Peninsula British
government policy towards the Persian Gulf began to change. There was the realisationthat Britain could no longer sustain its policy of non-interference given its new strategicinterests in aviation and oil. The debate over policy in the late 1930s was put to one
side as the exigencies of wartime planning took priority. The impact of the war served
to breakdown the peninsula’s insulation further: the US military gained its first footholdon the peninsula.

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Discovery of oil in Bahrain

The defining development of this period was the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932.
Although this was not necessarily apparent at the time it had immense significance forthe strategic significance of the Arabian peninsula; for the first time since the creationof the British Raj the focus of Western interest in the peninsula began to shift from thecoast to the interior (Bierschenk 1989: 205). Oil had been discovered first in the Middle
East in Iran in 1909 and subsequently Iraq. With the conversion of the British Navy tooil and the growing importance of oil to the capitalist industrial economies the acquiringof secure sources of cheap oil became a matter of immense importance. However, at
this time few of the ‘experts’ believed that the Arabian peninsula was a likely source.
The conventional wisdom of the day was that as the geological character of existing
known oil bearing rock formations was completely at variance with that of thePeninsula the likelihood of the discovery of oil there was remote.1 An exception to thisview was Frank Holmes who the Gulf Arabs came to know as Abu Naft - “the father ofoil” (Yergin 1991:281). He was convinced that oil was to be found on the Arab side of
the Gulf and eventually, despite many setbacks, his efforts proved him right. Holmes
had secured an oil concession from the ruler of Bahrain in return for his discovery anddrilling of water wells which at the time seemed of far greater importance to the Shaikh.
Ridiculed in London he travelled to New York and linked up with first Gulf Oil andthen SOCAL. After the First World War the British had inserted ‘nationality clauses’

1Daniel Yergin gives an insight into the views of the experts of the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company at the time:‘The company, to be sure, was convinced that there was no oil to be found in
Arabia...the geological reports “leave little room for optimism,” and one of thecompany’s directors had declared in 1926 that Saudi Arabia appeared “devoid of all

110whereby only ‘British interests’ could be given oil concessions by the Gulf Shaikhs.
Gulf Oil, as part of its success in gaining entrance to the Turkish Petroleum Company
was bound by the Red Line Agreement and could not prospect for oil in Bahrain.
SOCAL, however was not bound by this agreement; however it ran into the barrier ofthe ‘nationality clause’. The US government lobbied intensely to circumvent thisclause. The British reflected that by allowing American resources into oil development
the development of these resources for the Royal Navy would be enhanced and thedemands of the Shaikhs for British subsidy would be reduced. In 1929 SOCAL wasallowed to enter into a concession with the Sheikh of Bahrain with the proviso that all
correspondence between the company and the Sheikh went via the offices of the British
representative. Drilling started in 1930 and oil was discovered in small quantities in
1932. This news was a considerable shock. If oil was to be discovered in the off-shoreisland Bahrain, what were the prospects in the main land mass of the Peninsula only 30
miles distant and by all accounts with very similar anticlines? Thomas Bierschenk
summarises the scramble to acquire oil concessions on the Arabian peninsula following
the strike in Bahrain thus:

With the exception of Iraq, IPC held its concessions mainly on the Arabian
Peninsula. When American outsiders, Standard Oil of California and the Texas
Oil Company, who had managed to attain concessions for Eastern Saudi Arabia
and Bahrain between 1928 and 1933, struck oil in Bahrain in 1932, between
1935 and 1939 IPC rushed to obtain the concessions for Qatar, Western Saudi
Arabia, Aden, the Trucial States and Muscat and Oman through its subsidiary
Petroleum Concessions. Already many years before, the British Government
had made the rulers of these areas sign agreements that oil concessions would
only be given with the agreement of the British Government. (1989: 210)

prospects” for oil. Albania, the director had added, was the promising oil play.’(1991:281)
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This was essentially a pre-emptive move that was to remain in place until after theWorld War Two2 but the context in which the Arabian peninsula was to be placed forthe rest of the century had begun to be framed. It represented a new stage of theincorporation of the Arabian peninsula into the capitalist world market and its statesystem. One of the first issues it impacted on was the need for property rights which
required the creation of sovereign states with clearly defined boundaries.

Arabian boundaries and the Bahraini oil strike

With the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932, followed by that in the Hasa, the Westernworld began to impinge more deeply on the life of the peninsula: in contrast with thenineteenth century the British now had an interest in the interior of Arabia rather thanmerely the coast. This brought them into conflict with the emerging Saudi state
declared in its newest form in 1932. The ideology of the Saudi state had expansionist
tendencies which threatened the British clients on the coast:

Only the universal claim to act as an Islamic ruler could override the politicalunits of the shaikh and amir (shaikhdoms, emirates). The Wahhabi/al-Saud state
was the most aggressive manifestation of the Islamic tribal state and recognised
no compromise with others, Muslim or otherwise. (Wilkinson 1994: 98)

2 See Wilkinson (1994: 99). He comments ‘legitimacy of government and historic
tradition lay at the core of frontier problems in Arabia. Oil was never of any import inwestern Arabia and scarcely, if at all, entered the frontier dispute with the Imam of
Yemen. Interest in eastern Arabia was really only aroused by the discovery of oil in
Bahrain in 1932 and it was only then that Britain adopted the Iraq Petroleum Company(IPC) as the sole candidate for concessions in the territories of its proteges. Until after
the Second World War the interest of this international conglomerate in Arabia
remained essentially pre-emptive. IPC was determined that Standard Oil of California(SOCAL), which held Bahrain and had recently obtained a concession from Ibn Saud,should not get any more.’112

Thus, the scramble for oil concessions that followed the Bahraini oil strike coincidedwith a period of Saudi-British negotiations which attempted to settle the boundaries
round the periphery of the Empty Quarter in the north and Aden in the south (see,especially, Wilkinson 1991; Schofield 1994b; al-Shamlan 1987). These negotiations,while they succeeded in laying down general parameters for future frontiers between theFuad Hamza and Riyadh lines, ceased before any agreement was achieved, partly
because of the outbreak of World War Two.3 The Hamza line, offered to the British
government by Deputy Foreign Minister Fuad Bey Hamza during April 1935, remained
Saudi Arabia’s claim to territory in southern and south-eastern Arabia until theextension of October 1949, when the Buraimi Oasis was claimed.4 The failure of thenegotiations in the 1930s led to the conflict of the 1950s which Britain resolved by force
and will be examined in the next part of this chapter (4.2). The immediate effect of thisnew context of oil on British policy in the 1930s is examined next.

Changing British policy after 1932

It has been noted in chapter three (section 3.1) how despite the Political Resident’s(PRPG) awareness of the changes that the development of the oil industry was initiating
the optimal British policy in 1931 could still be stated in strictly ‘minimal terms’. As
the 1930s developed there was a change in the perception of both the new Political
Residents and the Air Ministry (Peterson 1986: 45-48). In 1934 PRPG, T.C. Fowle,

3 The Riyadh line ‘remained, for the course of the intermittent Anglo-Saudi frontier
negotiations, Britain’s most generous offer to Saudi Arabia for territorial limits in theregion’ (Walker 1994: 174). Julian Walker was an official for the Foreign Office andundertook the ‘fieldwork’ on which many of the boundaries in south-east Arabia are
based.

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noted the growing British intrusion into the internal affairs of the Trucial Coast
Sheikhdoms. Whilst traditional British concerns over the British Indian subjects,
prevention of maritime hostilities were nothing new he noted that the exertion of Britishpressure over the air route had led the Sheikhs to fear future British interference. Whilst
believing this fear to be unfounded Fowle did point out that for the first time Britain
had, with the discovery of oil, a compelling interest in the internal affairs of the
Sheikhdoms.5

Such a perception was shared by the Air Ministry who held that the creation of the airroutes required a greater intervention to the extent of intervening in disputes between
rulers on land. In this they were opposed by the Admiralty. To discuss this policy
dispute a meeting of the Committee for Imperial Defence Official Sub-Committee on
the Middle East was convened. G.W. Rendell, a counsellor at the Foreign Officeobserved

Today the Persian Gulf is one of the world’s highways, bordered by strongly
nationalist States, whose interest in the Gulf was real and active, and thediscovery of oil had led other foreign powers to take an increasing interest in
Gulf affairs. In his view, the time had come, or at least was rapidly approaching,when His Majesty’s Government would no longer be able to maintain theirprevious policy of merely keeping others out, and living, as it were, from handto mouth, but would be faced with the necessity of going either forwards orbackwards. (Peterson 1986:47)

4 This Saudi claim was made following advice on sovereignty rights from international
lawyers working for ARAMCO (Wilkinson 1994: 96).
5 In 1937 Fowle categorised the Persian G ulfs strategic importance as the ‘Suez Canalof the air’ (Peterson 1986: 47)
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He also noted that the ambiguous international status of the states would eventuallyneed to be addressed as other countries apart from Britain became interested in oil,aviation and trade in the Gulf. The formal adoption of a new policy was thwarted byinterdepartmental intransigence and thereafter the debates about the pros and cons of aforward policy was replaced by the exigencies of planning for the approaching world
war. This was to raise the strategic importance of the air routes.

The importance of the Arabian peninsula during World War Two

World War Two was the first conflict that touched every part of the globe. The Middle
East as a whole became an area of great geostrategic importance as a land-bridge
between Europe and Asia. Although fighting was rare on the Arabian peninsula - infact fewer military engagements occurred there than in World War One - it held
considerable importance through its command of the air and sea passages to the areas
east of Suez: the Indian Ocean, Asia and the Pacific. The peninsula and its air routes
were utilised for a number of functions including Far Eastern arena reinforcements,
anti-submarine operations, convoy escort, the East Africa campaign and the supply
route to the Soviet Union. For these reasons the British Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs noted in 1943 that:

It is of great importance that no international or inter-Arab rivalries should
disturb the existing peaceful conditions (in the Arab Gulf states) and thus
impede the development of the resources of the area or existing air
communications, (quoted in J.E. Peterson 1986:51)

The American military and the peninsula in World War Two

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By the beginning of the war American oil interests had gained representation in Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Bahrain; significantly, the war also forced the British to allow
the US military onto the Peninsula including Oman. One way in which American
participation took place was through the Persian Gulf Command whose task it was tochannel military assistance to the Soviet Union via the Gulf and Iran. Towards the
war’s end and with the shift in focus from Europe to the Pacific, US forces made greateruse of the Persian Gulf and South Arabian routes. While London recognised thenecessity of USAAF use of these routes and airfields, permission was granted only
grudgingly for PanAm’s use of these routes as the British feared the establishment ofclaims to civilian traffic rights after the war (Peterson 1986: 112). The use of the SouthArabian route meant that American aviators made use of the airstrips in the Sultanate ofMuscat and Oman; this first foothold of the American military in Oman is examined in
the next section.

4.1.2: Western involvement in Oman 1932 - 1945

Western strategic interest in Oman in this period was situated both on the coast and also
in the interior. On the littoral the construction of the South Arabian Air Route and its
subsequent use in World War Two meant both British interest in areas previously
untouched by Sultanate authority and also an American military presence for the firsttime. In wartime the British were keen to avoid allowing the creation of a precedent for
the granting of peacetime aviation rights to non-British concerns. These strategicinterests relating to air power on the coast did not intrude on the Imamate in the interior.

116

However the interest in oil did. The attempts to gain access to these territories in 1938
were the forerunner of the occupation of 1955.

Construction of the air route in Oman

The construction of the South Arabian air route required a greater degree of British
involvement than the policing operations in Sur to enforce Sultanate authority in the
1920s. Planning for this route had begun in 1929 and in 1932 the work of actuallyconstructing the facilities began with a meeting of AOCs (Air Officer Commanding) of
Aden and Iraq at a mid point in the Sultanate. In 1934 the Sultan and Britain signed a
Civil Air Aviation Agreement.6 Although this route would provide an alternative
civilian flight route from Cairo to India if needed, it was always conceived primarily asa military, strategic route; it consisted primarily of refuelling and landing strips whichmeant dealing with the local population. To achieve this was relatively easy eastwardsof Aden to the edge of the protectorate and from Muscat along the Batinah coast where
British control was relatively secure. The difficult stretch was between Salalah in
Dhofar to Muscat; the authority the Sultanate extended to these parts was purely
nominal and the British had had no reason before to enforce it. The sheikhs of theBedouin tribes had to be located and agreements negotiated in order to prevent
disruptions to the landing stations. This was achieved either through the offering of
incentives such as guard subsidies or threats of retribution if agreement was notforthcoming. Sometimes it took a number of visits by the Political Agent Muscat todetermine in whose territory a prospective landing strip lay. For these reasons it took117

until 1936 to finally complete the route and carry out the first scheduled flight. In the
Sultanate it consisted of landing strips and petrol stores at Salalah, Mirbat, Shuwaimiya,
Sawqara, Masirah Island, Ras al Hadd, Sur, Muscat, Sohar and Shinas (Peterson 1978:
139; 1986: 24-29). The construction of the air route required an extension of Muscati
authority to areas previously untouched by Western involvement. Because the air routefollowed the littoral it gave no impetus for an extension of British authority into theother remote area of the Sultanate - the mountainous interior. However the search foroil gave the outside world a reason to intrude into the Imamate. The initial probes took
place in the 1920s; these efforts were intensified in the greater efforts which followed
the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932. In Oman a new expedition took place in 1938.

The 1938 exploration for oil expedition

In contrast to the new oil company involved, Petroleum Development Oman (PDO),7
Sa’id was in far less of a hurry to start exploring for oil in the interior. Thus, following

6 This was replaced by an agreement in 1947 that gave Britain access to the airfields at
Salalah, Masirah and Gwadur for a subsidy to Sa’id bin Taimur of L6000 a year (Skeet
1992: 82).
7 In 1937 a concession was awarded to the Iraq Petroleum Company Group in the nameof the local company known as Petroleum Concessions Ltd. This concession was
subsequently assigned to the company set up to explore the concession, Petroleum
Development (Oman and Dhofar Ltd). Originally the proposed name for the subsidiary
was Petroleum Development Muscat but was changed due to Sa’id’s insistence that hecould sign a concession for the interior (Wilkinson 1987: 276). In 1950 Dhofar was
relinquished and the company name was changed to Petroleum Development (Oman)
118the 1937 concession an expedition set out for the Dhahirah on the periphery of Imamate
territory in the winter season 1938-39. The Sultan distributed some largesse to thetribes on the periphery of Imamate territory in order that they allowed passage for thegeologists. However, there was no chance of entry into the Imamate proper. The Imamwas of the opinion that the concession agreement signed with Sa’id only applied toMuscat territory and the expedition was forbidden to enter Imamate territory either onfoot or for aerial surveying to take place (Wilkinson 1987: 276; Biershenk 1989: 212).
The expedition was not a success; there was renewed optimism for the 1938/39
geological season with the emphatic statement from Sa’id that Buraimi did belong tohim. However, the outbreak of World War Two curtailed any further exploration; theresumption of activities after the war is examined in the second part (4.2) of thischapter.

Use of military bases during the war by the United States and Britain

The establishment of the air route in the Sultanate took on further strategic significancewith the approach of World War Two. J.E.Peterson identifies the air facilities in
Sultanate territory as below (1986: 49).
Air facilities in Muscat territory on eve of World War Two
Location

Facilities

ShinasEmergency landing ground with fuelLtd. In 1960 some of the partners in the IPC
but Shell remained as the major shareholder.

119group withdrew from theOmanventure
Oil was discovered incommercial

SoharEmergency landing ground

MuscatRAF depot with wireless station; nearby RAF aerodrome at
Bayt al-Falaj and seaplane anchorage at Bandar Jissa

Ra’s al-Hadd

RAF landing ground

Khawr Jarama

Seaplane anchorage; fuel and oil depot

GwadurAerodrome 12 miles inland, used by RAF/ Imperial Airways

Masirah Island

Seaplane Anchorage; fuel and oil depot

Umm al-Rasaa

RAF landing ground; fuel and oil depot

Khawr Gharim

RAF landing groundShuwaymiya

RAF landing ground

MirbatRAF landing ground; seaplane anchorage; fuel and oil depot

Salalah

RAF landing ground

These facilities were required by the US during the course of its supply operations.
Before the creation of a department of the air force the US army was responsible forrunning the Air Transport Command (ATC). In 1942 the US Army sought intermediate
landing rights for the ATC between Khartoum and Karachi. With the British
Government of India managing the external affairs of the Sultanate of Muscat andOman the Department of State, through the American Officer in charge in New Delhi,
asked for permission to station the necessary military and civilian ground crews at
Salalah and Ra’s al-Hadd. This was granted by the joint secretary of the government ofIndia after he had issued a reprimand for the unauthorised landing of four civilian Pan
American Airways personnel at Salalah. These personnel had stated that they had‘come to establish a staging post for a Pan American Airways service between
Khartoum and Karachi, that more of their men are expected within a few days withquantities at Fahud in 1964 and exports commenced in 1967 (Hughes 1986: 172).
120

wireless equipment, that they expect to cany private passengers if bookings ofgovernment priority passages permit this, and that they wish to negotiate with the Sultanof Muscat for a camping site, local labour and supply of provisions.’ The British rebuke‘on behalf of the Sultan’ was backed up with the advice that Pan American would haveto ‘come under complete military ownership and control and that its operations [would
have to be] determined absolutely by the War Department, and that nothing now done
will have or is intended to have any effect in establishing commercial rights’ (Hurewitz
1979: 606-608). The strategic Anglo-American rivalry in Southeast Arabia had begun.
It was a rivalry which was to determine the fate of the local rulers who were competing
to be defined as ‘sovereign rulers’ and thus benefit from the concession payments fromthe oil company. Although he sought to develop his independence from the British,
Sultan Sa’id’s lot was thrown in with the old imperial power; it was to be a mixed
blessing, as we will see next.

4.1.3: the impact of the West on Oman 1932 - 1945

The main focus of this section is on the beginning of the reign of Sultan Sa’id bin
Taimur: his strategy for independence and how he sought to implement it.

Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur and his strategy for independenceWith the British acceptance of Taimur’s abdication Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur became
Sultan in 1932 although he had been acting as President of the Council of Ministers
since 1929. He had been educated first in Baghdad and then at a school for princes inIndia and was literate, speaking excellent English and some Urdu and Hindi as well as

121his native Arabic. For the first twenty four years of his reign he was, in effect, to be
only the Sultan of Muscat: his authority extended only along the Batinah from Muscat
to Sohar and Shinas, the Musandam peninsula, the port of Sur and Dhofar.8

The reign of Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur (r. 1932-1970) can be conveniently divided into
two parts (Peterson 1987: 11). The first consists of the period up to the occupation of
the interior in 1955 when he pursued a relatively ‘activist’ policy. The second is from1955 to his deposition when he retreated to Salalah in Dhofar and sought to stall the
intrusion of most aspects of the modem world. Initially, he was regarded as a goodprospect by the British who hoped to be able to relinquish the day-to-day running of the
Sultanate’s administration: Sa’id they thought might be a ‘capable’ sultan. In 1932
PRPG Biscoe wrote to the Government of India:...we now have in Muscat a young Sultan who, if tactfully handled, should, I
think, turn out to be a good ruler. He should, I think, be given every chance toadminister his State on Arab lines, and every effort should be made to free himfrom those relics of the past which are galling to him, while we should try, at thesame time, to build up a facade of independence in the eyes of the world.
(quoted in Peterson 1978: 52)

The contradiction within the British view of a capable Sultan has already been noted.
Sa’id was forced to sign the same humiliating letter as his father and grandfather on his
accession which obliged him to accept British advice on all important matters.
However, he sought to assert his own independence wherever he could.

8 Townsend 1976: 55-56.
122

Sa’id resented the British domination of the Sultanate and had dreams of real
independence for his regime. To cultivate this image of independence he embarked on aworld tour (arranged of course by the British) in 1937 taking in Japan, the United States,
England Italy and India. The US State Department summarised the issue of the Sultan’s
independence in the following manner:

Although independent in the sense that he may enter into relations with foreignstates the Sultan is in special treaty relations with the British of a protective
nature, one of the stipulations of which is that territory may not be ceded to any
foreign power other than the British. The British Political Agent at Muscat
exercised a very considerable degree of influence in the Government of the
Sultanate, both as regards internal and external affairs. It is understood,
however, that the present Sultan is somewhat sensitive in the matter of British
control and is inclined to become increasingly assertive on that point9

He perceived that the cause of the Sultans’ dependence was financial; with the declineof the Omani economy (see 2.3) the Sultanate became dependent on Government ofIndia subsidies to pay off debts to the Indian merchants who resided in Muscat. His
strategy was to free himself from the financial dependence on Britain, to omanize his
administration and to work towards regaining control of the interior (Bierschenk 1989:
212). By bringing the administration under his control (he abolished the Council of
Ministers in 1932) and through stringent economising Sa’id erased both public andprivate debt by the 1940s; he even started to invest in Newfoundland stock andGovernment of India war bonds (Peterson 1978: 87).

A further source of revenue would be oil concessions from oil companies wanting tosearch for oil in the interior. In the early 1930s the Sultan urged the British government

9 See appendix C: US Department of State, ‘Information on the Sultan of Muscat andOman and his Country’, February 1938, in Porter (1982: 59).
123

to negotiate a concession for him and eventually forced the issue by startingnegotiations with an American oil company, Standard Oil of California.10 He wassubsequently sharply reminded by the British of his obligation, under the 1923
agreement signed by his father which he had also been required to sign on his accession,
to seek British advice on all important matters.11 The outcome was a concession with asubsidiary of IPC, Petroleum Concessions Ltd, rather than Standard Oil, the forerunnerof ARAMCO. The oil company were aware that as Sa’id was entitled the Sultan ofMuscat and Oman he had some claim to the territory beyond the mountains but it was
believed at the time by the oil company that Sa’id would not include the territory of the
Imamate in any concessions he signed. However, Sa’id would make no such exclusion
and he refused to let the oil company see the Treaty of Sib lest it diminish his authority
in their eyes. The problem of the Sultan’s authority in certain areas of the option
agreement signed in June 1937 was skirted round by using a clause of the 1925 D’Arcy
agreement which stated:

The company recognises that certain parts of the Sultan’s territory are not atpresent safe for its operations. The Sultan undertakes on his part to use his good
offices with a view to making it possible for representatives of the company toenter such parts and will inform the company as soon as such parts become safe.
(Wilkinson 1987: 276)

10A US State Department document of February 1938 commented: ‘As regards oil, theSultan is known to have been interested in possible American participation in thedevelopment of Muscat’s resources. Presumably, however, such action could only beundertaken with the approval of the British in view of the Sultan’s agreement with the
British in which he undertook not to permit the exploitation of his petroleum resources
except with the consent of the Government of India.’ See ‘Information on the Sultan ofMuscat and Oman and his country’ in Porter (1982: 57).
11 In the subsequent concession documents with P.D.O which were based on the 1925
D’Arcy agreement, the word “independent” before “ruler” was deleted at Her Majesty’s
Government suggestion (Wilkinson 1987: 276).
124

It was thus decided that oil company personnel should only enter an area once theSultan had given his explicit agreement.

Sa’id’s use of concession revenue

Having secured a new source of income he now tried to start building his authority inthe interior through the settling of tribal disputes and by improving relations with tribal
leaders through the giving of presents. Bierschenk comments:
This policy to outbuy the Imam, who was unable to compete with it financially,
was remarkably, successful. Between 1937 and 1939, the Sultan of Muscat was
visited by the two leading sheikhs of the Eastern Province (al-sharqiqa), Ali
Abdullah al-Hamuda of the Bani Bu Ali and Isa Salih al-Harthi, leader of the
Hinawi faction of the Omani tribes, Sheikh Ahmad Muhammad, the son-in-lawof the Imam, as well as by the leading men of the Dhahirah tribes. They all left
Muscat showered with gifts and arms. (1989: 213)

Furthermore, the income from the oil concession meant that Sa’id could pay higher
salaries than the Imam, allowing him, to attract a number of the Imam’s officials to
appointments in the Sultanate’s administration. Ali Abdullah, the brother of the Imam,was made governor (wali) of Boshar, whilst Nasir Rashid al-Kharusi, the brother of thepredecessor of the Imam and judge (qadi) of the Imam in Rustaq was appointed as
judge of Suwaiq on the Batinah coast (Bierschenk 1989: 213). Thus, the late 1930s,
Bierschenk argues, can be seen as the start of the Sultan’s campaign to integrate theinterior into the Sultanate.

The administration of Said bin Taimur

125

Sultan Sa’id’s examples were the independent princes of British India although he did
not attempt to compete with them in displays of extravagance; rather he lived a frugal
life. He had been educated away from Oman and throughout his reign sought to keep a
distance from the Omani people. This helped him to avoid expenditure: by refusing to
see the many supplicants for aid at his palace in Muscat and by spending ever more of
his time in Salalah he reduced the need to pay out subsidies unless it suited him. His
closest acquaintance was an Indian merchant in Muscat with whom he conducted a lotof business to their mutual profit; otherwise he mixed socially with the British officers
and advisers (Townsend 1976: 57).

Sultan Sa’id achieved one of his first objectives quite quickly: that of removing theSultanate from a position of debt. Townsend comments ‘Sultan Sa’id’s own
achievement in balancing the budget and keeping out of debt within a short period of his
coming to power should not be underestimated’ (Townsend 1976: 57). Throughdraconian measures the budget deficit which had been running at an annual average of
two lakhs from 1925 until after Said took control in 1929 was reduced to put the budget
into the black by half a lakh in 1931.12 This modest surplus continued until thesubstantial inflows from British military subsidies during World War Two andafterward when the sultanate piled up reserves of twelve lakhs in 1943, nearly nineteen
lakhs in 1944 and over twenty one lakhs in 1945. Even by 1947 there was a surplus ofnearly thirteen lakhs. As a result the financial position of the state was favourable until
the events of the 1950s (Peterson 1978: 90). We examine the events of the post war
years and their impact on the Sultanate in the next part of this chapter.

126

12 The lakh is an Indian term for one hundred thousand and was used in reference to the
Sultanate’s budget as the Indian Rupee was the Sultanate’s currency in this period.
127

4.2: Oman and the West 1946 - 1955

In this second part of chapter two we examine the changing international context inwhich British and America interests in south-east Arabia were situated. Notably thetensions of British-American rivalry and co-operation in a Cold War context which
played themselves out in the Buraimi Crisis. Local rulers such as the Saudis, the Imamin Oman and the Sultan of Muscat sought to pursue their goals in this framework andestablish themselves as sovereign rulers by proclaiming property rights over territories
whose borders were disputed by their neighbours.

4.2.1: The international context 1946-1955

In this section we consider the effects of World War Two on world politics, thedevelopment of the Cold War on the Middle East and Anglo-American rivalry in theregion.

The effects of World War Two on the international system

World War Two accelerated and compressed major changes in the international system
which had been underway since the early decades of the twentieth century. The start of
the global competition between the ascendant Western power, the United States, and theSoviet Union developed as the central feature of world politics at the end of the war.
Notably, the war contributed towards the weakening of the end of the West European
empires and the encouragement of nationalist movements (Bromley 1994: 108). For
Britain the most significant change in its colonial empire was the attainment by India of128

independence in 1947. We have seen in chapter two how it had been the need tosafeguard the sea routes to India which had been the basis for British policy towards the
Persian Gulf and the Middle East as a whole. Also of great significance was the growthof Arab nationalism and particularly the Free Officers coup in 1952 in Egypt; from thenon Britain would be caught between a powerful combination of forces in the Middle
East: Nasserism and US antipathy to European colonialism in the region.

The start of the Cold War and the Middle East

Despite the imminent independence of India, near the end of the war the strategic
importance of the Middle East to Britain was already being re-affirmed by the Middle
Eastern Defence Committee of the Cabinet:

The Middle East is a region of life and death consequences for the Britain and
the British Empire in four ways, (a) as an indispensable channel ofcommunications between the Empire’s Western, Eastern and Southern
territories; (b) as a strategic centre, control of which would enable an enemy todisrupt and destroy a considerable part of the British imperial system andinfluence as a major power; (c) as the empires main reservoir of mineral oil; (d)as a region in which British political method must make good, if the British wayof life is to survive. The vital importance of these considerations has been
established by hard experience in both World Wars, (quoted in Peterson
1986:60)

With the start of the Cold War a major review of British defence planning in 1946
addressed itself to a scenario of conflict with the Soviet Union. Such wartime
requirements to defend the northern Gulf from a Soviet advance were seen to include
operational naval bases at Aden with forward bases at Tobruk, Haifa, Port Sudan,
Bahrain and Masirah Island. It was also going to be necessary to involve the UnitedStates:129

Even allowing for the timely arrival of the Americans, it might still not be
possible to hold the oil fields at the head of the Persian Gulf... We consider,therefore, that it should be a definite part of our policy to associate the UnitedStates in the defence of the Middle East oil-fields.
(quoted in Peterson 1986:62)

Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East

This need to involve the Americans in the British planning for the imperial security of
the Middle East was especially galling for the British. This period witnessed thedevelopment of bitter Anglo-American rivalry in the Middle East as Britain’s
ineluctable imperial withdrawal began. On the Arabian peninsula, the US government,at the behest of the American ‘majors’ (the largest American oil companies) was
determined to break down the exclusive access agreements which had been formulatedby the IPC. The main objective of US oil policy formulated in Washington between
1944 and 1947 was expressed in a memorandum as ‘to remove or modify existing
barriers (legal, contractual or otherwise) to the expansion of American foreign oil
operations and facilitate the entry or re-entry of private foreign capital into countries
where the absence of such capital inhibits oil development.’ Furthermore ‘Washington...
should promote, by advice and assistance.. .the entry of additional firms into all phasesof foreign oil operations.’ The immediate outcome of this policy was the renegotiationof the Red Line Agreement and the resulting increased access to the oil reserves of the
Middle East for US interests (Bierschenk 1989: 210).
In 1948 the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) was formed by SOCAL,
Mobil and Texaco to develop concessions in Saudi Arabia.

130

In 1952 Britain was still the dominant power in the Middle East and determined tomaintain this position. The British controlled enormous oil reserves which helped theireconomy and believed that the Middle East was vital to their strength as a great power.
As well as a massive base in Egypt with 80,000 troops the British possessed naval
facilities in Jordan, air bases of significance in Iraq, reserves in Malta and Cyprus andprotectorates along the Persian Gulf. The British perception was that in return for
British support for US NATO policies and burgeoning American commitments
throughout the world, the United States would support the British position in the Middle
East. Prime Minister Churchill sought a meeting with President-elect Eisenhower
hoping to re-establish their wartime alliance and Anglo-American unity. A briefing
paper prepared for Churchill stated ‘each power must support the other fully and be
seen by all to do so. Lack of positive support and an affectation of impartiality by either
power will be interpreted as disagreement with the other and exploited to the detrimentof both.’ The Americans, however did not share this view. Eisenhower recorded in hisdiary that Churchill was old and feeble and surely due for retirement; Anglo-American
unity was only a move by the British to maintain their position in the Middle East. The
State Department agreed; Anglo-American friction in the Middle East was happening
because frank discussions had yet to take place over their change of roles. As the
British were failing to maintain security or come to terms with Arab nationalism it fellto the United States to expand its role lest an expansion of Soviet influence come about(Petersen 1992: 73-74). From this political involvement the US government also saw
an opportunity for US oil companies to supplant British ones. With the AngloAmerican overthrow of Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 the US replaced Britain as the pre­eminent Western power in Iran as well as Saudi Arabia. This was due to the131diminishing ability of Britain to influence wider events, the activities of the CIA andaggressive lobbying by the United States. With regards to the effect of this changing
international context on Oman Bierschenk argues:

It is solely against this background of the shift in British Near Eastern policy
from protection of the sea route to India to exploitation of the region’s oil
potential, and the replacement of British imperial hegemony by BritishAmerican rivalry that the Omani-Saudi Arabian border conflicts as well as the
dispute in the 1950s between the Sultan of Muscat and the Imam of Oman overcontrol of the interior, can adequately be interpreted. (1989: 211)

We now turn to see how these changes in the wider strategic and international politicalcontext affected British and American involvement in south-east Arabia 1946 -1955.

4.2.2: Western strategic involvement in Oman 1946 - 1955

The focus here is on the attempts by PDO to prospect for oil in the interior in the area ofthe concession it had signed with Sa’id bin Taimur and the way in which this intersectedwith the British government’s strategic interest.

The resumption of oil prospecting in Oman

The start of World War Two had suited the Sultan as it stopped any further prospecting
by Petroleum Concessions and the subsidies he received from the RAF increased theresources at his disposal to gain favour with the tribes of the interior (Bierschenk 1989:
213). By these means he hoped to accumulate so much political credit that when theelderly Imam died the tribes would renounce the election of a new Imam and accept
Sa’id’s reintegration of the interior more easily. In 1946 the Imam was reported to be132

fatally ill and his death expected. Sa’id received friendly letters from influential shaikhs
in the interior, one of whom vouchsafed that he ‘intended to take no part in the future of
the Imamate’ (Timpe 1992: 166). On the Imam’s death Sa’id bin Taimur planned to
immediately occupy the interior with a force of tribesman loyal to him. The Sultan
made a request to the Political Agent Muscat for some light arms, one British officer
and some Indian officers and RAF support. The British initially supported his plan; thePolitical Agent wrote to his superiors ‘Now that the Petroleum Concessions Ltd are in aposition to open up their operations it is obviously in our interest that the state [i.e.
Muscat] should be in a position to support them in their journeys and ensure their safe
conduct wherever they wish to go.’ From the oil company’s point of view such adevelopment would be advantageous because it would give them access to promisingareas such as Jebel Fahud. In London the Labour Government *recognise[d] reasons infavour of proposal as a means of hastening the time when PC Ltd will be able to survey
the possible oil bearing areas of interior inaccessible on the ground’. It also consideredthat oil development should take place as soon as possible and therefore agreed to the
supply of arms and officers. However, fearful of public opinion they declined to offer
RAF support and instead suggested using financial inducements in the Sultan’s name togain support of tribal chiefs in the interior. Sa’id was so incensed with this that herejected the offer of arms and officers and also refused to take any responsibility for thenegotiations between the oil company and the interior tribes. In the event the Imamrecovered and the Sultan remained on good terms with him until al-Khalili died in 1954:
Sultan Sa’id’s plans had to be postponed (Bierschenk 1989: 214).

133

The political significance of oil concessions

From the perspective of the oil company Petroleum Concessions (PC) the refusal of the
British government to provide the Sultan with the military force he wanted meant they
were compelled to consider alternatives such as gaining their co-operation throughfinancial means. In 1948 the PC Representative assessed the situation thus:

I doubt if we shall get permission for the geologist to go beyond Dhank until
either an understanding can be brought about between the Sultan and Suleimanor the latter is paid handsomely by us/given a separate agreement...It is time thatHis Majesty’s Government faced facts and, if upholding the Sultan’s sovereignty
over Oman implies refusing to allow the de facto rulers of the Interior tonegotiate concessions with the Company, there is no prospect whatsoever ofdeveloping Oman’s probably very considerable resources, (quoted in Bierschenk
1989: 214)

Negotiations were started with the semi-bedu A1 Bu Shamis of the Dhahirah, the Na’imi
Shaikh of Hafit and the Bani Ka’b Shaikh (Wilkinson 1992: 251); these threatened to
exclude the Sultan and take on the status of negotiations with independent rulers. From
PDO’s point of view this was the only option given the Sultan’s lack of militarystrength without the British government’s backing. Both the Sultan and the tribal
sheikhs of the interior were aware of the political significance of these concessions: thatof attaining the status of supreme political authority in an area and thus able to grant theproperty rights required by the oil company and benefit accordingly from theconcession fee. Bird of PC wrote to the Political Agent Muscat noting that ‘the Sultan
was extremely perturbed by the Company’s direct approach to the tribes...He feared that
the A1 Bu Shamis negotiations would tend to encourage every tribe in the Dhahirah toassert its independence by dealing direct with us.’ In 1950 Suleiman bin Himyar of theJebel Akhdar asked for recognition by the British government as an independent ruler

134

and an agreement with the PC. This situation demanded that the British define theirpolicy in south-east Arabia. The PRPG, Sir Rupert Hay, wrote to London that thealternative was either to ‘adopt a more realistic attitude towards the Sultan and treat him
as Ruler only of the places under his effective control, viz. the eastern coast of the Gulf
and Oman from the Batinah to Sur inclusive and Dhofar...[or] to allow the existing
situation to continue for the present in spite of its fictitious character.’ The reasons the
PRPG gave for favouring the latter option were thatfirstly, if we adopt the attitude that [inner Oman including the Dhahirah and up
to Buraimi] are not included in the Sultan’s dominions we have no locus standi
to negotiate regarding their boundaries with Ibn Saud and we shall find it
difficult to object if he should endeavour to bring them under his influence.
Secondly, the Iraq Petroleum Company hold concessions from the Sultan
covering all his dominions except Gwadur. Our action would automaticallycancel their rights in all these areas and open them up to all comers. Thirdly, we
should bitterly offend the Sultan...which might well affect our position in the
Gulf Sheikhdoms generally, (quoted in Bierschenk 1989: 215)

Bierschenk argues that

It was hence the importance of the British interests in the region - in contrast to
the local interest of the PC in Oman - which caused the British Foreign Office tocontinue supporting the Sultan...To safeguard its strategic interests in the region,
which at this stage largely consisted in the exploitation by British concerns of
the regions oil reserves, the British Government decided to continue basing its
Arabian policy on the assumption that the Sultan was sovereign over the wholeof Oman. Direct negotiations by the PC with the tribes of the interior were now
clearly excluded. ( Bierschenk 1989: 215)

With this clarification of British policy in 1950 the stage was set for the different actors
to take their parts in the dispute that put south-east Arabia in the world headlines.

135

The Buraimi Oasis Dispute and Anglo-American RivalryThis development of this dispute eventually came to involve two sides. Firstly, theImamate forces of the interior, the Saudis, and behind them the American oil company
in Saudi Arabia, ARAMCO, backed by the tacit agreement of the US government.13 On
the other side were the Sultan of Muscat, the British government and the British oilcompany - Petroleum Development Oman. Essentially it was a dispute over who would
benefit from the development of any oil reserves in the interior of Oman. The
Americans supported the Saudis because they would receive any oil concessions
resulting from an extension of Saudi territory. Significantly, Saudi and Sultanate papers
prepared for an arbitration committee were written by American and British officials
respectively.

As we have seen, the treaty of Sib of 1920 arranged by the British, had secured peace in
the Sultanate by recognising the de facto autonomy of the interior under the Imamate;the interior remained calm for the next three decades under Imam al-Khalili and thetamimah of the important Hirth tribe Isa bin Salih. Isa bin Salih died in 1946 and was
succeeded by his weak son Muhammed. A power struggle ensued within the Hirth tribe
between Salih bin Isa supported by his brother Ibrahim, and Muhammed’s son Ahmad.
Salih triumphed and Ahmad began communicating with Sa’id bin Taimur. Through the
Hirth power struggle Sulaiman bin Himyar of the Jebel Akhdar became the leading

13 See Petersen 1992 for a detailed account of the US-UK diplomacy over this disputeand its relation to the overall international situation in the Middle East.
136

secular force in the Imamate and he began making overtures to the Saudis (Allen 1987:
64).

The Saudi occupation of Buraimi and the British response

In October 1952 Saudis (encouraged by the Arabian-American Oil Company ARAMCO) occupied the Buraimi oasis on the western edge of Imamate territory andappointed a governor (Petersen 1992: 71). From 1954 onwards the Imamate was to beallied to the Saudis but in 1952 this was not the case with al-Khalili; he wrote in protest
to the Saudi governor of Buraimi: ‘Your statement that in view of repeated requests
from your subjects in Oman to appoint a representative on your behalf among them, youhave appointed Turki bin Abdullah bin ‘Uteishan, has astonished us, because we do notknow that you have subjects in Oman’ (quoted in Bierschenk 1989: 216). In association
with the Imam Sa’id assembled a force of tribesmen at Sohar to march to Buraimi toexpel the Saudis; however, due to American pressure, the British instructed him not tomarch - they were too aware of American involvement to allow anything precipitate tohappen.14 Sa’id bin Taimur had the sense to make sure that the instruction not to march
to Buraimi was read to him in full public view by the British Counsul General Chauncy

14 See Townsend (1976: 168). Conventionally, it is perceived that the Sultan, in
cooperation with the Imam,had been the driving force behind the assembling of a tribal
force at Sohar to expel the Saudis from Buraimi in 1952. However, a document foundby this author in the Foreign Office files in the Public Records Office, London
contradicts this view. In 1966 E.F. Henderson produced a report entitled ‘Security Muscat and Oman’. A hand written note on this document by M.S. Weir of the Arabian
Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, states ‘it was not really his action: we
had been urging it upon a reluctant Sultan for weeks, until we suddenly went into
reverse’ (See Appendix H, PRO, FO 371/185383; Security - Muscat and Oman, E.F.
Henderson, 19 July 1966).
137

who had rushed at top speed along the Batinah coast to deliver the message as instructedby London. The tribesmen dispersed and returned to their homes. In May 1954 Imamal Khalili died after a long period of poor health and tribal leaders assembled in Nizwa
to elect a successor from a number of proposed candidates. Sultan Sa’id was rejected
on religious grounds, others on tribal affinities. The eventual choice was Ghalib bin Ali
al-Hinawi who was favoured by Sulaiman bin Himyar and his Saudi allies (Allen 1987:
64).

The oil company and the Muscat and Oman Field ForceWith the change of Imam in the interior PDO saw an opportunity to explore Jebal Fahud
in its concession in the interior given by Sa’id. The British government, having
prevented the oil company from signing a concession with parties other than Sa’id andrefused RAF support, was happy for the oil company to finance the creation of theMuscat and Oman Field Force (MOFF) under the command of a British officer, the firstsignificant expansion of the Sultanate’s military forces since the creation of the Muscat
Levy Corps in the 1920s (Bierschenk 1989:215). The PC saw this as in its interest:

It would be a wise investment on our part, it is the only solution to thesebackward areas, and it might lead to the opening up of an extremely favourably
placed oil field with a terminal on the Arabian Ocean as opposed to the Persia
Gulf or the Gulf of Oman... and it would very likely pay handsome dividends,(quoted in Bierschenk 1989:216)

It was agreed that the company would pay £143,000 (£55,000 direct and £88,0000
through the Sultan) and £100,000 in any consecutive year (Bierschenk 1989: 216). In
December 1954 the four hundred strong MOFF accompanied a PDO surveying team138

from al-Duqm on the coast to Fahud. A detachment marched on and occupied Ibri
against explicit instructions from Sa’id not to do so. Sulaiman bin Himyar persuaded
Ghalib to attempt to retake Ibri. At this point the Sultan approved offensive action to
occupy the whole of the interior. The Batinah Force marched into the Ghadaf where it
defeated Imamate forces under Talib bin Ali the brother of the Imam. The Trucial
Oman Scouts expelled the Saudis from Buraimi in October 1955 thereby denying the
Imamate of military supplies and money. Finally, the MOFF occupied Nizwa
unopposed in December 1955. Ghalib resigned as Imam, Sulaiman bin Himyar retired
to Tanuf and Talib bin Ali and Salih bin Isa fled to Saudi Arabia. Sa’id made a crossdesert journey from Salalah and embarked on a tour of the interior appointing Ahmad
bin Muhammed as tamimah of the Hirth and governor of Nizwa.15

Anglo-American diplomatic relations and south-east Arabia

As has been already indicated, behind these events in South East Arabia lay the whole
dynamic of change in the British and American positions in the Middle East; AngloAmerican diplomatic relations reflected this as the following diplomatic exchange on
the Sultanate’s occupation of Nizwa in 1955 illustrates. On 24 November 1955 theCabinet gave consideration as to whether to give the Americans advance warning of the
Sultan’s move into Nizwa and it was decided not to do so. On 12 December theForeign Office informed Secretary of State Dulles that the Sultan of Muscat had
initiated an offensive against the Imam. Dulles replied that had he known earlier hewould have urged restraint as the Saudis might now consider asking the Security

15 For an account of this tour of the interior by a journalist who accompanied Sa’id see
James Morris, Sultan in Oman (1957).
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Council to place Buraimi on its agenda. Foreign Office officials were livid with thisAmerican response. Permanent Under-Secretary, Kirkpatrick, was observed ‘breathing
fire’ and summoned Walworth Barbour, the Minister-Counsellor at the American
Embassy in London. Against the news that the Sultan had occupied Nizwa without
opposition and that the Imam had fled to Saudi Arabia, Kirkpatrick professed
bewilderment at American policy. The Americans were supporting the Saudis who
seemed at best to be pursuing a neutralist policy and at worst taking delivery of Soviet
arms, opposing the Northern Tier arrangements and generally taking an anti-Western
stance. The Americans he contended were supporting the Saudis in their bid to absorb
the pro-Western states of south-east Arabia. Kirkpatrick asserted that if Washington did
not believe that the Sultan of Muscat should take action he deemed appropriate torestore his authority in what he believed to be his territory then the Americans were
‘inevitably supporting the establishment of Oman as a Saudi puppet preparatory to its
inclusion in Saudi Arabia* (quoted in Ovendale 1996: 128). On Buraimi Barbour
admitted that the Saudis had broken the arbitration agreement but protested that theAmericans regarded the Saudis as staunchly anti-Soviet.

