1 Rejecting Authenticity in the Desert Landscapes of the Modern Middle East: Development Processes in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, Oman Dawn Chatty Nomads throughout the Middle East have been viewed through a lens of romantic attachment or latterly uncomfortable disdain and disparagement. For decades they have been subjected to state-sponsored as well as international settlement efforts in the name of modernity, progress and more recently environmental protection. Peoples who move have challenged the neo-colonial projects of the League of Nations Mandate era as well as the post World War II independent nation by the sheer fact of their mobility. Movement, as Ernest Gellner, pointed out made these peoples ‘marginal’ to the state, in that they could move out of the orbit of state control (Gellner 1969; also see Scott 2009). Despite efforts by central authorities to control and extend authority over these peoples, a political order outside the state continues to characterize nomads with their tribal, kin-based social organization in the Middle East. The Harasiis nomadic pastoral tribe have been, for centuries, the sole human inhabitants of the central desert of Oman. In the 1930s, the reigning sovereign named this desert, the Jiddat il-Harasiis in recognition of their connection with the land. This remote tribe, one of six in the region who continue to speak south Arabian languages predating Arabic, is organized around a subsistence economy based on the raising of camel and goat. Mobility over the vast and largely inhospitable rock and gravel plain of the Jiddat il-Harasiis has been the principle feature of their livelihood focused on camel transport and latterly on trucks. The authenticity of their attachment to this region is intimately tied to the traditional distinction in Islamic historiography between bedu in the deserts and hadar in the towns and cities. Recent decades in the Sultanate of
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Rejecting Authenticity in the Desert Landscapes of the Modern Middle East:
Development Processes in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, Oman
Dawn Chatty
Nomads throughout the Middle East have been viewed through a lens of
romantic attachment or latterly uncomfortable disdain and disparagement. For
decades they have been subjected to state-sponsored as well as international
settlement efforts in the name of modernity, progress and more recently
environmental protection. Peoples who move have challenged the neo-colonial
projects of the League of Nations Mandate era as well as the post World War II
independent nation by the sheer fact of their mobility. Movement, as Ernest
Gellner, pointed out made these peoples ‘marginal’ to the state, in that they could
move out of the orbit of state control (Gellner 1969; also see Scott 2009). Despite
efforts by central authorities to control and extend authority over these peoples, a
political order outside the state continues to characterize nomads with their tribal,
kin-based social organization in the Middle East.
The Harasiis nomadic pastoral tribe have been, for centuries, the sole
human inhabitants of the central desert of Oman. In the 1930s, the reigning
sovereign named this desert, the Jiddat il-Harasiis in recognition of their
connection with the land. This remote tribe, one of six in the region who continue
to speak south Arabian languages predating Arabic, is organized around a
subsistence economy based on the raising of camel and goat. Mobility over the
vast and largely inhospitable rock and gravel plain of the Jiddat il-Harasiis has
been the principle feature of their livelihood focused on camel transport and
latterly on trucks. The authenticity of their attachment to this region is intimately
tied to the traditional distinction in Islamic historiography between bedu in the
deserts and hadar in the towns and cities. Recent decades in the Sultanate of
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Oman, however, have seen increasing effort by government, international
conservation agencies and multi-national extractive industries to re-describe and
classify this land as “terra nullius” (empty of people). Efforts to move the
Harasiis out of their encampments, to settle them in government housing, and to
turn them into cheap day labourers all point to the rejection of these peoples’
claims of belonging to the landscapes of the desert. This paper examines these
developmental processes, both national and international, and explores the ways
in which the Harasiis have responded by becoming more mobile and adapting
their living and herding arrangements as well as by generally becoming
unresponsive to state development efforts. A small element of the Harasiis as
well as other tribal groups in south eastern Arabia have begun to reject the
confines of the state and instead assert their transnational identity across the
borders with international borders with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates where their authenticity as “bedu” is generally recognized.
