The United Arab Emirates: A Passion for Stability

By Richard Curtiss

The journey from Abu Dhabi's futuristic airport into the capital of the seven-member United Arab Emirates is startling for first-time visitors. From the air as they descend they can see that Abu Dhabi is a large, very modern city situated between the shimmering blue waters of the Arabian Gulf and a vast, confusing panorama of sand islands separated by narrow channels, broad bays, and occasional mangrove swamps.

But from the moment the car pulls out of the airport until it arrives almost in the center of the city, passengers are whisked along a superhighway between seemingly unbroken walls of trees and shrubs, some of which always seem to be in bloom. Where are the miles of sand that dominate the landscape as seen from the air? And if the road is a broad tunnel through greenery, why were so few trees visible on the sand flats and low rolling hills outside the city?

The answer lies in the passion for greenery of Sheikh Zayid Bin Sultan Al-Nahayan, ruler of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates. Nor is the tree-lined highway linking the airport to the city he built almost from scratch a sort of Potemkin village. The 100-plus miles of superhighway that link Abu Dhabi to the inland oasis city of Al-Ain also are lined the entire way with trees and shrubs, broken only in one place by a giant, shifting sand ridge that intersects the highway. There the same maintenance crews of expatriate laborers who turn on and off the elaborate system of irrigation pipes and feeder hoses that keep the shrubbery green along Abu Dhabi's superhighways must bulldoze away the sands that encroach on the highway with every strong wind off the desert or the Arabian Gulf.

Sheikh Zayid's determination to soften the desert landscape with miles of greenery, irrigated in Abu Dhabi by wastewater channeled into the carefully maintained individual earth basins around every shrub, is reflected in every aspect of the planned city that grew up on Abu Dhabi island. When, nearly 25 years ago, I first visited Abu Dhabi, which is both the principal city of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the capital of the United Arab Emirates, I was startled by an elaborate and artistically laid-out network of low cement walls, railings, pillars and inlaid brick sidewalks providing a strikingly beautiful corniche that would have enhanced the most picturesque Mediterranean city. However, what seemed to be missing in those days was a city large enough to back up this planned seafront.

In subsequent years, the city developed and grew to fit the carefully planned corniche, to which fountains, lawns and parks have been added. Now so many tall, glass-fronted office and residential apartment buildings line the two miles of corniche that developers are forced to buy up and tear down tall buildings dating only to the late 1970s to make way for ever higher and grander office towers reflecting the petroleum-fueled prosperity of a country with a per capita GNP of $22,220, one of the highest in the world. (Japan is $28,280, the U.S. is $23,120.)

In fact, Abu Dhabi's vast reserves of petroleum provide the glue uniting the seven emirates, which is why Abu Dhabi's ruler also serves as the U.A.E. president. At the time the British pulled out of the lower Gulf in 1972, all of the emirates had been given the choice of going it alone or forming a confederation. Like Kuwait, Bahrain, which had found and pumped its oil a generation earlier than the others, chose to maintain its independence and depend on banks and service industries to replace its dwindling oil as the country's principal foreign exchange earners. Qatar, with plentiful oil and bountiful gas reserves, followed suit. But Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Um Al-Qawain, Ras Al-Khaima and Fujaira chose links with generous Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Those links are holding, even though Ras Al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Dubai now all have found oil of their own.

Meanwhile, in booming Abu Dhabi, the corniche no longer is the city's seafront. First a breakwater was built half a mile offshore, turning Abu Dhabi from a seafront to a bayfront city. Then artificial islands were built along the breakwater, creating a strip of restaurants, amusement parks and yacht basins whose lights glitter attractively across the water separating them from the city itself.

Therefore, each return to Abu Dhabi is a new wonder, even for an annual visitor. This year and last, however, the surprises for me came from outside. By chance, I had been in Abu Dhabi on Sept. 13, 1993, watching on my hotel room television the historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and listening to the moving articulation by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of his vision of the integration of a peaceful Israel into the Middle East. Traffic in the streets outside had halted. It seemed the whole population of the glittering oil-rich city, which has so much to gain from a stable Middle East, was watching the televised event.

By coincidence, on Oct. 26, 1994 I was glued to the television set in the same Abu Dhabi hotel watching wind-whipped Israeli and Jordanian flags flapping over the sun-seared participants in the treaty-signing on the border between Israel and Jordan. But this time neither King Hussein's fixed smile, Yitzhak Rabin's petulant fidgeting until an aide brought him a baseball cap to protect him from the sun, nor Shimon Peres' predictable eloquence brought the Arabian Gulf metropolis to a standstill.