These diplomatic exchanges illustrate the intensity of the Anglo-American friction inthis period leading up to Suez. The events of 1956 in Egypt and their relation to eventsin Oman will be assessed in the next chapter. With the occupation of Nizwa in 1955 theauthority of the Sultanate had finally been exerted over the interior. However, as theabove narrative indicates, the decisive factor was the interest of the British oil company
in controlling the development of any oil reserves there. Petroleum Concessions soughtto achieve this interest in a situation where the British government had forbidden the oilcompany from signing a concession with the interior tribes due to the consideration of140

the British government’s strategic position in the region as a whole. Sultan Sa’id’s
strategy for unification was successful because it coincided with the interests of the
British government and oil company for whom he was a useful ‘collaborator’.
Furthermore it was not long before Sa’id’s authority was to be rejected again in theinterior and then in what he regarded as his personal estate - Dhofar - the subject ofchapter five. So far in this chapter the focus has been on the strategic interests andinvolvement of Britain and America in Oman - it remains to reflect on the impact thishad on a number of aspects of politics in south-east Arabia, most notably thedevelopment of the state system of the area up to this point.

4.2.3: The impact of the West on Oman 1946 - 1955

We can at this point survey the progressively interventionist role of Britain in theprocesses of Omani society as the British pursued their strategic interests in the area.
Britain had first perpetuated the A1 Bu Sa’id Sultans (late 19th century), then isolated
the Imamate in the interior (1920) and now had occupied the interior and overturned the
Imamate. This was part of the wider process of British involvement in the developmentof the state system of the Gulf region. As George Joffe puts it:

The modem sovereign political structures of the Arab states of the Gulf region
are, in virtually every respect, a testimony to British imperial policy, spurred on
by a desire for oil and for commercial control. This is particularly true of thesmall states along the Gulf littoral of the Arabian peninsula, but it is also true, toa greater or lesser extent, of the three major states of the region: Iran, Iraq andSaudi Arabia. Although at least two of them had a sovereign existence before
the British-dominated colonial period in the Gulf region began, nonetheless theactual form of sovereignty manifested by all of them today clearly shows theconsequences of British interest. This, in turn, derived from concern over accessto India and over commerce during the nineteenth century and over control of oil
production during the first half of the twentieth century. (Joffe 1994: 78)141

The British drawing of borders in south-east Arabia

One of the main consequences of this aspect of the intrusion of the West was theimposition or adoption of Western concepts, most notably of sovereignty and state.16
With the realisation that vast oil deposits lay under the Arabian peninsula the British
realised that there was an urgent need to define the territories of the quasi-states they
had created; previously they had not been particularly interested as long as calm
prevailed. This meant the application of international law to lands previously organised
in terms of tribal concepts of territory {dor).

17

This tribal law often centred aroundusufructory rights which allowed the mobility on which the peninsula with its sparsenatural resources (until the oil age) depended. In contrast international, that is, Western
law had developed in feudal Europe and then been applied to colonial division in Africa
and linked sovereignty to territory:...the corpus of international law relevant to deciding sovereignty over sparsely
populated territory was singularly ill suited to the needs of the region. All
territorial boundaries are in some measure artificial, but the imposition onto
Arabia of sovereignty concepts that basically started with feudal rule over areasof sedentary subsistence agriculture and ended up with European rules designed
to partition Africa, inevitably cut across the very flows of migration, trade andpolitical loyalty that permitted the local population to exist in its traditional wayof life. (Wilkinson 1994: 97)
16 For example, the Imamate began to adopt Western concepts and practices of state inorder to play the ‘sovereign state game’ in the international fora of the Arab League andthe UN. It started issuing its own passports, receiving consuls and even issuing its own
stamps (the Sultanate’s stamps bore the head of Elizabeth II surcharged in rupees andannas - see Innes 1987:63). Indeed the Imamate was more active in this regard than
Sultan Sa’id who was not interested in joining international organisations.
17 See Wilkinson 1994 for a synopsis and 1991 for a full exposition of his study on
Arabian boundaries.
142

Associated with territorial sovereignty was the Western concept of state which ininternational law has a particular meaning: ‘states are entities with populations living in
territories effectively controlled by governments, which are also capable of conducting
international relations with other states’ (Joffe 1994: 78). Until the oil age and theevents of the 1950s this had been problematic in Oman as it was completely at variancewith the traditional practices of power and political organisation there:

Political power could also certainly translate itself into terms of regionalsovereignty. Resource-rich areas in the traditional geographic cores of Greater
Bahrain, Greater Yemen and Greater Oman offered opportunities for a degree ofsocial stratification and the development of a quasi permanent central
government system. The fact that in such areas ‘circulation’ patterns wererelatively highly internalised also helped reinforce a sense of regional identity.
But the tribal ideology that prevailed in all areas of Arabia was geared tominimizing such centralisation of power and wealth. So even when rulers
developed a hold over commercial or tribal empires, they were never able totransform their society into the hierarchically organised social, urban andadministrative structure that characterises full, permanent statehood. Arabia
remained at the two-tiered “chiefdom” level in state and class formation.
(Wilkinson 1994: 98)
In the dominant ideology of the area only the universal claims of an Islamic ruler could
take precedence over the political units of the shaikhs and emirs. The Zaydi Imam in
Yemen, the al Wahhab-Saudi state and the Ibadhi Imam of Oman were all therefore
opposed to what they regarded as the illegitimate forms of government of the Britishprotected rulers on the coast. Thus Wilkinson comments : ‘The Islamic state order was
therefore fundamentally in conflict with British rule in Arabia, and although in Oman
and Yemen, unlike the case of the Wahhabi state, the Imamates could constitutionallyaccept some constraints on their sovereignty, these concessions never extended topermanently limiting their territories’ (Wilkinson 1994: 99).

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These concepts of sovereignty and political order were, in Oman, overturned by theimposition of the sovereignty of the capitalist state system which required authority andproperty rights to enable the development of the oil reserves by the international oil
companies.

Conclusion: the expansion of the Sultanate 1932 - 1955

In 1932 the area of effective control of the Sultanate was in Muscat and Matrah, theBatinah and Dhofar. The Sultanate’s expansion into the interior was primarily due tothe desire of the oil company (PDO) to develop its concession and the British
government’s policy of supporting Sa’id bin Taimur in the context of its strategicinterests in the Gulf as a whole. This contract of collaboration was necessary but after
1955 the shifts in the international expectations of a ruler began to progressively
undermine the contract between the British and Sa’id bin Taimur. It became clear inthis time that the new developments that have been outlined in this chapter werechanging the Arabia that had existed within the cocoon Britain had spun around it. The
cocoon was crumbling and Arabia exposed to the air of the outside world. Hence, thetitle of David Holden’s account of this time, Farewell to Arabia, (1966). Two of thewinds that were to blow into the Sultanate, Arab nationalism and revolutionary
Marxism, are examined in the next chapter.

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Chapter Five: the consolidation of the Omani state 1956 -1977

The period 1956 - 1977 forms a distinct period in the process of state formation in
Oman. It is defined by the impact of Arab nationalism and Arab radicalism on the
British position in the Middle East. Up to this point the British protected shaikhdoms of
the Persian Gulf had seemed isolated from developments in other parts of the Arabworld. However, the effects of the rise of Arab nationalism and radicalism graduallypercolated through to the British-protected rulers on the Arabian peninsula including theSultan of Muscat and Oman. In the international arena the Suez War demonstrated that
the European powers could no longer act in the Middle East if they did not have theacquiescence, if not active support, of the United States. Timpe concludes that the‘events of Suez had no apparent effect on Britain’s relationship with Oman. The record
clearly indicates that Suez was not responsible for any change in the substance or styleof the patron-client relationship that had developed between Great Britain and Oman’(1991: 321). While this may have been true on the level of relations between British
officials and the Sultan perhaps this is not where we should look to find an effect. The
effect of Suez was far more at the level of British policy to the whole East-of-Suez
arena: the failure to assert British hegemony in Egypt meant that Britain’s position in
the Gulf and Oman was now set increasingly in the context of attempts to secure British
interests after British imperial withdrawal from the area. A key objective of thepolitical movements of Arab nationalism after 1956 and later the left-wing radicalism of
the 1960s and 1970s in South Yemen and Dhofar was to remove the British from theirposition of overbearing influence on the Arabian peninsula from Aden to Kuwait. The

145

pressure of these political movements forced the British to initiate schemes for
economic and political development on occasionally reluctant rulers.

In Oman ultimately the culmination of these pressures meant that Sa’id bin Taimur was
deposed in 1970 and his son Qabus installed as Sultan. British strategic and military
involvement was essential for the attempts to consolidate the Omani state in the face of
renewed rebellions. Firstly, in the interior, the integration of ‘Oman’ in to the Sultanateof Muscat and Oman was contested, and then in Dhofar where a new challenge was
posed to the regime of Sa’id bin Taimur. The need to defeat these rebels required anumber of reviews of the British relationship with Sa’id bin Taimur which, as alreadynoted, eventually led to his removal and to Qabus becoming Sultan. Lying behind allthese developments was the bid to develop the oil resources of the Sultanate and to
institute some form of development before the rebels could oust the A1 Bu Sa’id and theBritish with them. The development of a centralised rentier state, made possible by theoccupation of the interior in 1955, was brought to fruition in this period.

5.1.1: The international context 1956 -1967

In this section we examine the aftermath of Suez and Anglo-American relations as they
sought to develop an overall strategy for the protection of Middle East oil in a Cold War
context. We also look at how in this context the British government’s policy towards
Oman underwent reviews in 1958 and 1960.

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Suez and its aftermath

The wider strategic developments affecting Oman and the Arabian peninsula in thisdecade were the aftermath of the Suez War of 1956 and continuing adjustments in the
East-of-Suez role which had followed Indian independence (Peterson 1986: 77). Indian
independence in 1947 had removed the original justification for a British military
apparatus in the Indian Ocean; logically it should have led to a run-down in the British
presence east of Suez for a number of reasons. Firstly, on economic grounds: Britain nolonger derived so much revenue from India and had been seriously weakened by WorldWar Two. Furthermore, in the postwar years the advent of nuclear weapons
necessitated a complete re-think in strategic thinking. However, what in fact happened
was that the East-of-Suez presence was justified on new grounds and indeed it remained
one of the last areas in which Britain maintained a military capability outside the North
Atlantic/European theatre.

The main reason for this was inertia - a habit of mind of thinking as a global power.
Additionally, three specific factors can be noted. Firstly, the difficulty of considering
withdrawal when British forces were continually involved in East-of-Suez
contingencies. Secondly, the commitment of the three services to a world role partly
through tradition and also the inter-service politics of a declining defence budget.
Thirdly, the inability of successive British governments to take long term decisions.
The result was that:

The defence system originally designed to safeguard the Indian Empire wasmaintained through the fifties to secure what were thought to be Britain’s
interests and responsibilities in the Middle East, the Far East and Africa. And in147

the early sixties, when Britain’s colonial empire had gone the way of the Indian
Empire it was refashioned, and in some ways strengthened to meet therequirements of the post imperial order. (Darby 1973: 327)

British defence policy and the Sandys White Paper

British participation in the 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal was unquestionably atremendous debacle, particularly as it affected Britain’s relations with the Arab world
and thus its military presence in many Arab states. Its effect on strategic thinking was
somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, there was an instinctive feeling that all
Britain’s spending on conventional forces had gone for nought - they might as well be
got rid of and the money spent more wisely on nuclear defence. This seemed to be themessage of the 1957 Sandys White Paper, which stressed a nuclear priority, smaller but
more mobile conventional forces, an eventual end to conscription and cuts in defence
expenditure (Peterson 1986: 83).

At the same time it was held by others that the poor showing in military terms at Suez
was due to the starving of conventional forces. By this view, the lesson of Suez wasthat Britain needed to upgrade its forces and mobile capability, since its overseas
commitments would require British assistance for some time to come. This view wasbacked by service lobbying: even the navy began to show an interest in the concept oflimited war. The government sought to balance opposing views by emphasising thenuclear umbrella and at the same time relying heavily on the potential of an airliftedstrategic reserve. Thus, the key effect of Suez and the emerging air and sea barrier was
to stimulate consideration of the East-of-Suez arena as a theatre in its own right and toopen up British strategic debate from sole concentration on a potential total war to148

fighting limited wars. J.E. Peterson comments: ‘As a consequence, strategic mobility
became an integral part of British defence policy from the late 1950s through theeconomic collapse of 1967, and the concept was put to the test in the Arabian Peninsula
during the Oman and Kuwait crises’(1986: 84). Kuwait and its oil and sterling balanceswere the cornerstones of the British position in the entire Gulf area.

Anglo-American relations, the Gulf and Oman

The British position in Kuwait was discussed as part of Anglo-American planning toensure continued access to the petroleum reserves of the Middle East. Although one
strand of opinion in America held that Britain should encourage reform in the Gulf
states, Loy Henderson, the deputy Under Secretary of State, was opposed to such a
stance (Ovendale 1996: 186). The British ambassador at Ankara observed that theAmericans needed to be convinced that the British position in the Gulf was important
for the West in general and was not just an ‘out-dated relic’ of British imperialism.
Preservation of the rule of the al-Sabah family depended ‘in large measure on therelationship between the ruling family and the United Kingdom’, and this was animportant part of the wider system of the relationship between Britain and the Gulf
rulers. Britain insisted that it could do nothing more to ease the situation over Buraimi(Ovendale 1996: 187). London informed Washington of its intervention to support the
Sultan of Oman, when, in the middle of July 1957 tribesmen took over the mountains
near Nizwa in Oman. Britain considered once again that the establishment of a separate
state under the Imam of Oman in central Oman would be used by Egypt, Syria andSaudi Arabia as a centre for intrigue against British interests in the area. Primeminister
Macmillan told President Eisenhower that Nasser was encouraging the trouble and that

149

the Saudis were involved. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd told the Americans it was aminor matter on the military side: ‘sending 50 men or so and shooting up a fort or two.’Eisenhower assumed it was the latest incident in the old Buraimi affair, and refuted therumours current in London that the troubles had been brought about by the efforts ofAmerican oil companies to damage British oil possessions in the region.

In a statement to the Commons on 28 July 1957 Selwyn Lloyd justified thegovernment’s decision to help the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. There were implicit
obligations to a friendly ruler and because direct British interests were involved inconnection with the importance of the Persian Gulf to Britain. Selwyn Lloyd thenproceeded to make an important statement about the government’s view of its
commitments in the Persian Gulf, noting that although Britain’s obligation to the Gulf
Sheikhdoms were of two kinds

the difference between a formal obligation and the obligations of a long standing
relationship of friendship is not readily apparent to the local rulers and people.
If we were to fail in one area it would begin to be assumed elsewhere thatperhaps the anti-British propaganda of our enemies had some basis to it, and that
the Government were no longer willing or able to help their friends. (Darby
1973:131)

American intelligence found no evidence of official Saudi support for the Imam of
Oman. Secretary of States Dulles feared a small Suez. He warned Eisenhower on 3
August that the Arab world could be drawn into opposition to Britain, Nasser would
have a new chance to assert Arab leadership, and Washington would be caught between
its desire to maintain an influence with some of the Arab countries, particularly Saudi
Arabia, and the desire to maintain good ties with Britain (Ovendale 1996: 189).

150

Washington decided to abstain over the inscription of the Oman problem on the agendaof the Security Council. The ambassador at Washington, Sir Harold Caccia, warned theAmericans over the danger of such a move for public opinion in Britain, and for AngloAmerican relations. In the end Washington did abstain, but the vote in the Security
Council was five to four against, and the ‘Oman question’ was not placed on theagenda.

The Oman situation turned out to be more serious than had been supposed, and thequestion of air action was raised in October. The Cabinet Defence Committee, howeverthought that bombing was unacceptable on political grounds. MacMillan used his sonin-law, Julian Amery, who sent in the Special Air Service in actions in Oman over thefollowing two years to pacify the rebels. As part of the settlement in September 1958
the Sultan of Muscat ceded Gwadur, his small possession off the coast of Baluchistan,to the government of Pakistan (Ovendale 1996: 188).

Kuwait Oil and the Domino theory

By November 1957 the joint planning with the Americans had brought forward
proposals from Washington for the protection of Middle Eastern oil. On 14 November
Sir William Stratton, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff warned the Chiefs ofStaff that the size of the force which Britain could muster constituted a major limitation,and that it might be worth considering planning to use joint Anglo-American forces inthese circumstances. But R.W.J Hooper, who headed the Permanent Under Secretary’s
Department at the Foreign Office, advised that there would be political difficulties if
Americans were part of any forces destined for protection measures in the Gulf

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Shaikhdoms. At this time the Foreign Office, in response to the disturbed situation inMuscat and Oman, outlined a British policy in which the British position in the Gulf
and Southern Arabia was viewed as a ‘single whole whose parts were mutually self
supporting’. This amounted to a domino theory: ‘Our withdrawal from any one of these
territories for whose protection we were now responsible would thus fundamentally
weaken the whole of the present system and if it did not destroy it would at least hasten
its final collapse’ (quoted in Ovendale 1996: 189). It was in this context that therequest of Sultan Said for British help against the renewed Imamate rebellion of May
1957 (this will be examined in more detail in section 5.1.2) led to the formulation of a
new British policy towards Muscat and Oman whereby the British provided aid for an
expansion of the military forces of the Sultanate and a civil development programme.
The diplomatic protocol for this new policy was an Exchange of Letters.

The 1958 Agreement

The 1958 Exchange of Letters indicates the different aspects of British support: military
aid in the form of subsidy and secondment of personnel and civil development.

“In pursuance of the common interest of Your Highness and Her Majesty’s
Government in furthering the progress of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman,
Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom have agreed to extend
assistance towards the strengthening of Your Highness’s Army. Her Majesty’s
Government will also, at Your Highness’s request, make available regular
officers on secondment from the British Army, who will, while serving in the
Sultanate, form an integral part of your Highness’s armed forces. The terms andconditions of service of these seconded British officers have been agreed withYour Highness. Her Majesty’s Government will also provide training facilities
for members of Your Highness’s armed forces and will make advice available
on training and other matters as may be required by Your Highness.”

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“Her Majesty’s Government will also assist Your Highness in the establishmentof an Air Force as an integral part of Your Highness’s armed forces, and they
will make available personnel to this Air Force.”“Your Highness has approved the conclusion of an agreement for the extensionof the present arrangements regarding civil aviation and the use by the Royal Air
Force of the airfields at Salalah and Masirah.”“We also discussed the economic and development problems of the Sultanateand Her Majesty’s Government agreed to assist Your Highness in carrying out acivil development programme which will include the improvement of roads,
medical and educational facilities and an agricultural research programme.”( British and Foreign State Papers 1957-58, H.M.S.O., 1966)

Under the 1958 agreement the RAF maintained a base at Masirah Island which becamea dispersal point for nuclear armed Vulcan bombers from Cyprus, the only British
aircraft with nuclear capability; regular training missions took place involving
deployments to Masirah (Winn 1994: 546; Kechichian 1995: 145).

Given the political and strategic significance of the Sultanate it is not surprising that the
disturbances in Oman caused considerable debate as to the best British policy towards
the Sultan. In July 1959 M.C.G. Man the Acting Political Resident in Bahrain
proposed:

If the Sultan will not do what we think is necessary to crush a rebellion, or toprevent a recurrence, or as is more likely he prevaricates, we shall have to beprepared to compel him, or to overthrow him in favour of someone who will do
as we want. If we decide...to proceed at once to installing a new Sultan who will
do better than the one we have, we must likewise be prepared to back our man to
the full during this inevitable rebellion, and when it is crushed, hope that he will
be able to prevent another, (quoted in Timpe 1991: 292)

This was one view from the Gulf of the best policy towards the Sultan of Muscat andOman. Of course, eventually this was the option chosen by the British. Sa’id bin

153Taimur, like Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi earlier, was removed in 1970. But for the time
being the British continued their policy of supporting their existing client, Sa’id bin
Taimur; however alternatives were considered.

Britain and the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman: the Cabinet Paper, July 1960

Options for change were being considered at all levels of the British government. In
July 1960 the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd presented a paper (see appendix E) to the
Cabinet which outlined policy alternatives for the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman in thecontext of British strategic interests in the Gulf as a whole.

He first affirmed that ‘it is important that the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman should
remain effectively controlled in friendly hands’. The necessity of this was based on thewider context of British interests in the Gulf which he identified as:(a) Economic - To retain access on favourable terms to oil produced in the States
bordering on the Persian Gulf, and to maintain acceptable arrangements for
Kuwait’s sterling balances.
(b) Strategic - To maintain rights over Masirah Airfield. This is likely to growin importance, both as an air staging post providing flexibility on air routes to
the Far East, and also possibly in the long term as an alternative to air bases
which we possess at present elsewhere in the area.
(c) Political - To defend the area against the spread of Communism or pseudoCommunism. (CAB 129/102 Part 1 p.82)

To be able to achieve these three interests he argued that ‘certain political and militaryrequirements in the area must be met. We have to retain the confidence of the Rulers in
our will and our ability to protect them, and we must maintain the military facilities

154

needed for successful intervention. These requirements have developed substantially inrecent years.’

He argued for an increase in the amount of subsidy to the Sultan of Muscat and Oman inorder to implement the 1958 policy properly. He also outlined a number of alternative
policies such as strategic disengagement from the Sultanate as a whole, and support fora British-protected state in inner Oman. These were all argued against on the grounds
that they would erode the British position in the Gulf. A far greater erosive force was
Britain’s economic problems which led to the official British withdrawal at the
beginning of the next decade (see 5.2.1). The developments in the international context
we have examined in this period were reflected in British military involvement in Oman
to defend its client the Sultan.

5.1.2: British military involvement in Oman 1956-1967

In the period 1957-67 two ‘quasi nationalist’ armed rebellions - on the Jebel Akhdar andin Dhofar - were to indicate the difficulties Britain would have in securing a proWestern state in Oman.

The Imamate rebellion in the interior and British reoccupation

The extension of Sultanate authority into the interior in 1955 was initially short lived only with a further introduction of British forces was the interior finally pacified. With
the fall of Nizwa Talib bin Ali the erstwhile Imam’s brother had made his way to Saudi

155

Arabia where he started recruiting Omani labourers to the Oman Revolutionary
Movement (ORM). He started planning a revolt in Oman with his brother Ghalib,
Sulaiman bin Himyar and Sulaiman bin Isa al-Hirthi. In May 1957 Ghalib reasserted
his claim to the Imamate at Bilad Sait and was immediately besieged by the MOFF.
Talib’s ORM, armed with US made arms and mines supplied by the Saudis made theirway into Oman via the Batinah and broke the siege; the Sultan’s forces withdrew toFirq and subsequently to Fahud. Ghalib’s army once again raised the white Imamate
flag over Nizwa (Allen 1987: 67). Sa’id sought the help of his British supporters. Aftera parliamentary debate (Britain was still coming to terms with the Suez fiasco) the
British government agreed to provide assistance. A company of Cameronians under
General J. A.R. Robertson was sent to Oman and air cover from Sharjah was promised(Allen 1987: 68). Together with the Trucial Oman Scouts this force easily reoccupied
Firq, Nizwa (where Venom fighters strafed the fort) and Bahia; the Cameronians werewithdrawn in August 1957 as Britain sought to cover itself against attack at the United
Nations. Ghalib, Talib and Sulaiman bin Himyar withdrew with their supporters to theplateau at the top of the mountain Jebel al-Akhdar. Here they were well entrenched the many caves providing hiding for supplies provided by friendly villages and arms
from Saudi Arabia. They continued to lay mines and ambush government convoys andpursue their case in international fora from an office in Cairo.

The Jebal Akhdar campaign and Anglo-American relations

The British remained concerned with rebel activity against the Sultan. London decided
to increases the British military presence in the Sultan’s territory and to utilise the156

Special Air Services Regiment. The Foreign Office informed Secretary Dulles of its
decision: ‘in the event of this news leaking later, we should have more chance to defend
ourselves against any charge of having kept the Americans in the dark’. According to
London, the American Secretary of State ‘attempts to relate the Oman Trouble to thegeneral unresolved issues of sovereignty and boundaries in this area.’ The Foreign
Office admitted that settlement of outstanding differences with Saudi Arabia might
contribute to a peaceful solution in Oman but also that ‘a settlement on terms acceptable
to Saudi Arabia would in the long run serve only to disrupt our position in South East
Arabia generally. The Foreign Office sent Secretary of State Dulles a message noting
his concern that ‘further British military action in Oman might prejudice a peace
settlement, however in dealing with people like the Omani rebels pressure of this kind isprobably the best means available of creating the frame of mind in which a satisfactory
settlement will be possible.’ Then on 23 December the Foreign Office informed its
Washington embassy that additional soldiers would be sent to Oman, another seventy to
one hundred men because of the difficult terrain. The embassy was instructed to passon the information to the State Department, but did not communicate directly to preventthe possibility that the United States might ‘attach undue importance’ to the dispatch ofadditional troops (Joyce 1995: 150). The British perception of the American attitude
was that it should move forward with plans to increase its force in Oman because the‘Americans have no sympathy for anyone who having decided to use force does not use
it in more than adequate or absurdly overwhelming strength in order to finish the job
quickly’ (quoted in Joyce 1995: 150). This was to be achieved by the introduction of
the SAS.

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The SAS and the conquest of the Jebel Akhdar

Colonel David Smiley, who had been seconded to organise the Sultan’s Armed Forces,
managed to isolate the mountain in Autumn 1958 and found a route up to the plateau
from Wadi Bani Kharu, which due to its sheemess of its incline was undefended. For
the storming of the mountain a contingent of the SAS were diverted to Oman on returnfrom counter-insurgency operations in Borneo. On the evening 27th January 1959 theyoccupied the mountain in a surprise operation.1Ghalib, Talib and Sulaiman managed toescape to Saudi Arabia and the Imamate cause was promoted until interest gradually
petered out by the 1970s.

British building of the Omani military in the 1960s

The 1958 agreement with the British allowed a steady expansion of the military, andtheir commitment was reaffirmed as a result of a report submitted in March 1960 by
War Office Representative, Brigadier M.R. J. Hope-Thompson who spent six weeks in
Oman. His terms of reference were ‘to recommend the long-term measures which must
be taken in order to ensure the security of the Sultanate. To this end to examine andadvise on the way the SAF should be organised, trained and equipped.’ The terms ofreference were qualified with the proviso that ‘no significant increase in the number of
seconded British officers could be considered’ 2 The first product of this military

1 Darby comments: ‘The basic military lesson of the campaign was that air power was
no substitute for troops on the ground in maintaining stability in underdeveloped
countries. Whatever may have been possible in Iraq and the North-West Frontier before
the war, the Oman operation demonstrated that air action alone could no longer quell
skirmishes and major uprisings in desert areas (1973: 130).
2 FO 371/149017
158expansion was the Oman Gendarmerie, established in mid-1959 with headquarters firstat Sohar, then at Azaiba and finally at Sib. Originally it was conceived as a sort of rural
police with the responsibility of patrolling the northern borders of the Sultanate but waslater reconstituted as a regular regiment. Soon afterwards the Sultan of Oman’s Air
Force (SOAF) was created with a nucleus of three Provost T52 and two pioneer aircraft(Peterson 1978: 95). This military force was to be required in the Sultanate but not in‘Oman’ - increasingly the military threat was to come in the area separated from Muscat
and Oman by 500 miles of gravel desert and always geographically and culturally
distinct: Dhofar.

Geography and Ecology of Dhofar

Although territorially contiguous to Oman, Dhofar is separated by a five hundred mile
expanse of desert. Like Oman, it is in many respects an island: it is bordered by the Rub
al-Khali, and the Indian Ocean; while the Mahra and Hadramhawt are naturalextensions to the west the rugged nature of the terrain in effect forms a natural barrier(Peterson 1978: 187). Geographically it consists of three distinct areas: the Salalah
Plain, thirty miles long and ten miles wide, so named after the main town of Dhofar
which is situated there on the coast facing the Arabian sea; a line of mountains
consisting of Jabal Samhan in the east, the Jabal Qara in the centre and the Jabal Qamar
in the west; and behind these mountains, the Najd, a stony plateau. A further distinctive
aspect of Oman’s ecology is that it is the only part of Arabia which is touched by themonsoon system. Hence for three months of the year the kharif brings low mists which
cover the hills transforming them into verdant rolling downs. The Arab population is159mainly of the Kathir tribe; the inhabitants of the mountains, the jebalis, are thought tobe descended from ethnic groups particular to South Arabia: the Qara, the Mahra andthe Shera (Peterson 1978: 187). They possess a separate culture and language.3

Establishment of Omani control in Dhofar

Dhofar had not had links to Oman until the nineteenth century when Omani domination
began. Dhofar was first occupied by Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan in 1829 following thedeath of the chieftain Sayyid Muhammed bin Aqil. Political control remained loose andit was not until an occupation following the Omani expedition of 1879 that Omani
control was more effectively imposed (Janzen 1982). Faisal was the first sultan tospend more time in the province and this trend was continued by Taimur culminating in
Sa’id who initially extended sultanate authority throughout Salalah plain and into themountains. As early as 1935 Sa’id improved the palace at al-Husn and developed
agricultural estates. Sa’id spent much of World War Two there and resided there fully
after 1958. He treated Dhofar as his personal estate and imposed many petty
restrictions on the inhabitants causing many Dhofaris to leave secretly to work in the
Gulf (Peterson 1978: 187). Said had a particular distaste for the jebalis whom he called‘cattle thieves’ (Pimlott 1985: 27).

Rebellion in Dhofar: The Dhofar Liberation Front

In 1960 British Foreign Office officials wrote of Dhofar:

3 For a detailed account of Dhofar’s cultures and languages, see Miranda Morris,

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There is no serious threat to the Sultan’s authority here. The Sultan likes to keep
this province as separate as possible from the remainder of his country.4
This situation was soon to change; a rebellion in Dhofar became the most serious threat
to Sa’id’s regime and indeed British schemes for a new state system in the Gulf. This
threat ultimately required Sa’id’s ousting and a massive expenditure to integrate Dhofar
into the Sultanate. In Dhofar rebellion against Sa’id started amongst disgruntled
mountain tribesmen in 1962. They made their way to Saudi Arabia and then Ba’athist
Iraq where they received training. In 1963 and 1964 sporadic raids were carried out. In
1964 the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF) was formed from the merger of the Dhofar
Benevolent Society, the Dhofar Soldier’s Organisation and the local branch of the ArabNationalists’ Movement. As early as December 1962 acts of sabotage were carried out
at RAF Salalah and in April 1963 oil company vehicles were ambushed on the mid way
road (Pimlott 1985: 27). The Muscat Annual Report for the Year 1964 summarised theanti government activity in Dhofar:
The most serious incident was the explosion of a British Mark 7 mine in Julybeneath a RAF vehicle in Salalah. A British NCO was killed. Other incidents
occurred in Dhofar, including the blowing up of the Salalah Midway Road, a RAF
five ton crane destroyed by a mine and a ferret scout blown up by a mine. All are
believed to be the work of a band led by Musallan bin Mufl al-Kathiri. A small
reconnaisance party of SAF, including an element from SOAF, moved to Dhofar
early in December. The air route to Salalah via Masirah has been opened up for
SOAF and the road route marked so that it can be covered in three days driving; allwith the intention of the force being effective, if necessary in Dhofar.
The DLF held its first conference in central Dhofar in 1965 electing an 18 man
executive and issuing a manifesto calling for the overthrow of the sultan and an end toforeign influence (Pimlott 1985: 28). Subsequently a government patrol was attacked.

‘Dhofar - What made it different’, in Pridham (ed) (1987).
4 FO 371/148934, Telegram, Foreign Office to PRPG, No.863, July 29, 1960.
5 FO 371/179813, Muscat Annual Report for the Year 1964.
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In March 1966 the rebels activities had become such that William Luce, PRPG
telegraphed the Foreign Office in London stating:In view of the danger of attack on the R. A.F. airfield and camp at Salalah by theconsiderable force of dissidents now being hunted by the R. A.F., I have today
authorised the despatch of a platoon of the second parachute battalion from here to
Salalah to assist in local defence of the R AF . establishment.. .1 note from yourtelegram No.90 to me (not to all) that the Sultan has accepted the principle that we
can take such steps so long as British troops do not go outside the airfield. I leave it
to you whether to inform him direct of the present move or give the information tohis military secretary and let him pass it on 6
Subsequently, the Sultan’s military secretary, Waterfield, replied that either the Sultan
or his wali in Dhofar should always be consulted on such a development. This isindicative of how the obfuscating ‘protocol’ of informal empire was beginning to break
down under the pressure of the Dhofar rebels so that, increasingly, British power would
be unmasked. In 1966 an assassination attempt on Sa’id narrowly failed;7 after thisSa’id never left his palace and brought the predominantly Baluchi SAF to Salalah,
excluding all Dhofaris. At this point the rebellion was supported by Dhofaris who saw
it as a continuation of attempts to break away from A1 Bu Sa’id rule. It suffered from alack of resources; this was to change with the advent to power of the radical NLF topower in Aden in November 1967 and the subsequent creation of the Peoples
Democratic Republic of Yemen. The radicalisation of the DLF and the course of theDhofar rebellion after this are examined in section 5.2.2.

The military response to the DLF

6 F0371/185365, Telegram from William Luce, PRPG, to London.
7 See the account of W.C. Carden, Consul General, Muscat in PRO. FO 371/185364.
162

The Sultan’s military response was weak, chiefly because he lacked both information
about the threat and the means to gain that information. His army comprised only two
British-officered battalions - The Northern Frontier Regiment (NFR) and the Muscat
Regiment (MR) neither of which was stationed in Dhofar nor contained Dhofaris, andwhen the Commander, Sultan’s Armed Forces, Colonel Anthony Lewis, led an NFR
company onto the Jebel in search of the DLF in October 1964, he faced enormous
problems. Approaching the mountains from the north, Lewis had had:a cold start for getting to know the enemy, the inhabitants and the terrain.
Fortunately the DLF was just as weak, lacking men, materiel and an organised
infrastructure, and no contacts were made, but it was a poor start to a counter­insurgency campaign. Better results were achieved in May and June 1965, when
two MR companies patrolled the wadis above Salalah in Operation Rainbow - on
two separate occasions DLF groups were found and defeated - but once themonsoon began SAF troops were withdrawn and the mountains left to the rebels,(quoted in Pimlott 1985: 28)
The monsoon was one problem the SAF faced; another, which was to become moreacute with British withdrawal from Aden in 1967, was the use by the Dhofari rebels of
the port of Hauf in the East Aden Protectorate as a ‘safe zone’ where they could rest andrecuperate. In autumn 1966 planning proceeded in British officialdom for a military
operation to deny this port to the Dhofari rebels. On 25 October the Secretary of Stateof the Foreign Office authorised Operation Fate which was carried out three days later.
Troops of the First Battalion, the Irish Guards, with helicopter support from HMS
Fearless carried out a cordon and search operation; achieving complete surprise theyencountered no opposition and sustained no casualties. Twenty two members of theDhofar Liberation Front were arrested and deported to Dhofar.8 British officials

8 Peter Thwaites, the commander of the Muscat Regiment informs at that these rebels
were interrogated by Bob Brown, Sultan Sa’id’s Intelligence Officer for Dhofar, and‘eventually ordered to be detained at the Sultan’s pleasure’. He comments: ‘The Sultan
was a merciful man. In obedience to Koranic law, he never took the lives of his
163regarded it as a success - ‘a considerable setback to the Dhofar rebels’ - and a minute
was sent to the Defence Secretary and copied to the Prime Minister conveying thecongratulations of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. Knowledge of the conflict inDhofar and British military operations there went to the top of the British politicalsystem, in this case, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.9 This deployment of theresources of the British armed forces was to be crucial in the eventual suppression of therebellion in Dhofar which will be examined in the next part of this chapter. It was a
deployment that was obscured through a number of measures so that more than any
counter insurgency campaign in the post war British imperial retreat it merits fully thetitle of one participant’s account: the secret war.10

5.1.3: The impact of the West on Oman 1956 -1967

In this section we focus on the regime of Sa’id bin Taimur and its relationship with theoutside world. The outside world was piercing the British cocoon which had isolated
Oman: the United States showed interest in developing its relationship with theSultanate whilst at the United Nations Sa’id’s reliance on Britain was criticised as a
type of imperialism. British support of Sa’id bin Taimur at this time meant that whilst it
prevented his regime from being overthrown it now also put pressure on him to end theprisoners. High on the parched black rock surrounding Muscat harbour was a terrible
fort called Jalali, built by the Portuguese in 1589. Here languished the Sultan’s
enemies, heavily shackled with great iron bars between their ankles; smugglers,murderers, political agitators, adulterers, debtors - and rebels.’ See Muscat Command(1995: 20).
9 See PRO, F0371/ 185365. The minute is reproduced as an appendix.
10 The account in question is David Arkless (1988), The Secret War: Dhofar 1971/1972.
The book recounts the author’s experiences as an air-drop crew member working with
the Skyvans in counter-guerrilla operations in Dhofar between 1971 and 1972.
164

isolation of the Sultanate and allow the development of the country. His failure to do
this adequately, which we will examine later in this section, both alienated the populace
and undermined British commitment to him. This dynamic of imperial development
meant there was an increasing shift to ‘sell the Sultan down the river’.11 Under thepressure of resistance to Sa’id’s regime this is what was to happen when the British
eventually dropped Sa’id bin Taimur to secure their wider interests. First we look at thecontext and significance of the 1959 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations andCommercial Rights between the United States and the Sultan of Muscat and Oman.

Oman and the United States

In February 1949 the American Vice Consul in Dhahran had written to his Secretary ofState:

With the vast and dynamically expanding American interests in the Persian
Gulf, I am sure that the Department is not unaware of the increasing strategic
significance of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, lying as it does athwart thenarrow entrance commanding the sea access to the Gulf. With the paucity ofcurrent information on this area, it is especially important that this consulate
effectively discharge its responsibilities to report on this region, to protect andpromote American interests there and to cultivate friendly and cordial relations
with the Sultan and people of Muscat, (text from Porter 1982: 81)

An opportunity to develop ‘friendly and cordial relations’ was presented by thenegotiations to replace the 1833 treaty between Oman and the United States - this was
the last treaty granting the United States extraterritorial rights (see section 2.2). This
treaty was replaced with a Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations and Commercial

11 This phrase was used by the Foreign Office official A. Brooke Tumes in July 1966
whilst discussing the possibility of withdrawing from RAF Salalah (FO 371/185375,

165

Rights in 1959 despite almost non-existent trade relations (Joyce 1994: 145; Rigsbee
1990: 130).

The 1959 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations and Commercial Rights

The State Department underlined the prospects of substantial further development ofMuscat’s oil resources by American business. To this end a treaty was required tofacilitate the establishment of a consulate and thus make available to American citizens
the services of consular officers having access to the ruler.

For all practical purposes, there is now a vacuum in our relations with Muscat inthat we have neither a satisfactory treaty nor even a more limited agreement of
the type now in effect with Saudi Arabia and Yemen. This is a matter of morethan ordinary concern where a country with an absolute ruler is involved. Insuch a case a treaty can serve to deter the ruler from capricious use of his powerin an manner detrimental to US interests, (quoted in Joyce 1994: 149)
The treaty would allow right of entry to the Sultanate for American business andguarantee American protection of property. Agreement had been reached by the
beginning of March on all points but one - Washington’s proposal that disputes bereferred to the International Court of Justice. The Sultan continued to say no; hesuggested that if a dispute arose, the treaty be abrogated. Schwinn reported to
Washington that there were three reasons for the Sultan’s refusal to send unresolved
disputes to the International court: his existing treaties with Britain and India did notcontain such procedures; he was completely uninformed about the functions of theInternational Court; and he was reluctant to permit any third party to interfere in a treaty
between the two nations. The Sultan explained: T, as ruler, am now free; once a paper

comment on draft proposal for RAF Salalah, 12.7.66).
166

is signed, I am restricted.’ The Secretary of State was informed that while willing tolisten to the points made by the American negotiator the Sultan ‘proved tenacious andfirm once he has made up his mind.’ The Sultan contented that he did not need a newtreaty and would be quite happy with abrogation of the defunct treaty of 1833 (Joyce
1994: 149). The choice appeared to be either to accept the Sultan’s position or to forgo
the treaty. The State Department emphasised the prospect of substantial further
development of Muscat’s oil resources by American business, which at this pointconsisted of the Cities Service oil concessions in Dhofar and the American share in the
Iraq Petroleum Company concessions in Oman (Joyce 1994: 153). The US conceded
defeat; a text for the treaty was agreed that did not contain the provision for recourse to
the international court.

The Imamate and Saudi reaction to the US/Muscat Treaty

In the eyes of the Omani rebels the United States had, in concluding the treaty, aligned
the US with the British in an unwarranted interference in Oman through support for
Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur, which amounted to a violation of the Charter of the United
Nations. In Damascus a representative of a leader of the Imam of Oman, issued astatement deploring President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s request to Congress to expedite
ratify of the treaty and urged Congress to refuse ratification (Joyce 1994: 150).