Authenticity, Landscape, and Identity
The desert-dwelling inhabitants of the Oman, organized in tribes are
recognized as bedu, while tribes and extended families in the mountain and
coastal settlements of the country are regarded as hadar.i This bedu-hadar
distinction has deep roots in Muslim history and historiography (c.f. Ibn Khaldûn
1958). In the medieval period Arab writers saw the significant forms of social
categories in the dichotomy between the city and the country; or between
civilization and its presumed absence. From the perspective of the settled urban
historian, the pinnacle of civilization was the city with its government, places of
worship, schools and markets. The city and town dweller was hadari. The other
extreme, the badia (desert), was defined by its lack of hadar or civilization and
was represented by the social category of badawi or bedu. The latter were mainly
Field Code Changed
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the desert dwellers, the nomadic pastoral camel and sheep herders. The different
landscapes of the bedu and hadar had important cultural and social dimensions in
the understanding of human activity.ii The urban and settled notion of human life
versus rural and nomadic divide became, over time, a deeply ingrained
idealization of social categories; which are no longer clearly defined or
distinguished. Furthermore though the term hadar/hadari is hardly referred to any
longer, the term bedu remains in contemporary use. For the bedu such self-
identification is a statement of tribal identity and solidarity as well as attachment
to the desert landscape which is a physical background and social and cultural
foreground. This desert is constantly shaped and reshaped by social processes
and interactions with the physical environment; it is a physical space and a socio-
cultural place as well as a form of ambience and a perceptual surround (Hirsch
and O'Hanlon 1995). However, when non-bedu use the term, particularly
contemporary Omani government officials and international civil servants, it is
often a statement of contempt, highlighting the presumed backwardness and
primitiveness of this social category with no reference to the desert landscape.iii
In general, bedu tribes and tribal views of events are relegated to the “moral
margins” by settled bureaucrats, government officials and international experts
(Dresch 1989).
Nationalism and identity are two concepts which are at the heart of the
processes described above. The Sultanate of Oman had its modern “birth” in 1970
after a “near-bloodless” palace coup brought the Sultan Qaboos to the throne.
From that moment the Sultan and his advisors have struggled to create an
imagined political community of a unified nation (see Anderson 1983). The first
few decades after the birth of this new nation saw campaigns to attract educated
and professional Omanis in exile to return to create the modern state (Peterson
1978). This paper posits that once these outsiders and expatriates had integrated
and transformed themselves into “insiders,” they set about creating an ‘imagined’
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nation which was homogenous and modern. Furthermore, in order to promote the
development of its extractive industries, the desert interior was declared terra
nullius -state land- empty of land claims. Thus the authentic inhabitants in the
“background landscapes” such as the deserts (Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995) became
the “outsiders.” The tension between the outsider ‘traditions’ and new insider
“modernities” appears to be resolved in a representation that encapsulates the
political and cultural fiction of a unified nation at the expense of the bedu tribes of
the interior deserts; bedu claims to authenticity are thus increasingly rejected or
cast aside as insignificant.
Identity, national or otherwise, is closely tied to language and the spoken
word often becomes an iconic marker of national belonging. The Omani national
language, in this case Arabic, is not a neutral tool of communication. It represents
the language of the “hegemonic” ethnic group in power, the Ibadi of Oman rather
than the once preferred language, Swahili, of many of the returning expatriate
Omanis from Zanzibar and East Africa. The gradual emergence of Arabic as the
sole formal language of government in the modern state, replacing Swahili,
Baluchi, Urdu and English is a reflection of the consolidation of power in one
ethnic group (Bloch 1971). Many minority groups in exile reinvest in their
“native” language to an extent never practiced prior to leaving their homeland or
places of origin (see Goody 1986; Chatty 2010). In other cases, traditional, local
languages are part of a specific cultural setting and therefore have difficulty
surviving independently from the maintenance of the social ties and networks, the
resources and their allocation as well as the modes of production on which such
settings depend (Crawhill 1999). In Oman both linguistic realities co-exist. Some
expatriate minorities manage to maintain their traditional’ languages having
returned from exile; while other minorities in situ struggle to keep their languages
alive.