Outside, I could see swimmers on the white sand beach, motor boats and sleek yachts plying the glittering waters, and traffic moving along the broad, tree-lined boulevards. Inside, CNN kept switching away from the ceremony to interpretations of it by correspondents, and BBC kept switching away from the ceremony to other "world news headlines." Only the U.A.E. television cameras focused unblinkingly on the Jordan events, from the time VIP guests first emerged from the black bedouin-style goat-hair tent erected to shelter them from the pitiless sun to the final release of hundreds of balloons as the heads of state, participating and non-participating ministers and diplomats, the 1,000 Israeli and 1,000 Jordanian spectators, and the U.S. presidential party of some 300 officials, Arab-American and Jewish-American guests, and journalists climbed into their helicopters and limousines to leave the half-century-old minefield that, overnight, had become the site of the signing of Israel's second, after Egypt, treaty of peace with an Arab state.

Wisely, the U.A.E. anchor persons offered little commentary. Their viewers were left to decide for themselves whether the ceremony marked a shameful breach of King Hussein's pledge not to sign a separate peace with Israel before its forces had withdrawn from all the Arab lands seized in 1967; or whether, instead, the ceremony marked the long-delayed breaking of another unnecessary barrier to an era of peace and prosperity for all of the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East.

Nor were subsequent conversations in the U.A.E. particularly enlightening on this point. The day before the signing, one U.A.E. official, after a lukewarm expression of gratitude to the United States for sending its forces so quickly to the aid of Kuwait when Saddam Hussain's troops had made their sudden lurch to the south, expressed his profound personal hope that the next time Saddam showed signs of moving south, the U.S. would proceed directly to the bombing of Baghdad. Fairly or unfairly, he attributed the expensive airlift of U.S. ground troops to the exigencies of U.S. election-year politics, and said that the Gulf states seemed destined to pay a steep financial price to give Clinton a bump upward in the polls. (This was before the Iraqis withdrew and the U.S. aborted its buildup, holding the price to the Gulf states to far less than they initially feared it would cost.)

The day after the treaty signing, another U.A.E. government official confessed he had not watched the signing ceremony at all, even though it occurred conveniently at 2 p.m. U.A.E. time. "Has anything really changed?" he asked, stressing that his skepticism was a private, not official, opinion.

"Israel keeps Jordan's land," he said. "The water won't be shared unless someone else pays to build Jordan's dams; the Israelis occupy the Golan Heights and south Lebanon; and instead of getting their sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians remain closed off in Gaza and Jericho and closed out of Jerusalem."

But, on the same day, and in the same government building, another young but highly placed government official asked hopefully: "Does this mean it's all over?"

The three English-language daily newspapers in the U.A.E. gave the ceremony extensive coverage the next day, but none sought to answer the young sheikh's question. Rather, they soon went back to the U.A.E.'s preoccupation with epidemics in India. When pneumonic plague had broken out briefly in India a few weeks earlier, followed by a localized outbreak of malaria, the U.A.E. shut down all flights to and from that giant neighbor.

In a country with a total population of some 1.8 million residents, of whom perhaps 200,000 are Indians, the decision made a greater stir than the Jordan-Israel treaty. While stranded Indians who had been vacationing with their families in India waited to return to their jobs, their U.A.E. re-entry visas expired. Indians due for home leaves, which often are built around weddings and other family events, were unable to go. Suspicion arose among both Indian employees and their Emiri employers that the epidemics were only excuses by a U.A.E. government eager to cut down its force of resident expatriate workers in order to create more jobs for its own young high school and university graduates.

Back to normal also meant that the Emiris returned to their ever-present concern about Iran which, starting in the time of the shah, has in periods of domestic crises distracted its populace by renewing disputes with various members of the U.A.E. Already Iran has seized islands owned by Sharjah and Ras Al-Khaima. Now, with reports of economic deterioration in Iran, the Emiris wonder what Iran's Islamic Republican government may do next.

No one, therefore, is more anxious to see the stability that a true Israeli-Arab peace would bring to the region. But the Emiris, like people throughout the Middle East, still are wondering: "Does this mean it's all over?" And, "Has anything really changed?"

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.