The State Department sent a copy of the treaty to the Saudi Arabian ambassador in
Washington emphasising that the treaty was a standard economic and consularagreement and held no political significance. However, strong objections were made by
Acting Head of the Saudi Foreign Office Shaikh Omar Saggaf to the American embassy

167

in Jedda. Saggaf protested that American recognition of rights for the Sultan outside
Muscat demonstrated Washington’s support for ‘British aggression against Kingdom
Saudi Arabia. ’ Jedda maintained the treaty contradicted the text of a joint communiquesigned on 8 February 1957 in Washington by Eisenhower and the Saudi monarch. Thatstatement pledged the two governments to settle Middle East problems by peacefulmeans within the framework of the United Nations charter, with both leaders declaring
their firm opposition to the use of force from any source. Jedda wanted Washington torevise the American position, which for the Saudis was ‘subject astonishment andamazement’. Shaikh Saggaf felt that misunderstanding might have been avoided ifprior to concluding the treaty Washington had consulted Jedda informally. Sweeny(iCharge d ’A ffaires ad Interim, American embassy in Saudi Arabia) explained: ‘Our
understanding is that the Saudis are bothered by the term “dependencies” fear the
British have taken us in’. The American Charge d ’A ffaires acknowledged that on theissue of boundaries Saudi opinion was often ‘unrealistic’, given that most Saudis
believe their national destiny should include all of the Arabian peninsula except for the
Yemen.

From Dhahran Schwinn indicated that when the Sultan insisted on using the phrase‘Kingdom Of Oman’ in the treaty he did so in order to indirectly obtain, Washington’s
acknowledgement of his claims to Oman. Schwinn suggested that the American
position should be that in using names and titles in current international usage theUnited States was not in any way taking a position on border disputes between the
Sultan and his neighbours (Joyce 1994: 151).

The Question of Oman at the UN

168

Following the collapse of the rebels’ military position in Oman their Arab supporters
attempted to put the ‘question of Oman’ on the agenda of the United Nations (Peterson
1978: 151). The only substantive results of UN consideration were reports submitted in
1963 and 1965. Herbert de Ribbing, the Swedish Ambassador to Spain was appointed
by the Secretary-General to investigate the situation. He visited Oman, Saudi Arabia
and London in 1962 and submitted his report in the autumn of 1963. His conclusions
were substantially in line with the Sultan’s position, observing that the rebellion waslong over, that the majority of the populace denied the existence of political repression,and that the British officers in SAF were apparently not involved in general policy­
making. He also recommended that UN assistance be made available to help improvehealth and social conditions in Oman. Nevertheless, the Arab states continued to pressfor UN action favourable to their position. As a result, in December 1963, the General
Assembly created an ad hoc Committee to engage not only in a fact-finding mission on
Oman but also to give a judgement on the conflicting views of the parties to the dispute.
This committee held discussions in London, Dammam, Kuwait and Cairo; Said bin
Taimur did not allow members of the committee to enter Oman and Said requested that
Britain represent him at the UN (Halliday 1974: 279). Partly as a result of this attitude,
the committee declared Britain’s presence was imperialistic and that all troops should
be removed (Wilkinson 1987: 326). This was not the case due to the start of rebellion
in the southern province of Dhofar.

Sa’id bin Taimur and development in Oman

169

It would seem that Sa’id believed that by isolating Oman from the outside world hemight be able to perpetuate his form of rule. Many writers have contended that under
Sa’id there was a range of official petty restrictions such as a ban on radios andspectacles, although this has been rejected as erroneous by a British official who was
based in Oman at the time (Pridham 1986: 133). Furthermore Sa’id was not eager tostart development projects such as hospitals or education. The reason he gave wasabsence of revenue in his treasury; however, in 1958 he received a windfall of three
million pounds from the sale of the Omani enclave of Gwadur on the Makran coast to
the government of Pakistan. This money was deposited in a Swiss Bank account. In
the late 1950s the Sultanate had an annual income of about two million pounds of which
one and a half million was British subsidy. After the Jebal Akhdar rebellion the British
sought to institute some form of development to ward off further discontent. A further
reason was to cover up the damaging effects of the disproportionate response to theJebel Akhdar rebels: the British civil development programme of 1960s was thenecessary accompaniment of military pacification in the interior (Holden 1965: 234).
Holden notes that when Lieutenant Wellsted had climbed the Jebel Akhdar in the 19th
century that he was able to do this because with the proceeds of the slave trade Sultan’s
writ ran large. Wellsted found every sign of a flourishing agriculture on the plateau. As
we have seen the decline of the slave trade meant the end of prosperity in the interior
and led to migrations to Zanzibar and the coast. The irrigation channels fell into disuse
and their destruction was completed in the air raids on the jebel in 1959 - the remaining
villagers on the mountain prepared to abandon villages for good. The British
government sent the Royal Engineers and an agricultural adviser, Jack Eyre, who
restored the channels, distributed diesel pumps and opened an agricultural researchstation in Nizwa to host a vegetable show. Villages were being repopulated by the end

170

of 1962 as migrants heard the news in Zanzibar and sought to return to their ancestralplots (Holden 1965: 235).

However, Sa’id stalled these development efforts with his extreme caution particularlyin the areas of education and health; before 1970 only one hospital existed in Oman run
by the Arabian Mission of America and much of the population was chronically sickand living in abject poverty (Allen 1987: 101). This had consequences for the securityof all parts of the Sultanate as dissatisfied groups tried to obtain an improvement in theirstandard of living.

In 1966 the British Political Agent in Dubai, D.A. Roberts, warned off Sheikh Saqr of
Ras al-Khaimah from an attempt to take over all of Muscat territory on the MusandamPeninsula. In his letter to Consul General Carden he concluded:

It is gratifying to see that my warning to Sheikh Saqr had some effect but it isclear that so long as the people of the Musandam Peninsula are dissatisfied they
will continue to scheme with Shaikh Saqr or anyone else to improve their lot.
The Sultan’s refusal to do anything about this area will remain a constant sourceof trouble and embarrassment for us here. I hope that when his oil money starts
to come in he may be pressed to spend some of it on his subjects here in thenorth.12

Carden replied:

I should be less than honest if, by remaining silent, I led you to think that the
Sultan was likely to earmark much of his oil money in the initial phases for the
Musandam Peninsula. From his standpoint Muscat and Matrah, Oman, theBatinah coast, and Dhofar are all of greater political importance. It would
therefore be unrealistic to expect the Sultan to allocate to his part of the

12 FO 371/185364, D.A. Roberts to Consul General Carden, 28.11.66.
171

peninsular sums comparable to those available to Ras al Khaimah anyway
before 1969.13

The official British pretence that Oman had an independent ruler meant that Britain
could, to an extent, wash its hands of the state of the Omani populace. It was only whenrevolutionary forces threatened to overthrow Western influence in Oman that the British
really concerned themselves with the nature of their client’s regime. Ironically, incontrast to the days of the Indian Raj when they had sought to exclude any other
Western presence in the Sultanate, the British now welcomed it as a buttress to theirposition:

According to one well placed witness a consortium of major German companies
are interested in obtaining a sea-bed concession and held discussions on thesubject with the Sultan in December. Dr Wendell Phillips had put them in touchwith him. If this leads to the Germans getting the concession it will have theadvantage that a further Western country will have a vested interest in thesovereignty of the Sultan and the territorial integrity o f his country. Countries
with such a stake now are limited to the U.K, the U.S.A. and the Netherlands.14

The emigration of Omanis to the oil states

One effect of the situation in Oman was the emigration of large number of Omanis toGulf states experiencing oil-based development such as Kuwait, Bahrain and eastern
Saudi Arabia. In July 1957, some tribes loyal to Sa’id bin Taimur were ordered todestroy the houses, date palms, and irrigation channels of communities which had
rebelled (Eickelman 1985: 19). Following the Jebal Akhdar war and continuing

13 FO 371/185364, Consul General Carden to D.A. Roberts, Political Agency, Dubai,
14.12.66.
14 FO 371/185362, Muscat Annual Report for the Year 1965. See Appendix F.
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throughout the 1960s there was an acceleration of working-age male emigration to thesignificant communities of Omani manual labourers and shopkeepers in Kuwait,
Bahrain, and eastern Saudi Arabia (Eickelman 1985: 20). This was because after thesubmission of the Jebel Akhdar and the escape of the rebel leaders in 1959, punitive
restrictions were placed on the region’s inhabitants and a campaign of systematic
reprisal began. They were denied regular access to the markets of neighbouring towns
and forbidden to obtain passports to seek work outside Oman. They nonetheless usuallyfound alternative means of leaving the country. The result was that by the late 1960s
there were over 50,000 Omanis living in neighbouring Gulf states (Eickelman 1985:
20). For the same reasons many merchants moved to Dubai to escape the anticommercial policies of the Sultan (Halliday 1974: 287).

Sultan Sa’id’s regime in OmanWith the rebellion in the interior 1957-1959 Sultan Sa’id withdrew to Salalah, never toreturn to Muscat. He conducted government business by radio wire and the residents ofMuscat were subject to the whims of some members of the royal family. For example
Sayyid Shihab refused to issue passports for the Hajj without payment of a substantial
deposit which in practice was very difficult to get back. Shihab claimed that his
intention was to prevent dissatisfied subjects from using the Hajj as a cover to leave thecountry to work, which was illegal, or worse to join the rebellion (Joyce 1995: 96). The
Sultan invited retired British Consul General to return to Muscat to work as his personal
adviser; after consulting with the Foreign Office Chauncey took up the post (Joyce
1995: 96).

173

At this time British officialdom was concerned about possible adverse public relations
which might stem from public executions in the Sultanate. One such execution had
involved the fifteen year old son of the victim firing an eighteenth century rifle which
had misfired three times. Eventually the boy handed the rifle to an older relative whohaving hit the prisoner’s chest, fired a second shot five minutes later hitting theforehead. A later execution was filmed by a member of the royal family. Britain wasconcerned about the impact if knowledge of the public executions became public in
Britain. However, it was the Sultan’s aim ‘not to expose himself to any accusations by
the bigoted Ibadhis that he is departing from the strict letter of the Sharia law.’ Political
Resident William Luce pointed out that Britain was not in a position to pressure theSultan, with the need for military facilities in connection with the defence of Kuwait(Joyce 1995: 92-93).

In 1965 Amnesty International groups in the UK began a letter writing campaign onbehalf of what they regarded as ‘non-violent prisoners of conscience’ such as Saif bin
Humaid al-Jabiri imprisoned in Jalali prison. In rebutting the allegations made in a
letter from David Roberts of the Bristol Amnesty International group the Consul
General, D.C. Carden wrote to M.S. Weir in the Arabian Department on the
improvements that had been made in conditions in Jalali prison since 1960:

Conditions in the fort have improved considerably over the past five years. I
have no reason to think that they will not continued to improve. On virtually
every point raised by Mr Roberts, there has been a marked improvement since
Major Anderson gave us his 1960 report. Indeed taking into account the living
conditions of the average Omani, the prisoners are quite well off, with freeclothing, food and medical treatment.15

174

This is gives an indication of the privations that the rest of Sa’id bin Taimurs subjects
had to endure. When Amnesty International members directed letters to their Memberof Parliament the tactic of the Foreign Office officials was to issue two letters. One wasfor the constituent’s consumption and stated that the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman wasa fully independent state and that Britain had no basis to intervene. The other went to
the MP stating, in confidence, that Britain was trying to influence the Sultan but that
this was best done by gentle prompting rather than direct confrontation which would becounter-productive.16

Sa’id’s system of rule

In the late 1950s and 1960s Sultan Sa’id often repeated to his British advisers his belief
that ‘if Oman’s little rulers are all right then so is Oman.’ He was referring to thecountry’s tribal sheikhs upon whom he depended to maintain order. The scope ofgovernmental activities remained what it was prior to 1955 except for a small militarypresence and a small network of individuals personally commissioned by the Sultan towrite confidential reports on local events. Reliance upon tribal sheikhs provided an
inexpensive means of government in the interior, but at the cost of maintaining an
administrative system with neither the capacity nor the resources to initiate development
projects of any sort or to assess local needs in any significant way (Eickelman 1985;
17).

Sa’id bin Taimur and Dhofar

15 FO 371/179814
16 FO 371/179814
175

Said treated Dhofar as his own personal domain where he might escape from theinterference of the British and also the demands for financial largesse from tribal
delegations.17 Sa’id was a thoroughly obnoxious character - in the 1950s when heresided in Muscat one of his favourite past times was to make his slaves swim under his
balcony and then shoot at the fish around them (Halliday 1974: 277). Sa’id’s presencein Dhofar meant that his regime there was particularly oppressive. The UN Committee
on Oman interviewed two persons from Dhofar and gave this summary of theirinterview

The people of Dhofar, the Committee was told, were treated by the Sultan asslaves. He was cruel and imposed many arbitrary restrictions on the people.
They could not travel outside; they were not permitted to build houses; food
could only be bought in one walled market where the quantity that could bebought was fixed; and they were not allowed to import or export goods. Further,
there was no work in Dhofar, no schools, no hospitals, no economic life, noequality and no right to participate in politics. For instance, in 1957 when the oilcompany came, people from outside the country were given jobs, although local
people had wished to work. However, the young people of Dhofar had held
secret meetings about these matters and although they had had no education,some of them had travelled and they all knew their rights. (UN Report of the
Ad Hoc Committee on Oman, 1965, p. 164)

After the assassination attempt Sa’id ordered a blockade of the mountains and sealed off
Salalah which prevented the jebali from gaining access to their traditional markets andalienated uncommitted jebali (Pimlott 1985: 28). Although until this point it had been
the Imamate forces of the interior that had posed the most persistent threat to the British
supported Sultans of Muscat, it was in Dhofar that a rebellion started that at one point

17 There is a case of a sheikh who trekked by camel across the desert from northern
Oman to Dhofar. When he got there Sa’id refused to see him and gave him enoughmoney to only cover his expenses thus deterring any future missions to Salalah(Eickelman 1985: 18).
176

seriously threatened the rule of the A1 Bu Sa’id Sultans and Western influence in Oman.
It was to precipitate a greater external military involvement than the Sultanate had
seenbefore and the creation of a new post-colonial order in Oman.

Sa’id bin Taimur and the parameters of collaboration

In his discussion on the end of the British empire in the Persian Gulf, Glen Balfour-Paulcomments on Halliday’s assertion of the colonial status of Muscat and Oman:‘The only counter observation offered here is that, if Muscat and Oman was ever acolony in Halliday’s de facto sense, it had certainly ceased to be so by the period we areconcerned with. Any British representative (the author was one) who sought in that
period to tender advice to Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur on the governing of his country soon
found how constitutionally (in both senses of that word) impermeable he was.’(Balfour-Paul 1991: 199).

Sa’id was clearly a wily character and knew how to play the British officials at theirown game - or ‘obstinate’ as some of the British in Oman liked to call it. He had thepower to stall, and a limited power to manoeuvre and was certainly not a ‘puppet’.
However the parameters of collaboration meant that while Sa’id could ignore British
advice his usefulness was becoming outlived. In January 1966 the Consul General inMuscat, Bill Carden wrote to William Luce, PRPG that

The next five years will be a contest with the rebels and their friends trying tooust the Sultan and us before he can consolidate his position by expenditure ofoil revenues.18

18 FO 371/185363, Consul General Carden to PRPG Luce, 15.1.66.
177

Ultimately, it was to be the British who, towards the end of that five year period, ousted
the Sultan so that they could retain their position in Oman and maintain the A1 Bu Sa’id
dynasty in power through the expenditure of oil revenues. The further development of
the Dhofar conflict examined in the next part of this chapter meant that their erstwhile
collaborator, Sa’id bin Taimur, had to be dispensed with.

178

5.2: Oman and the West 1968 - 1977

The second part of chapter five reviews the changes in Western security arrangements
for the Gulf, the development of the conflict in Dhofar in this context and the resulting
removal of Sa’id bin Taimur. The development of the Omani rentier state under the
regime of Qabus is examined.

5.2.1: The international context 1968 - 1977

The British withdrawal from the Gulf and the Twin Pillars policy were the two key
developments in Western security projects for the Gulf in this period. This change
reflected the growth of regional powers of Iran and Saudi Arabia and their relationshipwith the dominant Western power the United States.

The British Withdrawal from Aden and the Gulf

The gathering pace of British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf which came to a head in
this period is characterised by Sir Anthony Parsons, a British diplomat in Bahrain at thetime, with a metaphor from cricket:

Governments, Labour and Conservative, were like teams embarking on what
they believed to be a timeless, at least, a five day Test Match. Suddenly, they
discovered that the rules of the game had been changed: they were playing alimited-overs game and, at the beginning of each session, the umpire reduced thenumber of overs remaining. Long term strategy and planning, if any, gave way
to hasty improvisation, the important lost priority of the urgent, decisions were179

made for the wrong reasons, or were not made at all, advice from the region was
ignored or rejected, (see his foreword in Balfour-Paul 1991: xvi)

As this indicates, British policy regarding military bases east of Suez continuallychanged as each successive revision to attempt to conduct a viable policy was undercut
by events on the ground. The eviction from the Egypt Canal Zone and the debacle ofSuez led to the building up of Aden as the RAF’s major base in the Middle East only to
see British rule there face sustained and eventually successful opposition.19 It was clearthat British imperialism was in terminal decline; efforts turned to securing post-colonialstates on the Arabian peninsula conducive to Western and specifically British interests.
However, developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict between 1967 and 1973 made thismore difficult by catapulting the Arabian peninsula into world attention and breaking
down its insulation from the destabilising force of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Halliday
1980:212). Fred Halliday comments:

The context of those years needs little summary: globally, the final death throesof the European empires, the rise of the revolutionary movements in Indochina,
the conflict between Russia and China for influence in the third world;
regionally, the crisis of the Arab nationalist movement that followed the defeat
in the 1967 war, the consolidation of a new pro-western bloc headed by Saudi
Arabia and Iran, the rise of a revolutionary movement in South Arabia,
beginning with the Yemeni revolution of 1962, leading onto the anti-British
guerrilla movement in South Yemen between 1963 and 1967, and the outbreakof guerrilla warfare in Dhofar in 1965. (Halliday 1997)

19 The role of another RAF base, that on Masirah Island, is given in another an RAF
planning document of 1969 - ‘Operational Policy for NEAF Vulcan Squadrons.’ This
states that two squadrons of Vulcan bombers were to be based at Akrotiri in Cyprus
with three operational tasks: to provide the UK nuclear contribution to the Central
Treaty Organisation; to provide nuclear support as necessary to meet the requirementsof UK war plans; to support UK conventional war plans in the Mediterranean and Gulf
areas. In order to meet the first two of these tasks they were to generate 100% of theaircraft within 72 hours which included sending three planes to Maharraq (Bahrain) and180

In Aden and South Yemen British attempts to construct a pro-Western government
failed: in 1967 the Marxist NLF came to power (see, especially, Kostiner 1984). In
Oman, by contrast, the British were successful - eventually. On 16 January 1968 thePrime Minister, Harold Wilson, in a supplementary question on defence policy
announced Britain’s intention to withdraw all armed forces by the end of 1971 from theremaining British-protected states in the Gulf: Bahrain, Qatar and the shaikhdoms of thelower Gulf known as the Trucial States (Jones and Stone 1997: 2). This declaration wasmade in response to chronic economic problems and the need to make defence cuts
following the devaluation of the pound in November 1967.20 The United States,
preoccupied as it was with Vietnam, opposed the British decision. Whilst theConservative Party in opposition argued against it, it did not reverse the decision on
coming to power in June 1970: Britain’s imperial withdrawal was not to be halted.
There was though a significant difference in the approach of the Conservatives; asupplementary statement on defence issued in July stated unambiguously that the UK
should ‘resume, within her resources, a proper share of responsibility for thepreservation of peace and stability in the world.’ In effect this meant the commitmentsof Britain’s colonial past and the demands of the Cold War: whilst Britain was going toterminate its official protection agreements in the Gulf it would not be the end of
Britain’s strategic involvement in the area (Jones and Stone 1997: 2).

six to Masirah island; regular training detachments to Masirah were assessed as six
detachments of three aircraft for three weeks each year (Winn 1994: 123).
20 Anthony Parsons informs us that in November 1967 when all the Gulf rulers expected
Britain to depart, a Minister was sent out to inform them that Britain was intending tostay. Then two months later the same minister returned to tell them that Britain was infact going to withdraw; the volte-face was to avoid raising the cost of prescriptions.
However, it would seem that money was not the only issue as two of the rulers offered

181

The US and the Twin Pillars Strategy

The US perceived that the British withdrawal would leave a power vacuum in the Gulf,
an area whose oil reserves were becoming of increasing importance to the US; inaccordance with the Nixon doctrine this vacuum was to be filled by strong regional proWestern powers friendly to the West. In the Gulf this took the form of the ‘Twin
Pillars’ policy which envisaged the building up of the military capabilities of Iran andSaudi Arabia. In reality, Iran was the military power of the Twin Pillars whilst Saudi
Arabia used its financial muscle. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war and ensuing oil crisis
further elevated the economic and strategic importance of the Gulf: it became an area ofvital US interest (Cordesman 1984: 55-59). In particular the oil of the eastern Gulf had
to pass through the Straits of Hormuz. Sovereignty over the Musandam Peninsulameant that the shipping lanes lay in Omani territorial waters: Oman’s resulting strategic
importance focused Western policy-makers on the necessity of defeating the Dhofar
rebels who since 1968 had adopted a Marxist-Leninist orientation and become thePeoples Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLO). With the coming to power of the
NLF in South Yemen in 1967 the Dhofar rebels were to pose a more serious threat toWestern interests than either the Oman Revolutionary Movement or the Dhofar
Liberation Front. The efforts of Britain and pro-Western allies in the area to defeat therebels is examined in the next section.

to pay the cost of British protecting forces in the Gulf but the offer was rejected(Balfour-Paul 1991: xvi).
1825.2.2: Western involvement in Oman 1968 - 1977

In this section we will review the change that took place in the political stance of therebels in Dhofar. The success of the rebellion led to the ousting of Sa’id; a vigorous
counter-insurgency campaign combined with international support for the Qabus regime
defeated the PFLO and British withdrawal from the bases in Salalah and Masirah took
place in 1977.

The Radicalisation of the Rebellion in Dhofar

Britain’s treaty relations with the Trucial States were terminated in December 1971 in apeaceful transfer of power to local elites (Said Zahlan 1991: 90). British withdrawal
from Oman was made more difficult by the conflict in Dhofar which became
increasingly serious (Allen 1987: 101). At the second conference of the DLF at Hamrin
in 1968 the existing nationalist leadership of the rebellion was replaced by committed
Marxists; one of the most influential figures in the new leadership was Muhammed alSayl al-Ghassani (Peterson 1986: 100; Janzen 1986: 166). Reflecting this change indirection the DLF became the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab
Gulf. Its declared aim was to overthrow the entire post-colonial structure Britain wastrying to erect in the Gulf. This shift towards the left was largely due to the changes inSouth Yemen where the British had withdrawn in 1967 to be replaced by the People’s
Democratic Republic of Yemen. The rebels benefited from the advent to power of theradical government in Aden which gave them supplies and bases just inside the South
Yemen border. Also the defeat of Egypt by Israel in the Six Day War removed
Nasserist support; from then on the rebellion in Dhofar could only obtain material183support from communist countries (Janzen 1986: 166). Since 1967 China had suppliedarms, training and political literature to the Front (Halliday 1990: 143). The rebellion
gathered momentum pushing back the ineffectual SAF until by early 1970 Sultanate
authority in Dhofar was confined to three towns on the narrow coastal plain: Salalah,
Taqa and Mirbat. Travelling between these enclaves of Sultanate authority was perilous
for the SAF (Pimlott 1985: 20).

The 1970 coup

The British became increasingly concerned about the ability of Sa’id’s regime to win
the conflict. Brigadier John Watts, commanding officer of 22 SAS was horrified as hecompleted his preliminary reconnaissance of Dhofar in response to a belated requestfrom Sultan Sa’id for help:

The road was cut and the only resupply was by air or sometime by sea... There
were no Dhofaris in SAF, which was virtually an army of occupation.
Everybody on the jebel was with the enemy, some convinced, some out ofboredom, some intimidated; SAF had only a few jebali guides. It was crazy - wewere on a hiding to nothing, (quoted in Pimlott 1985:30)

Said had ignored one of the most basic rules of counter-insurgency: to understand youropponents’ grievances.21 As late as April 1970 he told the new CSAF, Brigadier John
Graham, that the jebalis were ‘evil and dangerous men - I want you to destroy them’(Pimlott 1985: 30). On 12 June 1970 there was an attempt to extend the conflict to

21 In a cable to his superiors just prior to the coup, a British intelligence officer working
for the Sultanate’s intelligence services ‘G2Int’ comments that ‘he [Sa’id bin Taimur] is
fiddling while Rome burns and no one will change him’ (Jones and Stone 1997:3).
184

northern Oman, not far from the PDO oilfields, with attacks in Ibri and Nizwa by the
National Democratic Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Occupied Arab Gulf.
Such an extension would threaten the whole of the post- colonial structure which was
being planned for the Gulf. The Shell oil company pressed action on the British
government. Following the general election of 20 June a Conservative government waselected and the risks of staging a coup prior to an election, which had perhaps weighedon the Labour government, could be ignored (Halliday 1974: 288). Whitehall saw thecoup as a solution to the problem o f Sa’id: a Foreign Official was purported to havecommented in April 1970 ‘we need an Omani Zayid for Sa’id’s Shakhbut’.22 The
Consul-General in Muscat, David G. Crawford and the PRPG, Geoffrey Arthur and theseconded SAF commander, therefore cooperated with the plans to remove Sa’id drawn
up a group of British officers and Sa’id’s son, Qabus (Peterson 1978: 202). The longterm expatriate community in the Sultanate had been divided for some time into thoseloyal to Sa’id and those keen to see him replaced. Of the first group the Military
Secretary Brigadier P.R.G. Waterfield was the most prominent; in January 1970 heretired and was replaced by Colonel Hugh Oldham, a former SAF Commander. This
removed a potential obstacle to the smoothness of any operation to remove Sa’id. A
key figure was Tim Landon, an SAF intelligence officer and Sandhurst classmate of
Qabus. Other Omanis involved apart from Qabus were Burayk bin Hamud al-Ghafiri,
the son of the wali of Dhofar and Hamud bin Hamud A1 Bu Sa’id, the Secretary to
Sultan Sa’id. Although Sa’id’s brother Tariq had more experience internationally than
Qabus, he was considered to hold ‘nationalist attitudes’ and was not, therefore, to the
British liking as a potential Sultan (Bebehani 1981: 152). A meeting of the head of the

22Sheikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi, another Gulf ruler who embarrassed Britain with his
unsuitableness to the modem world, had been removed from power by the British in

185

Sultanate’s intelligence service with Tariq in Dubai in April 1970 ensured his
agreement to Qabus becoming Sultan. This group prevaricated until the rocket attack at
Izki pushed them to implement their plans for the ousting of Sa’id (Peterson 1978: 202).
On July 23 rd 1970, the guards having been bribed to turn a blind eye, a small force
entered Sa’id’s palace in Salalah. After a brief exchange in which a slave was shot andin which Sa’id shot himself in the foot, Sa’id relented and was forced to sign a letter ofabdication. He was immediately flown out of the country, first to Bahrain for medical
treatment and then to London where he resided in the Dorchester hotel until his death in1972 (Graz 1992. 283).

Development of the Counter-Insurgency Campaign

The priority for the new regime was to win the war in Dhofar. With Qabus installed it
was now possible to pursue the classic elements of a counter insurgency campaign.
John Pimlott identifies a number of the key features of such a campaign: theunderstanding of rebel grievances and countering with reforms; government propaganda
to encourage defection from rebel ranks - the winning o f ‘hearts and minds’; military
campaigns based on good intelligence within a clear political strategy; military
operations conducted by a well-resourced army (Pimlott 1985: 30). The Front’s
Marxist-Leninist ideology with its commitment to women’s emancipation was not
popular with some of the jebali whose society was based on the Moslem religion andtribal traditions (Pimlott 1985: 34). Due to these changes a conflict ensued within the
Dhofar rebels and one group led by Salim Mubarak handed themselves over to the
Sultan’s forces. Qabus announced a pardon for all surrendering rebels. These men

1965 and replaced by his brother Zaid (Halliday 1974: 288).
186

were organised into military companies called flrqats which formed an invaluable
resource for the Sultanate’s forces with their knowledge of the local terrain and
PFLOAG tactics. This was exploited by the ‘information experts’ of 22 SAS who wereorganising leaflet drops onto the jebel to encourage more members of the Front tochange sides.23

Operation Storm: the SAS in Dhofar

With their expertise in counter-insurgency the SAS played a key role in the outcome of
the Dhofar conflict.24 The SAS had been returning to Oman regularly on training
missions since the storming of the Jebel Akhdar in 1959. Confronted with the state of
the beleaguered military situation in Dhofar three senior SAS officers discussed notes in
Easter 1970 and identified the key aspects of a strategy to win the war (Geraghty 1980;
Pimlott 1985: 32). These were a medical campaign to provide aid to the 50,000jebalis
in the mountain; a veterinary campaign to help the jebali with their livestock such as the
digging of wells; improved intelligence on the enemy to break down their morale; apsychological operation to persuade the rebels to change sides; and a policy of directly
involving the Dhofaris in the fight for their province. The SAS were inserted into
Dhofar under the guise of British Army Training Team (BATT) allowing thegovernment to deny they had been deployed there purely on a combat role (Jones andStone 1997: 4). To a limited degree this was the case - as conceived in the strategy
described their main job was to bring initial medical aid for the jebalis and to organise

23 See Halliday (1974:349) for one of these leaflets.
24 See the account of Major General Jeapes of the SAS involvement in Dhofar inOperation Storm: SAS Secret War, (1996), or with its original title, SAS Operation
Oman, (1980).
187

the firqats which were the first military units to start challenging the Front’s control ofthe mountainous interior of Dhofar 25 The SAS also attacked Hauf on a number ofoccasions to pressure the PDRY to end its support for the rebels (Cordesman 1997:
126). The most significant military battle in which the SAS was involved was at
Mirbat in July 1972 when the BATT team there withheld a sustained attack from the
PFLO AG in July 1972 in an engagement which was seen as a turning point in the war.
The Front’s attempt to demonstrate it still had the ability to mount a major offensive
suffered an irreversible setback.26

The Dhofar Conflict: a British-run war

Whilst the role of the SAS units played an crucial part it was the massive combinedinternational involvement which eventually decided the war’s outcome in which
different external powers played different roles: the British, Americans, Iranians,
Jordanians, Pakistanis, Saudis and Emirates all contributed as they all had a stake in theoutcome:25 One of the ‘perks’ in this campaign for some of the members of the SAS was an
unofficial bonus derived from the firqats. The SAS soldiers in outposts were expected
to recruit firqat soldiers directly; the payroll of these firqat soldiers was adminstereddirectly by the SAS in the field. Some SAS soldiers issued a rifle to a non-existentfirqat soldier and then pocketed the monthly wages. Amounts which could be garneredin this way could amount to 1000 - 2500 pounds in the 1970s. When the whistle wasblown on this practice it was kept secret for twenty five years with the knowledge ofgovernment Ministers, senior army officers and Whitehall officials (Yvonne Ridley,‘SAS Cash for Arms’, Observer, 25.10.98.)
26 An account of this battle by one of the soldiers involved is given in the television
documentary ‘The SAS: The Soldiers’ Story. (Carlton, 1996)’ See also Geraghty(1980: 124-132) and Ladd (1986: 162-164).
188

Although Britain was initially the sole outside party involved, the conflict inDhofar became a highly internationalised one, in which at least nine foreign
powers participated in the campaigns to crush the guerrillas. The participationof these powers is illustrative not only of the fact that the suppression of theDhofar guerrillas was essential to the region’s stability, but also of a new inter­state system being built in the Gulf. (Halliday 1977: 24)

Halliday’s identification of the far-reaching implications of the outcome of this war isechoed by the British military commander, Major General Timothy Creasy who arrived
in September 1972 to become the Commander, Sultan’s Armed Forces. The stakes in
Dhofar were high:

He who controls Oman, and particularly the Musandam, controls the Gulf. He
who controls the Gulf controls the Gulf oil supplies, and these are crucial to boththe West and Russia. The fall of Dhofar would lead inevitably to the fall ofNorthern Oman and the Musandam, and thus of the Gulf - a classic example of
the Domino theory, (quoted in Skeet 1992: 168)

As a result of the significance attached to the outcome of the war extra British officers
were seconded to command the SAF which was expanded and reorganised; fifty percent of the Sultanate’s budget was allocated to the military. By the end of the rebellion
in 1975 the British presence numbered over 1500 including 220 officers on private
contract, sixty Special Air Service members, 75 men from the Royal Engineers and 147
RAF personnel at RAF Salalah (Halliday 1977: 103; Peterson 1986: 103). In contrast toVietnam where the involvement of American servicemen was covered by the media, theBritish-directed war effort in Dhofar was concealed by a strict policy of news
management (see Halliday 1987a); this secrecy was helped by the fact that the war was
paid for out of the Sultanate’s oil revenues which started in 1967 (Halliday 1977: 48).
Although, in contrast to Vietnam, the war in Dhofar was kept secret, in other respects it

189was a similar campaign such as in some of its tactics in dealing with a guerrilla army inmountainous territory: the use of napalm to deprive them of cover.27

Weaponry supplied by Britain

Such bombing raids were made possible by the supply of military aircraft to Oman by
Britain. Orders were placed in April 1968 for Jet Provost trainer aircraft, in September
1970 for five Skyvan transport planes with more ordered in September 1971, followedby an order for a dozen Strikemaster fighters and various naval patrol aircraft. The
culmination of these purchases came in late 1974 when the sultanate contracted for 12
Anglo-French Jaguar fighters and 28 Rapier missiles, at a cost of between £71 millionand £83 million (Peterson 1986: 104). These aircraft were used to support advances byinfantry in the campaign to oust the rebels from the areas they controlled in themountains.

The Military Campaign to establish Sultanate control in Dhofar

The repelling of the Front’s assault on Mirbat in 1972 represented a turning point.
From then on the Front was seeking to stem Sultanate advances; it still required aconsiderable effort to return all of the mountains to Sultanate control. A number of
fortified lines were built progressively from east to west in Dhofar bisecting rebel held

27 Liesl Graz observed that some Dhofari landscapes bore the scars: ‘in the Jebel Qamar,around Kazetikayf, napalm killed the trees and the high plateau remains desolate in that190

territory thus breaking supply lines. By early 1973 government troops had begun tocapture key points on the western Jebal Qamar; ‘Operation Thimble’ recovered andpermanently held the Thumrait road re-opening a ground link between Salalah andMuscat. Previously the rebels had been able to retake this road during the monsoon
season and thus regain any ground denied to them by Sultanate forces. It was clear that
the Sultanate forces were gaining the upper hand and were on their way to victory.

The Sultanate forces gained the upper hand in the Dhofar conflict in 1973 but it was torequire two more years to finally crush the rebellion. In July 1974, in an indication of
its reduced horizons PFLO AG divided into the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Oman and a People’s Front in Bahrain. The PFLO continued the guerrilla struggle in
Oman whilst the latter continued underground political work in Bahrain (Halliday 1990:
144). In September government forces accelerated their offensive with action aroundSarfait. An Omani-Iranian attack on Rakhyut which involved a heavy loss of Iranian
lives led to the capture of the town on January 5th 1975. This allowed the constructionof the Damavend line northward from Rakhyut. At the close of the 1975 monsoon
season SAF and Iranian troops moved into areas north of Rakhyut while the PFLO basein Hauf, South Yemen was attacked by Sultanate aircraft. With other Iranian units
moving south from Sarfait towards the sea Sultanate forces occupied the remaining
towns in the west of Dhofar as the guerrillas slipped back into PDRY territory. On the
11th December Sultan Qabus declared the war officially over (Peterson 1986. 103).
The British, from their perspective, had prevented another ‘Aden’ with theircontribution to the massive external military intervention on behalf of the Sultanate.
Conversely, they had avoided a British ‘Vietnam’.

otherwise verdant region’ (1980: 40).
191

The American Concern

The American approach to the Dhofar conflict was shaped by two factors: the Cold War
and Vietnam (Peterson 1978: 193). This meant that whilst the US was extremely
concerned to avoid a communist take-over in Dhofar they were unable to get involvedin any serious way themselves. Instead, under the Nixon Doctrine this responsibility
was to be assigned to regional powers, supplied with the latest American weaponry - USproxy military forces. Thus, the Americans kept a close eye on events in Oman. On
coming to power Sultan Qabus had quickly established links to the US to prevent asimilar fate to his father. Initially this took the form of covert CIA funding for his
personal security and intelligence force (Stork 1980b: 11). The objective was to get
Oman ‘out from under the dominance of the British’.28 In 1973 Oman became eligible
for American military assistance and the Americans also inquired about access to the
RAF air strip at Masirah. In September 1973 US Army Colonel George Maloney madea three-week visit to Oman. His report concentrated mainly on the situation in Dhofar
and stressed the potential usefulness of the airstrip on Masirah Island (Stork 1980b: 11).
In 1974 Secretary of State Kissinger sent the following memorandum to President
Gerald Ford.

28 This was the comment of Robert Anderson who admitted he had volunteered
information to the CIA but said he had no official responsibilities. Because the CIA
was known to run its own show independently of the other channels of government the
US Charge d’Affaires, Clifford Quinlan, could vouchsafe ‘I discovered that the CIA had
connections with Robert Anderson and Omar...I didn’t know what representations they192

Maintaining Oman’s stability in the face of the war is a great concern to both the
Saudis and Iranians. The Shah, King Faisal and other moderate Arab leaders areencouraging us to develop closer relations with Oman, particularly since its
strategic location at the mouth of the Gulf means that two-thirds of the world’s
oil exports transit its territorial waters, (quoted in Joyce 1995: 106)

Oman received its first significant supplies of American arms in 1975 when anti-tank(TOW) missiles were transported to the Sultanate with a small training team (Halliday
1977: 36). In January 1975 Qabus visited Washington: the Americans raised thepossibility of access to the RAF bases, especially Masirah Island, asking Britain andOman simultaneously (Kechichian 1995: 146). Following the Sultan’s meeting with the
President, the State Department prepared a draft statement for the possible use of theWhite House press secretary. The statement said that Washington welcomed andstrongly supported the efforts of all regional states, including Oman, to strengthen
security. The only American programme in the Sultanate at the time was a thirtymember Peace Corps operation. The White House planned to declare that no newprogrammes were discussed. Nevertheless, the United States ‘would be as responsive
as possible’ to any Omani request for aid. A Washington Post article reported thatwhen the Sultan hosted a reception at Blair House ‘some pretty big guns attended’
including Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and William Colby, director of theCentral Intelligence Agency (Joyce 1995: 107). After the Sultan’s visit to the UnitedStates, cooperation between Washington and Muscat increased: an informal agreement
had been reached in which in exchange for access to Masirah Island the US airlifted 10
launchers, 180 anti-tank missiles and two advisers. These missiles were set up in the
Dhofar region for use in any possible conflict with the PDRY (Halliday 1977: 66; Stork
1980:11; Kechichian 1995: 146). Joseph Kechichian comments:

were making to His Majesty in the name of the US. They were unofficial

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Even after all these years, it remains to be determined whether this informal
agreement involving the TOWs in exchange for access to Masirah Island was
initiated by the administration, or by Secretary Henry Kissinger without theknowledge of the State Department, the Pentagon, or the National Security
Council. (1995: 146)

One of the advantages of Oman to US strategic planners was Qabus’s willingness tocooperate and unambiguous pro-Western stance. Although at this stage the OmaniAmerican military arrangement was an informal one, a Congressional study inDecember 1977 noted that, ‘the absence of FMS [Foreign Military Sales]
prospects... does not accurately reflect the reality of an apparently intense desire among
Omani officials for discreet assistance, especially in the area of training’ (quoted in
Stork 1980b: 11). A formal US-Omani agreement was to come about after the Iranianrevolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These events and the agreement are
examined in more detail in the next chapter. American support for the Sultanate in theconflict in Dhofar was facilitated through the policy of the time - reliance on the Twin
Pillars of Pahlavi Iran and Saudi Arabia. In military terms this meant the contributionof thousands of Iranian troops and their US-supplied equipment (Stork 1980b: 11).

The Iranian intervention

In November and December 1973 several thousand Iranian troops were deployed by the
Shah in support of Sultan Qabus (Halliday 1990: 145). Dhofar presented the Shah witha rare opportunity to provide combat training for his troops, and the rapid rotation of
Iranians fighting in Dhofar was alleged to have resulted in nearly 200 deaths. Iranian

representatives of the US government.’ See Skeet (1992:59-60).
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helicopters and paratroopers were sent to Dhofar in early 1973. Iranian paratroopers
were key elements in ‘Operation Thimble’ of December 1973 when the Thamarit Road
was recovered and permanently held open, providing the first ground link between
Muscat and Salalah in several years (Peterson 1986: 102). By the end of 1974 Iranian
troops totalled over 2000 growing to over 5000 in 1975. A local headquarters wasestablished at the sprawling air base at Thamarit and Iranian F-5 Phantoms patrolled
the PDRY border, while Iranian destroyers shelled the rebel-held Dhofari coast. The
Iranians were at the centre of Rakhyut’s capture in January 1975 and they played aprominent role in the ‘big push’ in December.

The support of Arab monarchies for the Sultanate

Iranian involvement in Dhofar was viewed with suspicion by most other Arab states,
including Oman’s neighbours in the Gulf. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
provided the Sultanate with welcome financial assistance while Jordan contributed staff
officers and NCOs, intelligence officers, engineer units and a combat battalion in 1975
(Peterson 1986: 104). This gave an extra dimension to the Sultanate effort. Whereas
from 1970- 72 many of the propaganda leaflets failed as they were written in the Arabicof British intelligence officers, they had more effect when Jordanian intelligence
officers were brought in to help with this aspect of the campaign (Halliday 1977: 56).

The British withdrawal from RAF Masira and Salalah

As we have seen the outcome of this massive support for the Sultanate was the effective
military defeat of the Popular Front in Dhofar. In December 1975 Commander SOAF

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Watts informed the Sultan that Dhofar was ready for civil development - developmentin the Sultanate is examined in the next section (5.2.3). Having successfully defeatedthe rebels in Dhofar and secured a pro-Western Omani government Britain announced
in July 1976 that it would hand over its air bases at Salalah and Masira; this took placein March 1977 (Peterson 1978: 155; Halliday 1977:32). This was not, however, the endof Britain’s military links with the Sultanate; the nature of British military involvementwith Oman in the 1980s and 1990s is examined in chapter six.

5.2.3: The impact of the West on Oman 1968 -1977

In this section we examine the modernising regime of Qabus and the composition of thestate elite. The end of Oman’s isolation and the establishment of foreign relations is
also reviewed. We also consider the debate on the extent to which the Qabus regime
differed in this time from that of his father.

The Modernising’ regime of Qabus: the Omani rentier state

The post-colonial state that was to develop after the British staged coup that brought
Qabus to power was a rentier state. A key feature of such a state is that the rent derived
from a single product allows the ruling elite to act independently of other elite groups
with which it previously had to negotiate.29 Thus, in the era of revenue from oil exports
which started shortly before Qabus came to power, Oman has experienced an ever196

increasing concentration of power in the hands of the Sultan and the diminution ofpreviously influential groups, most significantly the tribal leaders. M.E. Yapp writes:

As elsewhere in the Gulf one may see the new political elite in terms ofconcentric circles composed of ruler, household, notables and citizens, narrowly
defined. One may also observe the same process of the elevation of the ruler
and his household above other groups. In particular the role of tribal leaders
declined after 1970, for example Ahmad ibn Muhammed al-Harithi, whose
support had been vital to the success of the Sultan in his struggle with the tribal
rebels in 1957 and who had played a major role in Omani politics thereafter wasarrested in 1970. (Yapp 1996:375)

On becoming Sultan, Qabus quickly established complete domination over thegovernment on an official level; initially his uncle, Tariq, was brought back as prime
minister but at the end of 1971 Qabus took direct control of the government and of theministries of foreign affairs, defence and finance (Yapp 1996: 375). Tariq spoke of
Oman gradually becoming a constitutional monarchy.

