Essay: A Shot in the Dark
Dec. 4th, 2009 12:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerThis writing every day wheeze is a bit more of a challenge than I had realised. :-) Well, let's take another trip to the Middle East, this time to the Arabian Peninsula.
It's not every day that a British officer shoots at a monarch he's supposed to be serving.
That was, however, what Ray Kane found himself doing on 23 July 1970. Kane had been commissioned as an officer in the British Army in 1965 and, by virtue of secondment, commissioned also in the Sultan's Armed Force (SAF), the army of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, in 1968. He commanded a company of the SAF stationed in the southern city of Salalah, in Oman's Dhofar Province, and on this particular night he had been sent to the sultan's palace with orders to support a coup being staged by the sultan's son. And in doing so, he found himself exchanging gunfire with the sultan himself.
Sultan Said bin Taimur of Oman was not an easy man to live with, either for his son or his subjects. Born in 1910, he had "encouraged" his father, the previous sultan, to abdicate in 1932, leaving the throne to Said. Said had traveled throughout the Arab world and to Europe, but when he became sultan he banned any travel abroad by his subjects, for fear of their being corrupted by foreign influences. He banned all modern innovations in his kingdom. There were no hardtop roads, no electricity, no telephones, no public lighting. No music was allowed. Sunglasses and watches were banned. Anyone wishing to import a tractor (or any other motor vehicle) had to obtain permission from the sultan himself (and few did). For a country of around one million population, Oman had one hospital and one primary school: no secondary schools, no colleges or universities. Despite the discovery of oil in Oman in the 1950s, the sultan saw no reason to spend money on improving infrastructure or making life easier for his people. Why change patterns that had sufficed for centuries?
The sultan extended this severity to his family. His son Qaboos he sent away to the United Kingdom (UK) to be educated as a soldier and a national leader. Qaboos attended a private school, then the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst. He received a commission as second lieutenant in the Cameronians, a venerable Scottish regiment, and was stationed at one point in Germany, as part of the British Army of the Rhine. Returning to the UK, he toured the country, learning the ropes of local and regional government and civil administration and visiting various British industries. But when he returned to Oman, his father pronounced him too modern, too westernised, and locked him away in a palace with a Koranic instructor, whose duty was to replace all these avant garde notions with traditional virtues.
Qaboos stuck it out for six or seven years, but eventually he snapped. Probably with some prompting from the sultan's nominal allies, the British (who were concerned by the increasingly negative results of the sultan's harsh policies on the simmering insurgency in the backcountry), Qaboos, his friend Sheikh Baraik bin Hamood, and troops of the sultan's own army (including Ray Kane) headed for the sultan's palace.
Kane, by his account, somehow ended up in an upper floor. Scouting through empty rooms, he took fire from a darkened hallway. He fired back and realised that it was Sultan Said who was shooting at him. He tried to shift the determined old man by tossing a grenade towards him, but to no effect. Kane tried to get around behind the sixty-year-old monarch by climbing up onto the palace roof. He found a balcony below him that opened into the sultan's chambers, but he was unable to force open the bulletproof glass doors. He did manage to create enough of a hole in them that he could talk to those inside, and he when at length he threatened to stick a white phosphorus grenade through the hole, they agreed to surrender. His prisoners turned out to be several of the sultan's personal servants, armed with pistols, and the sultan himself, wounded in the foot. In somewhat comic opera style, it turned out that the bullet in the royal foot had not come from one of Kane's shots but had from Said's own Mauser, which had gone off while he was reloading during a break in the fighting. As Kane left the building, nursing a leg wound of his own, he saw Qaboos, now sultan in his father's place, heading upstairs, a pistol in hand...
Postscript: That makes a lovely dramatic ending, full of menace and parricidal foreboding, but Qaboos did not finish off his crusty progenitor. Said bin Taimur left Oman for London and spent the remaining few years of his life living in state at the Dorchester Hotel.
Sultan Qaboos bin Said dramatically improved the living standards of his people, ended the communist-backed insurgency within five years, introduced an elected majlis (advisory council) and a state consultative council, and in 2003 allowed universal suffrage. Two members of the current majlis are women, as are three of the sultan's ministers. In a country where less than 40 years ago there was no electricity, the sultan's long-term economic plan is based in part on Oman's developing telecommunications and information technology sectors.
It's not every day that a British officer shoots at a monarch he's supposed to be serving.
That was, however, what Ray Kane found himself doing on 23 July 1970. Kane had been commissioned as an officer in the British Army in 1965 and, by virtue of secondment, commissioned also in the Sultan's Armed Force (SAF), the army of the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, in 1968. He commanded a company of the SAF stationed in the southern city of Salalah, in Oman's Dhofar Province, and on this particular night he had been sent to the sultan's palace with orders to support a coup being staged by the sultan's son. And in doing so, he found himself exchanging gunfire with the sultan himself.
