Word: saudi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Buraimi has slumbered for centuries. Its 8,000 inhabitants subsist on dates, camel meat and milk, and live in eight, mud-walled villages scorched by the gusts of the shamal. No one knows for certain to whom Buraimi belongs. Northward lies Trucial Oman, "protected" by the British; westward lies Saudi Arabia; all around is uncharted waste, so desolate that even the Arabs call it Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter...
Over the centuries many marauders have come-the rulers of Oman, of Abu Dhabi, the Unitarians of Nejd (ancestors of modern Saudi Arabia)-briefly planted flags, then vanished. In 1869 the Trucial sheiks drove off the last of the Saudi tax collectors. Most conscientious modern geographers simply label Buraimi "undefined." It is a land of shifting sands, shifting tribes and shifting allegiances...
Last August a camel caravan lumbered into Buraimi bearing 40 Saudi officials, clerks and armed men headed by a doughty Arabian named Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan. They started wooing the bewildered inhabitants and chiefs with lavish feasts, silver riyals and sweet talk. Immediately, the Trucial Sheik of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat appealed to their "protector" Great Britain to repel the "invaders...
...officered Oman levies marched up and set up camel-hair tents encircling the oasis; London sent a note demanding Turki's withdrawal. At this point, Washington, the perennial "third party" in the Middle East, stepped in, negotiated a secret "standstill" agreement. It lasted barely a few months: soon Saudi Arabia denounced Britain's "provocative actions" and Britain announced "complete freedom of action...
...crew of a sambuk marooned a load of pilgrims on an uninhabited island near the Eritrean coast, telling them they were in the Holy Land. Most of the pilgrims died of thirst, but a few lived to identify the sambuk crew, who were hanged. Last year a Saudi Arabian patrol found another party of pilgrims, 18 of them dead of thirst, who had been dumped on a lonely shore and told to walk in the wrong direction. None of this was known to 32 innocent Nigerians who had spent two years walking from the west coast of Africa, across deserts...