Qabus, however, neverseriously considered involving his subjects in government at this stage. In 1972 Qabus
told a Lebanese journalist: ‘It was not possible to follow the Western tradition of
democratic systems. We are not yet ready to embark on this stage. We have noconstitution. We have no chamber of deputies’ (Townsend 1976: 93). What did happen
in the governmental system was that members of the A1 Bu Sa’id staffed thedepartments of government which were greatly increased to accommodate them andothers. A key trend in the years after 1970 was the monopoly of government posts by

29 See Crystal (1990: 6) for an analysis of the impact of oil in the Gulf.
30 See J.E. Peterson (1978: 209). A CIA report claims that Tariq was declared persona
non grata by Shaikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi because he had called for the overthrow of
Sa’id bin Taimur. According to the same report a constitution for Oman had been
prepared and a govemment-in-exile formed (Skeet 1992: 36).
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Omani Arabs at the expense of those of Zanzibari, Baluchi and Indian origin who had
previously staffed the administration (Yapp 1996: 375).

Qabus renamed the state the Sultanate of Oman to signify the intention to unify andmodernise the Sultanate: the failure of Sa’id to do this was perceived as one of thecauses of the rebellion. In his accession speech Qabus explained why he had deposed
his father:
I have taken this action against my father in an effort to place the country along
the path of reconstruction and development, (quoted in Kechichian 1995: 37)

Modernisation programmes were initiated in all areas: military, education, health andeconomic infrastructure. In this the new regime was considerably helped by growing
oil revenues. A commercially viable well had been developed at Fahud in 1964 and oil
exports started in 1967. Oman developed as a rentier state; the rentier state controls therent from oil which is the most important material resource of Omani society.31
Although Oman is an oil producer its reserves are nowhere in the league of Saudi
Arabia or Abu Dhabi.

With the effective ending of the war in 1975 the non-military modernisation
programmes gathered apace. An ambitious five year plan was drawn up in which withthe growing oil revenues sought to create a basis economic infrastructure and health andeducational system. The government emphasised private sector participation in the

31 See Bierschenk (1984: 239). Although this assessment of the importance of oil would
not have passed comment in the early 1980s at the time of Bierschenk’s study on state
formation it would now at the end of the 1990s perhaps raise an eyebrow. The
significance of water resources in the coming century for the countries of the Middle
East is becoming ever more apparent. This will be discussed at greater length in chapter
six.
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achievement of these plans. Business growth was phenomenal with Western companies
profiting greatly from the boom conditions in Oman. The awarding of these contracts
was in the hands of a small group of Al-Sa’id family members and long-time associates
who accordingly prospered greatly.

Bierschenk (1984) identifies four groups in the rentier state that initially emerged after
the 1970 coup and which together formed a ‘stateclass’: the ‘Palace’ (diwari) and‘Courtiers’, merchant class, the Ibadhis and the Zanzibaris. The merchant class, theIbadhis and the Zanzibaris are termed coopted groups; this means they have no direct
share in power through access to the key decision making process. They have been‘bought o ff with material opportunities and exclude themselves from making inputs tothe decision-making process. In the merchant class an important distinction is thatbetween the Hindu merchants which chose to retain their Indian citizenship and wholost out in the Omanisation process to the Khojas - Indians of Sunni Muslim extraction.
The ‘Ibadhis’ are representatives of the traditional notables of the tribal society of inner
Oman. The Zanzibaris had technical skills and were strongly represented in the oilcompany, Petroleum Development Oman.

The most important social group is the diwan consisting of the Sultan and a small groupof ‘courtiers’. Bierschenk questions whether it is the Sultan that rules or the courtiers
through the Sultan (Bierschenk 1984: 219). The courtiers have high official positions
such as minister, governor of a province for key areas such as the capital or Dhofar, or
as officers in the military apparatus, police or secret service. Independently of theofficial description of their political position, they are sponsors for foreign construction
firms or old established Hindu merchant families which, with the ‘Omanisation’ policy

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of the government, required a partner of Omani nationality in order to win business.
They are partners in banks and furthermore they have their own business and financial
enterprises with international connections in Europe and the USA. They used theirconnections to the Sultan, who ultimately could control all oil rents, to gain his
agreement to make funds available for particular projects in which they had an interest
e.g. the construction of a road.

An example of these courtiers at this time were the brothers Qais and Omar Zawawi.
Their grandfather Yusuf al-Zawawi, originated from Taif in Saudi Arabia and was amerchant who became an adviser to the Sultan in Muscat at the end of the 19th century.
His son Abdul Muneim apparently lived in Pakistan for a time which is where his son
Qais and Omar received their school education. Omar trained as a dentist and Qais
managed a Pepsi Cola distribution centre in Kuwait in the 1960s. They returned to
Oman in 1970 in the expectation of an upturn in the economy and to build up theirfamily business again. Their first enterprise was the Muscat Pharmacy in the Matrahsuq (Bierschenk 1984: 222).

The political climb of the Zawawi brothers began in 1973 as Qais became Minister for
Foreign Relations - the Sultan is Foreign Minister himself. His appointment was part of
the Omanisation of the government, whereas in the first years after the coup of 1970 all
the top positions were held by foreigners. He was also the deputy chairman of theDevelopment Council which had responsibility for the control of the five year plans andtherefore determined the development policy of the Sultanate, as well as of the FinanceCouncil which had the last word on all state expenses. The chairman of these two
councils was the Sultan but he appeared to have little interest in economic policy and200therefore allowed himself to be represented by Zawawi. Zawawi was, therefore in all
three political functions the direct representative of the Sultan. His brother Omar was
also on the Finance Council so the Zawawis had two of the ten votes there (Bierschenk
1984: 222).

Bierschenk (1984: 223) lists the extensive business interests of the Zawawi brothers by
the early 1980s which reflected the developments of the 1970s. They had businessinterests in nearly all sectors of the economy. Companies they controlled or had sharesin included Zawawi Trading which was one of the ten largest trading firms in Oman andamongst others, the agent for Mercedes and IBM, two important suppliers to the Omani
ministries. Other Zawawi interests were Oman Mechanical Services which represented
General Electric and gained the order for the delivery of the gas turbines for the copper
project at Sohar. Wimpey Alawi was a joint venture with the British construction
company Wimpey and one of the largest road building firms in Oman. A further
construction company, Qurm Contractors, was partly owned by the Zawawis. The
Lebanese construction company, Consolidated Contractors Company hired the Zawawis
as unofficial sponsors and gained the largest road project at the time, the main roadfrom the north to Dhofar. The Zawawis also had shares in the Bank of Oman, Bahrain
and Kuwait which is the second largest local bank in which leading Omani, Bahraini
and Kuwaiti business people have shares and which also has a management contract
with the American Chemical Bank. Finally, Omar Zawawi Enterprises employed
former US military officers and was responsible for procuring the majority of Oman’s
weapon imports (Bierschenk 1984: 223).

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It was this mixing of private and public interest, of which the Zawawi brothers were aprime example, that led to the comment in the Financial Times in 1979 that: ‘It has been
pointed out by foreign observers, sympathetic and unsympathetic Arab states and evensome officials inside Oman that a small number of corrupt advisers are deciding theallocation of key civil and military projects’ (quoted in Bierschenk 1984: 221).
Furthermore, these corrupt officials had available to them a wide-reaching security
apparatus consisting of the army, police and secret service.

Establishment of foreign relations and international recognition

The Qabus regime sought to institute foreign relations, perhaps most importantly withhis fellow monarchies in the Gulf. He created an Oman Friendship Committee to tour
the Gulf states to assess the attitude of his Gulf neighbours. Under the chairmanship ofthe Minister for Education, Shaikh Sa’ud al-Khalili (from a well known Imamatefamily), the Oman Friendship Committee visited Riyadh in January 1971 (Kechichian
1995: 71). This paved the way for Qabus’s state visit to Saudi Arabia in December
1971 where he met with King Faisal; both heads of state shared an antipathy towards
the regime in South Yemen and its foreign policy. Saudi support for the Imam Ghalib
and the Oman Revolutionary Army was toned down and traditional suspicions lessened:boundary issues were discussed and the Buraimi oasis territorial issue was dealt with on
an interim basis in 1974 (Joffe 1994: 91). Oman started to receive considerable
financial aid from Saudi Arabia - between 1972 and 1975 Oman received $150 million
from the Saudis (Kechichian 1995: 73). Also significant in this regard was the202connection with Shaikh Zaid of Abu Dhabi. Zaid was the first foreign head of state tovisit Oman after Qabus became Sultan and he pledged his support. A further visit byZaid took place in 1972 with Qabus going to Abu Dhabi in 1973; in this year Abu
Dhabi granted Muscat a total of $200 million.

The beginning of such contacts with his Gulf neighbours helped to clear the way for
Oman’s membership of international organisations. In the UN the ‘Question of Oman’
which had been debated annually by the 4th Committee since the 1960s was shelved inautumn 1970 in a resolution which recommended reconsideration of the question of
Oman’s independence after a year (Skeet 1992: 57). The Arab delegations did not wantto commit themselves before the matter was considered by the Arab League; in
September 1971 the League accepted Oman as its seventeenth member - the PDRY was
opposed but Saudi Arabia’s change of position due to meetings between the Sultan andthe Imam carried the day. On 4 October 1971 the Security Council unanimously
recommended that Oman be admitted to UN membership and Oman was officiallyadmitted on 7 October. Voting was 117 in favour, one against (PDRY) and two
abstentions (Cuba and Saudi Arabia) (Skeet 1992: 58). The question of Oman at the UN
had finally been resolved.

The changes in Oman after the 1970 coup: an Omani renaissance?

The sudden rush for modernisation that occurred in the decade after the 1970 coup
produced change that was extensive and dramatic. B.R. Pridham (1986) has noted thatthese changes led to a number of published accounts heralding the ‘rebirth’ of Oman

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and identifying the accession of Qabus as a distinct break with the past.32 These
accounts he comments, formed a new ‘conventional wisdom’. Pridham emphasises thesimilarities between the two regimes in giving a partial justification of Sa’id’s rule. The
key to understanding the changes in Oman in the decade after the coup is anappreciation of the political context of the Qabus regime. Qabus came to power withthe help of outside forces - specifically Sandhurst classmates - and remained an absolutemonarch surrounded by British and US advisers. At this point there were none of theconsultative councils which were to appear later33 He was reluctant to widen
participation in the decision making process (in 1985 he was to abrogate experimental
elected rural councils) and seemed fearful o f ‘his’ populace - generally the firstgovernment building constructed in a town in the interior was a police station. For thetime being the Qabus regime was accepted; this domestic stability was largely
dependent on economic conditions. However, if these had deteriorated, for example,
with a severe collapse of the oil market, there seemed potential for considerable unrest.
The many ethnic divisions and long term acceptability of the Al-Sa’id regime to Ibadhi
and tribal leaders could then come to the fore. Furthermore, there did not exist a clear
successor to Qabus. If he had been killed or suddenly incapacitated it could haveprecipitated power struggles both within the ruling family and the country as a whole.
Many of these points became increasingly less than hypothetical in the 1980s and 1990s
and are discussed in chapter six.

32 Examples of such accounts are Pauline Searle, Dawn over Oman (1979) and F. A.
Clements, Oman: The Reborn Land (1980).

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The end of British informal empire in Oman

In the chapters so far we have examined the involvement of the West, principally
Britain, and the impact on Omani society from 1920 to 1977. This involvement waspredicated on the strategic interests that accrued as a result of wider strategic
developments affecting the Arabian peninsula. The Western interest in Oman changed
from the British concern for the security frontier of the Raj in India through the gradualwithdrawal of the British to an increasing American interest in the country. The British
imperial withdrawal from the Gulf officially took place in 1971 but as we have seen
Britain’s informal empire remained in the Gulf area: the British maintained RAF basesin Oman until 1977. The end of British informal empire in Oman started with theousting of Said and the withdrawal from RAF Salalah and Masirah represents its final
termination (Halliday 1988: 97). Unlike formal empire whose beginning and end canbe easily identified with proclamations of annexation and imperial withdrawal, the onset
of informal empire and its passing is, by definition, more gradual, indirect andunacknowledged. It can, perhaps, be likened to the process of ageing: at the time it isdifficult to see it but you know it’s happened looking back.34 If we want to find a
ceremony and a point in time to take as the end of British informal empire in Oman thelowering of the Union Jack at RAF Salalah and Masirah is as good as any. From thispoint on relations between Oman and Britain and the United States were the politics ofinfluence in a system of international inequality between states. The development ofWestern and particularly American strategic interests in the contemporary Omani stateis the subject of the next chapter.

33 The nature of these councils will be discussed in chapter six.
34 With thanks to Fred Halliday for this metaphor.
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Chapter Six: Western strategic interests in the contemporary Omani stateThis chapter is concerned with the development of Western strategic interests in Oman
since 1978 and the integration of the Omani rentier state in the international capitalist
state system. In contrast to the nature of Western influence in the British ‘informal
empire’ in Muscat and Oman which has been examined in the previous chapters,
Western relations with the Sultanate in this period can best be characterised as being
conducted in an in international system of inequality between states.

6.1.1: The international context 1978 -1989

The developments in the wider context of international relations and policy that were to
be the most significant for the development of Western strategic interests in Oman inthis period were the Iranian revolution and the events in the ‘arc of crisis’: the resulting
Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine, the unfolding of the Iran-Iraq War, and the end of
the Cold War.

The Iranian Revolution, the ‘Arc of Crisis’ and the Carter Doctrine

By the middle of 1978 it became clear that the regime of Muhammed Reza Shah was indeep trouble. When the Shah left, never to return, the stage was set for the return of
Ayatollah Khomeini and the eventual creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The
Iranian revolution meant the crumbling of the “Twin Pillar” policy and coupled with theSoviet intervention in Afghanistan it was perceived as a major setback for US policy in206the region. The Persian Gulf, with the Straits of Hormuz as its ‘chokepoint,’ came to be
seen as being in the centre of an “Arc of Crisis” extending from Afghanistan throughthe Gulf and South Yemen into the Horn of Africa in which US interests were
threatened by a Soviet willingness to exploit opportunities to increase their influence.1
On 23 January 1980 President Carter, as part of his State of the Union Address
enunciated, much to the surprise of the Gulf States who had not been informed of it, theCarter Doctrine:

An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will
be regarded as a an assault on the vital interests of the USA, and such an assault
will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
(quoted in Skeet 1992: 83)

Pentagon military planners had been developing the concept of a Rapid Deployment
Force on paper since the late 1970s - the Carter Doctrine gave further impetus to turn itfrom a paper-pushing exercise into a practical proposition (see Acharya 1989 and Stork
1980: 3-4). Funds for the RDF were budgeted, facilities at Diego Garcia further
improved and negotiations for access facilities stepped up. The US naval presence in the
Indian Ocean rose to around 25 ships, including two aircraft carriers and 150 planes.
The situation in the Gulf in 1980 was assessed by the US analyst, Gary Sick, thus:

Not only was the US military presence [in the Gulf] at its highest level in history
but there was also an underlying conviction that this region represented a major
strategic zone of vital interests, demanding both sustained attention at thehighest levels of US policy-making and direct US engagement in support ofspecifically US interests. That was without precedent, (quoted in Skeet 1992:
84)
1 See Fred Halliday, Threatfrom the East? Soviet Policyfrom Afghanistan and Iran to
the Horn o f Africa, (1982). For a summary of the spectrum of contemporary views on
Soviet policy in the region in the early 1980s see Peterson, Defending Arabia (1986:
122 - 127).
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The Department of Defense, quoted in the New York Times, made this clear toanyone who had doubts: ‘Our principal objectives are to assure continued access to
Persian Gulf oil and to prevent the Soviets from acquiring political of military control
directly or through proxies’ (quoted in Skeet 1992: 84).

The Reagan Doctrine

Ronald Reagan, who took over the Presidency of the United States from Jimmy Carterin January 1981 doubled expenditure on the RDJTF and, on 1 January 1983
reconstituted it as the US Central Command. He assumed, and spoke of but did not
define, a ‘strategic consensus’ in the area. It was undefinable since the Gulf Co­
operation Council’s defence policy was formally based on non-alignment. However, themilitary assumption behind ‘strategic consensus’ was that access ought to mean accessfor land as well as naval forces. In the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense, Frank
Carlucci:

The fact is that for the most effective deterrent we need both sea based and land
based forces and once our determination becomes clear to our friends and allies
in the Middle East, they will become more forthcoming on the kinds of access
we need, (quoted in Skeet 1992: 84)

This expansion of base infrastructure in sensitive parts of the world such as the Persian
Gulf was one of the essential components of what became known as the Reagan
Doctrine; a further significant aspect was the regular exercises by US armed forces in
pro-Western Third World states situated close to states deemed hostile to the West(Halliday 1987b: 30).

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The Iran-Iraq War

In September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran leading to the start of the longest war since WorldWar Two (Chubin and Tripp 1988: 1). The war galvanised the Gulf monarchical statesof Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain Qatar, UAE and Oman into the creation of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) in February 1981 (Peterson 1986: 213-218). Initial Iraqi
advances had turned by 1982 into an Iranian offensive that threatened to break throughthe stalemate and overwhelm Iraq (and it was feared Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, indeed thewhole Middle East) with larger reserves of manpower (Peterson 1986: 131). In thissituation Iraqi strategy was to raise the cost of the war to Iran, elicit support from Arabstates and to draw in superpower involvement, a strategy in which it was largely
successful (Yapp 1996: 427). Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil installations led to Iranianretaliation against Iraq and those Arab states supporting Iraq financially and militarily
and an Iranian threat to close the Straits of Hormuz . US military officials wereconcerned about the implications of an Iranian breakthrough in this war (Halliday 1987:
31). In addition to helping to arm Iraq the US, to be specific the CIA, established asecret intelligence link with Baghdad through which it shared information gatheredfrom spy satellites and US-manned AWACs flying out of Riyadh (Timmerman 1986:314). The US sought to publicly persuade Saudi Arabia and the UAE to allow it tostation USAF fighters in GCC airfields (Peterson 1986: 132). The ‘tanker war’ whichstarted in Spring 1984 eventually led in May 1987 to the US agreement to escort
Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag in order to counter the Soviet Union’s initialoffer to Kuwait. This was an operation in which US warships were brought into action

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against Iranian craft. In 1988, with Iraq utilizing its superior airforce and stock ofchemical weapons, the impetus of the war turned once again against Iran and in July
Ayatollah Khomeini accepted UN resolution 598 and the resulting ‘draw’.

The Second Cold War and its End

Developments in the Persian Gulf region contributed to and were placed in the context
of the deterioration in US-USSR relations which marked the ‘Second Cold War* (seeHalliday 1986). The Americans received the strongest backing for their policies fromthe Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher elected in May 1979. However withthe advent of the Gorbachov era in the mid-1980s condemnation of the ‘evil empire’gave way to fireside chats with the ‘man we can do business with.’ The final collapse ofcommunism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the end of the USSR’s rivalry andconfrontation with the West marked the end of the Cold War.2 Soviet troops withdrew
from Afghanistan in 1989.

6.1.2: Western strategic interests in Oman 1978- 1989

How did these developments in the wider international picture affect British andAmerican strategic interests in Oman? Broadly, it greatly increased the strategic
importance of Oman to the West. With the fall of the Shah and the establishment of theIslamic Republic of Iran hostile to Western influence in the area, the fact that the
shipping lanes through the Straits of Hormuz ran through Omani territorial waters

210

suddenly obtained immense significance. Furthermore Oman was willing to allow the
US access to its military facilities and openly took a pro-Western policy stance in a
number of areas.3 Britain retained considerable influence in the Sultanate.

The Straits of Hormuz

The fall of the Shah was a bitter blow to American plans for Gulf security - it denotedthe crumbling of the ‘Twin Pillars policy’ which in military terms had in effect always
relied solely on the Shah of Iran as witnessed by his contribution to the crushing of theDhofar rebellion. An important aspect to this role was the ‘policing’ of the Straits of
Hormuz. The Straits of Hormuz are 24 miles wide at their narrowest point and Oman
and Iran both claim 12 mile territorial waters overlapping at this point. Most
significantly the shipping lanes through the Straits of Hormuz ran in Omani territorial
waters due to its sovereignty over the enclave of the Musandam Peninsula. At the timeover 60% of Western Europe and 80% of Japan’s oil supplies passed through the Straitsof Hormuz making it one of the world’s most strategically important waterways (Graz1982: 49). With the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hostile to Western
influence in the area, Oman’s strategic position with its territorial control of the Straitsof Hormuz was highlighted and the strategic importance of the Sultanate to the Westfurther increased.4 In 1981 an American Staff Study Mission on US Security Interests

2 For an analysis of the reasons for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at thispoint see Fred Halliday (1994) chapter nine, ‘A Singular Collapse: The Soviet Unionand Inter-State Competition’.
3 Sultan Qabus was dubbed ‘our man in the Middle East’ by one American writer. See
Allen (1984: 3).
4 Oman’s strategic importance had been long apparent to Omanis and the British. It wasmore Americans, as John Duke Anthony notes, who suddenly became aware in the early211

in the Persian Gulf reported to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that the Omani
navy though ‘small, ageing and slow’ was ‘doing a valuable and effective job of
patrolling the shipping lanes in the strait’ (quoted in Graz 1982: 184).5 However thesame report noted that: ‘Responsibility for keeping open the Strait of Hormuz in theevent of a serious regional conflict ultimately must be with the United States and theWest.’

The 1980 US-Omani Agreement

In order to implement the Carter Doctrine the United States needed access to militarybases in close proximity to the Persian Gulf to establish a secure location from which to
conduct military operations. Bahrain had logistical disadvantages and Saudi Arabia
would have political difficulties in openly allowing a US military presence. Facilities at
the nominally British territory of Diego Garcia were improved but were viewed as
inadequate as a forward staging area due to its distance from the Gulf (Rigsbee 1990:
72). A Pentagon official confided:

We need to get much closer [than Israel] in the event of any actual militarycontingency [in the Gulf] and that’s why we’re going for forward basing inOman.
(quoted in Stork 1982: 12)

1980’s of Oman’s strategic location. See John Duke Anthony, ‘ Oman the Gulf and theUnited States’ in B.R Pridham (ed), Oman (1987: 178).
5 Graz (1982) dubbed the Omanis the ‘Sentinels of the Gulf. Iranian incursions into
Omani territorial waters in the early 1980s are listed in Cordesman, The Gulf and the
Search fo r Strategic Stability, (1984: 615).
212

Oman offered a suitable point of access of the type the US was looking for.
Negotiations for access to Omani facilities were intensified. By February 1980 theprincipal of an access agreement had been agreed: Foreign Minister Qais Al-Zawawi
stated that Oman was interested in granting the US use of port and airport facilities
under certain conditions although he maintained Oman would never allow foreign bases
on it soil (Kechichian 1995: 147). The terms of the agreement were defined during avisit to Muscat in April 1980 by Reginald Bartholomew, Director of the Bureau of
Political and Military Affairs and it was officially signed 4th June 1980 through an
exchange of letters between US Ambassador Marshall Wiley and the Deputy Prime
Minister for External Affairs, Qais Zawawi.6

US upgrading of military facilities in Oman

The details of the agreement have not been published but the main elements concerning
the upgrading of airports, pre-positioning of supplies and access to port facilities on aprior approval basis are widely known (Kechichian 1995: 147; Rigsbee 1990: 76). The
US gained contingent use and access to Omani air bases at Thumrait, Masirah Island,
Sib and Khasab and naval bases at Salalah and Matrah (Joyce 1995: 115). In return the
US undertook to pay for the modernisation and upgrading of the facilities and gave
Oman a formal undertaking of support in the event of aggression against the country.
The construction programme starting in fiscal year 1981 cost the United States $260.7
million 1981-1987.

US Military Construction in Oman 1981-1987 ($ millions)

6 See Skeet (1992: 84) for the main text of the letter.
213

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 Total

85.5

80.7 60.4 28.6 2.3

0.0

3.2

260.7

Source: US Department of Defense. Fact Sheet: MILCON Program, Sultanate of Oman,
Unclassified Pentagon Document, 9 January 1985. (Rigsbee 1990: 79)

Most of the construction was undertaken by the US Corp of Engineers although they
wore civilian clothing to reduce the ‘visibility’ of the US military presence (Rigsbee
1990: 78). Three of the bases, Masirah, Khassab and Thumrait were chosen fordevelopment due to their remoteness from centres of population. Between 1981 and1987 a total of $144.3 million was spent on upgrading Masirah allowing year-round use
even in the monsoon season and making it an excellent centre for forward operations ina crisis. Khasab’s location on the Straits of Hormuz seemed ideal for the rapid
deployment force; however difficult communications made upgrading prohibitively
expensive: work was only started in 1981 when $3.5 million was spent at which point
no more money was spent. Thumrait was regarded as another possible base for rapid
deployment operations as its isolation in the interior of Dhofar was attractive. Total
military construction costs 1981-87 were $54.6 million designed to support the
introduction of US Air Force Personnel (Rigsbee 1990: 82). Sib airport had theadvantage of being capable of taking B52 bombers and as an existing international
airport required less expenditure - between 1982 and 1985 $57.6 million was spent on
upgrading. However it was feared that a large influx of foreign military personnel here
could have negative consequences for the Qabus regime as it is located near the main
centre of Omani population (Rigsbee 1990: 81).

214

US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program

A further aspect of the enhanced US-Omani security relationship which the agreement
signified was the provision of military aid in the form of the Foreign Military Sales
credit program. Under this program loans or even grants are made to foreign countries
for the purchase of US military equipment and expertise. This started in the late 1970s
but with the regional crisis of 1979 the amounts involved leapt upwards in 1980.
Between 1977-1987 Oman received a total of $200.1 in FMS credits from the UnitedStates.

US Foreign Military Sales Credits to Oman ($ millions) 1977-1987

1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987
.913

0.0

.059 25

25

30

30

40

40

9.14

0.0

Source: US Department of Defense, Office of Military Cooperation. Muscat: Briefing
Book. Washington, D.C., Office of Military Cooperation, Jan. 1988(see Rigsbee 1990: 74-75)

In 1980 officials had to make a case before a Congressional Subcommittee that Oman,
while its per capita income of $4000 placed it outside the category of a developing
country, had other characteristics that allowed its classification as such and thus eligible
for assistance on a grant basis under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (see Graz 1982:

215

191-194). The sudden provision of extra credit in 1980 enabled the US to increase its
military assistance and training and up its arms sales program. Six M60 tanks and an
unknown number of TOW and Sidewinder missiles for Oman’s Jaguar aircraft weresold in that year (Kechichian 1995: 150). Additionally, commencing in 1981 US
training advisory field teams gave support to Omanis under the Defense Department’s
International Military Education Training Program (Rigsbee 1990: 83-85). However,
the extent of the program remained relatively small as Britain pushed hard to remain the
primary provider of training to Omani military personnel as was the case in terms of the
supply of arms. The Americans were resigned to their secondary role in this regard
although they believed that with the ‘Omanisation’ of the Sultanate’s armed forces that
US arms sales and training would increase (Kechichian 1995: 150).

Benefits for the US from the 1980 agreement

In logistic terms the agreement greatly strengthened US military capability in the Indian
Ocean where the US was conducting a sea surveillance programme over Soviet ships.
At the time the official public stance was that the facilities would be available in theevent of a Soviet attack on the region but unclear as to the position in the event of an
intra-Arab conflict in which American interests were threatened 7 B52 bombers flownout of Guam could have landed at Masirah especially as the British government had
refused them permission to land at Diego Garcia (Kechichian 1995: 149). The
agreement allowed the US to stockpile supplies at three large depots as well as to use

7 See ‘US Security Interests in the Gulf - Report of a Staff Study Mission to the Persian
Gulf, Middle East and Horn of Africa, October 21-November 13, 1980, to theCommittee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives, March 16, 1981. A textof the report is in Graz, The Omanis: Sentinels o f the Gulf, (1982: 182-189).
216

Masirah Island for flights bringing in equipment, food and supplies for the US fleet in
and around the Persian Gulf (Kechichian 1995: 148). In short, the US had theopportunity to establish facilities fully compatible with US requirements for rapid
deployment and to pre-position supplies ready for incoming ‘over the horizon’ forcesfrom Diego Garcia in the event of a crisis (Pool 1994: 276; Cordesman 1984: 619).

The agreement was not a ‘base accord’ in the strict sense in that Washington had toofficially provide advance notice of the landing and mooring of vessels entering theSultanate. According to Sultan Qabus the US was to be granted access to Omani
facilities only at the request of the Omani government or a majority of GCC states andin a case where a threat to Oman could not be repulsed alone (Kechichian 1995: 148).
However, even before the official signing of the agreement the US used facilities at
Masirah Island in April 1980 without prior warning or request for the ill-fated rescue
attempt of US hostages in Iran (Skeet 1992: 88). This raises the question as to what
degree of control the Omanis actually had over the base.

Benefits of the 1980 agreement for the Omani regime

The Omani motives for the agreement were varied (Kechichian 1995: 148). Essentially,
Sultan Qabus saw his opportunity to extract from the US a security commitment in thecontext of uncertainty engendered by the regional crisis of 1979 and also to obtain US
assistance in the modernisation of Omani military facilities - assistance which had notbeen forthcoming from the GCC.8 Oman was the only Arab state that subscribed to the

8 Kechichian quotes a report in which Qabus explained: ‘I would like to reveal one of
the reasons behind this agreement. The strategic location of Oman and the possible217

US view that Soviet Union and its allies were the main threat to the security of theregion (Pool 1994: 276; Graz 1982: 175). While the main details of the agreement are
well-known there is less public information about the side-letter to the agreement inwhich there is a formal undertaking by the US to support Oman in the event of
aggression against the Sultanate 9 Excluding President Truman’s letter to Ibn Sa’ud thiswas the only case of such an agreement between the US and an Arab country until after
the Kuwait War of 1991.

From the Omani perspective the agreement provided more than support for his regime.
Specifically, it provided a iow visibility’ presence which reduced the political costs.
The agreement stated that there were to be no American ground troops stationed in
Oman and none in rotation through the Sultanate. It formally excluded an area of
territory being used as a rest and recreation area. Muscat was concerned to keep the US
presence as low profile as possible. Accordingly, military personnel were to wear
civilian dress and little publicity was to be given to US military activities. Furthermore,
US military exercises were to be staged away from populated areas (Kechichian 1995:
148).

threats, however remote, made it indispensable that Oman should enlarge its military
establishments and airports. Consequently, we asked the GCC brothers to help us inthis task, particularly as our oil resources are very limited in comparison to theirs. The
required improvements involved about $2 billion, a sum which most brothers declined
to spend, while the US showed readiness to finance these projects. That is how wecame to agree on the facilities’ (1995: 154).
9 See Skeet, Oman: Politics and Development, (1992: 85). Public reference to the
Presidential letter was made in the Hearings before the Subcommittee on Europe andthe Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1980. However the subcommittee
took up the matter privately with the executive. See the text in Graz (1982: 191).
218

As part of the negotiations the US also signed an agreement in August 1980 to set up a
Joint Commission on Economic and Technical Cooperation and made further
agreements to give assistance in fisheries development, water conservation projects andtraining of Omanis in the US. However, by the end of 1980 the Omanis were still
awaiting the arrival of a team from the US Army Corps of Engineers promised for
September to assess potential projects. The delay, due to Congressional constraints on
expenditure, helped reinforce the Omani perception that the US did not live up to its
security commitments.

Yearly, $5 million of Economic Support Funds appropriations financed the operationsof the Commission, feasibility and design studies, technical assistance and training. In
1983 Nicholas Veliotis, Assistant Secretary of State confirmed to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that a $10 million loan program had up to that point concentrated
on water resources and in the following fiscal year 1984 would be focused on school
construction (Skeet 1992: 85). What was the significance of this economic aid? Ian
Skeet notes that, whilst no comparable process of scrutiny of foreign policy exists inOman by which to assess official comment ‘it seems incontrovertible...that Sultan
Qabus saw that it was in his best interests to conclude an agreement with the US. The
economic element was useful but only secondary. It was the military content that was
important’ (Skeet 1992: 88).

The development of the US-Omani relationship in the 1980’s

219With the advent of the Reagan administration the politico-military relationship wasdeveloped further. Despite public pronouncements, Oman encouraged the building andimprovement of airfields as well as the pre-positioning of arms, equipment and fuel foruse by USCENTCOM forces. Senior Omani officials asserted that whilst Muscat could
not agree to the establishment of outright bases they would cooperate with the Western
allies in order to meet their strategic responsibilities ( Kechichian 1995: 151). Visits ofhigh level US officials took place including former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger,
Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, John Tower and former President,
Gerald Ford all of whom met with Sultan Qabus and Foreign Minister Al-Zawawi. A
US General P.X. Kelly, Commander of the Rapid Deployment Force visited Muscat tocheck on logistical procedures. In January 1982 Senator Charles Percy, Chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee spent four days in the Sultanate during which
he discussed bilateral relations with Sultan Qabus. The following month Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger visited the country. According to Omani sources hesought to ‘acquaint himself with the capability of the Omani armed forces, theefficiency of the Omani soldier and his comprehension of the latest weapons andadvanced equipment’ (Kechichian 1995: 152).

Political links were further enhanced in 1983 after Sultan Qabus visited the UnitedStates at the invitation of Ronald Reagan and endowed a National Symphony chair fornarrative music in honour of Nancy Reagan. He also expressed his confidence that theUnited States would indeed come to the assistance of the GCC states if requested to see
off an enemy (Kechichian 1995: 152). In June 1983 Qabus affirmed that Oman stillneeded the back-up of the Access Agreement with the Americans despite the creation of220

a separate GCC Rapid Deployment Force. In December 1983 he conveyed his views on
the Israeli-Palestinian situation to the President via Reagan’s personal envoy, Donald
Rumsfeld, who also held much noticed talks with Major General ‘Ali Majid AlMa’mari. This facilitated the visit to Muscat in March 1985 of Lieutenant General
Robert Kingston, commander of USCENTCOM and Major General David Watts,
Director of Logistics and Security Assistance for USCENTCOM. They served noticethat Washington had nearly completed building and modernising sites in Oman for use
by their force in the event of a crisis. These upgraded facilities would support tacticalairlift operations, MAC (Military Airlift Command) operations, and pre-positioning of
Air Force war readiness material assets. A senior military official asserted that ‘Oman
had become what we had hoped Egypt might be,’ while a State Department official
maintained that ‘we could never secure the kinds of access in Saudi Arabia that we havenegotiated in Oman’ (see Kechichian 1995: 154). One aspect of this access was theopportunity to conduct invaluable training exercises to practise rapid deployment.

US-Omani Military Exercises

The 1980 Agreement had laid the foundations for military to military contacts in which
joint exercises were the main focus. They were of great value in testing theeffectiveness of the upgrading work and due to censorship of the media in Oman could
take place without generating publicity in Oman (Rigsbee 1990: 86). The Saudis
reportedly offered Oman $2 billion in development aid to reduce its military
cooperation with the US and to cancel the Operation Bright Star 1 Exercise.

221

The first exercise ‘Operation Accurate Test’ took place in February 1981; designed totest communications equipment for the RDJTF in the environmental conditions of the
Persian Gulf it was deemed a success. In December 1981 Bright Star involved 960
marines practising amphibious landing on the Dhofari coast Operation to demonstrate
American intentions to help safe-guard the security of the oil-producing states of the
Gulf in an exercise in which a total of 6000 Army, Marine, Air Force and Navy
Personnel took part. The duration of the exercise was shortened to forestall Oman’s
Gulf partners objections and as a result of the concerns of British advisers fearing a lossof influence (Kechichian 1995: 151). Oman also participated in the annual US exercise
in South West Asia code-named ‘Jade Tiger’ and ‘Operation Bright Star 2’ exercise
which took place in August 1985. However, the US was involved in more than just
exercises during this period.

US military deployment

In the 1980s facilities in Oman were used by the US in the prosecution of a number ofmilitary operations, primarily in relation to the Iran-Iraq war. In February 1981 a small
contingent of US Army and Air Force Personnel set up a temporary communications
centre in the Sultanate to monitor airborne surveillance of the Straits (Kechichian 1995:
150). One writer reports that early in the Iran- Iraq War the US received intelligencereports that Iraqi helicopters were preparing to commandeer Omani and Saudi Arabianfacilities to launch attacks on Iranian bases across the Gulf as well as Iranian
installations on three Gulf islands. The Saudis signalled to Washington that they
expected prompt military help from the US (see Bradley 1982: 106). In February 1984
the Supreme Defense Council in Tehran allegedly decided to occupy and fortify Goat

222

Island. The commander of the Omani army, a British general let it be known that Oman
could probably resist a determined Iranian invasion for less than 48 hours. The US
promptly reaffirmed the Carter doctrine and no attack or invasion took place (Cooley
1991: 132).

In the 1980s US naval P-3 surveillance aircraft ‘transited’ at Masirah Island and also
occasionally at Sib, allowing them to maintain surveillance over the Gulf of Oman area,
including Iranian naval vessels, resulting regularly in Iranian protests to Oman (Eilts
1988: 27). In October 1986 a USCENTCOM briefing team visited Muscat andreviewed regional military threats and capabilities. At this point the Iran-Contra link
was surfacing in public (Halliday 1987: 6). The Persian Gulf area was just as vital an
arena for the application of the Reagan Doctrine: Americans claimed that Oman was aninvaluable staging area for the supply of the CIA supported mohaddejin in Afghanistan(Kechichian 1995: 154). In April 1987 Vice President Bush returned to discuss regional
developments and Gulf security. Following talks in June 1987 between the Chairmanof the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, and Senators John Glenn and John
Warner, Oman granted US overflight rights for vital operations during the Kuwaiti
tanker reflagging operation. In April 1988 US naval aviators launched attacks ontargets in the Straits of Hormuz. In June 1988, USCENTCOM Commander General
George Crist and US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Murphy visited Oman again
to discuss bilateral military relations. In November 1989 the new US CENTCOM
Commander General Norman Schwarzkopf met with the Commander of Oman’s Land
Forces, Major General Khamis bin Hamid Al-Kalbani and exchanged views on the
Sultanate’s defence posture (Kechichian 1995: 156-157).

223

The 1985 renewal of the agreement

The 1980 Access Agreement had stipulated a five-yearly review the negotiations forwhich proved more difficult than expected and generated considerable ill-feeling (Eilts
1988: 34). Essentially, the Omani side sought to strengthen the conditions of access(the secret use of Masirah for the attempted rescue of US hostages in Iran was a sorepoint) whilst the US military negotiating team took the line that as the US had paid forthe upgrading of the facilities they should have unconditional access to them (Skeet
1992: 88). Accordingly, US Department of Defense lawyers sought to obtain ‘status offorces’ provisions which in the words of a former American diplomat ‘would havemade these Omani facilities virtually American bases’ (Eilts 1988: 33). Despite thedifficulties, sufficient coincidence of interest between the countries existed so that theagreement was eventually renewed with US personnel perquisites at Omani militarysites curtailed and advance Omani approval conditions for American usage of facilities
tightened. Final agreement on conditions for pre-positioning US military supplies was
also reached (Kechichian 1995: 154).

In the mid-1980s strains in the Omani-American relationship focused around threeissues relating to the negotiations. The first, as mentioned above, was the issue of US
access without Omani permission. The second was over publicity. Various reports in
the American media highlighted the involvement in Oman of ex-CIA officials;
furthermore the Pentagon was wont to give publicity to joint US-Omani military224

manoeuvres.10 Thirdly, there were considerable tensions over the presence of the
British officer, General Watts - the Omani Chief of Staff - at the head of the Omani
negotiating team. The American military assumed that the British government was‘pulling the strings’ behind the scenes (Skeet 1992: 89). This raises the question: what
was the nature of the British-Omani relationship in the 1980s - what had changed andwhat had remained?

Britain’s relationship with the Sultanate in the 1980s

The British withdrawal from Masirah Island in 1977 marked the abandonment ofBritain’s commitment to act as the ‘ultimate guarantor’ of the security of the Qabus
regime against external attack. As has been seen developments at the turn of the decade
led the US to assume this role. The Americans was willing to do so and the Omanis,aware of the limits to Britain’s resources, were keen to enlist US guarantees of support
and assistance in the modernisation of its military infrastructure. However, Britain’s
long-standing and wide-ranging relationship with Oman meant that it maintained apresence and still exerted influence in a number of ways. These can be identified as thebroad commercial, cultural, and educational contacts, the role of British advisers to the
Sultan and the command structure of the Omani armed forces, police and intelligence
service and government ministries. These all reflected the long standing British-Omani
politico/military relationship which can be clearly identified by focusing on joint
training exercises and arms sales in the 1980s. In many of these areas the British
presence in the 1980s could be contrasted with a negligible US role.

10 See Eilts (1988: 34) and Skeet (1992: 88). They both make reference to the article byJeff Gerth and Judith Miller, ‘US Set to Develop Oman as its Major Ally in the Gulf,

225

Oman was an extremely lucrative market for Britain. A quarter of Oman’s imports camefrom the UK - nearly four times the amount from the US. Conversely, the UK bought
only one per cent of the Sultanate’s exports, in contrast with six per cent for the US.
Britain therefore derived considerable benefit to its balance of payments from Oman
resulting from the SI billion in annual export earnings (Anthony 1987: 188). In
contrast, the US did not penetrate deep into the Omani market except in areas connectedwith the Defense and Access Agreement (Skeet 1992: 89). These well-establishedcommercial connections were reflected in the tendency of wealthy Omanis to send theirchildren to schools in England and also to own property there. This educational link also
held in the military sphere: training abroad for the Omani armed forces took place
primarily in Britain (Anthony 1987: 191).

This was hardly surprising, reflecting as it does Britain’s long involvement with theSultanate. Oman’s armed forces have been described as a ‘miniature version’ of the
British army, indicating their build up by Britain in the decades since the 1950’s. Britain
sold arms and provided the basic structure of technical, personnel, training and staff
appointments - officers who were seconded from the British army or contracted directly
to the Sultan’s Armed Forces (Skeet 1992: 99). In 1980, following visits by Foreign
Secretary, Douglas Hurd and Defence Minister, John Nott, additional British officers
were transferred to serve with the Omani armed forces. In 1981 Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and Sultan Qabus agreed to appoint General Sir Timothy Creasy, theformer commander of British Land Forces, as Chief -of-Staff of the Omani Armed
Forces for a two year period. In 1982 out of a total number of Omani Air Force officers

The New York Times, 25 March 1985.
226

of 350, 200 were British. Similarly, in the army there were 32 officers seconded and
130 British ‘contract officers’11 (Cordesman 1984: 611). Until 1987 the Chief of Staff
was British, the last one being Lieutenant General John Watts.12

In 1982 an Omani became commander of the police; however it remained dominatedby expatriate officers as did the secret police, the Oman Research Bureau (Allen 1984:7-8). In the 1980s the head of the Omani foreign intelligence department was an exM16 officer Reginald Temple, appointed on his retirement from the British intelligence
services in 1979 (Block 1983: 259). An interesting case of British influence in the
Omani government ministries is that documented by Fred Halliday (1987a: 196). It
concerns the activities of a certain Tony Ashworth who, in the early 1980s, continued towork in the Omani Ministry of Information where he had been ‘seconded’ in 1974.
Halliday argues that there was no case in which it was ‘clearer how the British in Oman
used their Arabian client for ventriloquy and deception.’ Another case was that of the
British Corporation, AirServices, the major consultant to the Omani Ministry of
Defence, a link which both reflected, and was strengthened by, the order of British
Aerospace Tornado jets in 1985 (Allen 1987: 118).

