The United Arab Emirates receives Arab support in territorial claim over three small islands held by Iran.
Tensions between Iran and the United Arab Emirates regarding three small islands in the Gulf have been reignited by a statement of support from the Emirates from a group of Arab nations.
The Interim Arab Parliamentary Union, which is made up of parliamentarian groups from 22 Arab nations, has issued a letter supporting the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) claim over the three Gulf islands, currently under Iranian control.
The Greater and Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa islands are located in the Gulf between Iran and the UAE in the 35-mile opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Iran has refused to engage in a substantive dialogue with the UAE including having the issue referred to the International Court of Justice,” Dr. Christian Koch
Director of International Studies at the Gulf Research Center in the United Arab Emirates told The Media Line.
“What is particularly offensive to the UAE,” he added, “is that Iran regularly refers to the territorial dispute as a ‘misunderstanding’, implying that the UAE authorities are simply not sophisticated enough to understand the matter.”
In the absence of Emirati military forces Iranian troops established their presence on the islands on the islands in a bloodless takeover in 1992. Three years later the Iranian Foreign Ministry claimed the islands were “an inseparable part of Iran.”
On December 31, 2001, the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE – issued a statement reiterating support for the UAE’s sovereignty over the islands, declaring Iran’s claims on the islands “null and void” and backing “all measures… by the United Arab Emirates to regain sovereignty over its three islands peacefully.”
“[The Iranians] say historically this is part of their sovereign territory,” Dr Mehrdad Khonsari, Senior Research Consultant at the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies in London told The Media Line. “Whether [the claims] are worth anything is another question. It’s a [dispute] that started with the British over a hundred years ago.”
The official Iranian standpoint refers to a number of historical cases that support their claim.
In 1888, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the British Minister to Tehran, presented a War Office map to the Iranian King Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, in which the islands were presented as Iranian territory.
In his 1892 book Persia and the Persian Question, George Nathaniel Curzon, the Viceroy and Governor-General of India recognized the islands as belonging to Iran, but a decade later in 1902 the British occupied the islands as a buffer against the growing Soviet influence in Southern Iran.
Iran and Britain clashed over the islands until 1968, when British forces withdrew their troops from the Indian Ocean and Gulf region.
In 1971 Iran signed an agreement with the colonial protectorate of Ras al-Khaimah and Sharjah, areas which are now part of the UAE, ‘to take responsibility’ for the islands’ security while recognizing the sovereignty of Bahrain and the UAE.
In 1992, UAE officials claimed sovereignty over all three islands, and have since that date, condemned what they describe as Iran’s ‘occupation’ of the islands.
Every month some 100 supertankers pass through the Gulf to load oil, the region’s major export. Due to the significant wealth generated by the income from oil, more and more commercial goods are flowing into the region.