Sultan Said bin Taimur of Oman was not an easy man to live with, either for his son or his subjects. Born in 1910, he had "encouraged" his father, the previous sultan, to abdicate in 1932, leaving the throne to Said. Said had traveled throughout the Arab world and to Europe, but when he became sultan he banned any travel abroad by his subjects, for fear of their being corrupted by foreign influences. He banned all modern innovations in his kingdom. There were no hardtop roads, no electricity, no telephones, no public lighting. No music was allowed. Sunglasses and watches were banned. Anyone wishing to import a tractor (or any other motor vehicle) had to obtain permission from the sultan himself (and few did). For a country of around one million population, Oman had one hospital and one primary school: no secondary schools, no colleges or universities. Despite the discovery of oil in Oman in the 1950s, the sultan saw no reason to spend money on improving infrastructure or making life easier for his people. Why change patterns that had sufficed for centuries?
The sultan extended this severity to his family. His son Qaboos he sent away to the United Kingdom (UK) to be educated as a soldier and a national leader. Qaboos attended a private school, then the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst. He received a commission as second lieutenant in the Cameronians, a venerable Scottish regiment, and was stationed at one point in Germany, as part of the British Army of the Rhine. Returning to the UK, he toured the country, learning the ropes of local and regional government and civil administration and visiting various British industries. But when he returned to Oman, his father pronounced him too modern, too westernised, and locked him away in a palace with a Koranic instructor, whose duty was to replace all these avant garde notions with traditional virtues.
Qaboos stuck it out for six or seven years, but eventually he snapped. Probably with some prompting from the sultan's nominal allies, the British (who were concerned by the increasingly negative results of the sultan's harsh policies on the simmering insurgency in the backcountry), Qaboos, his friend Sheikh Baraik bin Hamood, and troops of the sultan's own army (including Ray Kane) headed for the sultan's palace.
Kane, by his account, somehow ended up in an upper floor. Scouting through empty rooms, he took fire from a darkened hallway. He fired back and realised that it was Sultan Said who was shooting at him. He tried to shift the determined old man by tossing a grenade towards him, but to no effect. Kane tried to get around behind the sixty-year-old monarch by climbing up onto the palace roof. He found a balcony below him that opened into the sultan's chambers, but he was unable to force open the bulletproof glass doors. He did manage to create enough of a hole in them that he could talk to those inside, and he when at length he threatened to stick a white phosphorus grenade through the hole, they agreed to surrender. His prisoners turned out to be several of the sultan's personal servants, armed with pistols, and the sultan himself, wounded in the foot. In somewhat comic opera style, it turned out that the bullet in the royal foot had not come from one of Kane's shots but had from Said's own Mauser, which had gone off while he was reloading during a break in the fighting. As Kane left the building, nursing a leg wound of his own, he saw Qaboos, now sultan in his father's place, heading upstairs, a pistol in hand...
Postscript: That makes a lovely dramatic ending, full of menace and parricidal foreboding, but Qaboos did not finish off his crusty progenitor. Said bin Taimur left Oman for London and spent the remaining few years of his life living in state at the Dorchester Hotel.
Sultan Qaboos bin Said dramatically improved the living standards of his people, ended the communist-backed insurgency within five years, introduced an elected majlis (advisory council) and a state consultative council, and in 2003 allowed universal suffrage. Two members of the current majlis are women, as are three of the sultan's ministers. In a country where less than 40 years ago there was no electricity, the sultan's long-term economic plan is based in part on Oman's developing telecommunications and information technology sectors.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 09:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 01:41 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sk3k
Very interesting!
no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 02:10 pm (UTC)Britain definitely had an interest in getting the old sultan moved on because, although he trusted the British, he wouldn't take their advice about the revolt in Dhofar. Incidentally and ironically, Dhofar was the part of his kingdon he preferred to live in, and where his second wife, Qaboos's mother, was from. But neither of those facts got the Dhofaris a break from his severity. His solution to the insurgency was simply to block up wells, shoot or imprison rebels, and ignore their growing military strength. He had taken power in part with help from the army, so he knew it could be dangerous and allowed only token security forces to deploy to Dhofar, keeping the rest in Oman proper. The SAF in Dhofar never had enough troops to protect the population from the rebels.
Sultan Qaboos, by contrast, offered an amnesty to rebel fighters, formed local defence forces (firqat) to supplement the SAF and give it local knowledge, used the country's oil money to build roads, hospitals, and schools, and gave the SAF the freedom to bring more forces south to find the hardcore rebels. The British suggested a very effective counterinsurgency strategy of the inkspot variety. A joint SAF/firqat team would move into a village, drill a well if there wasn't one, build a road to link it up with the towns (so villagers could bring their cattle--the area was mostly pastoralist--to market more easily), build a store and a mosque, train a local firqat, and engage in joint patrolling until the area was safe enough to leave it to the firqat to protect.
Oman wasn't that valuable strategically to Britain by itself, but it was directly adjacent to the Trucial States (now the UAE) and to Saudi Arabia, and it is positioned right at the chokepoint of the Persian Gulf, so a Chinese-supported communist government there was an eventuality it was important to avoid.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 12:14 am (UTC)The journo is charmingly breathless about the FCO not wanting to release the documents showing that they knew about the coup ahead of time and thought it was a good idea, but let's be real--why would any government willingly release information about it's having thought a coup against an ally was a good idea? No one ever *wants* to have that sort of opinion circulated, even if it did all work out for the best. (I note with interest that the reporter doesn't talk about Sultan Said's eccentric and despotic rule whatsoever...)
In any case, thanks again for pointing that out--it was quite an interesting piece!