A further source of perceived influence were the British advisers to Sultan Qabus.
Hermann F. Eilts, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, put it like this:

11 For an account of the day-to-day life of a contract officer see Hoskins, A Contract
Officer in Oman, (1988).
12 See ‘Defence’ by Roger Matthews in ‘Oman: A Special Survey’, The Financial
Times, 13.1. 83; See also World Development Movement, Gunrunner's Gold: How the
public’s money finances arms sales, (1995: 26) and Skeet (1992: 99).
227

Oman does receive some criticism from its fellow GCC states for its continued
heavy dependence on the British. The sultan is surrounded by British advisers
who, presumably with his concurrence, control all access to him, especiallyduring the six months of the year that he spends in Salala. To be sure, they are
there entirely at the sultan’s pleasure, yet their influence, real or imagined,
projects an image of British dependency. (Eilts 1988: 32)

Ian Skeet writing at the beginning of the 1990s maintained that this relationship with the
British was unlikely to change at least whilst Qabus remained in power:

His personal experience of Britain and the British has given him confidence intheir advice and judgement. This has occurred at many different levels, from thefriendships that he has with members of the Royal Family, the prime ministerand ministers, through to the military, diplomats, bankers and ordinary
professional people. This has given Britain a preferred position amongst foreigncountries, a position which is reflected by large numbers of Omanis from a
broad spectrum of experience and activity who have personal links with Britain.
(1992: 99)

A further source of British influence certainly applicable to Qabus is that made by John
Duke Anthony:

British foreign affairs practitioners in general, and ‘old British Arabian hands’ inparticular, unlike their counterparts on the US side, continue to derive subtle
influence due to the fact that more than a few of their number were intimately
involved in the accession to power of a majority of the incumbent GCC heads ofstate. (1987: 190)

Essentially, all the above points have to be placed in the context of Oman’s historicalpolitical and military relationship with Britain as examined in earlier chapters. In the
1980’s these two aspects were expressed in the sale of arms to Oman and in the conductof joint military exercises and training in Oman.

228

•

Britain remained Oman’s principal supplier of arms in the 1980s.

It

These arms sales

were facilitated by the provision of export credit, as shown below.

UK Export Credits for Arms Sales to Oman 1980-1989 (Total: 486 million poundsl(£ million and percentage of total cover each year)

1980/81 1981/82 1982/83 1983/84 1984/85 1985/86 1986/87 1987/88 1988/89
£

%

£

% £

% £

305 100 62

94 61

15 0

%

£

%

£

%

£

%

£

4

10 17 22

37

56 0

%

£

%

0

-

Source: World Development Movement, Gunrunners Gold (1995:22).

This provision of export credit was a political decision in which large tranches of export
credits were provided for arms sales which were perceived as cementing the BritishOmani strategic relationship. They often generated substantial disagreement within the
British government from the Treasury which came into conflict with Ministers,
including Prime Minister Thatcher, and Ministry of Defence officials who were
enthusiastic about large arms sales. An example of this was the battle over the sale ofpatrol boats. Robin Fellgate, a former senior Treasury official dealing with defence,argued at the time that this sale ‘would have entailed increasing ECGD’s exposure to
the Omani market in a manner to which Treasury Ministers were opposed.’ Ultimately
these considerations were overruled from the top and export credits extended, ‘partly for

13 See Rigsbee (1992: 73). For a detailed study of the way in which the British
government backed the sale of weapons to, amongst other countries, Oman, see
Gunrunner's Gold: How the public's money finances arms sales, (London, World
Development Movement, 1995).
229

economic reasons and jobs in a particular area of Britain, but I think at least as much for
wider political reasons, the bilateral relationship with what, after all, was an ally
country’ (World Development Movement 1995: 21).

British arms sales to Oman developed throughout the 1980s within this context of thepolitico-military relationship. In 1980 Oman placed an order at a cost estimated at over$140 million with British Aerospace for 12 Jaguar strike aircraft (effectively doublingits fleet of Jaguars) as well as Rapier Blindfire missiles. In November of the same year
an agreement was signed to allow for the refuelling of Royal Navy ships at Mina Qabus.

British arms sales developed throughout the 1980s within this context of the politicalmilitary relationship. In 1980 Oman placed an order at a cost estimated at over $140
million with British Aerospace for 12 Jaguar Strike Aircraft (effectively doubling its
fleet of Jaguars) as well as Rapier Blindfire Missiles. In November of the same year anagreement was signed to allow for the refuelling of Royal Navy Ships at Mina Qabus(Kechichian 1995: 133). Britain still had the edge on its Western competitors in Omani
defence procurement; an example was the contract for armoured vehicles for the army.
French and British bids were alike technically and on price: the contract went to the
British firm partly due to the Sultan’s conviction that it was more efficient to buy
mostly from one source and also for reasons of sentiment accruing from the Dhofar
campaign. A British officer holding senior rank in the SAF commented, ‘Blood, sweat
and tears we shed together in those days. That created an emotional bond that is difficult
to break. ’14 Following the visit of Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine to Muscat in

14 See Bridget Bloom, ‘Discreet relationship with the UK’, Oman: Special Survey in
The Financial Times, 11th November 1985.
230

October 1985 the first export order for Tornado air defence variant aircraft was placedby Oman at a cost of $350 million.15 This deal indicated the continuing involvement ofBritain with Oman in the military sphere which was also reflected in manoeuvres anddeployment.

British manoeuvres and deployment in the 1980s

The SAS were regularly present in the Sultanate where they trained the Sultan’s Special
Force16and conducted their own exercises. In 1981 a fifty strong company of SAS
soldiers, in Oman on training, were sent to Salalah by ‘Omani’ intelligence to put downa rebellion which turned out to be non-existent. The reporter for the Times explainedthat the SAS was not even supposed to be in Oman that year, indicating that the force
was there on a regular basis (Block 1983: 140). The military links between Britain andOman were exemplified in 1986 with the conduct of Operation Swift Sword.17

This exercise lasted from 16th November to 8th December 1986 and was the largest
British deployment in the Gulf until the Kuwait crisis of 1990. It involved 4750 British

15 See Bridget Bloom, ‘Discreet relationship with the UK’, Oman: Special Survey in
The Financial Times, 11th November 1985. See also Allen, Oman, (1987: 118) andPeterson, Defending Arabia, (1986: 205).
16 This company sized infantry unit, recruited from tribesmen of the Jebel area in
Dhofar, is independent of the regular army command structure and is stationed ineastern Oman. See Chris Westhorp, The World’s Armies - An illustrated review of thearmies of the world (London, Salamander Books, 1991), entry on Oman and The
Financial Times, 11th November 1985, Bridget Bloom, Defence, in Oman: A Special
Survey. Additionally, there is the Sultan’s Royal Guard Brigade under a commandindependent of the regular army. The raison d'etre of the forces can be surmised as toprevent Qabus from being overthrown by the regular army.
17 See Sunday Times, 2.11.86, James Adam, ‘Hold on, the cavalry’s coming’ andFinancial Times, 24.11.86, David Buchan, ‘UK practises helping Gulf friends’. See also
Kechichian (1995: 133).
231

serviceman as well as units from the Sultan’s Armed Forces. The exercise, at a cost of
4.1 million pounds, was designed to test Britain’s capacity to operate in out-of-area
contingencies and to test some of the lessons of the Falklands Campaign. The scenario
was that the eastern oilfields of Oman are occupied by a hostile force and Oman turns to
Britain for help. Using Masirah Island as a forward base, British forces, using
amphibious landing and parachute drop tactics, repulse the forces o f ‘Fantasia’. Alsopractised was the 10 hour non-stop flight to Masirah by six Tornado jets with in-flightrefuelling from VC-lOs and the RAF’s new tanker, the Tristar. Lieutenant-General Sir
Michael Gray, the on-the-spot commander of the British forces admitted that the heavy
British ‘infiltration’ of Omani forces made Swift Sword easier than other joint
exercises. Press reports at the time noted that self-interest and a web of confidential
defence agreements meant that neither British or Omani government officials would
rule out such a fictitious scenario from actually occurring in which British planning for
rapid deployment would be put to the test. This planning had its origins in the NottDefence Review of 1981 (before the Falklands Campaign) which called for the creationof a rapid deployment force, composed of an airborne and seaborne brigade, and similar
in concept to those of France and America.

This kind of exercise facilitated the 1987 ‘Armilla’ naval deployment to safeguard thepassage of oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq war. This
operation was supported by RAF Nimrod maritime reconnaissance planes operating out
of Seeb. British minesweepers routinely made use of Omani ports (Kechichian 1995:
133).

232

Anglo-American tensions: competition and cooperation

From the above it is evident that in the 1980s the Omani-British relationship remained
strong and that Britain still continued to exert considerable influence in the Sultanate.
So whilst the significance of the US-Omani Access Agreement was of great importanceit should not be interpreted as the ‘overnight’ departure of the British. The British
reluctantly came to accept the US presence but pushed hard to maintain British interests
in Oman, commercial and military. Accordingly, Margaret Thatcher assured President
Reagan that America could rely on Britain’s full support in the Gulf but at the sametime opined to her compatriots that it would not be in their interests to let the Americans
any further into the Sultanate (Anthony 1987: 188). For example, Hermann Eilts notesthat controversy arose when some British advisers to the Sultan sought to limit US
access to American-financed Omani facilities (Eilts 1988: 28). In certain US military
circles this was all seen as British ‘obstinacy’; this ‘obstinacy’ undoubtedly reflected theresentment at increased US competition in a state which, with the British withdrawal
from the Gulf, represented the last major bastion of predominant British influence in thearea.

The outcome of this was that the ‘visible’ US presence in the Sultanate in termsof US military personnel and US nationals working there could, in the mid 1980s, still
be characterised as ‘small beer’ by John Duke Anthony (1987: 187). He notes thevarious arguments put by both sides and the tensions it engendered. However, he thengoes on to detail a substantial record of Anglo-American cooperation reflecting amutually beneficial division of labour. Furthermore, Eilts notes that Britain is able tosupport the Qabus regime in areas which the Americans would find more difficult, for233

example, counter-insurgency and dealing with internal rebellion and dissent (Eilts 1988:
33).

The two countries cooperated to improve ‘Omani’ maritime surveillance capacity,
integrate the new British consignment of Jaguars into US-developed facilities on
Masirah and held periodic joint consultative sessions in London and elsewhere. John
Duke Anthony assesses that Britain accommodated basic US security needs andinterests which in turn was reciprocated. British military personnel serving with the
Omani armed forces were briefed at the US Central Command headquarters. The US
also arranged for tours for Omani air force officers and their British advisers of US arms
manufacturers such as McDonnell-Douglas and Nyrop. Furthermore, a defence contract
relating to Oman that would normally have gone to a US company was apportioned to a
British one (Anthony 1986: 191).

In summary, Britain and America cooperated on issues relating to shared interests inoverall Gulf security whilst competing for influence in the Sultanate. The Americans
perceived that British influence would gradually decline and were happy to assign some
aspects to British management such as internal security. By the same token the British
could not resource such commitments as defence guarantees and were relieved to havethis burden lifted from them. The Americans were also aware that some of the failure to
make greater inroads into the Omani market was of their own making although various
military strategists and US armament manufactures riled at the British attempts torestrict their presence in Oman and its markets. Ultimately, the Pentagon militaryplanners were delighted to have secured such ‘breakthroughs’ as the access to Omani
facilities.

234

The development of the Omani state in this period and the impact of Western strategicinterests on it will now be discussed.

6.1.3: The development of the Omani economy, political system and military

The development of Western strategic interests in Oman reflected Oman’s integration
into the world capitalist state system. A number of points can be made concerning theconsequences of Western involvement for Oman relating to the Omani economy,society and political system. The integration of Oman’s oil dominated economy18 into
the world capitalist system meant that it was exposed to the fluctuations of theinternational oil market. Oil provided the major part of Omani finance although since1980 it has transferred a proportion of the revenue into a State General Reserve Fund
(SGRF) to offset dependence on yearly income (Skeet 1992: 103). Oman wasparticularly hard hit by the collapse of the oil price in 1986 and as revenue remained
relatively static thereafter, the squeeze was on development expenditure. However, thiswas not implemented across the board. The breakdown of expenditure by ministry in
Omani Five year Plans shows that Western defence of Qabus’ regime had anotherpernicious consequence. The main growth area was the royal diwan, always the mostdifficult cost centre to control. From 1981- 1985 the diwan was responsible for 12 percent of all expenditure and 13 per cent of civil recurrent expenditure. In 1988 the diwan
was responsible for one third of development expenditure and its share of recurrent
expenditure had risen to 14 per cent. In terms of combined development and recurrent

18 For details on the development of the Omani economy in this period see Skeet (1992:
100-109), Allen (1987: 94-100), Whelan (1987) and Hughes (1987).
235

expenditure the diwan had become larger than any other ministry, spending in 1988
RO140 million presumably on ever more lavish palaces and the like (Skeet 1992: 104).

In such lavish consumption the Sultan was undoubtedly supported by his British
advisers and friends who benefited accordingly. One such case was the awarding of a£300 million contract in the construction of Sultan Qabus University to the British firm
Cementation International which happened to employ Mark Thatcher, the Prime
Minister’s son, as a consultant. This followed the visit by Mrs Thatcher to Oman in
1981.19 In 1984 a Sunday Times investigation established that Dennis Thatcher was a
co-signatory to the account through which Mark Thatcher would receive his
remuneration.20 The Export Credit Guarantee Department handed over all its papers
relating to the affair to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.21 However,
the inquiry was effectively limited by the Prime Minister’s refusal to say actually what
she did discuss in Oman and by limiting Mark Thatcher’s exposure to the press before
spiriting him off to the USA.22 The Prime Minister saw no conflict of private andpublic interest and asserted she was ‘batting for Britain’.

In the political sphere Qabus remained an absolute ruler and showed little enthusiasm towiden participation from his inner circle. He retained the prime ministership, and the
direction of finance, foreign affairs, and defence and continued to directly administer
Dhofar, Musandam and Muscat. He kept a close watch on petroleum and commercial
affairs through his cabinet appointees. These areas were dominated by a group of Al-

19 ‘Cementation not mentioned’, Financial Times, 1.3.83.
20 ‘Thatcher urged to make a full Oman statement’, Financial Times, 5.3.83
21 ‘$148m loan raised for Oman hospital’, Financial Times, 6.3.83.
22 See Observer 16.1.84 and 5.2.84.
236

Sa’id family members, long-time business associates and expatriate advisers, together
known as the Muscat Mafia. Prominent among the Mafia were Qabus’s first appointees
such as Thuwaini bin Shihab Al-Sa’id, Hamad bin Hamad A1 Bu Sa’id and some more
recently appointed officials. This latter group included Fahr bin Taimur Al-Sa’id,
deputy prime minister for defence and foreign affairs; Fahd bin Mahmud Al-Sa’id,
deputy prime minister for legal affairs; Qais Abd al-Munim al-Zawawi, minister of state
for foreign affairs and deputy prime minster for financial affairs and his brother Omar, apersonal adviser, the son ofZubair bin Ali, Sultan Sa’id’s one-time minister of justice;and Sa’id Ahmed al-Shanfari, a member of the merchant family which has moststrongly supported Al-Sa’id control of Dhofar (Allen 1987: 85). Additionally, there
were various ‘freelance’ expatriate advisors, both American and British, whom Qabus
had brought in after the 1970 coup (Halliday 1987: 194). Qabus tended to isolate
himself and paid no attention to those areas of government in which he had little
personal interest and in this respect was like his father.

Creation of the State Consultative Council

In 1981 Qabus set up the State Consultative Council (SCC) (see Eickleman 1984,
Peterson 1988 and 1984). Preparations for the SCC itself dated from 1980. The Sultan
requested several ministers to discuss how broader formal consultation might take placein Oman. According to participants they considered such topics as what “democracy”
might mean in the context of Oman, representation, a parliamentary versus a
consultative body, and even the possibility of voting. Clearly a major decision was
being considered, but the discussants were given no specific information beyond theirinitial mandate and no feedback.

237

Although Muscat officialdom takes pride in knowing of developments in the pipeline
before they are officially announced, in the case of the SCC almost complete secrecy
was achieved. Only senior members of the Royal Family and those sections ofgovernment involved in the drafting of the SCC and selecting the delegates had
knowledge of the new developments before the event (Eickleman 1984: 55).

The concept of consultation (shura) with its Islamic connotations, was an integral
element in the Ibadhi Imamate but the newer Sultanate, based on the A1 Bu Sa’id
dynasty, had never developed a tradition of consultation, let alone formal
representation. The council was made up of 43 members initially but was expanded to
55 in 1983. The original SCC committee was responsible for selecting the members
and sending their names to the Sultan, who accepted every nominee for all three SCC
sessions. Only the SCC’s president was directly chosen by the Sultan; the president
always held the rank of minister because he had to have direct access to the Sultan.

Nineteen members (including the president) belonged to the government, comprising
the 11 under secretaries of the social service ministries and seven other nominatedofficials. The Chamber of Commerce elected 19 candidates, from which the SCC
committee chose 11 members. Each of the Sultanate’s seven geographic regions was
represented by a varying number of members according to its population size anddevelopment needs; the number ranged from seven for the Batinah coast to two for the
Musandam enclave. Despite the manner of their appointment, these 25 members
officially represented all of Oman. The member of the SCC guiding committee from aparticular region (or the one most familiar with that region) was responsible for238

choosing a list of 12 candidates, from which the whole committee selected the region’s
representatives. During the first session, the 44 members included 24 Ibadhis, 13Sunnis and 7 Shi’a. Twenty two had received some modern education, with six having
attended university; their average age was 47 ( Peterson 1988: 103-104).

Despite all this elaborate preparation, the SCC had the most restricted national council
mandate in the GCC. In part this derived from the infrequent, highly formal nature ofits meetings. Only three sessions were held each year; each session lasted only threedays until 1985, when the period was extended to five days or a week. As originallyconceived, all meetings were held in camera and the council’s competence restricted toeconomic and social matters. Because the SCC is not in session most of the year there
was little scope for discussion and debate. Consequently, if a member wished to raise
an issue during the 48-49 weeks the SCC was not in session, he had to submit a letter tothe SCC’s executive committee (composed of president and his two deputies as ex
officio member, plus another five members elected by the council). This committee
could then pass the matter on to the appropriate standing committee, which returned its
recommendation to the Executive Committee, which added its own recommendationand sent it to the appropriate ministry. The committees have met much more regularly
than the SCC as a whole. Eickleman quotes one SCC member as explaining that ‘thecommittees are where our recommendations are cooked’ (1984: 64). By the time issues
were discussed in the full quarterly meetings, the major lines of recommendations had
already been decided (Peterson 1988: 105).

The mixing of government and non-government members raised the question of conflictof interest, not only in regard to the under-secretaries but also to the president. Because239

the president was the head of the SCC for only two years, he had no real stake in the
consultative process. Because he was a minister, both by virtue of his personal rank, andby past and future positions, he was more a member of the government than awatchdog. Another area of conflict of interest arose from the tendency of someministers to use their official positions to advance their personal business. How could apresident support measures of personal accountability among officials when it might
involve him and his past and future colleagues, it was asked. The representational
nature of the SCC could be questioned as well, given the secretive nature of theselection of its members.

It was difficult, therefore, to determine whether the formation and activities of the SCC
contributed to the legitimacy of the state. In a sense, the SCC carved out a modest nichethrough the petitions submitted to it by individuals and groups of citizens, who alsoquestioned members from their region. The exclusion of such areas of government
activity as defence, foreign affairs and oil from the council’s competence was defended
by the government on the grounds that the SCC was too new to entrust it with suchsensitive matters. Beneath it all ran the knowledge that Oman, far more than its GCC
neighbours, was a one-man monarchy whose authority was virtually unchallenged by
the ruling family or merchant families or even the cabinet. One area in which thecouncil could conceivably have provided a benefit was discussion over the question of
succession, but this was the most sensitive area of all. Peterson commented: ‘It is to thesultan’s credit that he established the SCC and has pushed for its acceptance within the
Omani political system, often against the reluctance of other family members andministers’ (1988: 108). Although it was outwardly a representative body the council

240

was, in practice, very much controlled by the Sultan through the power of appointment.
Calvin Allen, writing in the mid 1980’s commented:...[the council] has been dominated by A1 Bu Sa’id loyalists, the Muscat
commercial community, and traditional elites from the interior. The newly
appointed president, Salim bin Nasser A1 Bu Saidi, is a member of the royalfamily. There appears to be little desire to turn the council into an elected body,and Qabus seems very reluctant to introduce any form of democracy into thecountry as demonstrated by the abrogation of the rural councils. (1987: 86)

This abrogation of the elected rural councils in 1985 by Qabus was hardly a ‘step
towards political participation’.23

The Omani Military

In the military 24sphere Qabus refused to put a time frame on complete ‘Omanisation’ of
the military and in this he was supported by the British (Allen 1987: 88). On theappointment of the General Sir Timothy Creasy as Omani Chief-of-Staff in 1981, asenior British adviser, commented, ‘when you have a family of children you don’t
consult with them until they’ve grown up a bit’ (see Kechichian 1995: 133). In foreign
policy terms Qabus pursued a number of independent initiatives, amongst others
establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1985.25However, Oman reliedon the ‘umbrella’ of the protection of the Western allies in the eventuality of any serious
threat to its security. With the effective end of the Cold War and cessation of hostilities

23 This phrase is in the title of J.E. Peterson’s work, The Arab G ulf States: Steps
Towards Political Participation (1988).
24 For details on the expansion and composition of the Sultan’s Armed Forces in the
1980s see Allen (1987: 86-88), Cordesman (1984: 606-620), and Skeet (1992: 98-100).
25For details on the evolution of Qabus’s foreign policy see Joseph Kechichian, Oman
and the World: the Emergence o f an Independent Foreign Policy, (1995).
241between Iran and Iraq in 1988 it might have appeared that such threats had receded.
However, this was only the calm before the gathering storm. The events of the early
1990’s are examined in the next part of this chapter.

242

6.2.1: The international context since 1990

The key developments in the international context since 1990 were the regional threat toWestern interests posed by Iraq and its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the resulting
Western military campaign and evolution of a dual containment policy. A further factor
is the break up of the coalition force which went to war against Saddam Hussein overthe use of sanctions and military force. This was manifested with the development of
an independent Russian policy and the French eagerness to benefit from trade with Iraq.

The United States, the Gulf, and Iraq: preparation for ‘middle intensity conflict9

It might have been thought that with the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the demise of Cold
War tension that both a regional and global source of potential conflict had been
removed from the Persian Gulf. However such a surmise would ignore the remaining
problems for Saddam Hussein’s regime which remained despite the defeat of the Iranianthreat and the acceptance by Khomeini of the ‘poisoned chalice’ - the UN cease-fireresolution. In the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War Iraq was in a parlous state and required
funds to rebuild its war-shattered economy. It was widely perceived that Iraq had
conducted its campaign against Iran with the financial backing of Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis and Kuwaitis were fearful of an expansion in influence of Iranianstyle Islamic fundamentalism which threatened the legitimacy of their ruling houses autocratic monarchies.

Furthermore, Saddam Hussein, indeed all governments of Iraq, had a number of special
grievances against the Kuwaiti government, resulting from the geopolitical position.

243

The most long standing was the claim that the Emirate was the 19th province of Iraq
separated by the machinations of British imperialism in the settlement after World War
One. Thus, Iraq had never relinquished its claim even after it accepted the military
limits in the Kuwait Crisis which followed Kuwaiti independence in 1961 (see Chapter
5). A further grievance of this nature was the refusal of Kuwait to cede sovereignty of
two islands at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway Bubiyan and Warba. This
meant that Iraq’s sole access to the Gulf was restricted to the port of Umm Qasr:
possession of the islands would have facilitated the development of a petrochemicalindustry there (Yapp 1996: 502).

On the oil front there were two points of dispute. Firstly that Kuwait was extracting
more oil than it was entitled to from the Rumallah oil field in the neutral zone. Much
more serious was the Kuwaiti exceeding of production quota which was keeping theprice of oil low. This, Tariq Aziz maintained, was an act of war against Iraq, which was
losing SI billion in foreign exchange earnings a month as a result; had the situation
continued for another month Iraq would have gone bankrupt26

In these circumstances, Saddam Hussein ordered the Republican Guard to move south
towards the border with Kuwait. His perception was that the US, after Vietnam, would
not intervene. This perception was confirmed by a discussion with US ambassador April
Glaspie on 25 July 1990, in which she told the Iraqis that the US would not excuse theuse of force but she had no authority to go further. Given the subsequent US response
this meeting has been seen by some as evidence of a US conspiracy to lure the Iraqis
into Kuwait in order to smash them militarily. However, for David Mack, Director of244

Gulf Affairs at the State Department in 1990 the idea was absurd: ‘the idea that April
Glaspie with no instructions to do so could have told Saddam Hussein “if you send one
tank across the border my President will send a half a million US men and women andkick your butt back across into Iraq” - well, she would have been laughed out of theroom. 27
7

That said, the United States had been preparing for a war of this type for some time:

For the USA this war - or a variant of it which would inevitably take place in the
Middle East, with control over oil as the trigger - was one Washington had been
preparing for even as the arms trade with Iraq flourished in the late 1980s. In
1988 the US Commission on Integrated Long Tern Strategy underlined the new
threat to the USA of strong regional powers with large well-equipped armies.
As any threat from the Soviet Union disappeared with the end o f the Cold War,in the early months of the Bush Administration, Middle Intensity Conflict
became the preoccupation of the planners. The US military began to prepare
itself to face conflicts with what President Bush himself called ‘renegade
regimes’ in the Third World. Spelt out by Defense Secretary Richard Cheyney
in secret planning documents for the period 1992-97, Middle Intensity Conflict
was clearly targeting Iraq and Syria. (Brittain 1991: 9)

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait: the first post-Cold War crisis

Tensions were eased by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s visit to Iraq when hereceived Saddam’s assurance that he had no intention of invading Kuwait but was
merely seeking to exert some pressure. However, in the weeks before the invasion the
US national security establishment received intelligence suggesting that something
serious was underway.

On the early morning of August 2 1990 intelligence photos

26 The Gulf War. Invasion, BBC Television, 1995
27 The Gulf War: Invasion, BBC Television, 1995245

were received which showed the Iraqi tank encampments empty: the tracks were going
south in the direction of Kuwait. The Iraqi invasion of the Emirate had begun.

Iraqi control of Kuwait was quickly established, the Emir eluding capture with minutes
to spare. Iraq now controlled one fifth of world oil reserves which was deemed a threat
to US vital interests: ‘the notion of Iraq, which was an oil powerhouse in itself acquiring
the Kuwaiti resources and then perhaps being able to dominate OPEC was a tremendous
danger.’28 A move towards the Saudi border seemed to indicate the possibility of a bid
to seize the eastern oil fields of al-Hasa province which would have increased the Iraqi
control to 2/5 of world oil.

This was the first post-Cold War crisis, a test of the New World Order which President
Bush had declared. Initially, American policy makers discussing what the appropriate
response to the invasion was considered whether the US ‘could live with the Iraqi
occupation.’ After this period of deliberation and emboldened by Margaret Thatcher’sadvice President Bush declared that this ‘aggression will not stand.’ Operation Desert
Shield swung into action. The Americans elicited support both diplomatic and military.
In the UN, with the Russians willing to cooperate with the US, a resolution condemning
the Iraqi occupation was passed without serious opposition. Only Jordan and thePalestinians supported Iraq. Of vital importance for the success of the military
operation was the willingness of Saudi Arabia to support US efforts against Iraq byproviding access to Saudi bases.

28 General Brent Scowcroft, US National Security Adviser at the time. ‘The Gulf War:
Invasion’, BBC Television, 1995.
246

Operation Desert Shield involved the dispatch of a vast amount of military supplies andtroops from 33 countries in all, but principally the United States. Saddam Hussein wasgiven a deadline to withdraw from Kuwait and Iraqi assets were frozen and sanctions
installed. After the failure of negotiations the 15 January deadline passed and themilitary operation moved into Desert Storm. The first part was the extensive bombingof Iraqi air defences, communications and military installations and subsequently Iraqi
troops. Following diversionary tactics a surprise land assault from the western desert
which swept round towards the Euphrates to cut off the Iraqi troops in Kuwait. The
retreating Iraqi army was caught in a ‘turkey shoot’ on the road to Baghdad.

Sanctions and Dual Containment

Following the expulsion of the Iraqis the UN maintained the programme of sanctions
which were to stay in place until the destruction of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons ofmass destruction had been supervised; an unofficial goal seemed to be the end of
Hussein’s regime. This was in the context of a US policy of dual containment whichsought to isolate both Iraq and Iran internationally, fully implement sanctions against
Iraq in the belief that it would lead to the fall of the regime there, and to pressure Iran tochange its foreign and domestic behaviour.29 In the aftermath of the Kuwait War US
power was untrammelled. The United States had demonstrated that only it could defend
the oil monarchies; ideas of Gulf self defence or European leadership were illusions.
The US concluded defence agreements with five of the six GCC states and an extensive
informal defence cooperation with Saudi Arabia (Dunn 1996). In 1995 the US 5th Fleet247

was established with its headquarters in Bahrain from where periodical bouts o f ‘sabre
rattling’ with Saddam took place as the Iraqi leader sought to test the limits of his
freedom of manoeuvre and to exploit strains in the coalition.

For the citizenry of the GCC the invasion of Kuwait highlighted the fact that despite thespending of billions of dollars on arms the Gulf monarchies still required American
troops to defend them (Gause 1994: 89). A further impact of the Kuwait War was
renewed domestic demands in the Gulf states for political liberalisation; these states,caught in the intense international media spotlight were the subject of Western media
calls for democratisation. The Omani experience of this phenomenon is examined in
the final part of this chapter. The role of Western strategic interests in Oman in these
operations is the focus of the next section.

6.2.2: Western strategic involvement in Oman since 1990

In this section we consider British and American use of facilities in Oman during the
Kuwait crisis and subsequent use.

British and American use of Omani facilities during the Kuwait crisis

Oman played an essential role for the coalition forces during Operations Desert Shieldand Storm and the improvements which had been carried out during the 1980s proved
their worth. Although little information has been made public Joseph Kechichian

29 The dual containment policy was set out by Martin Indyk, senior director for the Near
East and South East Asia on the National Security Council, to the Washington Institute248comments that senior US officials have verified the vital link that Oman provided at an
early stage of Operation Desert Shield before supplies could be flown from the US(Kechichian 1995: 157). The US Airforce in particular benefited from the use of pre­positioned supplies at Thumrait which saved the US the equivalent of 1,800 C-141
airlift sorties, thus increasing the quickness of the US build up during Operation Desert
Shield (Cordesman 1997: 204). Furthermore, Oman gave political support to the effort
against Iraq. In August 1990 Oman initiated a resolution at the Cairo League of ArabStates meeting, condemning the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. At the same time, the Omani
foreign minister travelled to New York and Washington to discuss the effectiveness of
the UN sponsored international coalition force against Baghdad. Despite this major
preoccupation and at a time when it was difficult to anticipate what political outcomesmight result from a defeated Saddam Hussein, Oman and the United States were also
involved in the renewal of the ten year old “Facilities Access Agreement”. Negotiations
resulted in a new agreement extending US access after December 1990; a side letter on
excess defence articles was appended to the accord subject to bilateral militaryarrangements (Kechichian 1995: 157).

Between December 1990 and February 1991, Oman participated in Operations Desert
Shield and Storm by deploying troops to Saudi Arabia, granting US access to its air andseaport facilities, and authorizing a drawdown of pre-positioned equipment to support
US forces in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During the opening stages of this conflict
Omani troops were the only GCC force able to communicate effectively with Western
•

*

•

•

forces due to similarities in equipment and procedures according to Omani officials.

for Near East Policy on May 18 1993 (Gause 1994: 190).
30 Gulf States Newsletter, No. 503, January 1995.
249

30

US air transport planes came into Sib at the rate of one an hour.31 A much publicised
practice amphibious landing in Oman was relayed to the world on CNN and served as a
bluff to Saddam Hussein who expected a seaboume assault on his positions in Kuwait
rather than the sweep in from the western desert.

Kechichian argues that ‘simply

stated, the West in general and in the United States in particular could not haveachieved their success in the liberation of Kuwait were it not for the pre-positioned
equipment in Oman’(Kechichian 1995: 158). This was personally acknowledged byGeneral Norman Schwarzkopf when he visited Muscat in March 1991; he emphasizedMuscat’s support during the early stages of the conflict before major US reinforcements
could arrive in theatre.

British forces also used the Omani facilities in their part of Operation Desert Storm:
Operation Granby. Britain benefited from its long-standing links and good military
relations with the sultanate’s forces. As with the plans for dispersal of nuclear bombersin the 1960s Omani bases enabled Britain to achieve its strategic goals. The following
extract illustrates the way in which Omani bases facilitated training and reconnaissancein the deployment following the invasion of Kuwait.

The Jaguar wing led by Wing Cdr Jerry Connolly and its attendant fleet oftransports left Coltishall early on 11 August. After a stopover in Cyprus they
proceeded to the Gulf then flew south to Oman - landing at the desert airfield ofThumrait, 40 miles inland of the coastal town of Salalah.
There were good reasons for this move so far south as 6 Squadron,Jaguar Pilot Fit Lt Dick McCormac explains: “The Omani air force had Jaguars
as well, we did training missions with them and they were pretty good to us

31 Author’s conversation with an expatriate working in the Omani government at thetime. Muscat, March 1995.
32 In Oman 15,000 US marines practised three amphibious landings with 18 US landing
vessels and 90 fixed wing jets (The Independent, 29.10.91).
250

down there. It was of mutual benefit. They used to simulate air threats against
us, bouncing us on training missions.”
Also sent to Thumrait was one of four teams despatched from the Mobile
Servicing Section, based at Brize North, whose job it was to refuel aircraft.
“Because we’re a mobile section my bags are packed the whole time” states
Sergeant Jim Carr. But we didn’t know where we were going til we landed .
The VC 10 Captain said ‘Welcome to Thumrait. the time is eight o’clock local
time - that was a shock to the system. The Americans were already there andwere very helpful in lending us ground refuelling equipment. The next day the
Hercs and VC 10s started pouring in. We had to refuel them at three different
locations, the four of us, working 18 hours on, having a short break, then back towork again.
(Charles Allen 1991:6-7)

By the third week of August Operation Granby was in full swing; all the machinery of
support command was generating the personnel, the equipment and the organisation
required to enable strike command to get a second wave of aircraft to the Gulf andbring a third wave to combat readiness. A Nimrod detachment had already been
dispatched to Oman to support the UN naval blockade on Iraq (Charles Allen 1991: 10).
The operation of the Nimrods in the area was already well established: an officer
involved comments ‘for the previous eight years we’d been sending Nimrods to Omanas part of a deployment known as the Magic Roundabout. Its primary role was to havea British presence there to support the Omanis’ (Charles Allen 1991: 26). For one
officer, Squadron Leader Sean McCourt, the operation revived memories of an earlier
attempt to counter an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait: ‘when I first joined as a young airman in1960 I was involved in a similar operation when British troops actually went into
Kuwait in Britannias and Comets. They went in and prevented an invasion by Iraq. So
I was only surprised that we didn’t get involved more quickly’ (Charles Allen 1991:
26). In the aftermath of the war access to bases in Oman remained an importantWestern strategic interest to enforce the policy of dual containment.

251Western military involvement with Oman since the Kuwait War

Oman renewed its Access Agreement with the US in 1995 and retained its importanceto US military policy in the region; some 20% of US pre-positioned supplies in the Gulf
are in Oman - mainly at Masirah, Sib and Thumrait. US ships regularly resupply in
Oman and the US has an electronic surveillance centre in Oman which plays animportant role in monitoring Iran. The US and Britain have a joint venture contract forsome of the facilities in Masirah (Cordesman 1997: 204). Oman also continued to work
closely with Britain; there are roughly 500 British officers and NCOs seconded orcontracted to the Omani forces. British officers play a major role in training the army,and some 80 British officers are seconded to the Omani air force. The crew training for
Oman’s new Muheet-class frigates is carried out by the Royal Navy’s Flag Officer Sea
Training. British SAS personnel have trained the Omani anti-terrorist and assist in
surveillance of the border with Yemen. British forces also make frequent use of Omani
facilities, have an intelligence post near Muscat, and use the Omani base at Goat Islandin the Strait of Hormuz and a new intelligence post at Qabl in the Musandam Peninsula
for a variety of functions (Cordesman 1997: 205). During the 1994 Yemen civil war,
Oman and British military intelligence benefited from the close ties between the two
establishments.33 Despite the ostensible ‘Omanisation’ some 65 British officers,
including a General-Major, Jeremy Phipps, continue to serve on official secondment. In
addition Sultan Qabus continues to rely on a small group of British advisers. These
include RAF Air Marshall Sir Erik Bennett, Timothy Landon listed as a counsellor at
the Omani embassy in London and Timothy Ashworth still reported to be controlling
censorship in the Sultanate (Jones and Stone 1997: 10). France signed two military252

cooperation agreements with Oman in 1989, and now trains part of the Omani Navy.
Oman conducts joint exercises with British, French, and US forces. The joint Kunjar
Hadd Exercise - held in April, 1995 - was part of an annual series of exercises involving
Omani, British, French and US units. Oman regularly holds smaller exercises with
British and US forces (Cordesman 1997: 205).

The political significance of Oman’s pro-Western security posture

The use of Omani bases and Oman’s pro-Western attitude during and after the Kuwait
War had considerable political significance in a process that has occurred in all the
GCC states:

In the aftermath of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, political unrest, much of it
based upon a broad Islamic agenda, has surfaced in most of the Gulf state andSaudi Arabia and Bahrain in particular. The underlying causes of this tension
are complex, but nonetheless have their roots in a wider socio-economic malaisethat has accompanied the steady decline in oil revenues since the mid-1980s, andchallenged the consensual base behind that social contract peculiar to the
Arabian Gulf - the rentier state. Such dissent had been compounded by the factthat ultimately, the Gulf states continue to remain dependent upon the West for
their security, primarily in the field of weapons procurement and training.
(Jones and Stone 1997:11)

We now examine the developments in Oman which were part of this wider process.

33 Gulf States Newsletter, No. 503, January 1995.
253

6.2.3: Oman since 1990

In this section we examine the impact of the Kuwait War and its aftermath on Oman. In
foreign policy terms to what extent has Oman been able to maintain its independent
foreign policy positions which have often isolated it within the Arab world and the
GCC? In the domestic arena the key features that emerged from the Kuwait War was
the pressure in the Gulf to ‘democratise’ in some form - the nature of Omani
constitutional development is analysed and the response of Islamist movements
discussed. A further concern is to identify the impact of the form of development thathas taken place in Oman in the last three decades. Is it sustainable both in human andnatural resource terms and what are the challenges of the approaching post-oil era for
Oman?

Oman and its foreign policy: an independent actor

In the aftermath of the War for Kuwait, Qabus chaired the GCC Higher Committee on
Security that sought to investigate what kind of security arrangement might be adopted
for the region but his efforts came to naught. His proposal to create a 100,000 man
GCC army, which could become a first shield against potential aggressors, remained incommittee. Qabus concluded that a lot more must be done to change preconceived
security notions among senior GCC leaders. Disappointed, Qabus instructed his
negotiators to move ahead with Western powers, including the United States, inplanning future contingencies. Still, he instructed them to insist on being treatedequally regardless of existing problems, to maintain a degree of pragmatism andcontinuity in the Sultanate’s foreign policy. Muscat signed a Facilities Access254

Agreement with Washington in 1980 because of its perceived long term interest eventhough this was unpopular in the Arab world. Then as now, it strove to delineate
intrinsic interest and to persuade Washington to stand by its allies (Kechichian 1995:
158). These independent foreign policy positions were backed up by a continued highlevel of expenditure on military hardware. Oman imported a total of $180 million
worth of arms during 1992-1994, $20 million coming from the US, $150 million fromthe UK. Since the Kuwait War Oman has signed a total of $600 million worth of newagreements during 1991-1994, all with major West European countries. In the same
period a total of $300 million worth of major new arms deliveries took place(Cordesman 1997: 172). Such arms expenditure was proving to be a real burden to
Oman’s economy to make many analysts, including the World Bank to question
whether it is sustainable. This issue will be considered after we examine the impact of
the Kuwait War on Oman’s political development.

The impact of the Kuwait W ar on political development in Oman

In the wake of the Kuwait War leaders of Arab regimes were alarmed by renewed
domestic demands for liberalisation which were reinforced by Western media calls for
democratisation, particularly with regard to the Gulf states. Claiming the exigencies ofnational security, states were able to resist these pressures in the immediate aftermathof the war. Subsequently some states developed some institutions of ‘consultation’
without yielding any significant power; advisory councils were created or expanded in
the UAE and elections for the National Assembly in Kuwait were held in October 1992
(Faour 1993). In Oman Sultan Qabus announced the Oman Consultative Council: theUS was the only global power that was able to play the role of powerful external ally255and with the US presence in the Gulf there was an indirect pressure to democratize (alHaj 1996: 571).

1991: Omani Consultative Council - Majlis al-ShuraAs we have seen in chapter five the Sultan’s regime was subject to intense military andideological pressure during the Dhofar rebellion of the early 1970s. With the defeat of
the rebellion, overt political opposition all but disappeared. The regime has encouraged
an apolitical ethos since that time, built on commitment to economic and infrastructuraldevelopment under the leadership of the Sultan and a self-consciously technocratic
governing elite (al-Haj 1996: 560). The outcome was a political situation that was either
tranquil or dull depending on one’s perspective. It was therefore a surprise when the
Sultan announced the Consultative Council - there was no great public demand similar
to public petitions in Saudi, Bahrain and Qatar - this was a political initiative from the
top of the political system. It was explained by Sultan Qabus and other government
sources as the natural evolution of the State Consultative Council experiment, unrelated
to the regional ferment set off by the Gulf crisis. Perhaps the timing of theannouncement was affected by the crisis, but it appears that the changes had been in the
Sultan’s mind for some time (Gause 1994: 113). Gause sees two aspects as worth
noting; firstly, the selection process was innovative and, secondly, it enjoyed greater
powers than its predecessor - ministers can be questioned in the fields of health,education, housing - but not defence or foreign affairs.

256Social composition of the Omani Consultative Council

The names of the OCC members indicate that they come from prominent tribes, theurban notability, the business community including traditional and new merchantfamilies, and from the emerging educated elite whose members come from poorer
families with tribal or merchant backgrounds. Tribal identification played an importantpart in the nominations for members to this council (Crystal 1996: 269). The merchantfamilies of Oman, as well as those of other GCC states, have always been in alliancewith the ruling families because of shared mutual interests. Thus, while the Sultan has
needed the merchant families in the past to provide him with financial resources to run
the state, the latter have sought the Sultan’s help to ensure their security and protection(al-Haj 1996: 564). Crystal argues that oil merchants have in effect, *renounce[ed] their
historical claim to participate in decision-making. In exchange, the rulers guaranteed
them a large share of oil revenues. Where economic elites once entered politics toprotect their economic interests, after oil, merchants left the realm of formal politics topreserve those interests’ (Crystal 1990:1). For Al-Haj the OCC has proved to be astabilising institution because it has provided an element of increased politicalparticipation in line with the Ibadhi tradition of shura. He feels it is possible that Sultan
Qabus will expand the council’s authority in the future and that political participation
will increase rapidly in the coming decade.he OCC has proven to be a stabilizing
institution in the country because it has combined elements of increased politicalparticipation within an Islamic framework that is in congruence with Ibadhi tradition. It
is quite conceivable that Sultan Qabus may expand its authority in the coming years,
and that political participation will increase rapidly in the coming decade (al-Haj 511).

