Word: muscat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Asia*was erased last week. In the first international cash-for-territory deal since the U.S. paid $25 million for Denmark's Virgin Islands in 1917, the republic of Pakistan purchased the sun-blanched, 300-sq.-mi. peninsula of Gwadar (pop. 20,000) from the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. Price: $8,400,000 cash and a percentage of any oil ever found on Gwadar's rainless shores...
Gwadar, which in the Baluchi language means Gateway of Winds, has been a haven for Arab seamen since the fabled Sindbad the Sailor cruised its coasts. The place passed into the hands of the Sultans of Muscat and Oman in the 18th century when Syed, heir to the Muscat sultanate, tried to seize the throne, failed, and fled across the Arabian Sea to escape his father's wrath. Gwadar at that time belonged to the Khan of Kalat, who welcomed Syed in princely fashion and made him a handsome offer. "You can have the revenues of as much land...
Maidens & Dhows. Gwadar was then the haunt of pirates and pearl divers. Later, in the iQth century, its freebooters prospered by procuring black-eyed Persian maidens for sale in Arabia's slave markets. The British, lords of India and protectors of Muscat, ended this racket. Since World War II smuggling has been Gwadar's chief industry. As the new republics of Pakistan and India, trying to husband their precious foreign exchange, clapped stern restrictions on luxury imports, the enterprisers of Gwadar took to their dhows to keep Karachi's shops well filled with the restricted items. When...
...routed rebel Imam of Oman fled on a donkey before the victorious troops of the British-backed Sultan of Muscat and Oman, eleven Arab states asked the U.N. Security Council to take up Britain's "armed aggression" in Oman, and Moscow joined in with a fevered blast against Britain's "inhuman methods of warfare against the peaceful population of Oman." Sir Harold Caccia, Britain's ambassador to Washington, called on John Foster Dulles to warn him that unless the U.S. supported Britain on Oman, it would be "almost as much a blow as Suez...
...British troops and planes had no business there. Britain's Sir Pierson Dixon replied that under the 1920 Treaty of Sib (which the British have never published), the Imam, "a religious leader," had won a measure of autonomy, but that the Sultan was still sovereign over all of Muscat and Oman, and that therefore Britain was within its rights in answering his plea for help. The British pointed out tellingly that none of the Arab states now rushing to the Imam's defense had bothered to grant recognition to him in the two years since he established...