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Currently, Oman’s official language is Arabic. But Swahili, Urdi, Farsi as
well as eight local and, perhaps, aboriginal languages are also spoken in the
country. They are Bathari, Harsusi, Hobyot, Jibbali, Khojki, Kumzari, Mahri and
Zidgali. Of these, five are unique south Arabian languages spoken in Oman’s
desert - Bathari, Hobyot, Jibbali, Mahri and Harsusi.iv
As a cultural heritage, these
languages and their oral traditions are not formally appreciated in the country.
Unlike Jordan, for example, where the Jordanian Commission for Oral and
Intangible Cultural Heritage has presented its bedu oral traditions and culture in
the regions of Petra and Wadi Rum to UNESCO for formal recognition as part of
the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, Oman officials remain mute about the
country’s linguistic treasures (UNESCO 2009).
Historical Background
Like so many states of the Middle East, Oman has been inhabited by
successive waves of peoples. Settlement in Oman from the desert fringe came
from two directions: one along the southern coast of Arabia from Yemen and the
other through the northern gateway of Al-Buraymi. The northern part of Oman is
distinctly influenced by the northern migrations via Al-Buraymi and is clearly
Arab, Muslim and tribal. The southern region, Dhofar, also Muslim and tribal, has
much closer cultural ties with Yemen and is home to a number of Himyaritic or
south Arabian language speakers. These pastoral tribes in the middle of the
country are the most remote and marginal peoples in Oman physically; culturally
they form distinct heterogeneous groups seemingly at odds with contemporary
government efforts to create a unified state. Other migrations into Oman include
the Baluch and Persian from Southwest Asia, African and Zanzibari from the East
coast of Africa, and Hydrabadis from the Indian Subcontinent. The latter have
settled in the coastal regions and the mountain valleys mainly of the north of the
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country (for greater detail of ethnic composition see Peterson 2004; Peterson
2004a).
Insert map of Oman
Until 1970, the Sultanate of Oman could justifiable be described as the
“Tibet of Arabia” (Eickelman 1989), so complete was its isolation from the rest of
the world. This remoteness and sense of separateness of the state was largely
created during the long reign of Sultan Said Al Said (1932-1970). It was a time
when many urban Omanis fled the country seeking education and livelihood
opportunities. During this period the tribes of the desert interior maintained their
largely subsistence livelihoods including local trade and barter with coastal
settlements. What little transformation took place along the coastal and mountain
settlements in the north of the country had little, if any impact, on the desert
tribes.
The Al Bu Said Dynasty came to power in 1744 as a result of an election
among the Ibadi constituency of the time.v This dynasty was able to maintain its
hold on power both in the interior of the country as well as abroad (variously in
Zanzibar and South Western Asia) with swings in authority and power due to
some short-lived rebellions and aborted insurrections.vi
In the mid 19th
century a
rapid decline in Al Bu Said fortunes ensued and British interests in Oman came to
be directed - until Indian independence in 1947 - from Delhi rather than from
Whitehall.
For the whole of the 20th century and into the 21st century, Oman has had
four rulers: Faysal (1888- 1913), Taymur (1913-1932), Said (1932 -1970) and
Qaboos (1970 to the present). All four rulers owed their position to British
support in one way or another. Although Faysal was not prepared for leadership
by the British through any form of specialized education, his peaceful accession
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to the thrown was facilitated by the British who let it be known that they would
not support any competing claims. During Taymur’s reign, growing unrest in the
interior by the followers of the resurgent Imamate culminated in the British-
brokered Treaty of Seeb in 1920. This treaty marked the de facto division of
Oman into a proto-autonomous interior under the spiritual and religious
leadership of an Ibadi Imam and a coastal strip under the secular rule of the
Sultan.vii
By the time Said was formally recognized as the ruler of Oman in 1932,
the 21 year-old inherited a country riddled with financial difficulty and was hardly
able to create any sources of income – outside of levying customs and issuing
postage stamps - to repay the mounting debt owed to the British government.