257

However, other groups in Omani society were plotting to increase their participation
without waiting for it to be handed to them by the Sultan. His postponement of this‘stage’ is comparable to Sa’id bin Taimur’s remarks that his people were not ready foreconomic development yet.

The arrest of dissidents in 1994

In August 1994, in an unusual press release, the Omani government announced that the
security services had uncovered a secret organisation that was using Islam to cause civil
unrest and national disunity in the county. The organisation was said to have more than
200 members, all of whom had been arrested by the authorities for questioning in May
1994. Members of this organisation included the former Omani ambassador to theUnited States (Riphenburg 1998: 107). Al-Omania, the official news agency o f Oman,emphasised that the organisation had external connections, both financial andorganisational and government sources mentioned that the detainees were politicalactivists belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. Those sources added that theindividuals arrested were members of a highly sophisticated and secret Islamicorganisation which had attempted to overthrow the regime in Oman and put an end to
its new representation experience. Furthermore rumours suggested that the detainees
had weapons and communication devices and that they were linked to foreign agencies(al-Haj 1995: 566).

The government played up the Islamist nature of the plot, according to unofficial
sources consulted by the G ulf States Newsletter. In fact, the 40 to 50 hard core of the258roughly 250 plotters were mainly concerned about questions of nepotism andcorruption. In particular, there was anger that the traditional distinction between
politics and business was breaking down. Merchants who were losing out believed thatcertain ministers were abusing their positions of power and enriching themselves.34 The
strengthening of the Omani autocracy had been evident for a while. Although theelections to the OCC gave it a democratic veneer, at least in comparison to theappointed majales in other GCC states, the institution was no more than a sounding
board for the government although at first it was also a forum for the expression ofnation-wide administrative grievances. Ministers who were publicly humiliated on
television subsequently denied the council information, imposing tight restrictions onaccess and thereby rendering the Council. In the same way the annual meet-the-people
tour was initially a useful way of identifying local failings of the administrative
bureaucracy. However, powerful senior ministers who did not like to be admonished in
front of the Sultan have since made this event a stage-managed event with carefully
screened participants powerless.

IS

None of these processes however provide a communication channel on controversial
issues to the powers that be. In the Omani political system power is centralised anddecisions forever pushed upwards. The final decision on most matters always rests with
the Sultan. Furthermore, he seemed unable to curb the ambitions of some of his
ministers: the Economist reported that some ministers originating from Dhofar had, forevery government office, created duplicate staff in Dhofar.36 Since the top leadership is
protected from serious protest by an effective and pervasive internal security apparatus,

34 Gulf States Newsletter, No. 503, 30.1.95
35 Oman: Where’s Our Sultan, The Economist, 9.8.97, p.48.

259

there remains little opportunity for popular expression of dissent or disagreement.37 The
next initiative from the top of the Omani political system came in 1996.

Oman: A Hereditary Sultanate

In November 1996 during his ‘meet-the-people tour’ Sultan Qabus announced a new
constitution for Oman, the Basic Law. As with the State Consultative Council no
information on this new constitution had been released during its period of planning(Siegfried 1998: 62). Sultan Qabus promulgated the state’s first written constitution
describing the system of government as a ‘Hereditary Sultanate’. The constitution
stipulates the establishment of a supreme judiciary council and forming an institution
called the ‘Council of Oman’ which is made up of the Consultative Council and theCouncil of State which will be formed soon. The constitution allows the creation of‘organisations on patriotic grounds’ but not political parties and bans ‘military or secretgroups or those which have activities hostile’ to the government.38

Siegfried (1998) points out that the term nizam asasi is used rather than dustur which
has connotations of the European dominated constitutional arrangements which had
been introduced in the Middle East. The nation (watan) is strongly stressed and Qabus
as an embodiment of this national unity is used as an explicit symbol. There is noreference to God or the people as holder of this sovereignty - the Sultan is sovereign
independently (Siegfried 1998: 84). The power of the Sultan is described in detail in
Article 42. He alone is responsible for the integrity of Oman, its internal and external

36 Oman: Where’s Our Sultan, The Economist, 9.8.97, p.48.
37 Gulf States Newsletter, No. 503, 30.1.95.

260

security, and the rights and freedoms of its citizens. Article 42 allows him to take any
powers necessary for the defence of these values (Siegfried 1998: 75). Nicholas
Siegfried concludes that with regard to the participation of the population the decree is
not innovative and further inclusion is not enhanced by the constitution. Qabus has
merely confirmed his politics up to now - that of an enlightened despot (Siegfried 1998:
86). In many respects the document has an ideological function. It seeks to create theidea that the Sultan is the embodiment of the Omani nation and unity when in fact thesense of Omani identity is based on factors other than the existence of the present rulingdynasty.

With regards to the issue of succession Article 5 says that the successor must be a maledescendant of Sayyid Turki bin Sa’id bin Sultan and “a Muslim, judicious, of soundmind and legitimate son of Omani Muslim parents.” Article 6 rules that ‘‘the Ruling
Family Council shall within three days of the throne falling vacant, determine thesuccessor to the throne.” If the Council is undecided, “the Defence Council shallconfirm the appointment of the person designated by the Sultan in his letter to the
Ruling Family Council.” Possible successors include Sayyid Fahd bin Mahmud, deputy
prime minister for cabinet affairs, and three sons of Tariq bin Taimur, Sultan Qabus’s
deceased uncle (O’Reilly 1998: 83). Whoever the successor is they will confront in the
not-so-distant future the problem of how to sustain Oman’s development.

38 Qatar News Agency. Accessed via the internet http://www.ips.org.QNA/Oman
261

Development in Oman: is it sustainable?

How sustainable is the development which has taken place in Oman since 1970?
Serious problems are the dependence of the economy on oil and gas, lack of investment,
depletion of water resources and the approaching exhaustion of oil reserves.

The issue of diversification

The Omani government is conscious of Oman’s dependence on oil and gas and plans todiversify the economy as part of it s 1996-2000 development plan. The government
plans to reduce the oil sector’s share of the GDP from 35% to 32% during 1995-2000.
It also plans to cut the share of government spending of the GDP from 23% to 11%,
while it raises the share of commodity production from 12% to 16% and of otherservices from 40% to 42%. Cordesman (1997) believes that these plans are credible inbroad terms but that on closer scrutiny there are obvious problems. At present, Oman’s
non-oil sector is heavily oriented towards services - only some of which contribute todevelopment and true economic growth. Agriculture and fishing have declined inimportance in recent years to only about 3.3% of the GDP, and little progress is reallyplanned to increase the share of mining - which is only 0.26% of the GDP.
Manufacturing is only about 5% of the GDP. The service sector accounted for 54% of
the GDP in 1995 and Oman’s current plans indicate that it will still be 53% in 2000.
Government services accounted for 13% of the GDP in 1995 and will still be 11% in
2000. The Government sector has grown in recent years despite budget deficits andOmani sources indicate that the government sector grew from 16% if GDP to 19% in1993 (Cordesman 1997: 159).

262

The 1994 World Bank Report on Oman

In January and February 1993 a world bank team of five researchers produced Oman:
Sustainable Growth and Economic Diversification, a 224 page report on the financial
policies being pursued by Oman. This report was made public in May 1994 andsummarised in an article in November 1994 in the Financial Times39 The Financial
Times highlighted the World Bank’s view that the financial policies being pursued by
Oman were not sustainable. It noted that many of Oman’s underlying structural
weaknesses are shared by its neighbours and partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
However Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE hold 40 per cent of the world’s known oil
reserves and are not faced with the same immediate and critical choices as Oman,
thanks to their larger ‘cushion’ of capital derived from their far greater oil reserves.
Because all six share the same type of hereditary and autocratic monarchical systems,
instability in one, Oman for example, could easily spread to one or more of the others.
The bank was particularly severe on the scale of Oman’s repeated budget deficits,
current expenditure trends and the decline in investment, all of which feature sometimes to a chronic extent - in the other five GCC countries. If these and otherproblems are not corrected, and the reforms proposed ignored, Oman is heading for a‘major economic and social upheaval’ as the oil and gas era comes to an end andOmanis are ‘forced to give up accustomed standards of consumption.’

39 See Robin Allen, ‘Oman warned: cut spending or face economic upheavals’,
Financial Times 7.11.94.
263

The report amounted to an indictment of the Omani government’s management of theeconomy, particularly in the ten years prior to the report when many key ministers had
held the same jobs. The bank’s analysis also represented a comprehensive rebuke toofficials at all levels who had developed the ‘plausible and positive platitude’ almost toa fine art form, even when confronted with unpleasant realities. The bank commented:‘Oman’s oil and gas wealth, being depletable, is analogous to a large
inheritance...Oman, like most neighbouring oil and gas producers, is currently spending
an excessive proportion of the proceeds of extraction on current consumption. In otherwords it is consuming its capital at a rapid rate.’

The World Bank report catalogued serious problems in the Omani economy. They
included a persistent top-heavy government role in the economy and state budgets over­stretched by bloated government expenditures, notably on defence and internal security(among the highest in the world with an average 33 per cent of budget expenditure forthe last 14 years and now 23 per cent of GDP) and civil service salaries.40 There was no
consistent foreign and domestic investment strategy for when oil reserves taper off. The
real exchange rate was overvalued in relation to what would be consistent with higher(and more desirable) national savings rates. Efforts to diversify into manufacturing andother non-oil industries were failing because of current public expenditure/savings
policies. The state’s reserves and contingency funds were being misused and there was
no appropriate tax structure and realistic charges for public services.

40 For details on the development of the economic liberalization process in Oman see
Nonneman (1993).
264

Furthermore, the Omani government held ill-conceived notions about the role and costof expatriate labour and consequently distorted the market when it sought to employ
Omani nationals at uneconomic rates. The Bank perceived there was a failure to alert
Omanis to the reality of the country’s fiscal position, to the inadequate rate of saving
and to their own unrealistic consumption and employment expectations. This was
combined with bureaucratic inertia and lack of financial discipline by ministers overtheir own budget allocations. Other problems identified were out-of-date andcumbersome legal frameworks, lack of a self sustaining private sector and an
investment framework to attract foreign capital, and lack of a role for private banks in
medium and long term financing. There was a need for more entrepreneurial,
competitive and less ‘rent seeking’ (cash income for no effort and minimal risk)
attitudes among Omani nationals.

The growing incidence of some of these structural economic weaknesses and theconcomitant political risks which the government of Oman was courting by ignoringthem was demonstrated by the protests which led to the arrests of Islamic activists in
1994. Although oil prices have recovered from the lows of 1986 and 1988, they haveremained apart from a brief period during the Kuwait War below $18 a barrel. The
World Bank Report stated that: ‘Even now, the Omani government has made only apartial expenditure adjustment to the stagnation in its oil revenues. In consequence, its
financial position has deteriorated and continues to do so.’ This the report said wasapparent in an almost unbroken string of deficits since 1981 (an annual average deficitof $871 or 23.4 per cent annually over budget revenue during the 11 year period);
declining contributions to the State General Reserve Fund (SGRF); a substantial rise inexternal debt; increased recourse to borrowing from the domestic private sector; and a265massive recent accumulation of negative changes in the governments accounts and thevirtual disappearance of net government financial reserves. The deficits have been the
result of an exceptionally high level of defence and national security expenditures,
coupled with continued strong growth in civil recurrent expenditures. The use of the
SGRF as an oil revenue stabilisation fund has pre-empted its potential as a vehicle forlong term public savings and investment. One of the report’s key recommendations wasthat Oman make major cuts in its military spending to compensate for the loss of oilrevenues (Cordesman 1997: 168).

The article in the Financial Times caused considerable irritation to Omani officials.
They accused the newspaper of focusing on the bank’s criticisms of the Sultanate whilst
ignoring the more positive aspects. The Omani government reacted swiftly to thecriticism. Oman’s Minister of State for development planning, Muhammed bin Mousa
al-Yosef, said ‘We have already initiated a strategy of action which is based on public
sector deficit reduction.’ World Bank officials responded by assuring the Omani
government that they thought the article ignored the progress the Sultanate’s
government had already made, reiterating the fact that the report had beencommissioned by the government itself. Although the original Financial Times article
was censored in Oman, the rebuttal was widely reported in the Sultanate’s newspapers.
Privately many Omani businessmen were pleased that the report was discussed so
publicly. Despite the World Bank’s reassurances to the government, the report raisedsome sensitive issues which had not been raised before in such a public manner. They
pointed out that for some years Omani businessmen had complained about monopolies
enjoyed by government ministers, excessive bureaucracy and government interference266

in business. Many hoped it would spur the government into taking rapid corrective
measures.41

A few weeks after the Financial Times report, Muhammed bin Mousa al-Yousef,
speaking at an investment conference in Muscat, gave a brief preview of the next five
year plan, which covers the period from 1996 to 2000. He said that the plan would
concentrate on creating a macro-economic framework and development policies which
would act as an incentive for the private sector to take the lead in development anddiversification. The Gulf Stales Newsletter commented: ‘the government is making
significant steps to come to grips with its structural deficit but whether it will really beable to cut into the fat remains to be seen. At the same time, the country faces problems
with motivating its people to switch from their cushy government jobs into the harshprivate sector’ 42 There were other problems which the Omani government sought toaddress, such as the lack of investment in Oman and depletion of the water and oil
reserves.

The problem of investment

In a speech in 1995 Sultan Qabus sought to encourage Omanis to invest in Oman.
During his speech he said that ‘only 6% of the capital available in the Arab world... isinvested in their countries...and the rest is abroad.’ This, he said, was very
unsatisfactory and he commented that he would like to see Omanis investing
considerably more in Oman. This is necessary because Japan, the world’s largest

41 Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Oman, 1st quarter, 1995, p. 12-13.
42 Gulf States Newsletter, No. 502, 16.1.95.
267

creditor nation, has been reluctant to invest substantially in Oman. In late 1994 a large
Omani delegation visited Japan to try to promote investment in the GCC. The chairmanof the Omani Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Sheikh Yaqoub bin Hamed alHarthy disclosed in an interview with the UAE newspaper al-Khaleej that the Japanese
had said during the talks that they were worried about investing in Middle East
countries because they lacked cheap and qualified labour, and had limited markets. He
said that he was not hopeful that significant Japanese investment would be attracted to
the Gulf.43

The political stability of Oman, as in any other country, is a factor in the decisions ofbanks to invest. An insight into the concerns of Japanese banks when considering an
investment in Oman is found in a request for a political risk analysis in January 1994
from the Industrial Bank of Japan to the International Institute for Strategic Studies,
London.44 This requested a risk assessment with responses to the following fourquestions.

(1) Would it be right to assume that the Sultan will have no natural heir? Whatwould be the succession process: who are the likely candidates; what is theprospect thereby for a stable policy-making and outlook?
(2) What is the state of the border disputes with Yemen and UAE (any others?)?
Are the resolutions for peace liable to be lasting?
(3) Are there opposition forces lurking at all in the country, perhaps in the formof tribal rivalries? Again, what are the underlying prospects?
(4) Which country/ies have most influence on Oman, commercially andpolitically, and how might the picture change?

43 Economist Intelligence Unit, Oman, 2nd Quarter, 1995, p. 10-11.
44 See Appendix J.
268This gives an indication of the Japanese bank’s perception of possible causes of politicalinstability; if they feel that the risk is too high it would sway them against an investment
decision. This, according to a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department, hasalso been a factor in US companies not being so keen to invest after Iran. In contrast
British companies were not so afraid with their greater experience of the region.45

Future Developments in Oman

In the future the Omani regime will face the reduction in a number of natural resources
such as oil and water which will bring a political challenge. Oman, traditionally had thegreatest water resources and hence agricultural potential of the Arab Gulf states; thepresent Omani generation has grown up in the era of oil revenues. As Riphenburg puts
it: ‘the major political issue confronting the regime is how to deal with the politics ofrising expectations in a climate of diminishing resources’ (1998: 2).

Water and ‘geo-constants’ in Oman

If the Omani government was thinking ahead on how to reduce the state sector it also
faced a problem in its development policies with regard to a natural resource which will
increasingly be the most important in the Middle East: water. The depletion of aquifers
means the loss of a resource which, in the next century, will be a more contested
resource in the Middle East than oil according to some analysts (Bulloch and Darwish1993). The depletion of Oman’s water resources is a major problem. Oman has only
about 0.43 cubic kilometres of internal renewable water resource, which is low, and45 Conversation at the London School of Economics, 13.12.95.
269

which amounts to about 1333 cubic meters per person. Even though Oman receives
rain from the Indian Ocean monsoons, some 70% of its annual rainfall of 100mm
evaporates without affecting the soil. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Oman has
begun to deplete the water resources from its wells in the Batinah Plain, its most fertile
region, and may be depleting the water resources of the Salalah Plain. Oman has used
its fossil water by over pumping its aquifers. Oman has tried to solve this water
problem with retention dams that will force the water into the soil, and by repairing the1000 year old system of underground aqueducts that once provided water in Oman’sinterior. Desalination is too expensive to be a solution to meeting anything other thancivil and urgent industrial needs and Oman currently allocates nearly 94% of its natural
water on agriculture versus 3% for domestic needs and 3% for industry (Cordesman
1997: 163).

Furthermore, Oman’s rapid increase in population is causing its natural water resources
per capita to drop sharply.46 The World Resources Institute and World Bank estimatethat Omani natural per capita water resources fell from 4000 cubic meters in 1960 to
1,333 cubic meters in 1990 and will drop to 421 cubic meters in 2025. Consequently,
Omani water policy is a problem that needs more government attention. Unless Oman
receives outside development aid to help it with water, it will become increasingly
dependent on food imports and may find it steadily more difficult to create jobs
(Cordesman 1997: 163). Such problems stress the continuing importance of what
Bowen-Jones (1987) terms geographical constants or geo-constants as constraints on
Oman’s development, of which the characteristics of groundwater is one. In contrast to270the view that holds that while, such constants may have operated in the past, they are nolonger so important today he argues that ‘the relationships between man and somefundamental geo-constants, it is true, may not be as simple or as direct today as once
they were, but they do exist and are ignored at our peril’ (Bowen-Jones 1987: 119). The
depletion of groundwater resources are not the only resource facing depletion: theresource on which all Omani development has been based is also running out - o il47

Towards the end of the oil era in Oman

The cessation of oil production in Oman is forecast for 2010 - now just over a decadeaway. This will break up the unstated compact between rulers and merchants in Oman
in which the merchants withdrew from direct input into the decision-making process if
the rulers allowed the merchants to make money. The death of Qabus or his
incapacitation, which almost happened in the car crash in 1995 which killed Qais
Zawawi, could also throw Oman into turmoil. Political loyalty in Oman is very much to
Qabus personally rather than to A1 Bu Sa’id ruling family.48 Eickelman hascommented:

Younger Omanis acknowledged a pervasive governmental respect for Islam, but
perceive a de facto separation of religion and state despite a vigorous
programme of constructing new congregational mosques bearing the name of
the ruler throughout the country. Indeed, the Qabus mosque in Nizwa is built
on the site of the congregational mosque in which imams were formerly
46 The annual growth rate of the Omani population is 3.5% , with an average fertility
rate estimated at seven children per Omani woman. Both these statistics are amongst thehighest in the world. See Economist Intelligence Unit, Oman, 1st quarter 1994: 12.
47 For an account of the impact of oil on Oman, written by a member of the Omani
government, see al-Yousef, Oil and the transformation o f Oman, 1970-1995, (1995).
8 As late as 1984, Omanis continued to say ‘Before Qabus nothing’ (Riphenburg 1998:
52).
271

selected. The Sultan’s National Day speeches and others make only generalreferences to ‘our heritage’ (turathuna), not to the rich stock of Qur’anic
imagery that is a pervasive part of the political process elsewhere. Yet
government sensitivity to the potential influence of religion upon contemporary
politics is recognised. After the Grand Mosque siege uniformed police wereposted outside Nizwa’s congregational mosque leading one religious scholar tocomment ‘the government now knows so little of what we think in the interior
that they believe we want the Imamate restored’... At the level of the influence ofIslam upon national politics, there is a decided lack of enthusiasm for the
principle of monarchic rule, but support for Qabus as a moderate ruler.
(Eickelman 1986:46-47)

Thus the death of Qabus could lead to a new phase in state formation in Oman.
However, the Western attitude to Oman will remain the same. The West is not thatconcerned about Oman’s oil which is insignificant in comparison to the Saudis andKuwaitis whose reserves are still expected to last another 100 years. Therefore Oman’s
geostrategic importance would remain even after oil in Oman has been exhausted. In
the event of political instability following from the exhaustion of Omani oil reserves theWest will keep a close eye on developments and the status of its military and strategicinterests there. It is clear that the US and the British could not easily contemplate an
unfriendly government in Oman. Therefore, if domestic instability in Oman were to
threaten Western interests it is quite possible that a Western intervention of some kind
would seek to avert an anti-Western government from gaining and consolidating powerin Oman.

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Conclusions

Conclusions can now be drawn to the three central research questions posed at the
beginning of the study.

State formation in Oman since 1920: from informal empire to contemporary state

The first research question asked what have been the most significant factors in thehistorical process of state formation in Oman in the era of modem Middle East politics?
It is first possible to summarise the four periods of state formation since 1920 identified
in this study which constitute ‘Oman’s odyssey’.1 Located on the remote mountain
range of south-east Arabia a distinctive form of social organisation developed
optimising the sparse water resources available to it. Through the institution of the
Imamate this tribal society was able to achieve a periodic unity and benefit from theopportunities of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. Subsequently, these trading
polities situated on the coast, concentrated on the opportunities to accrue wealth andneglected the tribal politics of the interior, resulting in civil war and the frequentintervention of outside powers. This pattern of politics was disrupted by the impact of
capitalism through its agency of British imperialism whose foremost concern was
safeguarding the route to India. Starting in 1798 the sayyids of Muscat became
progressively enmeshed in the security sphere of the British Raj which had no intrinsic
interest in the Arabian peninsula, but was merely concerned to ensure that the coastline
remained secure from internal disruption or rival great power intrusion. This was based

1 This is the title of J.E. Peterson’s overview of political change in Oman: ‘Oman’s
Odessy: from Imamate to Sultanate’ in Pridham (ed) Oman (1987).
273

on strategic considerations which ultimately related to the very real importance of India
to the British economy. British imperialism played a decisive role in the nineteenth
century in disrupting the Omani maritime economy. In this process the coastal based
Sultanate’s sources of wealth were steadily eroded with the resulting internal weakeningof the Sultans’ position and corresponding financial and military dependence on the
Indian merchants and Government of India to repulse the attacks by the Imamate fromthe interior. These attacks culminated in the siege of Muscat and its defence by the
Indian Army 1913-1920.

In 1920 the Government of India in accordance with its policy of promoting security on
the Arabian littoral brokered the Treaty of Sib which led to a de facto separation of the
Imamate in the interior from the British-backed Sultanate on the coast. The
administration of the Sultanate was restructured by British officials in the hope that it
would become less reliant on the Government of India. In accordance with the‘traditional’ strategic interest of protecting the sea-routes to India there was only aconcern with peace and stability on the coast - there was no concern with the Arabian
Peninsula intrinsically. In the 1920s new strategic developments began to erode thisstrategic position: the arrival of the air age to Arabia and the first intrusions of the oil
era. The first of these did not challenge the traditional preoccupation with the coast the air routes all ran along the littoral. However, the second development did: the initial
oil prospecting of the 1920s foreshadowed the greater probes of the next decades.

The discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 heralded a new phase of the incorporation of the
Arabian Peninsula into the capitalist world market and its state system as it required thecreation of capitalist property rights where previously tribal rights had held sway. The

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oil companies required ‘sovereign’ rulers who held sovereignty in clearly defined areas.
This would allow the oil companies to sign legal agreements with the rulers granting
concessions to first prospect for and then extract oil resources. There were many
competing contenders who sought recognition as such ‘sovereign rulers’; the oilcompany was essentially ambivalent as to which ruler became ‘sovereign’. British
strategic interest required that the government sought to ensure that British oilcompanies be awarded these concessions. It was to be British strategic policy in the
Persian Gulf as a whole that mediated the eventual outcome of this process; the entire
position in the Gulf - most notably its access to Kuwaiti oil - was seen as depending on
continuing to back the rulers with which it had a relationship: relationships formed
during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Thus, in 1955 the Sultan of Oman’s
military forces, first created in the 1920s by Britain, were expanded with finance fromthe oil company and occupied the interior of Oman to effectively end the twentiethcentury Imamate and establish a unified Sultanate of Muscat and Oman as a sovereign
rentier state with Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur as its client ruler. This process took place in aparticular international context: regionally, of Anglo-American rivalry over oil insouth-east Arabia, but globally, in an emerging cooperative division of labour in theCold War conflict with the Soviet Union in which Britain progressively became themore junior partner as it retreated from empire.

In the period 1956 to 1977 British military involvement ensured that the ‘sovereignty’of the Sultanate was maintained against two principal challenges to unity: the Imamate
resurgence of 1957 and subsequent Jebel Akhdar conflict, and then the Dhofar
rebellion. Without external military intervention the unified Sultanate of Muscat andOman would have crumbled and, given the ideological climate of the time, been275

replaced by an Imamate of Oman and then a ‘Peoples Republic’, certainly in Dhofar andpossibly in the north, threatening the entire post colonial state system the British wereattempting to erect. Instead, the massive military intervention and the restructuring of
the Omani military were accompanied in both cases by British instigated‘development’. In the first case, after the Jebel Akhdar war the British sought topressure Sa’id into instituting various schemes for economic and social development.
In the second case, the British allowed Qabus to take power and take advantage of theopportunities for oil based ‘development’ which ultimately allowed the suppression of
the rebellion and British withdrawal in 1977. This marked the end of British ‘informal
empire.’ This represented the maturation of possibilities for an Omani rentier statecreated by the unification of the 1950s, in which the British had acted, in Bierschenk’s
phrase, as a ‘mid-wife’ (1989: 218).

The final stage examined was that of the contemporary state. Here Western strategic
involvement, American and British, was geared to planning for rapid deployment toprotect the vast oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from global, regional andinternal threats. The shift in Western strategic policy to an intrinsic interest in thepeninsula which had been heralded by the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 came tofulfilment in the Kuwait War 1990/91. In 1961 it was Britain whose speedy
intervention prevented any possible Iraqi designs on Kuwait; three decades later it wasan American led force which ejected the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein to preserve
Western access to oil. As in 1961 pre-positioned equipment and access to facilities in
the area played an important role in this military mobilisation. In Oman’s caseAmerican military commanders recognised the essential role the Sultanate of Oman had
played. In the aftermath of the Kuwait War the oil monarchies of the Arabian peninsula276

came under pressure for political change. In Oman this pressure was particularly acutein that the oil revenues which had been used to buy off traditional elite groups weredwindling: the cake from which all had eaten well, even if the shares of some werevastly unequal, was almost gone. Dissent against nepotism and corruption was
expressed in an Islamist plot in 1994. In this context the autocratic Sultan announced
first a consultative council in 1991 and then a new constitution - that of a ‘hereditarysultanate’ - the Basic Law of 1996. Whilst this gave Omanis some codified rights inrelation to the state bureaucracy it enshrined the Sultan as the embodiment of the Omani
nation. It could be argued that with the economic, political and environmental
challenges facing Oman that the fate of Royal Decree which established the Basic Law
will be comparable to the ‘constitutional’ document written in 1920: a stop gap measure
which served a limited purpose but was ultimately dispensed with as it became
dysfunctional within the state system of the capitalist world market. This would be too
economically deterministic. There is no inevitability about the disappearance ofmonarchy in the Middle East - it may survive or it may not - and if does survive inOman this decree could be the ‘constitution ‘of Oman for quite some time.

The key formative process in state formation in Oman has been the conflict between
imperialism - external domination or intervention in some form, and anti-imperialism the internal resistance of the repeated rebellions of the Omanis which took place in the1860s, 1920s, 1950s and then Dhofar in the 1960s and 1970s. No other Arab Gulf state
has such a record of rebellion to external domination or has been so formed by it. These‘external’ and ‘internal factors’ are thus two sides of the same coin rather than opposite
ends of a polarity. This study of state formation in Oman has sought to avoid the recordof much of the literature where there is either an explanatory stress on external factors -277‘imperialism’ - or internal factors - ‘Islam’. This tendency has either led to the writingof the history of the states of the Middle East as if they are ‘driftwood in the sea ofinternational affairs, their destinies shaped by the decisions of others’ (Yapp 1996: 3) oron the other hand a stress on the particularism of the Middle East in terms of Islam. A
further concern has been to avoid an analysis of state formation in Oman which starts
with the discovery of oil: the impact of oil has been set in the context of pre-existing
economic and social structures, specifically the forms of political organisation in Oman
which existed prior to European expansion and the result of their interaction withinformal imperial influence.

The historical narrative found in chapters two to five combines both a strategic
approach and a sociological approach based on Simon Bromley’s work Rethinking
Middle East Politics; these are two approaches usually not combined in the discipline ofInternational Relations. Historically this divergence stems from the contention of thedominant realist paradigm in International Relations that the foreign policy and strategic
relations of states could not be explained by reference to their societies - this would bea reductionist error. Rather the foreign policy actions of states were explained by the
position of that state within the anarchical international system.

One of the key figures in the development of this paradigm, Ken Waltz,2 maintains that
there has been no attempt to develop a theory which combines insights into both thedomestic and the international politics of states and the relationship between them; thisview is not shared by the present author. One candidate theory that has sought to2 See ‘Interview with Ken Waltz’, Fred Halliday and Justin Rosenberg, Review o f
International Studies, Vol.24, No.l, (July 1998).
278

explicate these connections has been the tradition of historical materialist thought
initially developed by Marx. In seeking to relate the development of British andAmerican strategic interests in the Gulf and Oman and how they relate to thedevelopment of a global capitalist economy and accompanying state system this thesis
is situated in that tradition. It is hoped that this study usefully develops the research
programme laid out by Bromley (1986: 187) in providing a case study of one particularsociety in the Middle East and its economic, political and strategic relationship with theWest as part of the expansion of the world capitalist system.

State formation and political development in the GCC states

The second research question asked what is it about state formation in Oman from acomparative perspective that makes Oman different from the other GCC states: Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates? It is first necessary to
identify the features of similarity in order to identify the differences that pertain to
Oman. In his comparative study of the GCC states Gause (1994) identifies a number ofsimilarities that apply to their formation to a greater or lesser extent. He notes that in all
the GCC countries, historically, the ruler had to negotiate and deal with rival claims for
power and influence from other members of the ruling family, important merchantfamilies and religious figures. The history of state formation in the GCC states is that ofthe process whereby the ruling families removed themselves from this position. Thiswas facilitated by two external factors: the role of external intervention, that of British
imperialism, and then by the possibilities of oil revenue which allowed thecentralisation of state power. British support was crucial to the establishment of theserulers even to Ibn Saud who benefited from British subsidies against his Ottoman-279

backed enemies the Rashidis. The growth of oil revenues after World War Two meantthat the state was able to bypass the shaikhs who had traditionally mediated between theruling families and the tribes. At the same time the state was able to provide thematerial security which the individual had previously sought in the tribe. Prior to oilrulers had favoured Arab or European expatriates to staff their governments, after oil
positions in the government became dominated by members of the ruling families. In
this process the ruling families became ruling classes.

Gause (1994: 43) notes that the most distinct aspect of the Arab Gulf monarchies is that
due to oil revenues the governments have access to enormous oil wealth without having
to tax their relatively small populations. The central question for these states has been
how to spend money not how to extract it. These states are, thus, rentier states in which
the government relies for most of its income on direct transfers from the international
economy in the form of oil revenues. A number of direct consequences result from this.
Firstly the governments are the dominant players in the local economies. Secondly
governments can provide a wide range of free services directly to citizens in the form of
free or heavily subsidised education or health. Thirdly governments can build up large
civilian and military apparatus which form the bases for patronage, in terms of jobs andcontracts. Fourthly the nature of the rentier economy has directly and indirectly
weakened the economic basis of groups that in the past were sources of political
opposition to the state - merchants, tribes and labour organisations. Fifthly, thisconcentration of revenues in the hands of the state has allowed the ruling families toconsolidate power and political positions in their hands to a far greater degree than inprevious generations (1994: 43). This has all been accompanied by a legitmization

280

formula based on symbolic ideological appeals to tribalism, Islam and the promotion ofheritage (turath) (see Gause 1994: 25-27).

A further similarity is that all these ‘oil monarchies’ are faced by the same challenge.
There is now a very different climate to the boom years of 1973 - the mid 1980s. A
changed political climate has followed from the reduced oil revenues after the pricecrash of the mid-1980s coupled with the challenges following the Kuwait War 19901991. The immediate response was to draw down on reserves rather than a tighteningof belts. Groups which had not pressed demands for political participation under theunofficial social contract of the rentier states began to press their demands for politicalparticipation (see Crystal 1997). At the same time the rulers faced the demands of theirruling families for positions in government at the same time as a ‘commoners’ werepressing their claim. A further breach of the rentier social contract was that somemembers of the ruling families seemed to be breaking the unwritten code not to infringeon the business interests which were the preserve of other social groups. Following the
Kuwait War 1990-91 all of the GCC states have moved towards some kind of politicalparticipation by developing institutions of ‘consultation’ which may or may not ease thepressures outlined.

State formation in an oil monarchy: the case of Oman

Set in this comparative perspective what makes Oman different in terms of its state
formation? A number of differences can be identified in political identity, oil resources
and population, the ruling family and the record of conflict in the process of state
formation in the modem era. First of all Oman is a very different country to the other281

Arab Gulf states. Like Yemen it has a history of autonomous political identity
stretching back 3000 years based on the solidarity of tribe combined with the solidarityo f ‘sect’, that is, Ibadhism, a form of the Kharijite branch of Islam (Ayubi 1995: 124).
This tradition is one of the subnational identities found in the Sultanate today. Having
the most diverse geography of the Arab Gulf states it is possible to talk about three
Omans in the contemporary Sultanate: the Batinah and Muscat, the interior, and Dhofar,each with their own culture. Each region keeps an eye on the allocation of oil resourcesand economic benefits accruing to it. To what extent can these three separate areas andother subnational identities be welded into the Omani unitary state and a coherent
political identity achieved? In this task Oman has not had access to the vast oil reservesof Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Like Bahrain and Dubai it has relatively small
and dwindling oil reserves, and yet Oman has a greater population than the Gulf
Emirates. In 1970 Qabus set himself the task of national unification under his
leadership and marked this with the declaration that henceforth the state would beknown as the Sultanate of Oman. This was reflected symbolically in the new Omani
flag in which the colour red of the sultanate is more pronounced than the white of the
Imamate (Riphenburg 1998: 57). It remains to be seen whether the unification of thediverse areas of the interior, coast and Dhofar in an ‘hereditary sultanate’ will survive
the demise of Qabus. Furthermore as oil was discovered in Oman comparatively late(oil exports started in 1967), the economic, social and political processes associatedwith a rentier economy which took place in Kuwait and Bahrain also took placecorrespondingly later.

There is a significant difference between the Omani state and the other GCC states atthe level of the ruling family. Firstly at the level of size. In Saudi Arabia the state is282

dominated by the Saudi family which including its collateral branches numbers 20,000
of whom 250 were direct descendants of the founder of the state Abdul al-Aziz. They
are all competing for jobs in government and the accompanying power and patronage.
Since 1964 the Sudayri clan - the seven sons of Abdul Aziz by a wife from theimportant Sudayri tribe - has been the leading force in the in the massive Saudi Royal
Family. They have managed the succession on the basis of seniority, with the successor
and second in line designated in advance by appointment as first and second deputy
prime minister (Yapp 1996: 357). A similar dominance of the institutions of the city
states gaining independence in 1961 (Kuwait) and 1971 was achieved by the al-Sabah of
Kuwait, the al-Khalifa of Bahrain and the al-Thani of Qatar. The federal system of the
UAE emerged out of the mutual suspicion of the ruling families of the sevenshaikhdoms held together by fear and the wealth of Abu Dhabi. Ra’s al-Khaima only
joined the union when it became apparent that its oil wealth was not as great as hoped.
Within the institutions created by the 1971 UAE constitution the supreme council ofrulers is dominant and a veto is possessed here by the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Abu Dhabi under Sheikh Zaid has generally sought to expand the power of the union
but has been opposed by Dubai particularly when Shaikh Rashid assumed the prime
ministership (Yapp 1996: 374).

The Al-Sa’id family of Oman, in contrast, is small. It numbers less than one hundred
male members; furthermore the provisions for succession outlined in the Basic Law of1996 restrict succession to the male descendants of Sayyid Turki bin Sa’id bin Sultan to
exclude collateral branches of the A1 Bu Sa’id (Riphenburg 1998: 113). Additionally,
more than anywhere else in the Gulf Sultan Qabus stands alone at the apex of authority.
Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the circumstances of his coming to power.

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Qabus became Sultan during a time of crisis, the Dhofar war, and with a strong
candidate as a possible alternative Sultan in his uncle Tariq. In these early days of his
rule he sought to grasp the reigns of power and concentrate it in his hands as much as
possible. Following the coup of 1970 an expatriate advisory council was established togovern chaired by the Defence Secretary who was a retired British colonel. This
council was advisory in name only and made a number of decisions in Sultan Qabus’
name, one of which was to appoint Tariq as prime minister who formed his first cabinet
in August 1970. Qabus did not share Tariq’s ideas on a constitutional monarchy andparliamentary system and preferred the status quo in which power was concentrated in
the office of the Sultan (Riphenburg 1998: 51). Qabus’ method of rule and his methodsof government since 1970 have demonstrated these beliefs. Furthermore he wasconsolidating his power at the very moment that increased oil revenues became
available with the start of oil exports in 1967 and the oil price increases of 1973-4
which meant that the relationships established by the ruler with other important socialgroups were established at a time when the resources of the diwan were exponentially
increased. At the level of the individual Qabus spent his years prior to the coup in
isolation in Salalah under virtual house arrest by his father and allowed visits only bypeople approved of by Sa’id bin Taimur. This has resulted in a tendency to isolate
himself and surround himself with advisors. He may be preparing his people for more
responsibility and power, as he declares in a recent interview (Miller 1997), but thisprocess is starting from a particularly high degree of concentration of power.3

3 On the pace of change Qabus explained: ‘We’re making progress, but quietly. Slowly.
I believe in evolution, and not a sudden evolution. But the progress we’ve made isirreversible.’ See Miller (1997: 18).
284

Finally, Oman is different because, as has already been noted, in its formative process
the Omani state has a far greater record of conflict than the other GCC states. Oman
was a substantial maritime power with overseas dominions and had to be forcibly driven
back by the British in order to achieve their aims: first, maritime supremacy and thencontrol of oil resources. The establishment of first a de facto protectorate and theninformal empire produced a succession of rebellions against the British and their client
Sultans. These rebellions were based in the mountainous interiors of Oman and Dhofar
which allowed a space for tribal forces to organise their campaigns under religious orcommunist ideology against the British-backed Sultans .

Informal empire, collaboration and Oman: Gallagher and Robinson in an Arabian
context

The third research question asked to what extent theories of informal empire andcollaboration are useful in analysing the relationship between Oman and the West?
Gallagher and Robinson originally developed their ideas on the imperialism of free
trade in a West African setting. How do they fare when applied in an Arabian context?
Informal empire is a term of definition whereas collaboration refers to a process. Under
the definition of informal empire employed in this study Oman was the only case of
informal empire in Arabia. All the protectorates and protected states, that is, Aden
Protectorate, the Trucial States, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait were part of Britain’s formal
empire. Oman was the only country in Arabia which as Doyle puts it was controlled
through the ‘collaboration of a legally independent (but actually subordinate)
government’ (1986: 38). It could be questioned as to the extent to which government of285

the Sultanate was subordinate to the British Political Agent or Consul General - at what
point in time did it really fit the category of informal empire as described?

Robinson and Gallagher contended that ‘without the voluntary or enforced cooperationof their governing elites, economic resources could not be transferred, strategic interests
protected or xenophobic reaction and traditional resistance to change contained’. The
benefits of collaboration, in the initial stages for the A1 Bu Sa’idi rulers of Muscat was
to use the alliance with the British to defeat their rivals the Qawasim of Ra’s al-Khaima.
The crisis of collaboration came when the British expanded British Indian commerceand restricted Arab trade in order to achieve maritime supremacy in the Indian Ocean.
The British-mediated separation of the Arabian sultanate from the richer Zanzibar
sultanate completely undermined the Sultans in Muscat and they then required evergreater support to prevent tribal forces from ousting them. From 1871 the Sultanate canbest be described as a de facto protectorate. The British had no programme of imperial
development: they were only interested in preventing their Sultan from being removed
by tribal forces. This was in order that the British could control the Sultans’ external
relations and exclude rival European powers from a position on the Arabian littoral
which was part of the British strategy for British maritime supremacy in the Indian
Ocean. Great power considerations resulting from the 1862 British-French declaration
to guarantee the ‘independence’ of the separate sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar
meant that the 1896 proposal for an official Muscat protectorate was neverimplemented. However, the British curbs on the trade in slaves and arms struck at thepolitical and economic bases of the Sultan’s authority. The change over the 19th
century in the Muscat-British relationship from alliance to dominance inevitablychanged the relationship of the Sultan of Muscat with his populace from autocratic286

patrimon to foreign-supported puppet. With growing internal rebellion and instability
the British Political Agent (later a Consul-General) backed up by naval gun power,
became more involved in defending the increasingly reluctant Sultans culminating in
the dispatch of British-Indian troops against the tribes of the interior which besieged
Muscat 1913 -1920. and defend. Following the Treaty of Sib in 1920 the British
became increasingly involved in the creation of the administration and even the day-today running of the government. This involvement in both internal government andcontrol of foreign relations constituted informal empire. It could be argued that from
1932 the rule of Sa’id bin Taimur saw a lessening of this subordination. However Sa’id
achieved this not through the development of independent rule but through withdrawal
and isolation: he abolished the Council of Ministers, one of the rudimentary institutionsof government, which had been created in the 1920s. By adopting a stance of
withdrawal and isolation Sa’id bin Taimur displayed one of the psychological responses
of anxiety reduction behaviour which might be expected in such a patron-client
relationship as G. Lawrence Timpe has shown in his study (1991) applying clientelism
to Oman. Sa’id bin Taimur initially sought to achieve more independence from the
British. After the occupation of the interior Sa’id withdrew to Salalah. There werelimits to the escape Sa’id bin Taimur could achieve in this manner from British
development plans for Oman which were based on their wider Gulf strategic interests
relating to oil. Sa’id was clearly a wily character - or ‘obstinate’ as some of the British
in Oman liked to call it. He knew how to play the British officials at their own game;
he had the power to stall, and a limited room to manoeuvre and was certainly not a
puppet. However the parameters of collaboration meant that in the 1960s while Sa’id
could ignore British advice his usefulness was becoming outlived. . The British realised
they would always bear the burden of military intervention if some form of287

development was not instituted. The extreme poverty which had resulted from
British/A1 Bu Sa’idi collaboration provoked resistance from another group - instead of
the Imamate forces it was now the role of the Dhofaris who bore the brunt of Sa’id’s
idiosyncrasies. The violent conflict engendered by the Dhofari struggle against theregime of Sa’id bin Taimur led to a crisis of collaboration. The subordinated nature of
the Sultanate’s government meant that in 1970 the British replaced Sa’id with a newcollaborator - his son Qabus who was keen to institute development. The British
domination of Oman which had gradually developed since 1798 and since 1920 had
been informal empire finally came to an end with British withdrawal from RAF Salalah
and Masirah in 1977.

