R.A.F. to the Rescue

British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd faced the House of Commons with an air at once portentous and embarrassed: for the second time in a year British armed forces were on the shooting move in the Middle East. At the request of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, he said. British forces were being called upon to help put down a revolt in the desert.

As two companies of Cameron Highlanders were airlifted from Kenya to Persian Gulf bases, two British frigates slipped into the Sultan's coastal waters and four R.A.F. jet fighters roared up from a Persian Gulf sandstrip to fire rockets and cannon into the mud-brick-walled rebel citadels in the mountains of Oman. Cairo's press and radio filled the air with shouts about "a British attack on Arab nationalism." Actually it was not much of a war; only the current state of Middle East nerves made it front-page news.

Up the Imam. Some of the headlines made it appear that the British were once again shooting up primitive desert tribesmen, defending a despotic ruler and creating a "second Suez." But in fact this was a case when the British were going to the help of a Sultan who, in the London Economist's words, "is not contending against an electorate of the future--a nationalist movement of young and educated men--but against a reactionary rival." The British showed their might almost hesitantly. They acted in Oman, fearing that if they did not, their position would be weakened along the whole uneasy Persian Gulf coast. British preponderance on the oil coast, first created in the days when Britain wanted to protect its passage to India, rests on protective arrangements made long ago to safeguard minor sovereigns and sheiks around the gulf from wild tribal attacks out of the hinterland. The discovery of oil--or the hope of it--made this game of sand-dune diplomacy suddenly twice as important. What if the sheikdom of Kuwait, now the world's richest known oilfield, should sever its connections with Britain and the sterling area? Or if the same idea should occur to oil-rich Qatar and Bahrein, or those shadowy Trucial* Oman sheikdoms, whose rulers, like the Sultan of Muscat and Oman himself, reign over barren sand and hope for oil strikes?

Muscat and Oman (pop. 600,000) is a Kansas-sized land of racing camels, frankincense, lush oases and forbidding highlands that has had treaty ties with Britain for more than 150 years. In the center of it lies Oman, the most isolated part of Arabia, a place of fiery tribal rivalries and religious idiosyncrasies, bounded by the sea on one side and a wall of desert peaks on the other. The first Imam of Oman set himself up in the 8th century as chief of the Ibadhiya, a Moslem sect so ascetic that it still bars minarets around its mosques as too ornamental. The present ruling house descended from the wild peaks and established its capital at Muscat two centuries ago. Its dynasts turned from theocratic to temporal rule, and with the title of sultan instead of imam, built up a trading and slave-running empire that once extended from Zanzibar to Iraq.

Out of the Hills. The present Sultan, eleventh of his line, is Said bin Taimur, 46, a portly greybeard who was educated at a college for princes in British India, writes precise letters in English on crested blue paper, reads the airmail London Times delivered by the R.A.F., and understands perfectly what oil could do for his depleted fortune.

In the early 1950s he granted a British-run subsidiary of the Iraq Petroleum Co. a concession to drill for oil in the Omani hinterland. But he was not quite master in his own house. The fanatic Ibadhis in the hills, resentful of the Sultanate rule, had long ago elected a new dynasty of Imams and in 1920, after decades of hard fighting had won from the then Sultan a grudging acknowledgment of the Imam's rule in the mountains. So when two years ago the Sultan's foreign oil drillers went to work near the northern border, the Imam's tribesmen attacked them. The Sultan struck back, sending a few hundred British-officered levies to quell the rebels. He advanced in a flying column of Land-rovers, and it was a walkover. The Imam retired to a remote village, his brother led to Saudi Arabia, and bedaggered sheiks by the hundreds kissed the Sultan's hand.

Red & the White. Fortnight ago, the Imam donned his curved dagger of command, and with his brother Talib took to the warpath again. With 200 modern rifles and up-to-date automatic weapons, mountaineers swiftly took their old capital of Nizwa. The British were quickly convinced that the modern equipment came from King Saud's arsenal, even though that Saudi Arabian potentate, as if indifferent to the whole affair, was off in Ethiopia calling on Haile Selassie. They also feared that the U.S. would naturally side with Saudi Arabia, whose oil concessions are wholly American--but the fact is that U.S. oil money dominates even the areas where British protection prevails: U.S. companies own 50% of the stake in Kuwait, 100% in Bahrein, the Neutral Zones and Dhofar, 23.75% m Muscat and Oman.

The attack from the hills took the British by surprise. ("There is supposed to be a gentlemen's agreement in the Persian Gulf area," grumbled one officer, "that nobody fights in the summer--it's too bloody hot.") With the temperature last week at 130DEG, the Sultan's commander in chief, Pat Waterfield, was on home leave in England. So was Britain's top political resident in the Persian Gulf, Sir Bernard Burrows. That left command of the Sultan's army to Major Pat Gray, one of the soldierly Britons who were tossed out of Jordan's Arab Legion along with Glubb Pasha. In response to the hillmen's attack, Major Gray sent several truckloads of troops up to reinforce the garrison, but they were stopped by mines--the first land mines ever used in battle in the Sultanate. At this point the Sultan consulted his Foreign Minister, a hulking Scot named Niel Innes who used to command the Khartoum jail, and called for London's help.

The British, though not treaty-bound to help, agreed to. But they hoped not to land troops except as a last resort. Instead, after first dropping warning leaflets over Nizwa and its neighboring forts, they sent over the first jet planes that the Omani musketeers had ever seen. After three days and twelve rocket-and-bomb missions, the Sultan's red banner was seen flying in place of the Imam's white flag over the fort at Izki, and old hands at the R.A.F. base at Sharja were saying cheerfully that that was how it always worked in Aden and in the North-West Frontier province.

* The name derives from the treaties of "perpetual truce" ending "hostile acts at sea" (i.e., piracy, slave trading) that the British signed with their rulers in the 19th century.

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