Arab rulers see war as threat to their future

Press, 28 May 1984, Page 10

Arab rulers see war as threat to their future

BY

PHIL DAVISON, of

Reuter (through NZPA) Manama, Bahrain While the West may, by force of habit, see the latest Gulf war tension largely as a tnreat to oil supplies, many Gulf citizens see the central issue as the future stability of the waterway’s littoral States. The kings and princes who rule Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other States on the Arabian peninsula rely on political stability for their survival but now find themselves in one of their most delicate positions to date. The question facing them now is bow to stay militarily out of the 44-month-old Iran-Iraq war — in which they have given Bagdad

colossal financial backing — while Iraq appears to have no qualms about sucking them in. So far Saudi Arabia, which borders on fellowArab and fellow-Muslim Iraq and has spent billions of dollars on the best Western weaponry, seems to have bent over backwards to stay out of the Gulf fighting. The Saudis and their allies, mostly ruled by Sunni Muslims but with significant Shi’ite Muslim populations, have been peering warily across the Gulf since the Islamic revolution led by Shi’ite clergymen in 1979. The Saudis have since had to deal with the brief seizure of the al-Qaaba mosque at Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine, in 1979 by radical Muslims opposed to the ruling family. One of

their oldest allies, the island State of Bahrain, put down what it termed an Iranianbacked coup attempt in 1981. Kuwait was hit by a string of bombings in December for which Muslim extremists fighting for an Iranian-style administration in Iraq were convicted. Diplomats see the large Shi'ite communities in the Gulf States, described by one senior diplomat in Teheran recently as, “the Iranian time-bomb on the Arabian side of the Gulf,” as one of the key problems facing them in the longer term. Many of the Arabian Shi’ites, they said, looked favourably on the Iranian revolution and tuned in regularly to Teheran radio’s Arabic broadcasts.

But, according to experienced diplomats in the Gulf, it is tiie Iran-Iraq war which has posed the most serious threat to toe conservative Gulf States’ stability since it erupted in September, 1980. At the opening on Saturday of a United States Security Council session in New York on recent attacks on Gulf shipping, the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad alSabah, said that the attacks had “dangerous implications for the stability and security of the region.” Like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq, Iran is a Muslim State. But the mostly Shi’ite, non-Arab Iranians have been traditional enemies of their Arab neighbours for centuries. To the westerner there

may appear to be great similarities between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which forbid alcohol and tell their women to remain veiled. But the similarities largely end there. Saudi Arabia’s rulers reject Teheran’s militant brand of Islam. Iran’s clerical rulers describe the Saudi and other Gulf leaders as “sham Muslims” and “traitors to Islam”* because of the power wielded by toe ruling families. While staying militarily out of the Gulf conflict, with a view to their own stability, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and their allies have pumped an estimated 3US2O million (SNZ3O million) into the Iraqi war effort every day, on average, for the last 44 months, according to diplomats.

That cash has allowed the Iraqis to buy enough Soviet and other weaponry to keep the Iranians, who have superior numbers on toe front lines, more or less at bay. But toe Iranians are poised within striking distance of several southern Iraqi border towns and said to be ready for a new ground offensive likely to be aimed at cutting southern Iraq off from the rest of the country. Diplomats say that Saudi Arabia has been pressuring Iraq to stop attacking Gulf shipping since a laden Saudi-owned oil tanker, the Safina al-Arab, was hit by a missile on April 25. The Iraquis were widely believed to have hit the ship because it had picked up Iranian crude from Iran’s big Kharg Island terminal

in toe north of the water way. But the attacks on toe Safina al-Arab and other Arab vessels dealing privately with Iran were of minimal concern to the Saudis and Kuwaitis compared with recent strikes on ships off their own shores, apparently retaliatory raids by Iranian aircraft, the diplomats said. Teheran has not admitted any such attacks but has said that, if Iraq blocked Iranian oil exports from the waterway — vital to Iran’s continuation of the war — Iran would see to it that noone else would get a chance to export oil from the Gulf. Recent press reports in the United States have spoken of Iranian threats to widen the conflict by attacking Saudi oil fields or

attacking shipping with “suicide planes.” Such reports emanate from vague speeches by Iranian leaders. They are usually spontaneous, often purely rhetorical, and difficult to gauge. But most non-Arab diplomats on the Arabian side of the Gulf say that they accept recent assertions by Iran that it does not want to draw Saudi Arabia or its allies into the war, “provided these countries keep out of it and that they condemn the Bagdad regime.” The diplomats see the latter phrase, used by the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Hojatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani, as a warning to the Saudis and Kuwaitis to put pressure on Iraq to stop hitting ships using Iranian ports. As to the warning to the Saudis to

stay out of the war, the diplomats say that King Fabd would like nothing better. But the Iraqi President, Mr Saddam Hussein, seemed bent on halting Iranian oil exports, leaving the Saudis and Kuwaitis open to Iranian retaliation and a subsequent difficult decision on how to respond, the diplomats said. Whether Iran would consider Saudi Arabia a direct party to the conflict if Saudi aircraft shot down an Iranian warplane remained to be seen. The Saudis would clearly prefer to avoid any such scenario. Although the complaint to the Security Council by the Saudis and their allies spoke of Iranian aggression, the Saudi news media are muted in their domestic criticism of Iran.

In a move clearly aimed at keeping the lid on the Gulf, the Saudis have denied an American State Department spokesman’s statement that Saudi fighter planes had scrambled to chase an Iranian fighter plane which, according to the Americans, attacked the Japanese-chartered oil tanker Chemical Venture on Thursday. Saudi officials describe the assertion that their planes had chased an Iranian plane as “utterly untrue.” Senior bankers in the region’s main financial centre, Bahrain, say that they are not unduly worried by the recent increase in fighting but that any attack on oil installations on the Arabian mainland could change that. “There would be one hell of a queue at the airport," one said.