Oil exploration commenced in Oman during the 1930s and a number of oil
companies began making small payments to the Sultan Said in order to maintain
their rights to exploration. In the central desert of Oman, both the Harasiis and
the Jeneba nomadic pastoral tribes were affected by these activities. The Jeneba
tribe, closely watching oil exploration in the area, laid claim to the Jiddat-il-
Harasiis maintaining it was their land which they merely permitted the Harasiis to
occupy. Sultan Said dismissed the Jeneba claim. Wilkinson, moreover, suggests
that the Sultan’s true motive in coming down on the side of the Harasiis was his
confidence that the Harasiis had no relationship with the Ibadi Imam and thus
potentially were allies in his claim to future oil rights in the central desert interior
(Wilkinson 1987).
Oil activity in Oman stopped during World War II at time when Said set
out to cooperate completely with the British. British Royal Air Force (RAF)
installations were set up throughout the parts of Oman which he controlled and, in
return, he received support in modernizing the small armed forces which, again,
the British had established in the country with a contingent imported from
Baluchistan in 1921 (Peterson 1978).
In the early 1950s oil activity resumed and pastoral tribes in the north of
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the country, bordering on areas under the control of the Ibadi Imam, were
increasingly drawn into the growing armed conflict between the Sultan on the
coast and the Ibadi Imam in the interior.viii
In 1952 the Iman led a rebellion which
spilled over into a contestation over ownership of any oil finds by petroleum
company exploration teams. In 1959 a combined assault by the Sultan’s forces
and those of the British on the Jebel Akhdar defeated the Ibadi Imam and his
rebels. The success of that campaign heralded a period of genuinely close
cooperation with British authorities. Perhaps in recognition of the vital role these
forces played in consolidating his authority over the entire country, the Sultan
willingly approved significant military expenditure after 1967 when oil revenues
began to flow into his coffers. For other expenditures, Said remained cautious
perpetually searching for a way to gradually develop the country without
“modernizing” it.
Ever fearful that “his people” were not ready to move into the 20th
century, Sultan Said prohibited the general importation of cars and severely
restricted the enrollment of boys in schools. He took a direct interest in all
matters regarding changes to long-held “traditions.” He banned sunglasses and
torches and insisted that the gates of the capital of Muscat be closed at sunset.
Those caught outside had to wait until the next morning to enter the town. He
permitted only three schools to operate over the entire country admitting 100 boys
a year, who he personally chose. Yet Sultan Said, himself, was cultured and
cosmopolitan. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he made annual trips to the
United Kingdom, generally in the summer.
In 1964, oil was discovered in the central desert of Oman and by 1967, it
began to be exported. Projected revenues jumped dramatically, but even then
Said remained cautious about spending money he did not yet have. Thus, although
he commissioned plans for a new port at Muscat and a hospital in Ibri among
other projects, he took his time giving the go-ahead to implement these works,
Comment [TM1]: Flashlights?
Yes fine.
9
waiting first to accumulate the cash reserves to pay for these activities. Until his
overthrow by his son, Qaboos, Said continued to act and behave with the
shrewdness and calculation of someone always on the edge of financial ruin.