To understand the nature of British imperialism it is important to recognise that theextent of the British empire was more than those areas of imperial world maps coloured
red. It would be hard to find a better case of informal empire than Oman. However incontrast to other areas in the world where the idea of British informal empire has been
applied such as China from 1870 (see Osterhammel 1986) and Argentina in the 1880s(see Lewis 1976:21), British informal empire in Oman was based not on direct
economic interests but strategic ones as envisaged by Robinson and Gallagher in their
1953 article: ‘imperialism may only be indirectly connected with economic integrationin that it sometimes extends beyond areas of economic development, but acts for theirstrategic protection’ ( reprinted in Gallagher 1980: 6). In this respect the case of Oman
differs from China and Argentina and this thesis adds to the literature by providing adetailed study of informal empire based on strategic interests.

288

To conclude, the notions of informal empire and collaboration are useful in analysing
Oman’s relationship with the West and its effect on state formation since 1920 if we
recognise certain limitations. Firstly we should confine the category of informal empire
to a particular historical period which in Oman’s case ended in 1977. Thereafter the
relationship between Oman and the West is better understood as the politics of influence
between states which occupy a particular place in the international state system. Thissystem has developed with the expansion of capitalism, in which the era of informal andformal empire was a particular historical stage. The contemporary Omani state, while itdisplays some of the external appearances of a traditional polity is in fact very much a
product of modernity: a rentier state in the capitalist world system. Secondly, we needto recognise that Robinson and Gallagher’s theory of imperialism is a partial theory. It
is concerned with the interaction of the metropolitan powers and societies in the
periphery - it does not seek to explain the dynamic of expansion from Europe. For
attempts at such explanation we must look elsewhere. One candidate is expansion ofcapitalism and its state system from a historical materialist perspective. This provides
the overall theoretical framework of this study of state formation in Oman.

289

Endpiece

The author visited the Sultanate of Oman in March 1995. One afternoon we paid a visit
to the old town of Muscat and gazed up at the Portuguese forts, reminders of the first
European domination. We located the erstwhile British embassy in Muscat and found it
to be deserted; a notice on the door informed us that the British embassy had been
moved to the new consulate area outside of the old town. We learnt that the old
consulate building was to be demolished to make way for an extension to the Sultan’spalace. This is in some ways symbolic of the change in the relationship between Oman
and the West which has been surveyed in this study. Britain is now just one of many
powers, albeit with a well-established position, competing for influence and business in
the Sultanate. The regime of Qabus seeks to define the person of Qabus as theembodiment of Omani unity and independence. This is in contrast to the days of British
informal empire in the reign of Said bin Taimur, when, if defined as effective control,‘sovereignty’ was not to be found in the Sultan’s palace in Muscat but in the adjacentbuilding - the British consulate. Sa’id bin Taimur, the so called ‘sovereign ruler’ ofMuscat and Oman, was in remote isolation in Salalah. Meanwhile, the British Political
Agent resided on the seafront at Muscat, the embodiment of the real arbiter of power in
the Sultanate - British imperialism, which in this instance had created British informal
empire in the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman.

290

APPENDIXAAMERICAN CONSULATE
Baghdad, Iraq

March 14, 1931

Confidential

Subject: English Interest in Possible Oil Deposits in the Arabian Peninsula

The Honourable, The Secretary of State, Washington

Sir:
I have the honor to refer to that portion of despatch No. 108, dated August 7,
1930, concerning the activities of the Standard Oil Company of California and the oil
situation in the Persian Gulf in which mention was made of oil seepages along the
Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf and to make a further report on that subject.

SIR JOHN CADMAN’S STATEMENT AS TO OIL SEEPAGES ALONG THE
ARABIAN COAST OF THE PERSIAN GULF

During the early part of February, 1931,1 had a long conversation with Sir John
Cadman, the well known English oil financier, in the course of which he mentioned mycontemplated trip to Bahrein and Kuwait and informed me that in 1913 he had travelledover most of the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf. He added that he had made this trip291

in a search for oil seepages which had been reported by numerous people to the AngloPersian Oil company, but that he had discovered no such seepages and that other oil
geologists who had conducted a similar search had also failed to discover any seepages.

INVESTIGATIONS ON THE ISLAND OF BAHREIN

The detailed statement that Sir John Cadnam had made to me concerning thefalsity of the rumours of oil seepages on the Arabian coast seemed to me to be rather
unnecessary and consequently when I reached Bahrein I endeavoured to learnsomething of these reports. I found many people who seemed convinced that large
seepages existed in various sections, but in every case their belief was based uponhearsay evidence.

ARRIVAL OF MR BERTRAM THOMAS IN BAHREIN

On February 22, 1931, the last stay of my day at Bahrein, Mr Bertram Thomas
landed on the island from the Peninsula of Qatar. His arrival created some excitementin the English and American colony for the reason that he had disappeared from Oman
some months before and it had been feared that he had been lost in the Arabian desert. I
had the opportunity of meeting Mr Thomas for a short time during the day, and learned
from him that he head started on an exploration trip from the town of Dhafur which isabout halfway between Muscat and Aden on the shores of the Red Sea, that he hadproceeded by camel caravan to the northeast crossing the entire peninsula and especiallythat portion known as Rub al Khali (Empty Quarter) which, as far as known, has never292

before been crossed by a European, that he had completed his journey on the Peninsulaof Qatar and was now waiting the first opportunity to proceed to Muscat.

MR THOMAS POSITION IN MUSCAT

Some years ago, Mr Thomas obtained the position of Financial Adviser to the
Sultan of Oman. A few months ago his five year contract expired and Mr. S.E.
Hedgecock, a prominent official of the Department of Finance of the Iraq Government
was given this position. I learned from various English officials of Bahrein, that Mr.
Thomas had suddenly left Muscat without awaiting the arrival of his successor andwithout submitting an accounting of the business of his office. From Mr Thomas I
learned that he had not turned over his office to Mr. Hedgecock but was returning toMuscat to submit his final report.

MR. THOMAS DUTIES IN THE SULTANATE OF OMAN.

Later in the day I called upon Mr Walker, the agent of the Mesopotamia Persia
Corporation stationed at Bahrein. During this call Captain L.S. Parke, the officer
commanding the Bahrein police also called and the conversation immediately turned
upon Mr Thomas’ presence in Bahrein. Captain Parke criticised Mr Thomas for leaving
Oman in the manner described. Mr Walker immediately defended him stating that
British officials stationed in the Persian Gulf were well aware of the fact that Mr
Thomas had not been sent to act as financial adviser to the Sultan of Oman solely, butthat his main duties there were to explore the interior and to try and locate for the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company oil seepages reported to have been discovered by Arab

293

caravans in that section of Arabia. He added that British officials were also aware of
the fact that an Anglo-Persian Oil tanker had picked up Mr Thomas at Muscat and had
landed him at Dhafur and that his journey while ostensibly undertaken as an exploratory
trip over an unknown portion of Arabia was also undertaken to obtain all information
possible for the Anglo-Persian Oil company.

DRL.J. DAME’S STATEMENT

Later in the day I reported this conversation to Doctor L. J. Dame, an American
medical missionary stationed at Bahrein. Doctor Dame has made many trips into theinterior of Arabia and informed me that Mr Thomas during his five years stay in the
Sultanate of Oman had paid little attention to his duties as financial adviser but had
seemingly seized every opportunity to make trips into the interior of the country. He
showed me several copies of the Royal Geographical Magazine in which Mr Thomas
had reported several trips into the interior. He also informed me that during 1925 he
was at Muscat when Mr Thomas and three English geologists returned to that city.
According to information furnished to Doctor Dame at the time, these men had set out
on a rather extensive exploration trip, but reported when they returned to Muscat that
due to various reasons they had been unable to reach the portions of the country they
desired to explore. He added that some two years later the Royal Geographical
Magazine had published a paper written by Mr Thomas describing his trip in 1925 andfrom the report he made at that time, it appeared that he, and consequently the three
English geologists, had accomplished their purpose and visited every section of Arabia
they had planned to explore.

294

MR WALKER’S REPUTATION

I learned from American missionaries stationed at Bahrein that Mr Walker is avery out-spoken individual and due to his long services at various posts on the shores of
the Persian Gulf and his connection with the Mesopotamia Persia Corporation is wellinformed on everything that transpires in that section of the country.

Respectfully yours,

Alexander K. Sloan,
American Consul.

File No. 863.6
AKS/jgDistribution:
Original and four copies to Department;
Copy to American Embassy, London, England;
Copy to American Embassy, Istanbul, Turkey;
Three copies to E.I.C., Paris, France.

Source: Porter (1982: 28-32)295

Appendix B

DEPARTMENT OF STATEDIVISION OF NEAR EASTERN AFFAIRS

June 21, 1937

Mr Secretary:

Referring to our conversation of June 19th regarding the desire of the Sultan ofMuscat and Oman to make an official visit to this country, I brought the situation orally
and informally to the attention of the British Ambassador this morning.

I referred in this connection to the visit made in 1933 to the Sultan of Muscat by
Mr Paul Knabenshue, our Minister Resident at Baghdad, to convey a message of good
will and felicitation from President Roosevelt to the Sultan on the anniversary of thesigning of our present Treaty of Friendship and Commerce with the ancestors of the
Present Sultan. In consequence no doubt of Mr Knabenshue’s visit the Sultan had, I
sent a letter to the President expressing a desire to visit this country after a visit which
he expects to make to Europe. A reply from the President had already gone forward to
the Sultan extending him a formal invitation to visit the United States.

296

I told the Ambassador we were of course fully aware of Great Britain’s treaty
relations with the Sultan as well as with other native rulers in the Persian Gulf areas andthat for that reason we decided to acquaint the Ambassador with the situation as it had
developed thus far.

The Ambassador expressed his appreciation of the Department’s courtesy inadvising him of this development which he would of course bring to the attention of his
Government. He added that while he was not fully familiar with the relationship of his
Government to the Arab rulers in question, and the Sultan of Muscat in particular, hewished to point out quite personally and on his own responsibility that his Governmentis at present time greatly perturbed over the subversive anti-British propaganda being
conducted by the Italian Government in various parts of Arabia.

He wanted to say quite frankly that in his opinion his Government’s attitudewith regard to any state visit the Sultan might desire to make to Europe or elsewhere at
this time would depend largely upon the character and present attitude of the Sultan,
with which he was unfamiliar. If, for example, the Sultan should make a trip to Europe
and should either desire or be induced to visit Rome, he felt certain that his Government
would be seriously concerned. If, on the other hand, the Sultan is at present on friendly
terms with the British resident in Muscat and is amicably disposed toward Great Britain,
the proposed visit would, in all likelihood, offer no difficulties.

I pointed out to the Ambassador that any visit which the Sultan might eventually maketo this country would, so far as we were concerned, be merely a courtesy one without
political implications. The Ambassador said he appreciated this but that he would like297

to feel free to communicate to us any reactions that he might receive from his
Government on this subject.

In conclusion the Ambassador requested that this entire matter be regarded forthe time being as strictly confidential in order to avoid possible embarrassment to either
Government.

Wallace Murray

Source. Porter (1982: 43-45)

298

Appendix C

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATEWASHINGTON, D C.
February, 1938

INFORMATION ON THE SULTAN OF MUSCAT AND OMANAND HIS COUNTRY

The Country:

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman occupies an area of about 82,000 square
miles in the southeastern comer of Arabia. With the exception of several fertile strips
along the coast and a few high mountain valleys the country is barren and forbidding.

The Sultanate’s population has been estimated at about 500,000 persons, mostly
Arabs, with an admixture of negro blood along the coast. The capital, Muscat, has apopulation of about 4,500.

Dates and dried fish are the chief items of export, some of the former finding
their way to the American market. American trade with Muscat is, however,infinitesimal.

299

Transportation is largely by pack animal although automobiles are being used toa limited extent. There are no industries of importance.

History:

Muscat was captured by Albuquerque in 1508 and held by the Portuguese until
1650 when the foreign yoke was thrown off. Since that time it has been independent
except for five years of Persian occupation between 1736 and 1741. Muscat reached thezenith of its power under Said bin Sultan (1804-1856), great-great-grandfather of thepresent Sultan, whose dominions included a large part of Arabia, the Persian Gulf area
and considerable territory on and along the west coast of Africa, including thatimportant trading center of clipper ship days, Zanzibar.

It was to this Sultan that President Jackson sent Edmund Roberts on a special
mission which resulted in the signature of a Treaty of Commerce and Navigation on
September 21, 1833, one of the this country’s oldest effective treaties. In his letter of
May 24, 1834, transmitting this treaty to the Secretary of State, Roberts commented asfollows on the Sultan’s power:“The Sultan of Muscat is a very powerful Prince. He possesses a more
efficient Naval force than all of the native Princes combined from the Cape ofGood Hope to Japan. His resources are more than adequate to his wants - they
are derived from Commerce, running himself a great number of Merchantvessels - from duties on foreign merchandise and from tribute money - andpresents received from various Princes, all of which produce a large sum.”300

With Said bin Sultan’s death, however, his dominions were divided between his twosons ruling at Muscat and Zanzibar, respectively, and the decline which set in was
hastened by the disappearance of profits formerly derived from slave trading, piracy andgun running.

Government:

All authority emanates from the Sultan who governs through a Council of Ministers
largely composed of members of his own family.

Although independent in the sense that he may enter into relations with foreignstates the Sultan is in special treaty relations with the British of a protective nature, oneof the stipulations of which is that territory of the Sultanate may not be ceded to any
foreign power other than the British. The British Political Agent at Muscat exercises avery considerable degree of influence in the Government of the Sultanate, both asregards internal and external affairs. It is understood, however, that the present sultan issomewhat sensitive in the matter of British control and is inclined to become
increasingly assertive on the point.

American Interests:

Two American companies, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and a datebuying company, maintain small offices at Muscat. The Arabian Mission of the (Dutch)301

Reformed Church of America maintains a hospital at Matrah, a woman’s hospital atMuscat and a clinic at Birka.

An American Consul was assigned to Muscat in 1838 and representation
continued until 1915 when the Consulate was closed because of inadequate justification
for its continuance.

The Sultan:

His Highness Sayyid Said bin Taimur bin Faisal, the present Sultan, was bom in
1910. He came to the throne in 1932 at the age of 22 upon the abdication of his father,
Taimur bin Faisal, who had made no effort to conceal his aversion to assuming the
responsibilities of his position and had absented himself from Muscat for long periods.
As a result it became necessary during the latter part of his reign to set up a regency,
which included, among others, Bertram Thomas, of exploration fame, as Financial
Adviser. The former Sultan is now in Japan where it is understood that the present
Sultan was to visit him en route to his country.

Despite Thomas’ assistance, the young Sultan found the country practicallybankrupt and his troubles were further complicated by tribal unrest and conspiracy bycertain of his uncles, one of whom immediately profited by the occasion to set up an
independent regime.

302

The Sultan tackled the situation with resolution and within a short time thetraitorous uncle had been subdued, unrest quelled and, most of important of all, Statefinances put on a much more solid footing.

Observers describe the Sultan as being shrewd and energetic, with a flare forfinance and with a strong will of his own. At the same time he is agreeable, very politeand has a quiet sense of humor. He is of small statue but bears himself with dignity anddresses stylishly. He speaks excellent English which he learned at the Chiefs College
in Ajmere, India. He is unmarried.

Possible Subjects of Conversation:

One reason which the Sultan has given for his visit is to return the courtesy visit
to Muscat of our Minister Resident at Baghdad upon the occasion of the one-hundredthanniversary of the signature of our Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Muscat on
October 31, 1833. Presumably he will refer to this event.

In addition, he may, as was mentioned in Mr Welles’ letter of June 11, 1937
refer to the matter of the petroleum possibilities of his country and the revision of ourtreaty of 1833 to remove the restraint now placed on the Sultan’s levying power.

As regards oil, the Sultan is known to have been interested in possible American
participation in the development of Muscat’s resources. Presumably, however, suchaction could only be undertaken with the approval of the British in view of the Sultan’s

303

agreement of 1923 with the British in which he undertook not to permit the exploitationof his petroleum resources except with the consent of the Government of India.

With regard to the question of our Treaty it will be recalled that we havesignified our willingness to negotiate a new treaty with the Sultan substituting for thetariff provision of the old Treaty a new article providing for unconditional most­favoured-nation treatment. Negotiations lapsed at that point, however, without rejectionor acceptance of our proposal.

304

February, 1938

OUTSTANDING FEATURES OF RELATIONSWITH MUSCAT AND OMAN

Historical:

At the time of the conclusion of the Treaty of 1833, which is one of our oldest
treaties remaining in effect, Muscat was the most important naval power in the Arabian
Sea and along the east coast of Africa (the Island of Zanzibar was then included in the
Sultan’s dominions) and our clipper ships engaged in a lively trade with the Sultan’s
territories. Subsequently, Muscat lost Zanzibar and its power dwindled toinsignificance. While nominally an independent state, Muscat is actually under British
protection.

Petroleum Potentials of Sultan’s Territories:

During the past few years there has been an extensive penetration of the Arabian
Peninsula by foreign oil interest. American oil companies have been particularly activein this area, and the Standard Oil Company of California has brought in important
petroleum wells on the Island of Bahrein. This Company is also engaged in operationon the mainland in El Hasa, a province of Saudi Arabia. It us understood that
exploration rights in Kuwait have also been obtained by subsidiaries of the Gulf Oil
Corporation of Pennsylvania associated with certain British oil interests.

305

The Sultan of Muscat and Oman has no doubt followed this development with attention,
as also the fact that British oil companies are exhibiting renewed interest in the
petroleum potentialities of the Arabian Peninsula. Recently the Sultan requested theStandard Oil Company of California to look into the petroleum possibilities of his
territory.

Restriction of 1833 Treaty on Sultan’s Duty Levying Power:

Of further interest in connection with the expressed desire of the Sultan to make anofficial visit to the United States is the fact that our Treaty of 1833 restricts the duty that
the Sultan may place on goods landed at his ports from vessels of the United States to afive percent ad valorem duty. This provision also exists in treaties between the Sultan
and France and Great Britain.

In 1930 this matter was taken up with us by the British Government, which stressed theincreasing financial stringency which the Sultan was encountering and inquired
whether, in order to remedy this situation by a general increase in the tariff on goods
imported into Muscat, this Government would consent to waive its rights under theTreaty of 1833.

In subsequent discussions, this Government stated that it had no objection in principle
to a general increase in the tariff rates of Muscat, but that it was unable, under theConstitution, to amend the Treaty in question by an exchange of notes, as had beensuggested. We stated that we would be glad to conclude a new treaty with the Sultan

306

with a view to substituting for the tariff provision of the old Treaty a new article
providing for unconditional most-favoured-nation treatment in respect of customs duties
as well as of other matters. At this point the British allowed negotiations to lapse andthere the matter rests at present.

Source: Porter (1982: 57-65)

307

Appendix D

THE FOREIGN SERVICE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAAMERICAN CONSULATE
Dhahran, Saudis Arabia,

February 12, 1949

No. 27

CONFIDENTIAL

Subject: Current Information on Muscat.

The Honourable

The Secretary of State,

Washington, D.C.

Sir:
I have the honour to report that in a chance conversation on January 9, 1949, Mr
Jay Roland Kapenga of the hospital staff maintained at Matrah, Oman, by the Dutch
reformed Church in America, informed Vice Consul Hulen that Sheikh Sulaiman ibn
Humeer, paramount chief of the hinterland of Oman, is visiting the Sultan in Muscat.

308

According to Mr. Kapenga, it is surprising that Sheikh Suliaman should venture into
Muscat with only twenty retainers as he and the Sultan are the rival strong men of
Oman. The Imam, titular overlord of the mountainous interior, had been overshadowedby Shaikh Suliaman and is now reduced to the status of an ecclesiastical dignitary withminor temporal powers. The Sultan has effective control over the coastal plain up to 15
or 20 miles inland but even in Muscat his authority is circumscribed by a cabal ofministers, the chief of whom is Sayed Hamed Ibrahim, a relative of the Sultan and
Minister of the Interior.

Major Greenwood, a retired, or inactive, British army officer, is in charge of the
Sultan’s army which is described as a rather tough little aggregation of Baluchees
recruited from the Sultan’s possessions on that coast. They are armed with good rifles,some machine guns and at least two field pieces. In a recent conversation Major
Greenwood indicated that he had difficulty securing uniforms, but at that time did not
mention any shortage of arms. Mr Kapenga thought it probable that in any case hewould prefer British to American equipment and made the observation that the Sultan
is the second largest merchant in Muscat and might be interested in peddling any
procurable small arms to his subjects, for whom a dagger and a rifle are required articles
of dress.

The British maintain the only Consul now located at Muscat and their naval vessels
make infrequent visits. It is rumored that a cruiser will make a call in the immediate
future. This probably has reference to H.M.S. NORFOLK, which, with Admiral
Woodhouse aboard, is presently in the Persian Gulf.

309

The position of the American community, i.e. the six members of the Dutch Reformed
Mission, is indeterminate. The Sultan is apparently friendly but some of his advisers
are not, and during the past year they took advantage of the Sultan’s absence to close a
primary school operated by the mission; the school has since been reopened.

The Mission school has an enrollment of approximately forty young Arab students who
are taught reading, writing and arithmetic. In addition, a small class in English is
conducted by Mr Kapenga. The school is, in a way, a competitor to the school operated
under the auspices of the Sultan of Muscat, who has hired two Egyptians as instructors
in his school.

The Mission receives no assistance from the Sultan or his officials and very little
assistance from the local populace. Nor, is the Mission offered any encouragement by
any of these people. Mr Kapenga gave the illustration of the events occurring the day
following the baptism of a young Arab girl at the mission. The young girl, who
voluntarily was baptized in the Mission church, was subsequently called before certain
Moslem church officials at Muscat and told not to enter the Mission church on Sunday
again.

The Christian church services held at the Mission are normally attended by 50 to
60 natives despite the fact that “spies”, or informers, sit practically on the church door
step and scrutinize everyone entering the church to attend services.

Economically, Muscat is at the nadir of depression. The unskilled workman
receives a wage of 12 Indian annas per day and from time to time some of the poor

310

literally starve to death. Most of the trained artisans have fled to Bahrein or Kuwait. A
recent merchandising coup by the Sultan did not endear him to his ill-fed subjects;
learning of higher prices in Kuwait he rerouted to that place a shipload of desperately
needed wheat which had been lying in Muscat harbour.

According to Mr. Kapenga, the most interesting way of reaching Muscat from
Dhahran is to tale a British-India Line ship from Bahrein to Sharjah, then to proceed
overland by trucks which frequently travel back and forth to Muscat, taking about threedays for the overland trip. The Sultan would like to improve this road but had been
prevented because some of the higher passes are controlled by his adversaries.

With reference to my telegram No. 192 dated October 16, 1948, and theDepartment’s reply No. 219 dated November 5, 1948 and to my despatch No. 12 dated
January 20, 1949,1 should like to stress the interest which this Consulate feels inMuscat and its concern over the lack of frequency with which this Consulate feels inMuscat and its concern over the lack of frequency with which Consular officers from
Dhahran have in the past been able to visit the Sultanate. There have been only threevisits made by American Consular officers to Muscat in recent years: the visit of Consul
Parker T, Hart in April 1946; the visit of Vice Consul Larry W. Roeder in May 1946;
and the flying visit of Consul Waldo E. Bailey in March 1947 which was abortive inthat the Sultan was absent in Salala and Consul Bailey had to return to Dhahran on thesame day.

Shortage of personnel and extreme difficulty of transportation have been thechief factors hampering officers of this Consulate in their desire to make periodic visits311

to Muscat in order to report developments there. The Consulate now has a sufficientnumber of officers to enable it to discharge this obligation. In view of the increasing
frequency with which American naval vessels are operating in the Persian Gulf it isstrongly urged that the Department give consideration to arriving at some arrangementwith the Department of the Navy whereby the Navy with its unfailing cooperation might
assist officers of this Consulate to make visits from time to time at Muscat.

With the vast and dynamically expanding American interests in the Persian
Gulf, I am sure that the Department is not unaware of the increasing strategic
significance of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, lying as it does athwart the narrow
entrance commanding sea access to the Gulf. With the paucity of current informationon this area, it is especially important that this Consulate effectively discharge its
responsibilities to report on this region, to protect and promote American interests there
and to cultivate friendly and cordial relations with the Sultan and the people of Muscat.
The Consulate is keenly aware of this responsibility, it is eager to serve effectively thenational interest in the part of the Gulf within its jurisdiction, and it requests theassistance of the Department in exploring the possibilities of cooperating with the U.S.
Navy in arranging periodic visits to Muscat.

Respectfully yours,

Francis E. Melloy, Jr
American Vice Consul

File No. 350

312

EC Hulen/FE Meloy/DSMak
ccd.

Source. Porter (1982: 76-81)

Appendix E

C (60) 104
5th July, 1960

CABINETMUSCAT AND OMAN

Note by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs

Her Majesty’s government intervened in 1957, during the Omani rebellion inorder to ensure their general interest that the Sultanate of Muscat remained intact and infriendly hands. In so doing they incurred considerable international embarrassment.
For this reason they adopted in 1958 the policy of giving the Sultan certain assistancewith the object that he could eventually provide his own security without recourse toopen British intervention. The annual cost of the subsidy then foreseen was about£390,000 a year.

2.

Two things have now become clear. First, the cost of executing the

programmes laid down in 1958 was underestimated. The subsidy is already running at
something under £700,000 a year and the proper execution of those programmes might
cost £800,000 a year. Secondly, a thorough review has shown that the programmes laid
down in 1958 for the strengthening of the Sultan’s forces and for improving the loyalty314

of the population by spreading civil benefits were inadequate for the purpose. If the aimof the 1958 policy is to be achieved, the programmes must be expanded and the total
cost of the subsidy is likely to rise to about £1,350,000 recurrent plus about £1,565,000
in capital spread over about three years. Details are shown in paragraphs 10-14 of theMemorandum annexed to this Paper.

3. Our interests in the area to-day are no less important than those whichweighed with Her Majesty’s Government in 1958. They relate principally to thepreservation of the independence of Kuwait, on account of both of her oil and of her
sterling balances, and for this purpose certain political and military requirements in the
Persian Gulf must be assured: in particular, the confidence of the Rulers in our
protection must be maintained and we must retain military facilities in Masirah ( which
belongs to the Sultanate), Shaijah on the Trucial Coast, and Bahrain. The right tooverfly Muscat and Oman is also of great value. There are, in addition, important
subsidiary interests in the area, some of which may gain further importance in future,for instance, the promising oil discoveries in Abu Dhabi. Our interests are described inparagraphs 1-4 of the annex. To ensure these it is still our general interest that there
should be an independent and friendly Muscat and Oman.

4. The policy of avoiding open intervention in Oman is also no less important
to-day than it was in 1958. Indeed intervention to-day might be even more damaging toour relations with the other Arab Governments and Afro-Asian states.

315

5. Finally, we must recognise that the threat remains of a further rebellion
inspired and armed from outside by Saudi Arabia, supported by Iraq and the United
Arab Republic and applauded by most of the Arab states.

6. I conclude therefore that Her Majesty’s Government should continue thepolicy decided in 1958 and that they should be prepared to pay the extra cost thereof,
which is not extravagant in relation to the interests at stake.

7. Before reaching this conclusion, however, I examined other possible lines ofaction:(a) Various forms of disengagement from the Sultanate would not only bedishonourable but would imperil and almost certainly sacrifice the material interests in
the Gulf which we are concerned to defend. (Paragraphs 22-24 of the annex.)(b) A continuance of our subsidy designed to support the 1958 programmes (costingsay £800, 000 a year) would not really represent an attempt to continue the 1958 policy,
since we should in effect be doing only about two-thirds of what we know to benecessary, while relying largely on good luck for success in deterring or countering
further trouble. (Paragraph 16 of the annex.)(c) Finally, I have considered the possibility of giving to the Sultan a guarantee, which
would necessarily be public, that Her Majesty’s Government would defend his territory.
This would enable us to dispense with a large expansion of the Sultan’s forces. Making
an allowance for a certain necessary increase in civil development, the subsidy mightthen be pegged at, say, £850,000 to £900,000 a year, assuming that the Sultan’s forces316

are not to be reduced to insignificance but must be retained as a deterrent of some sort.
The attractions and the disadvantages of this policy are discussed in paragraphs 17-20 of
the annex. The decisive argument against it, in my opinion, is that it would render open
intervention by British forces not only more likely but, indeed, the first resort and not
the last. It would therefore represent an abandonment of the policy decided in 1958. It
would also be inconsistent with our general policy of avoiding new commitments in the
Middle East.

8. I therefore invite my colleagues to agree in principle that Her Majesty’s
Government should be ready to incur costs of about £1,350,000 recurrent, plus about£1,564,000 in capital (spread over three years) in order to maintain the policy decided in
1958. At the same time we should make clear to the Sultan that we shall reserve theright to review our 1958 policy at, say, the end of 1963 if that policy has not been
proved effective by that time. One object of this reservation is to increase the stimulus
to the Sultan to co-operate in making the policy effective.

9. If my recommendation above is agreed, conversations would begin at oncewith the Sultan (who is now in London) under various safeguards set out in paragraphs
28 and 29 of the annex.
S.L.

SECRET

317

ANNEX

MUSCAT AND OMAN

Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs

It is important that the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman should remain effectively
controlled in friendly hands. The reasons must be seen against the background of ourinterests in the Persian Gulf area as a whole. Apart from the need to meet our treaty andmoral obligations to the Rulers, these interests are as follows:(a) Economic. -To retain access on favourable terms to oil produced in the States
bordering on the Persian Gulf, and to maintain acceptable arrangements for Kuwait’s
sterling balances.

(b) Strategic.- To maintain rights over Masirah Airfield. This is likely to grow inimportance, both as an air staging post providing flexibility on air routes to the Far East,and also possibly in the long term as an alternative to other air bases which we possess
at present elsewhere in the area.

(c) Political.- To defend the area against the spread of Communism or pseudoCommunism.

318

In order to safeguard these interests certain political and military requirements in thearea must be met. We have to retain the confidence of the Rulers in our will and ourability to protect them, and we must maintain the military facilities needed forsuccessful intervention. These requirements have developed substantially in recent
years

2. For some 150 years it was British policy to avoid intervention on land ineither the interior of Oman or the Trucial Shaikhdoms. The reversal of his policy in thelast decade was to due the growth in importance of oil and the pre-eminence of Kuwait,
and secondly to the growth of Saudi Arabian imperialism. We now have to reckon alsowith the Iraqi threat to Kuwait. It is difficult to put a precise monetary value on thepreservation of Kuwait, but it is extremely important that Kuwait should not fall under
the control of an unfriendly Government since this would greatly strengthen any of the
Arab States in putting pressure on the oil companies or Her Majesty’s Government andwould jeopardise the L300 millions of Kuwait’s sterling balances.

3. Our principal interests in the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman apart from that
described in paragraph 1 (b) above are at present related to our position elsewhere in the
Gulf.
(a) The air base at Masirah (off the south coast of Oman) is essential, and overflying
rights over Oman are important to strategic plans for the defence of Kuwait.
(b) The base at Shaijah on the Trucial Coast, which might be endangered by events in
Oman, is also essential for the defence of Kuwait.

319

(c) It is essential to prevent the entry to the Gulf from falling into hostile hands. In thisconnexion, a 12-mile limit to territorial waters would eliminate the high seas passage
through the Straits of Hormuz.

There are also subsidiary interests:(e) Oil may be discovered in Oman, a territory at present relatively insulated from Arabnationalist influence.
(f) If the recent substantial oil strikes in the Abu Dhabi and Qatar sea-beds develop, thesecurity of these State, which depends also on (a), (b) and (c) above, would become
more important.

4. In addition to these material interests, Her Majesty’s Government also have amoral obligation to support the Sultan. This rests not only on their long friendship withthis dynasty but on the fact that they did not permit the Sultan, before 1955 to deal in his
own and probably effective way with the threat posed by the Saudi Arabians in Buraimi
or by the stirrings of independence in the Oman interior.

Intervention in 1957 and Subsidy in 1958
5. For the reasons in paragraphs 3 and 4 above Her Majesty’s Government
intervened openly in Oman in 1957 to sustain the Sultan’s authority against a rebellion
which would have placed the Omani interior and probably the whole country underhostile control. In doing so Her Majesty’s Government incurred considerable
international embarrassment As a result, in July 1958 they undertook to give financial
and other help to the Sultan in order to help him to preserve his security without the320need for open British intervention. This is the policy which has been pursued since thattime.

Situation in Oman and the External Threat
6. The threat envisaged in 1958 was that of an organised revolt on the lines of
1957, when a few hundreds of well-led dissidents, infiltrated from Saudi Arabia, held an
enclave on Sultanate territory. Insurrection on this pattern is still possible, and theSaudi Arabian Government have trained several hundred Omanis for this purpose.
Another form of threat is now, however, more probable and would be more dangerous,that of prolonged and widespread guerilla activity, supported by arms and money
infiltrated from Saudi Arabia, or from the United Arab Republic and Iraq, both of whom
have pledged their support for an independent Omani State.

The programme needed in 1958
7. The recurrent cost of the subsidy foreseen in 1958 was about £390,000 ayear. £50,000 of this was allocated for civil development, £68,000 for an airforce andthe remainder (£272,000) was added to the Sultans’s own contribution (£232,500) to
support an army. The civil development programme included the building of threeroads, a school, an agricultural research station and 10 dispensaries or medical centres,
for a population estimated at 500,000 in an almost wholly undeveloped country as large
as the United Kingdom. The air force included three strike aircraft, and two
communications aircraft, the bare minimum which is technically necessary to constitutea force at all. The army was expected to number 1,470 when recruits could be obtained.

321

8. The costs foreseen for 1958 proved to be an underestimate. Recurrent costs
are already running at something under £700,000 a year. Even these costs, however, areinadequate properly to execute the programmes for the Sultan’s Forces and civil
development envisaged in 1958. The cost of properly executing existing programmes
would probably be about £800,000 a year (roughly £620,000 for the army, £115,000 for
the air force and £65,000 for civil development).

Inadequacy of the 1958 Programme
9. Even if properly executed ( at a cost of about £800,000 a year) the 1958
programme would not, however, be adequate to secure the objectives of our policy as
decided in 1958. This has been shown by a thorough review, both military and civil,
which had been undertaken over the past six months. That is to say, if it is to bereasonably probable that a further rebellion inspired from outside by British forces, theSultan’s armed forced must be larger and better equipped, and the civil development
programme should be on a larger scale, than was necessary two years ago. This does
not reflect a recent deterioration in the situation, which has in fact been perceptibly
improving. It shows only that we have been operating with an unacceptably low marginof safety.

Increased Programme now needed to carry out 1958 Policy
10. A detailed military review has been undertaken by Brigadier M.R.J. HopeThomson, seconded for the purpose by the War Office. His comprehensive andconvincing report has been strongly endorsed by the General Officer Commanding in
Aden, approved by the War Office in the context of the 1958 policy, and approved (withamendments) by the Air Ministry. It gives high priority to deterrence and to the need to322

crush trouble in the early stages. It makes the maximum provision for the overriding
operational requirements of good intelligence, good signals and high mobility. Even
allowing for the economies of manpower thereby made possible, the report recommends
that the Muscat army establishment should rise over three years from 1,470 to 2,140 andthat a gendarmerie of 280 should be established. It recommends discarding certain
unrealistic assumptions made in 1958 about rates of pay ( which were inadequate to
attract Arab recruits), scale of equipment, depreciation of vehicles, and reserve holdings
and training ammunition. The number of seconded British officers would rise from 23
to only 25. Brigadier Hope Thomson disagreed with the view of the Sultan’s Defence
Secretary and of the Commander of the Sultan’s Armed Forces that the total army
strength should be has high as 3.060 and that two armoured car troops, two engineer
troops and other desirable but not essential items should be included. The preliminary
costing of Brigadier Hope Thomson’s army proposals indicates an additional capital
cost of very roughly £1,035,000 spread over 3-4 years, plus a total recurrent cost rising
after three years to about £1,291,000 per year. From these figures the Sultan’scontribution should be deducted. It is doubtful whether he will contribute much to thecapital, but on present form he would offer to contribute not less than £250,000
recurrent, leaving about £1 million per year in respect of the army to be found by Her
Majesty’s Government.

11.

On the air force side, Brigadier Hope Thomson’s recommendations are still

subject to reserves about future types of aircraft. They stress the great importance ofcommunications and transport and the need for rapidity of strike action in the first stageof any revolt. They envisage adding one transport aircraft, one communication aircraft
and two strike aircraft to the existing establishment. The Air Ministry agree that the323

additional strike aircraft are required (together with some reserve aircraft), but consider
that transport/communication needs could be best met by increasing the establishment
by two and re-equipping the Force with Beaver aircraft. The addition to the recurrent
cost would be about £70,000, making £185,000 a year in all. The capital cost involved
would be about £250,000, but this is not a true net addition to capital costs since a sum
roughly one-third of this amount would in any event shortly have to be incurred toreplace existing aircraft even if no expansion takes place. The Sultan has never madeany contribution for the air force.

13. The new civil development programme envisaged for the Sultanate would
increase by about £100,000 over the present £50,000 per year and involve additional
capital of about £282,000 (spread over some years). Much the largest item of theincrease is £33,000 recurrent plus £87,000 capital for medical aid (largely dispensaries
and health centres), which brings the most immediate and welcome benefits to large
parts of the population. The next most important items are those designed to increase
the productivity of the Sultanate, e.g., agricultural research, fisheries and port
improvement. Details of the whole programme remain for discussion with thedepartments concerned, but the order of the costs involved is approximately as
described above.

Probable Cost to Her Majesty’s Government of the New Programmes
14. The total annual costs to Her Majesty’s Government, military, air force andcivil, would be of the order of £1,350,000 together with about £1,565,000 in capitalcosts spread over about three years. The figure could be only slightly reduced even if
the Sultan increased his contribution to what we believe to be the limit of his capacity to324

pay. The cost would, however, be radically affected if oil is found in Oman or, in theother direction, if the oil companies renounced their concession at the end of theirpresent two year survey programme. It is also fair to say that the total costs quoted
above are somewhat greater than the net addition to the costs which would have to beborne by the Exchequer. For instance, the estimate of recurrent costs earlier in thisparagraph includes about £150,000 for British and seconded and attached personnel.
The pay, if not the allowances, of at least some of these might fall on the Exchequer inany case. A certain amount of military equipment, obsolete or obsolescent so far as Her
Majesty’s Forces are concerned, finds a market in the Sultan’s forces. Even new
equipment bought from this country provides a margin of profit.

Alternative Policies to be Considered
15.

In the light of this increase of costs it has to be decided whether we should

continue with our existing policy or whether the objects of our policy should be pursued
by other means or even conceivably modified or abandoned. There are three
conceivable lines of action within the framework of our continued support of the
Sultanate. These are>(a) To re-endorse the 1958 policy and accept its consequences in full together
with the increased costs.
(b) To continue our aid only to the extent of the programmes decided in 1958.
(c) To abandon the 1958 policy and give a guarantee of protection to the Sultan.
The implications of (a) have been discussed in paragraphs 10 to 12 above. The second
and third are discussed below.

...Continuance of 1958 (Unexpanded) programmes

325

Paragraph 15 (b)16.

This would mean deliberately accepting a considerable risk both that arebellion might break out and that Her Majesty’s Government would in that event haveto decide either to intervene once more or to watch a possible hostile regime establishedin the interior or even in the whole of the Sultanate. We would have to accept the factthat the Sultan’s forces and administration would not be built up to a level offering areasonable insurance against the need for such further intervention. ( The risk would ofcourse be even greater if only the present level of the subsidy was maintained, since thiswould not even suffice to support the 1958 programmes.) The principal question iswhether the extent of insurance so obtained would be worth having at the price or evenat all. There can be no clear-cut answer to that question. The weight of expert opinion,
however, is that the military establishment included in the figure of £1,350,000
recurrent in paragraph 14 above (plus a slightly larger sum in capital) is the minimum
necessary to achieve reasonable security. Failure to increase our aid accordingly would
mean that we were pursuing our 1958 policy only half-heartedly and relying largely onluck for its success. The assessment of the increased requirements (both military andcivil) must stand irrespective of the fact that the 1958 programmes have not yet been
fully executed. Considerable progress has been made, on the military side in particular,
quite sufficient to enable lessons to be drawn about the inadequacy of the 1958
programmes. Also the fact that no rebellion has occurred since January 1959 cannot betaken as evidence that the existing effort is inadequate. The Saudi Arabian Government
have deliberately abstained from making trouble during the current Anglo-Saudi
discussions on the resumption of diplomatic relations, but as soon as the irreconcilable
nature of British and Saudi views on Buraimi becomes evident once more, this restraint
may disappear. Furthermore, the United Arab Republic and Iraq have both espoused

326

the Omani cause. Although these Arab Governments may be willing to hold the Omani
threat temporarily in suspense, for some special reason of their own, they willcollectively or individually wish to maintain it in being, both as a weapon against theUnited Kingdom position in the Arabian Peninsula and as evidence of their fidelity to
the Arab nationalist cause.

...Possible Guarantee of Protection to the Sultan
Paragraph 15 (c)17.

There are considerable attractions in the concept of giving an undertaking

that Her Majesty’s Government would defend the Sultan’s territories. Since such acommitment, which would of course have to be public, would necessarily involve
planning for the use of British forces, it would no longer be necessary to build up the
Sultan’s forces on a scale sufficient to crush a rebellion on their own. A greater
proportion of the available money could moreover be diverted for civil development
and constructive purposes. The morale of the other Rulers in the Gulf might befavourably affected. It is difficult to estimate the financial saving which this new policy
might permit. It would seem desirable to maintain the Sultan’s Armed Forces at asignificant level, if only to reduce the risk that British intervention might be called for.
It is doubtful whether these forces should in fact be reduced much below the levelenvisaged in 1958. Allowing for an expansion of the civil development programme thetotal cost of the subsidy under this policy might be of the order of £850,000 - £900,000
a year, i.e., a saving of, say, some £450,000 a year over the full cost of continuing ourexisting policy.

327

18. The arguments against this new policy are, however, impressive. The
determining factor seems to be that such a policy would make open intervention by Her
Majesty’s Government more likely than does the present policy. Open intervention by
Her Majesty’s Government would become the first resort and not the last. Her
Majesty’s Government have not of course at any time decided that they will notintervene to save the Sultan in the last resort, although the have gone very far inindication to him that they will not do so.

19. The argument if paragraph 18 above is in my view decisive. There are,however other arguments of some weight. An undertaking to defend the Sultan’s
territory would run counter to our general policy of making no new commitments.
Moreover, during the next few months at least, while Mr Hammarskjold, the SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations Organisation, is conducting his negotiation for thedespatch of a “neutral personage” on what is no more than a tour of inspection in thearea, we are committed to take no action affecting the status of ordinance. A guarantee
to the Sultan would be interpreted as a clear breach of this undertaking. Secondly, thequestion of financial saving is not so clear. If the British intervention in Oman is to beeffective, plans must be made for intervention at the earliest movement, since the scaleof force necessary will rise rapidly if trouble is allowed to continue unchecked. Thismeans that the inconvenience and effects on other tasks in the area of this additional
commitment for British forces must be set against any saving in the subsidy. Actualintervention, if it became necessary, might more than cancel out any of the financial
economies envisaged above.

