Oman’s New Raysut Container Port in Dhofar Revives a Glorious Maritime Tradition

by Richard H. Curtiss

From the time the Sumerians began keeping the world’s first written records more than 5,000 years ago, the ports of the Hadramaut coast of Southern Arabia have been at the center of the maritime world. For half of the year ships from those ports rode the monsoon winds west to the ports of the East African coast. In the second half of the annual monsoon cycle they reversed course and sailed east to the ports of South Asia and the Orient.

From the port once called Dhofar—present-day Salalah in Dhofar province—two local products, frankincense and myrrh, were exported. The ships that carried them east brought back the spices, gemstones and fabrics of Asia for export, along with more frankincense, north and west via camel caravans to Mediterranean lands and beyond. When Roman civilization was at its zenith, writers complained about the enormous amount of gold and silver that was being drained off to Arabia to pay for the incense sending up fragrant smoke from altars all over the Roman Empire.

Later, during Europe’s Dark Ages, ships continued to set out twice a year from Salalah and the Arab sailors, who had become Muslims during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, spread the religion of Islam west to all the ports of Africa and east to distant Malaysia, Indonesia, and the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, in all of which it thrives today.

A hundred years ago Hadramauti ports were stops for bunkering, where steamships plying the main east-west trade routes loaded the coal they used as fuel. But then, as the freighters shifted to oil, fewer had any need to stop between European and Asian ports.

Now, with petroleum-producing Middle Eastern countries prospering, and expanding populations in nearby African and South Asian countries, there are lucrative markets for European and Asian goods in these intermediate lands, but it is uneconomical for the huge container ships that ply the main east-west routes to make stops at all of them.

That provides a new role for the ancient natural harbor near Salalah in Dhofar province that is now called Port Raysut. Seeking ways to diversify an economy that has been largely dependent upon petroleum production, the Omani government has invested $130 million of its own, and attracted a $120 million investment from the U.S. Sea-Land container shipping company of Charlotte, North Carolina, a subsidiary of the CSX company, to construct a new container harbor at Port Raysut.

Sea-Land in turn sold half of its interest to the Maersk shipping company, which operates the largest container ships in the world. Together the participants have formed a new company, Salalah Port Services, owned 15 percent by Sea-Land, 15 percent by Maersk, and 70 percent by Omani public and private institutions, to operate the terminal, which will be able to handle those giant vessels.

The first two container ships arrived Nov. 1, 1998, a full month before the official Dec. 1 opening. Starting with those first arrivals, the operators expect a steady stream of giant container “mother ships,” which they plan to turn around in an average of 24 hours per ship. At the same time, the port will be receiving even greater numbers of smaller “feeder” ships, which will bring containers in from smaller African, Middle Eastern and South Asian ports to be loaded on the mother ships, and remove containers dropped by the mother ships for distribution to the smaller ports.

Jamal Taufiq Aziz, director general of ports and maritime affairs in Oman’s Ministry of Communications, who holds a master’s degree from Georgia Tech University, confirms that Salalah’s illustrious maritime history played a role in his government’s decision to build a container port there.

“After the 1986 economic crisis when oil prices started to drop, we knew we needed to diversify to keep Oman’s development process on track,” he explains. “We started flipping through history books for sources of income in the past. Oman has a very strategic location on the world map. It has a very long coastline and it is quite central to a number of countries, including Iran, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and the African coast for the distribution of goods.

“We found that container shipment is on the rise. Everything can be containerized now, even vehicles. And containers are moved on larger ships across the Pacific, the Atlantic, and between Europe and Asia. We concentrated on the latter.”

Director General Aziz, who was responsible for airport construction before moving to port construction, said the Omani government’s partnership with Sea-Land has worked very well, with the entire construction phase of Port Raysut completed in only 15 months, from start to finish. He anticipates similar good results from the operating contract, since Sea-Land operates 30 terminals around the world. In addition to usage commitments from both Sea-Land and Maersk, because of its excellent location and Oman’s political stability, Port Raysut already has commitments from other major carriers as well.

Therefore, despite global recession and possible competition with the nearby port of Aden in Yemen, Aziz says, “we expect in the next five years there will be enough traffic for both.”

The port occupies 55 hectars, which Aziz describes as the equivalent of 100 football fields. It has opened with two berths operating, and two more under construction for operation by mid-1999. There are three to four cranes of the latest design per berth, and as many as five cranes can be assigned to work on one ship simultaneously. Dredging to accommodate the huge container ships now in use has deepened the port from 10 meters (about 30 feet) to 60 meters.

Some 800 workers have been employed in construction of the port, and a force of 450 workers, many of whom were sent to Hong Kong for on-the-job training with the giant new Japanese-made cranes, will operate the facilities. Of the operating force, 60 percent are Omanis. In addition to the “trickle down” economic benefits of the introduction of such large numbers of workers into largely agricultural Dhofar province, many new jobs will be created.

There will be ship repair and drydocking facilities, a free-trade zone, and distribution centers with warehousing, cold storage and bulk cargo (cement, grain, petroleum coke, etc.) facilities. For security purposes, all cargo moving in and out of the area will be electronically controlled. Eventually the airport, which already can accommodate C-747 commercial airliners, will be expanded into an international facility. “All of this will create additional jobs,” Aziz said. “What are more important are the downstream businesses. I would like to consider this project as the nucleus of a series of projects. It also will provide a boost to local agricultural producers, by giving their products quick access to new markets reached by the feeder ships.

“From day one we have achieved through training full operating capacity,” Director General Aziz said proudly. Matching his satisfaction at the manner in which the container port was completed and opened on schedule is Aziz’s optimism about the future. “We can easily reach capacity fairly quickly, so there will be a need for expansion. But we would like to complement rather than compete with existing ports. Otherwise only the shipping companies will benefit.”

To a foreign visitor, however, it is very clear that all of the people of Dhofar province will benefit, as will the entire Sultanate of Oman. This is an ultra-modern facility in an area where, for most of this century, the world’s great ships have simply steamed by without stopping.

With this significant addition to Oman’s remarkable economic expansion since the assumption of power by Sultan Qaboos 28 years ago, this southeastern anchor of the entire Arab world ratchets up its strategic importance another notch. The opening of Port Raysut also revives the glorious maritime tradition that through five millennia made Salalah, the frankincense port from which Islam spread to hundreds of millions of people on other continents, one of the premier seaports of the world.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.