Omanis had been fleeing the country for decades during Said’s (1932-
1970) due to economic hardship, political oppression, and lack of educational
opportunities. By the summer of 1970, British forces quietly instigated and
supported a coup d’etat by Qaboos. After the palace coup, the new Sultan
prioritized the modernization and development of his country. Qaboos embraced
“progress” wholeheartedly and set about commissioning schools, clinics,
hospitals, roads and other infrastructural development. Unlike that of many of the
states of the Gulf, Oman’s indigenous population was relatively large and
markedly heterogeneous. In the north of the country it included an elite urban
merchant class with strong cultural ties and trade links with India and the coast of
East Africa. Along the coast, subsistence fishing settlements were common, and
in the mountains and intervening valleys, terraced farming communities survived
by maintaining ancient systems of water collection and distribution (Wilkinson
1977). The towns of the interior of the country were the centres of local and
regional trade as well as of religious learning. These settlements mirrored Oman’s
long history of successful colonial empire and incorporated East African, Baluchi,
Persian and Indian elements into the dominant culture.
Once he had established his reign, Sultan Qaboos reached out to all
Omanis living abroad and encouraged them to return to the country as quickly as
possible. This they did in large numbers from Bombay, Mombasa, Liverpool and
other Western centres. Along with this returning “citizenry” came skilled
European, particularly British, and South Asian expatriate workers to help build a
government infrastructure nearly from scratch. The armed forces, the police
force, the internal security service, the civil service, and government ministries of
health, education, social affairs and labour, agriculture and fisheries, water and
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electricity, communications and roads among others were rapidly set up. The
trappings of a modern state were put into place almost overnight. Thousands of
miles of roads were tarmacked, and Muscat was connected for the first time by a
modern road network to Salalah. The social and economic transformation of the
coastal areas and the mountains behind in both the north and the south of the
country, funded mainly by petroleum extracted from the central desert, was
enormous. The same was not true of the interior desert areas of the country or for
its nomadic pastoral peoples.
The Harasiis tribe in Contemporary Oman
The Harasiis along with the Wahiba, the Duru and the Jeneba are the four
main nomadic pastoral tribes in the central desert of Oman. The Wahiba tribe of
about 7,000 people occupy the southern coast of Oman and the desert interior
known as the Wahiba Sands. To the West of the Wahiba Sands are the Duru
camel-raising tribe, numbering about 9,000. Spread out along much of Oman’s
southern coast and adjacent interior are the Jeneba; and their numbers are easily in
excess of 12,000. To the south of the Duru and Wahiba are the Harasiis tribe.
Moving over what was - until the 1950s - a vast, waterless plain of more than
42,000 square kilometres, the Harasiis are a “refuge” tribe. They are people,
largely of Dhofari origin, who have been pushed over recent centuries into this
most inhospitable core area of the central desert of Oman. They are the most
remote and isolated of already marginal peoples. The region they inhabit separates
north Oman from Dhofar. As such, the region has attracted individuals and
groups expelled from their own tribe as punishment for major infractions of
traditional codes of conduct and honour. The Harasiis tribe speaks a southern
Arabian language related to Mahri, an indicator of their lack of contact and
relative isolation certainly in the past few centuries (Johnstone 1977). The tribe’s
Comment [U2]: Tribe also instead of tribe ?
11
usufruct or rights to access graze and browse found in the Jiddat il-Harasiis were
established in the 1930s when the Sultan and his political advisor, Bertram
Thomas, decided to confer the name Jiddat il-Harasiis ix
upon the territory which
had fallen to them as much by occupancy as by the lack of desire of any other
tribe to be there (Thomas 1938).
Insert map of Jiddat il-Harasiis Oman
The Harasiis tribe clearly represent the most excluded element of the Omani
peoples. The leadership of the tribe as a whole lies with the Bayt Aksit whose
ancestral forbearer is acknowledged to have united the disparate units into one
tribe in the middle of the 19th century. From about the mid-1930s the Harasiis
tribal leader has made annual trips, generally to Salalah, in order to receive cash
gifts - along with the other Omani tribal leaders - from the Sultan.