328

20. Among the secondary arguments against the proposal are the following. If
the Sultan had a complete assurance of protection the incentive towards internal reform
would disappear. Secondly, a commitment to the Sultan personally, given the generalbackwardness of his regime, would not immediately commend itself to public opinion
in this country. Negatively, it can also be argued that a formal undertaken to defend theSultan’s territory would not be necessarily be more effective than our present policy asa deterrent against attempts at rebellion, since the rebel leaders already believe that weare committed to defend the Sultan, both because of our actions during the late rebellion
and because of the regular manoeuvres which have been held by British forces in Oman
since the autumn of 1959.

Policies Outside the Framework of Support for the Sultan
21. If for any reason we decided to discontinue our present policy of support for
the Sultanate there are three forms of disengagement which we might contemplateinvolving a partial or complete break with the Sultan himself:(a) An attempt to establish a new protected State in Oman, under one or more of
the late rebel leaders.
(b) Disengagement from the interior of Oman.
(c) Disengagement from the Sultanate as a whole.

...A New Protected State in Oman
22. At the cost of a partial break with the Sultan we might come to terms withthe late rebel leaders, or some of them separately, and try to establish them under ourown protection in the interior of Oman. Contacts with the rebels now in Saudi Arabia329

have in fact been going on with the Sultan’s knowledge. These have given no grounds
to believe that the rebel leaders, collectively or separately, would agree to anything lessthan complete autonomy, which the Sultan could never agree except force majeure.
There is very little reason to believe that the rebel leaders as a group would agree toreceive our protection in an autonomous Omani State. There is slightly more ground tobelieve that in certain circumstances one of the rebel leaders, Suleiman bin Himyar, if itwere possible to detach him from the others, would accept our protection. Even
assuming, however, that an autonomous Omani State could be established under our
protection, there would be strong external pressures on the leaders of an independent
Oman to renounce our protection and change their course and, although the Omanis are
traditionally distrustful of Saudi influence, these pressures are likely to prevail. The
only chance of maintaining stability in the area would be to establish a substantial
cordon sanitaire around the Omani State, particularly between Oman and Saudi Arabia.
The financial and military commitments needed to maintain this cordon, and to
subsidise the new protected State, might be no less and might be greater than thosenecessitated by our existing policy. In addition to the new military and financial
commitment, the course considered in this paragraph would involve relying on the very
doubtful willingness of the rebel leaders to maintain a relationship with Her Majesty’s
Government which would be repugnant to the Arab nationalist feeling which they have
hitherto invoked. The risks involved would therefore be considerable. The
consequences of failure would also be serious, since we would then incur the risks
described in the other two policies at paragraph 21 (b) and (c) above, dealt with inparagraph 24 below. Finally, any attempt to conduct serious negotiations with therebels behind the Sultan’s back would shake the confidence of the Persian Gulf Rulers
as well as representing a breach of faith with the Sultan himself.

330

...Disengagement from the Interior of Oman, or from the Whole Sultanate

23. If we attempted to disengage completely, either from the interior of Omanor from the Sultanate as a whole, we should be in serious breach of understanding with
the Sultan. Our obligation to the Sultan does not rest only on the 1958 agreement bywhich we undertook to build up his armed forces and give aid for civil development,
while he granted us a 99 year lease of Masirah. During the negotiations in Muscat in
January 1958 Mr Julian Amery, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State andFinancial Secretary, War Office, assured the Sultan categorically that British assistancewould be “on a very long term basis”, and that our presence in Masirah “would be asign of our enduring support for Muscat”. During the Sultan’s visit to London in 1959
he was assured that the object of Her Majesty’s Government was to ensure that thepolicy embarked upon in 1958 was practicable.

24. Either of these courses of disengagement would also entail dangers for ourinterests than the policy described in paragraph 22 above. The results of disengagementfrom the interior would depend largely on how far we could maintain a cordon sanitairearound Oman. The difficulty and cost of doing this might be much greater than if we
had only to attempt to contain a new “protected” State. Even if such a cordon could bemaintained, a neutral or unfriendly Oman would offer to the Saudis a valuable base forsubversion of the Trucial Coast. Such an Omani State moreover would soon press
claims on the remaining territories of the Sultan, with a corresponding increase in theeffort needed to defend them. The results of complete disengagement from theSultanate would be even more serious, control of the mainland opposite Masirah andthereafter Masirah itself would almost certainly be lost. It is most unlikely that, in the331face of a hostile world opinion, we could retain our position in Masirah by physicalforce in defiance of the mainland authority to whom Masirah belonged. Overflying
rights over Oman would lapse. The threat to the Trucial Coast would be greatly
increased and it is uncertain how far this could be contained. The confidence of theRuler of Kuwait and other Gulf Rulers would be seriously shaken, with unforeseeable
consequences in respect of the future of our relationship with Kuwait. Our subsidiaryinterests in the Sultanate would also automatically lapse (possible discoveries of oil, thereaction of events in Oman on future oil development in Abu Dhabi and Qatar, andcontrol of the entry into the Persian Gulf).

Conclusion on the Choice of Policies
25. Any form of disengagement (paragraphs 22-24) at the present time would
seem to involve both a breach of faith and unacceptable risks to our position in Kuwait.
Any radical change in our position in Kuwait might modify this position. On the other
hand other interests in the Persian Gulf which now seem relatively less important might
meanwhile gain in priority: for instance, latest indications from Abu Dhabi are
extremely promising, and it is not fanciful to visualise a time some years ahead when
Abu Dhabi and Qatar oil together, in which British interests predominate, may total
something like one-third of the present Kuwaiti production.

26. Within the framework of continued support of the Sultan, the choice appears to
depend on the importance which we still attach to the policy decided in 1958, namely,that the Sultan should be enabled to ensure his security without recourse to open
intervention would, I consider, be no less serious to-day than they seemed in 1958. It isdifficult to evaluate the direct and indirect economic costs of intervention on a battalion-332

group scale. Allowing for air support, the cost might be of the order of L2 millions.
More significance might be attached to the indirect economic effects due to a
deterioration of our relations with the Arab and other Afro-Asian countries. Against thebackground of our interests in the Gulf, the scale of expenditure involved in paying thefull price for carrying out the 1958 policy cannot be called extravagant.

27. I have considered whether it might ease our task if the Sultan could be
persuade to make way for a successor. No alternative regime, however, is conceivable
which would necessarily be better than the present Sultan, who is a staunch friend of
Her Majesty’s Government and possesses great virtues as well as considerable defects;
and the alternatives might be worse.

28. If we continue the 1958 policy of increased cost we should of course
continue also the regular training exercises in Oman which have been recently held by
British forces stationed elsewhere. These exercises are known to have exerted adeterrent effect on the rebel leaders. Secondly we should also seek any possible
opportunity for a settlement by which one or more of the rebel leaders submitted to the
Sultan’s authority and returned to Oman under conditions acceptable to the Sultan andsatisfactory to ourselves. Such a settlement seems at present unlikely, but if it could infuture be achieved it might reduce the rebel threat and therefore probably also theefforts needed to counteract the latter. Both lines of action described in this paragraphwould of course be important even if the alternative policies in support of the Sultan
were adopted (paragraph 15 (b) and (c) above).

Recommendation

333

29.

I consider that in principle Her Majesty’s Government should be prepared to

pay up to about £1,350,000 a year (plus £1,565,000 capital) as the price of continuing
our present policy in Oman: there would be little chance of significantly reducing thisburden unless oil is discovered, and we cannot confidently expect, though we shouldattempt, to secure United Nations assistance for development purposes. In invite mycolleagues to agree to this as a preliminary to the talks which we have been pledged
since last autumn to undertake with the Sultan on the long-term programme for hiscountry and which are due to begin in London early in July. During these talks my
Department will remain in close touch with the Treasury and Service Departments.
They will endeavour to reduce the total costs in detail, in so far as that is compatible
with the general policy which I have recommended above, and to secure the maximum
contribution from the Sultan himself. They will also try to ensure satisfactory methodsof control, both financial and otherwise, of any increased scale of assistance. It would
also be made clear to the Sultan that the object of increased expenditure is to render
practicable, with his assistance, the policy on which Her Majesty’s Government decided
in 1958, but that if events in the future (say within the next three years) prove that thisobject is unattainable, Her Majesty’s Government will have to consider other means of
securing their interests. I believe that it is essential to retain this note of doubt with its
veiled threat in our dealings with the Sultan if we are to instil a sense of urgency andsecure his co-operation in the active measures of reorganisation which seem necessary.

S.L.
July 1960
Source: PRO, CAB 129/102 Part 1

334

Appendix F

CONFIDENTIAL

MUSCAT ANNUAL REPORTFOR THE YEAR 1965

The Sultan and the Royal Family

1. The Sultan remained in Salalah throughout the year. He has decided against visiting
Muscat, and it seems unlikely that he will return to Muscat until oil revenues are suchthat he can be comparatively open handed. Sayid Qaboos, his only son, after his
English education and world tour has remained in Salalah. For the first six months he
was usefully employed in relearning Arabic and absorbing the laws and traditions of his
country from a Qadi brought to Salalah for this purpose. But well before the year had
ended this period was over and Qaboos has been bored and lonely. The Sultan finds iteasier to acknowledge the importance of giving Qaboos practical experience in the
management of affairs than to give him a position which will provide the experience.

Internal

2. Rebel activity in Dhofar apart (see para. 12), the Sultan’s system of ruling thecountry through his network of Walis has continued to work well. The only event of335

note was an attempt by Mohammed Saleh of Biah to accede to Ras al Khaimah. This
problem is small in scale but remains unsolved.

External Relations

3. After 11 years of intermittent argument agreement was reached in December
between the Sultan and the East Aden Protectorate authorities on an administrative
boundary between the Protectorate and Dhofar. It consists of straight lines linking
geographical features Ras Darbat Ali, Jabal Sadakh, Habrut and Ramlat Shuwait, andthe coordinate 52 degrees E and 19 degrees N. The features were all mentioned initiallyin 1954. Almost certainly the factor which made the Sultan readier to agree was his fearof what would replace the British authorities in the Protectorate after 1968. He wishedto lose no more time in getting the boundary fixed before then and his main regret wasthat the boundary which had been agreed would not rate as an international frontier.

4. The Sultan has been warned of the possibility that Pakistan may abrogate all or partof the Gwadur Agreement. This became evident when recruitment in Gwadur wasimpeded. In connection with this and arising immediately out of the Indian-Pakistaniwar, the Pakistan Government asked for the return of all Pakistan Army personnel
seconded to SAF. The Sultan refused this request and flatly rejected the idea thatmeeting this request and making concessions in other directions when they cost him
little he might get the Pakistan Government to leave him with those clauses of theAgreement which were vital to him. He has instead taken the line that any concession
by him would be the beginning of the end and all his rights would quickly crumble
away.

336

5. Sultanate subjects in Gwadur continue to complain of discrimination against them by
the Pakistani authorities.

6. A new Indian Consul-General Mr Chibber took up his duties in December.

7. There were the usual minor border disputes with the Trucial States over the year.
The Habus-Shihuh dispute over the drilling of a well in Ras al Khaimah flared up again
briefly; there was a dispute over the use of a well on the Muscat/Sharjah border at
Yidaiya and another over the exact location of a school being built at Dibbah, and there
was a period of tension at Buraimi after two Abu Dhabi subjects were wounded by the
Oman Gendarmerie when their Landrover failed to halt when challenged.

8. Mr Buckmaster completed the marking of the Muscat/Abu Dhabi border in the
Buraimi area and also his fieldwork on the Muscat/Sharjah border. He is currently
investigating the Muscat/Ras al Khaimah border.

Civil Development Programme

9. The Civil Development Programme continues to advance slowly. The two model
farms are working well, but plans to establish a third have been shelved indefinitely,
the network of Health Centres and Dispensaries is being improved. The 135-mile
Batinah coast road will be completed in March 1966. The Boarding School for the sonso f Shaikhs has been completed but as yet no pupils have appeared. The expected
detailed review of H.M.G.’s Civil Development Subsidy did not take place during 1965337

but it was agreed that assistance would be maintained during 1966/67 at the present
level.

10. If the Sultan is to make his people more contented and thus reduce the danger of
revolution (at present they tend to be discontented either because they are at heart
supporters of the ex-imam, or are frustrated by the Sultan’s regulations, or have seen
what oil-rich Rulers elsewhere have done for their people), then it is important that his
Civil Development Programme be accelerated and expanded. In particular he must
provide more schools despite the danger that schools in the Middle East tend inthemselves to be centres of unrest and disaffection. The Sultan is fully seized of thisnecessity, but refuses to move until he has sufficient money from his oil. There is a real
danger that he may leave it too late.

ANTI-GOVERNMENT ACTIVITY

11. Rebel activity in Oman virtually petered out over the year. There may, however, bea resurgence following the international support given to their case in by the General
Assembly of the United Nations.

12. By contrast rebel activity in Dhofar has increased considerably and it has become
necessary to keep a Company of SAF with air support at Salalah permanently. It seems
that there are two separate anti-Government groups, one operating in Salalah itself andthe other in the mountains, with the mountain group further split into factions. The
Salalah Front suffered a severe setback in June when 33 of its members were arrested
on information arising from the capture (by the Iranians) of a launch loaded with rebel

338

arms and documents. The mountain groups have also been hard pressed by SAF, whohave had some noticeable successes in arms recoveries, but they have neverthelessremained active. Incidents ranged from isolated minings to determined attack on
Marbat Fort. This happened on 7 November, when a group of rebels killed threedefenders but lost four men; this included their leader.

13. With the Omani rebels in eclipse the cause of the Dhofari rebels has been taken up
enthusiastically by Cairo and Baghdad Radios which broadcast detailed and largely
imaginary reports of their heroic activities. A factor to be bom in mind when
considering Dhofar is that the tribes are broken into very small sections. This works infavour of the rebels in that tribal discipline is non-existent. It works against them in thatit makes it more difficult for them to establish a large following. Dhofar joined theSultanate only late in the last century. Before and since conditions have been anarchic.
The present situation is not exceptional for this area.

OMAN AND THE UNITED NATIONS

14. The Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Oman was published in January.
Although reluctantly conceding that the Sultanate was neither a colony nor aprotectorate, the Committee concluded that the question of Oman was a “serious
international problem” arising from imperialistic policies and foreign intervention” andrecommended that a U.N. Good Offices Committee should be set up to facilitatereconciliation between the Sultan and the Imam. The Committee called upon the U.K.
and the Arab states to encourage such a settlement.

339

15. Despite the Committee’s conclusion that the question was not a colonial one, its
Report was referred to the Fourth Committee, where H.M.G.’s policy in the Sultanate
was the subject of bitter attacks by Afro-Asian delegates, who table a motion statingthat “the colonial presence of the U.K. in its various forms prevents the people of theterritory from exercising their rights to self-determination and independence”; callingupon the U.K. to cease all repressive activity, to withdraw British troops, and release
political prisoners and to eliminate British domination in any form, and inviting theSpecial Committee to examine the situation. This resolution was passed by large
majorities in both the Fourth Committee and the General Assembly. In the latter thevote took place on 17 December and was 61 in favour, and 18 against with 32
abstentions. Those who voted against the motion were Western Europe less Greece, the
Old Commonwealth, the United States, Bolivia, Israel, South Africa, and Malta.

16. The strength of the voting against us was undoubtedly due to some extent to thegeneral anti-British feeling over Rhodesia, but this should not be allowed to obscure thefact that the Arab States feel strongly about the Oman question and are unlikely to allow
matters to rest here. What more effective measures can they take to make their weight
felt in Oman? I was in Nizwa, the heart of Oman, ten days after the vote and while theUnited Nations resolutions may have stirred the people I could find few signs of it.
However it seems only sensible to expect increased rebel activity and it seems possiblethat a Govemment-in-Exile may be set up and recognised by the Arabs, theCommunists and some other Afro-Asians. The race between the Sultan’s development
programme and rebel activity is in any case likely to be both long and close.

MILITARY340

17. The review of H.M.G.’s Military Subsidy was concluded in Salalah in July. It wasagreed that assistance should continue during 1966/67 at the same level as during
1965/66. It is expected that the Subsidy will cease in 1967, when the acquisition of oilrevenues will remove the necessity for outside financial assistance. The position will be
reviewed, however, in the event of oil revenues failing to come up to expectations.

18. SAF continue to operate efficiently and economically. For its size and cost it must
be one of the most efficient forces operating in the region. A start has been made on
raising a Third Battalion. It is being paid for from the Sultan’s own revenues and isconceived as being necessary primarily to protect the operations of oil companies. It
remains to be seen whether Pakistan’s desire to amend the Gwadur Agreement (underwhich SAF receive Pakistan Army assistance, and recruit in Gwadur) will affect theefficiency of the Force.

GOVERNMENT OFFICES

19.

There have been no changes. It is clear that the present skeleton civil

administration is not capable of bearing the strains that will be imposed by the rapid
expansion following the advent of oil revenues, and H.M.G. have long been urging
upon the Sultan the necessity for improving the country’s administrative structure. He
has finally agreed to a visit early in 1966, by Sir Gawain Bell, to advise on the steps thatmust be taken. Whether the Sultan will accept and act upon such advice remains to be
seen.

341

CONSULAR WORK

20. Figures are as follows:

New passports issued:

44

Passport renewals (British)

24

Passport renewals (Pakistani)

28

Emergency Passports issued

441

Certificates of Identity

12

Visa

2386*

Registration of Births

Nil

Registration of Deaths

Nil

Registration of Marriage

Nil

Registration of U.K Citizens

8

Attestation of declarations

81

Deposit of Ship’s Articles

13

342

Masters’ Notes of Protest

6

Estate Cases

1

Criminal suits

Nil

Civil suits

Nil

Repatriation of Pakistani destitutes Nil

Letters of Recommendation51* About 1500 visas were granted annually for Kuwait. No Kuwait visas are now issued
by Consular Posts abroad.

TRADE

21. Imports for 1964 totalled £2,398,075. During the first 10 months of 1965 the valueof imports has been £2,600,981. These figures do not include duty free imports for the
Muscat Government and Oil Company. The main exporting countries during 1965
(January to October) were:£ sterling
United Kingdom

375,765

India

433,598

Singapore

140,835

343

Pakistan

225,127

Main British Imports:

M.T. Spare parts

47,324

Cigarettes/Tobacco

50,162

Confectionery/Biscuits/

23,998Toilet/Perfumery

16,383

Other main imports during 1965 (January - December) were
Rice valued at about £628,635 (12,618 tons),
Cement £110,840 (15,360 tons), Sugar £164,700 (4378 tons),
Wheat and Wheat flour £184,750 (5,358 tons).

22. Dry dates (3,620 tons) valued at about £250,000 were exported to India. In
addition 550 tons of wet dates valued at about £42,810 were exported to Aden and East
Africa. Dry lime exports were valued at about L138,000 (351 tons). Dry fish andKaska exports were lower than 1964. Customs figuresare £1,875 whereas local
merchants estimate exports via Dubai ( without Customs knowledge) exceeded£20,000.

OIL

23. Petroleum Development (Oman) Ltd. have begun work on the construction of thepipeline and the terminal installations at Saih al Maleh. A senior executive of Shell intelling you, Sir, in late October of Petroleum Development (Oman) Ltd’s expectations344

said that they hoped to begin exporting in 1 October 1967 with an output of 140,000
barrels a day. This should increase to between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels a day in1968 and possibly to 300,000 barrels a day in 1969. Revenues accruing to the Sultan
from these amounts would be £ three and a half million at the end of 1967, and between£15 million and £20 million in 1968. Apart from this clarification of prospects the mostimportant feature has been the new agreement offered by Petroleum Development(Oman) to the Sultan. Once accepted it will result in the Sultan’s getting substantiallylarger payments. The draft follows the pattern of Shell’s agreement with Qatar. It
incorporates the advantages for producer states recently obtained by OPEC.

24. MECOM, who have the concession for Dhofar, have been attacked and sufferedlosses from the rebels. But their work continues and it is said that they have found a
promising structure.

25. According to one well-placed witness a consortium of major German companies
are interested in obtaining a sea-bed concession and held discussions on the subject
with the Sultan in December. Dr Wendell Phillips had put them in touch with him.
If this leads to the Germans getting the concession it will have the advantage that afurther Western county will have a vested interest in the sovereignty of the Sultan
and the territorial integrity of his country. Countries with such a stake now arelimited to the U.K., the U.S.A., and the Netherlands.

Source: PRO, FO 371/185362

345

Appendix G

SECRET

DEFENCE SECRETARY
FS/66/99

OPERATION FATE

I am writing with relation to the very successful operation undertaken by units
under the command of the C - in - C Middle East on 28 October to clear the Dhofari
rebels from the East Aden Protectorate port of Hauf. The Sultan of Muscat and Oman
has asked our Consul General in Muscat to arrange for his thanks to be conveyed tothose who made possible and executed this operation and I should be grateful if thismessage could be transmitted to those concerned. May I add my own congratulations?
2. I am sending a copy of this minute to the Prime Minister.

G.A. Brown

2 November 1966

Source. PRO, FO 371/185365

346

Appendix H

SECRET

Mr Brenchley (Arabian Department)

Security - Muscat and Oman

The meeting of the working party on the Persian Gulf yesterday suggested to me that
this might be a useful moment for me to give my assessment of the security threat to oilin Muscat and Oman. I realise that our present thinking is that, although in theremainder of the Lower Gulf we are taking steps (Special Branch, Intelligence etc.) to
anticipate attacks, in Muscat and Oman we are depending on the Sultan’s own efforts,
partly because we think that he has the situation under control; and partly because wethink that he would not in any case allow us to intervene in what is an internal security
situation within his own sovereign state. Although it may be true that he would not let
us intervene, I am not convinced that we could not influence him and for reasons which
I have below I do not agree with what I believe to be his assessment of the security
threat.

2. There have been many occasions when the Sultan has proved himself correct in his
assessment of the political/security situation: for example, in 1952 his action to remove
Turki in Buraimi was undoubtedly a correct assessment in as far as the removal of the
Saudi threat was concerned, and I think that H.M.G’s decision to prevent him was347

wrong from that point of view. Secondly he has apparently had great success in the
Sharqiyah district where he chose the right man as governor and has had tranquillity forthe last 8 or 9 years in an area that had hitherto been independent of Muscat.

3. Where I believe he was wrong was when in September 1954 he refused to agree topush Talib’s little force out of Ibri and when, despite his orders to the contrary, I
managed to persuade his army commander to do just this in a 300 mile dash across thedesert; with the help of a mercenary force of Duru’ which we raised on the spot Ibri wascaptured and has been held since then. Subsequent history has shown that, if this action
had not been taken against the Sultan’s wishes, the new Imam would not haveconsolidated his position in Ibri and within a few weeks gained control of the Duru’tribe (to which Ibri is the key). The oil company and the Sultan’s forces would havebeen prevented from getting into the desert area: and I am quite certain that no company
holding a concession from the Sultan’s Government would have been able to find andexploit oil in this area, and the Sultan would not now have the prospect of enjoying
immense oil royalties. If anybody would have enjoyed them it would have been the
Imam or the Saudis. Since that day the Sultan has come around to understand theposition and Ibri was the bastion from which the 1957 rebellion was eventually
overcome by the brilliant action of the S. A. S.

4. I also differed with the Sultan over the surrender of the rebel leaders in Buraimi in
October 1955. But I feel that events proved that it was worthwhile to stop the fighting
in exchange for a safe-conduct of the rebels to Saudi Arabia. It was a cheap price to pay
and the alternative was possible failure of the operation to regain control of Buraimi on
behalf of the Sultan. On this occasion as on many others we were able to see the hatred348

which many of the tribal leaders have for the Sultan and their fear of imprisonment anda lingering death in Muscat. Rather than that they would have fought to the death. In
short these are but two examples in which the Sultan has almost certainly been proved
wrong in political/military decisions; and his mistakes have been based on a lack ofcommunication with his people. This lack of communication tends to get worse as eachyear he lives in his far away hideout.

5. The security position in regard to the new Omani pipeline, in my view, falls into two
sections:a) The protection of the pipeline in the desert should be comparatively simple, provided
that the Duru’ tribe is kept happy since all other tribes are terrified of them and will notwillingly enter that area against the wish of the Duru’. Furthermore sabotage ofpipelines in flat desert does not normally have serious consequences, and isolated
instances have only slight nuisance value to the oil producer.

b) The second phase of this problem begins where the pipeline enters the foothills to go
up and over the Samail Gap. Here the line will go from one tribal area to another. A
large number of tribes are involved, all of whom have histories of feuds and rebellion.
Sabotage in hill districts is much more serious to the oil company since large quantitiesof oil will flow out of the fractured pipe (the oil company may take this into
consideration and could perhaps fit a larger number of gates to the pipe than the normal
practice would indicate is necessary). I believe the Sultan thinks that by paying these
tribes a little money he can guarantee the safety of the pipe. Although I cannot say that
he is necessarily wrong in this assessment, I think that it is a very risky one to make349

and I have very grave doubts, amounting nearly to certainty, as to whether he will pay
them enough. Army patrols along a pipeline have been found often enough to beineffective in such a situation and the only way in which a pipeline can be preserved
from attack lies in absolute cooperation from the local people (which must bepurchased), and a very high-class intelligence service covering tribal activities, themovement of strangers, or perhaps even more dangerous the activities of returning
tribesmen from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. The loyalty of the tribesmen must bepurchased not so much by money as by good government and respect shown to the
Shaikhs. Substantial bribes will help. Small ones will not. clearly in a practical world
nothing will guarantee a pipeline from sabotage, but I think that if the points which I
have suggested were covered as far as they can, at least the risk would be reduced.

7. I do not, of course, know the details of the Sultan’s plans in this direction, but I
believe that the Sultan still operates with the tribes on a basis of minute bribes backed
up by convincing terror tactics in the form of the threat of imprisonment in Jalali. The
trouble will be that with outside influence and money and a growing feeling among thepeople that they would like to advance with the times, the Sultan’s old-fashioned tactics
are likely to become more out-of-date and ineffective as the days go by. I asked Shaikh
Zaid the other day what he thought of the political position in Muscat and he said thathe thought that the hatred felt by the majority for the Sultan would prevent his
Government from protecting the pipeline and oil installations and Zaid that he did not
expect the oil to get to the ships. Although I have a high regard for Zaid’s assessmentof the political situation, he is rather out of touch with the oil security problem and I
would think that his pessimism may prove excessive. My own view is that if theEgyptians or Iraqis make a determined effort to sabotage the pipeline they will probably

350

succeed. If they spent enough money and took enough trouble they could probably
succeed fairly frequently and damage oil production to a significant extent. I would
assume that the oil company, in conjunction with the Government, would take sufficient
precautions to protect pumping stations in the field and the terminal station on the coast.
But we have learnt again and again in the oil security business that lengthy pipelines
cannot be protected by physical security measures, especially if they are laid on thesurface (and I do not know what the company’s plan is in this respect). In large
oilfields this also goes for wellheads, where physical security measures are extremely
difficult to operate. Protection of these installations must therefore rely on politicalmeasures.

8. In brief, my own estimate is that in the long run the oil industry in Muscat and Omanis at least as vulnerable as any other in the Lower Gulf, and because of the length of thepipeline and its passage through the rocky hills I would estimate that it is probably themost vunerable industrial operation in the Middle East. Add to this the fact that the
Sultan is more completely at odds with the rest of the Arab world than any of his
brother monarchs and the fact that he has a large number of potential dissidents in his
country, and I would say that the security prospects are not good. I would be very
surprised if his precautions will be anything like adequate to meet the threat, unless wecan assist him in taking them.
E.F. Henderson
19, July 1966
c.c. Mr Shattock
SECRET
Source: PRO, FO 371/185383

351

Appendix I

CONFIDENTIAL

ARABIA
17 January, 1968
Section 1

PERSIAN GULF: ANNUAL REVIEW FOR 1967

Sir Stewart Crawford to Mr Brown (Received 17 January)

SUMMARY
1. Apart from the effects of the Arab-Israeli crisis and of the withdrawal of British
forces from South Arabia, 1967 was a quiet year, in which economic and administrative
development and the redeployment of British forces proceeded smoothly. (Paragraph
2 .)2. Impact on Rulers of our withdrawal from South Arabia. Their anxieties allayed by
Minister of State’s visit, but only temporarily. (Paragraph 3.)

3. Arab-Israel war, handling of oil exports, strengthening of internal security forces.
(Paragraphs 4-5.)

4. Effects of these developments on Sultanate; Kuria Muria Islands. (Paragraph 6.)352

5. Effects of sterling devaluation. (Paragraph 7.)

6. Expansion of oil exports, progress of economic and administrative development.
(Paragraphs 8-9.)

7. Situation in Trucial States; rivalry of Shaikhs Zaid and Rashid; position on territorial
disputes. (Paragraphs 10.)

8. Quiet internal security situation; absence of serious local issues which can be usedby external subversive movements; no public reaction to increase in size of British
forces. But the prospects clouded by uncertainty over what will result for the Gulf fromthe British review of overseas spending, on which early announcement is to be made.

353

('Confidential)

Bahrain,

Sir,

12, January, 1968

I have the honour to report upon affairs in the Persian Gulf in 1967 and to enclose achronological summary of the main events.

2. The most dramatic events of 1967 in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli crisis of MayJune, and the ending of colonial rule in Aden with the withdrawal of all British forcesfrom South Arabia in November, shook the Gulf States, but in different ways. The
former produced a severe emotional shock to the population as a whole, with some
Immediate harm to British interests, which if we are careful need not be lasting. The
latter, which caused no visible reactions among the general population but great anxiety
m the minds of the Rulers, can now be seen as the prelude to a major reappraisal of
British defence policy of East of Suez, which threatens to have a profound andpermanent effect on the history of the area. Otherwise, 1967 was a tranquil year, inwhich economic development and administrative improvement based on growing oilrevenues went ahead steadily in several of the States. The modest build-up of ourforces in the Gulf was also accomplished smoothly and without any overt public
reaction. The modest build-up of our forces in the Gulf was also accomplishedsmoothly and without any overt public reaction. The internal security situation, both at
the beginning and the end of the year, was as quiet as it has ever been. Even thesituation in the Dhofar Hills was less troubled than in the past, although at the end of theyear the portents for the future were not reassuring.

354

3. It had been expected that the withdrawal of British forces from South Arabia would
cause a severe shock to the Rulers of the Southern Gulf; but when it came, it proved themore severe because of the events leading up to it: the collapse of the South ArabianFederal Government, the flight of the Sultans, the emergence of the National Liberation
Front and the discovery that Her Majesty’s Government were prepared to treat with its
leaders despite their revolutionary political affiliations and the violent methods they had
used to seize power. It was inevitable that the suspicion should be propagated that Her
Majesty’s Government would before long abandon the Gulf Rulers also, and this was
the view expressed to some of them by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. In consequence,
the autumn of 1967 found the Rulers in a state of great apprehension about the futureand it was fortunate that the Minister of State at the Foreign Office had planned a visit
to the Gulf. This took place in November and Mr Roberts left the Rulers greatly
heartened by his statement to them that the British political and military presence would
be retained in the area for so long as it was necessary for the preservation of peace andstability and that no time-limit had been set to this presence. It was unfortunate that
almost immediately afterwards as a result of the economic crisis in the United Kingdom
which led to the devaluation of sterling, their fears were reawakened by the news that
Her Majesty’s Government were undertaking a fresh and rigorous review of all fields ofexpenditure including overseas spending. Thus, the end of the year left the Rulers once
again in a state of great perturbation. Their reactions to these developments took thesame form as in 1966 when they were originally told of Her Majesty’s Government’s
plan to withdraw from South Arabia: first, reinsurance through the establishment ofcloser contacts with Saudi Arabia and, second, the strengthening of local security
forces. It might have been expected that they would also draw closer together in orderto strengthen themselves against the uncertainties of the future by joint action. They all355

claimed to see the need for doing so and there were plenty of bilateral contacts; there
was not, however, any general meeting of Rulers during 1967, nor the creation of newforms of co-operation between them.

4. The Arab-Israel war caused in most of the Gulf area the same shock as in other partsof the Arab world, and brought home once again the importance, for the protection of
British interests, of Her Majesty’s Government striking a balance in its handling of the
Arab-Israel question at such a point as to avoid exposing it to charges of being proIsraeli. During the international discussion on the Straits of Tiran in May, the Arab
population became convinced that Her Majesty’s Government’s position was not
impartial, since its support for the internationalisation of the waterway coincided with
one of Israel’s policy aims. As a result the “Big Lie” during the war was believed bynearly everybody in the Gulf, with effects described in the next paragraph.
Subsequently, however, there was a general welcome for the line which you, Sir, took
in the United Nations, that as part of a peace settlement covering all the other needs ofthe situation, Israel should not retain territories acquired as a result of war. Provided
that our policy statements continue on these lines, it is possible that no lasting harm will
have been done to our interests.

5. The crisis showed, however, the growing involvement in the Arab cause of thepolitically conscious people of the area and, as a result, most of the Rulers felt
compelled to go a considerable way in expressing their support. Thanks to the swiftnessof the Israeli campaign and of the Arab collapse, their support could be largely platonic,
but it had significant though temporary consequences in oil matters. For the Rulers of
the oil-exporting States, though they did their utmost to limit the harm to our material356

interests and managed to avoid naming the United Kingdom explicitly as being
associated with Israel’s aggression, had no option but to comply with the decision of the
Arab Oil Conference, and to put an embargo on the shipment of oil to Britain andAmerica, until the Khartoum Conference enabled the ban to be removed. In this and inother respects, the Rulers handled the popular pressures with considerable skill andemerged if anything stronger from what was for them a searing experience.
Nevertheless, they all felt impelled to look to the internal security of their States. Thus,
the Ruler of Dubai, troubled by a short breakdown of order in his capital during the Junewar, embarked on an expansion and strengthening of his police force. The Ruler of Abu
Dhabi, which was quiet in June, but where there is the additional problem of the Saudi
claim to his territory, continued to give his Defence Force the resources it needed for aconsiderable expansion programme. The Ruler of Qatar, where there was some
disturbance within his own security, embarked on weeding out the South Arabians andYemenis whom he considered the main trouble-makers. Even most of the lesser Rulersof the Trucial Coast have now acquired small police forces. In Bahrain, where there
had been big demonstrations but virtually no violence, the State Police, under first-class
British leadership, came through with flying colours. None the less, the Ruler began tothink more seriously than in the past about setting up a small private army of Bedu,
under the command of his eldest son, to act as a second string for the handling ofinternal disorders.

6. The effect of these events on the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman needs separate
mention. The Sultanate is still largely cut off from the main stream of Arab opinion,
and was totally untroubled by the Arab-Israel war. The United Kingdom withdrawal
from South Arabia, however, affected the Sultanate much more directly than any of the357other States especially as the emergence of the National Liberation Front meant that on
his very border (and this has not yet received the sanction of an international
agreement), the Sultan now had a neighbour led by a Government dedicated to
revolutionary doctrines and the removal of Sultans. The situation was further
complicated by the claim put forward to the Kuria Muria Islands by the new South
Yemeni Government, after the islands had, following a consultation with the inhabitants
by Her Majesty’s Government, been returned to the sovereignty of the Sultan, whose
ancestor had given them to Queen Victoria in 1854. Thus, at the end of the year, there
was a possibility that friction might develop between the two countries and that the
National Liberation Front would in 1968 begin supporting the guerillas in Dhofar, forwhom 1967 had not been a successful year.

7. The devaluation of sterling in November, despite the substantial losses caused toGovernments and private investors, was accepted philosophically and without
recrimination. The Governments of Bahrain and Qatar decided against devaluing theirown currencies, primarily because this would have entailed a damaging rise in the costof staple food stuffs. The Sultan of Muscat, whose finances had been less able thanthose of his neighbours to carry the cost of India’s devaluation the year before, felt
obliged after some hesitation to follow sterling down. The effect of all this on British
exports to the Gulf remains to be seen; but the steady improvement shown in Board ofTrade figures for the first 11 months of the year (in the case of Abu Dhabi and Dubai
almost double the 1966 performance) is evidence that the opportunity is there to be
seized.

358

8. Despite these successive jolts, the Southern Gulf area developed peacefully during
1967, and was accompanied by a continued expansion of its oil resources. Abu Dhabi
production both on land and on the seabed continued to mount steadily (1967 revenue
some 37 million pounds and forecast of 70 million in 1968); export from the Oman
fields began on the 1st of August from the new terminal just north of Muscat, and is
now running at some 10 million tons a year. The Dubai Petroleum Company finallydecided to proceed with production from the find in the seabed and plan to start exports
at the beginning of 1969. Even Bahrain, otherwise static as a producer, can lookforward to a substantial increase in revenues from oil, through the exploitation by
Aramco of the field in the seabed jointly owned with Saudi Arabia; pending the receiptof this higher revenue, the Bahrain Government borrowed the substantial sum of BD6
million from Shaikh Zaid to tide it over.

9. Thus there has been a good basis for development, and the Rulers, nearly all within
their resources (and in the case of Shaikh Saqr of Ras al Khaimah beyond his), havebeen active in this field. Bahrain, in particular, with the most urgent problem becauseof its large number of unemployed school leavers, has during the year made good
progress in seeking new industries involving investment by foreign concerns. Our own
technical assistance programme has played a useful role in Bahrain and will before longbe supplemented by the establishment of an Advanced Technical Institute, to befinanced half and half by Her Majesty’s Government and by Shaikh Zaid, which should
ultimately benefit all the Southern Gulf States. The development of Abu Dhabi at amore primitive level continued fast but at a slightly less helter-skelter pace than seemed
likely a year ago; Shaikh Zaid has engaged officials from Britain and a number of othercountries, and now has an elementary form of administration, with a competent Iraqi

359

official as co-ordinator, on lines laid down after an Economic Survey conducted in
March at his request under the auspices of Development Division, Beirut. Dubai
celebrated the decision about oil production by concluding a contract with a British
consortium for the construction of a deep water harbour costing over 10 million pounds,
probably the largest British commercial project outside the oil industry yet to be started
im this area. The Sultan of Muscat, whose hope of starting development this year wasseet back by the ending in March of British financial help towards his defence forces, sixmonths before the start of oil revenues in October relieved him of the need for help, wassttill engaged in planning at the end of the year. He has drafted a long statement of his
intentions for issue to the people, but he will have to make concrete progress soon if heis to satisfy his many critics. It may be noted, however, that, apart from Dhofar, hiscountry is peaceful and his opponents abroad in considerable disarray.

10. The five Northern Trucial States, being still without oil, remained dependent for theb»ulk of their development on expenditure by the Trucial States Development Fund.
Sihaikh Zaid of Abu Dhabi has this year contributed 1 million pounds to the fund andthis money, coupled with Her Majesty’s Government’s contribution of something under
1/2 million pounds, enabled the Development Office to continue providing the basic
utilities needed in the Northern States. Our hopes that Shaikh Zaid and Shaikh Rashido f Dubai would be able to co-operate harmoniously and effectively in jointly leadingthese five little States were, however, disappointed. Relations between the two Rulers
remained correct, but did not become cordial. This was not simply because of the long­standing rivalry between the two States, but also because of the close relationshipbetween Shaikh Rashid and King Faisal, who still maintains his claim to much of Abu
Dhabi territory. In April Shaikh Zaid visited King Faisal but failed to find any way of360

making progress towards a settlement of the Buraimi dispute. Although none of theother territorial disputes were settled in 1967, there was a fair amount of activity
connected with them. Shaikh Isa of Bahrain visited Shaikh Ahmed of Qatar in April(ithe first such visit by a Ruler of Bahrain) and began exchanges over their dispute abouttlhe seabed and islands, but a settlement is little closer; a number of inconclusive but
fairly encouraging meetings took place between Shaikh Zaid and the Ruler and Deputy
Ruler of Qatar - to settle their seabed dispute; Shaikh’s Zaid and Rashid tried with little
siuccess to discuss their frontier problems, but these are better left buried.

11. None of these disputes, nor the events in South Arabia which culminated in
November in the passage of through Bahrain Airport of large numbers of servicemen on
their way home from Aden, had any effect on the internal security situation which, withthe exception of the week or so when the Arab-Israel crisis was at its height, remained
quiet throughout the year. This tranquillity was due partly to the steady growth of
economic activity in the Protected States, partly due to the increasing experience of theRulers and improvements in the administrative capability of their Governments, partly
to continued good work by the local security forces, including the Trucial Oman Scouts,
coupled with the general knowledge that British troops were there in the background incase of need, and partly to the absence of any determined external subversive or
propaganda effort against the Gulf States, other than the Sultanate. The latter fact
makes it impossible to be sure how the position would have developed if the United
Arab Republic Government, for example, had raised its current routine level ofsubversive activity by a marked amount. What can be said is that there was a notableabsence of serious local issues, of the kind on which an external subversive effort would
have to feed to be quickly effective. Contrary to the expectations of writers in the361

British popular Press, the doubling of the British forces in the gulf was not such an issue
with the public, whatever murmurings there were among members of the clandestine
Nationalist groups. 1967, therefore, ended as it began, quietly, but the prospects for the
future were obscured by uncertainty about what would be contained in Her Majesty’s
Government’s announcement, planned for mid-January, which was expected to set out
their decisions on Britain’s future defence arrangements in the Gulf. These are bound toprove cardinal for the peace and stability of the area.

Copied to: Her Majesty’s Ambassadors at Jedda, Kuwait, Cairo. Beirut and Amman,
Her Majesty’s Charge d’Affaires, Tehran, the United Kingdom High Commisioner,
Rawalpindi, Her Majesty’s Political Agent, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, andHer Majesty’s Consul-General, Muscat.

I have, &c.

STEWART CRAWFORD

Source. FO 371 Annual Reports for 1967

362

Appendix J

IBJ
The Industrial Bank of Japan, Limited
London Branch
Bracken HouseOne Friday Street, London EC4M 9JA
Tel: 071-248 1111 Telex: 886939 Fax: 171-248 1114

FacsimileDate:

17th January 1994

Fax No.

: 836 3108

To

: nSS

Attention: Mr Ahmed HashimRe: enquiry from IBJ head office -- Oman political risk

No. of pages

:1

From

: Research Department

Message

Mr Hashim363

I understand that you may be able to help me with an enquiry which I am, effectively,
relaying from our Tokyo head office. They have asked me to consult an expert fromwithin IISS on the subject of political risk applying to Oman.

If it would be possible for you to respond to the questions below, returning a fax ortelephone call by tomorrow evening, I would be most grateful. I have been authorized
to pay a contribution for such consultancy, provided it is within reasonable bounds.

(1) Would it be right to assume there that the Sultan will have no natural heir? Whatwould be the succession process: who are the likely candidates; what is the prospect
thereby for a stable policymaking and outlook?

(2) What is the state of the border disputes with Yemen and UAE (any others?)? Are
the resolutions for peace liable to be lasting?

(3) Are there opposition forces lurking at all in the country, perhaps in the form oftribal rivalries? Again, what are the underlying prospects?

(4) Which country/ies have most influence upon Oman, commercially and politically,and how might the picture change.

With many thanks for your attention and assistance,
Andrew Shouler

Source. International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, Country Files: Oman (A)364Bibliography
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