The tribe is small, numbering about 5,000 people. Although their claim to
the Jiddat has been, on occasion, contested by other groups, no other tribe has
actually attempted to move into this most desolate of landscapes with little if any
seasonal grasses, no natural water sources, and unfit for human habitation during
the scorching summer months. It was only with the oil activity of the 1950s that
the fortunes of the Harasiis and their grazing lands on the Jiddat were
transformed. In 1958 an exploratory party came to a point called Haima in the
middle of the Jiddat il-Harasiis and sank a water well there to support its oil
activity. Another well was sunk at a point 70 kilometres towards the coast, called
al-Ajaiz. These two wells were the first water sources on the Jiddat il-Harasiis, an
area approximately the size of Scotland. Al-Ajaiz became something of a magnet
attracting pastoral families to its well and its seasonal browse. The Haima well
was not used to the same extent as that at Al Ajaiz, because the area surrounding
Haima was a salt flat with very little graze or browse for the herds of camels and
Comment [TM3]: Browse? Obscure to US readers. Ok, but what other term can
we use to distinguish between what they eat
from the ground (graze) and from the acacia tres and bushes (browse)?
Comment [TM4]: Same as above
12
goats.
The traditional economy of the Harasiis was based on the raising of
camels and goats by natural graze for the production of milk rather than meat. At
the core of their way of life was migration determined by a combination of
seasonal and ecological variables in the location of pasture and water. Survival of
both herds and herders made movement from deficit to surplus areas vital.
Households were, and are still, generally extended family units, the average
family being composed of nine members. Generally three or four adults, of one
degree of kinship or another, make up the household. On average a household
keeps 100 goats, which are owned by and the responsibility of women and older
girls, and twenty-five camels which are owned by and the responsibility of men.
Of these camels, five or six are generally kept near the homestead – these are the
heavily pregnant or lactating ones. The remainder of the camels are left free to
graze in the open desert. The whereabouts of these animals are very carefully
monitored and an elaborate camel information exchange system operates among
all the tribesmen. When they meet, tribesmen first exchange news about the
conditions of pastures, then the whereabouts of various loose camels, and finally
news items of various family members. Homesteads are generally moved a
significant distance three or four times a year.x
Basic to the organization of all pastoral people is the existence of
sedentary communities in adjacent areas and access to their agricultural products.
For the Harasiis tribe, their trading towns have been along the northern desert
foothills of the Sharqiyya particularly Adam and Sinaw as well as the southern
town of Salalah. For the Harasiis, the relationship with the villages reinforced not
a cash economy, but a subsistence one. Until the late 1970s, this economic
interaction was unchanged among the Harasiis and extended no further than these
border desert villages and towns.
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Transforming and Contesting Authenticity
In the early months of 1980, I was offered an opportunity to join a small
convoy of vehicles across the desert of Oman. The trip was to start in Salalah, the
capital of Dhofar, the southern region of Oman, and to cross the deserts of Oman
and end up in Muscat. It was not quite the retracing of the steps of the early
Twentieth Century explorers, Bertram Thomas (1930s) and Wilfred Thesiger
(1940s), but it still felt a rare opportunity and unique adventure. The purpose of
the journey was partially to track several lapsed tuberculosis patients from tribes
in the Dhofari interior and, at the same time, to provide immunization vaccines to
any children we came across from these communities. Half way through our
journey we came across a small group of nomadic pastoral Harasiis women and
children preparing for a wedding. We took the opportunity to stop and to seek
their permission to begin the course of immunization against some of the six
World Health Organization (WHO) targeted childhood diseases (poliomyelitis,
diphtheria, tetanus, measles, and rubella). “Why,” we were asked, “did we want to
do this?” Our answer was, “The Sultan of Oman wishes to see all Omanis
immunized against these diseases.” “Why,” they continued, “should he want to do
this for us?” We were initially lost for an answer, having assumed that the sense
of belonging to one nation had reached these parts of the country. That did, in
fact, develop over time; however, the tie to the desert landscape of the Jiddat, that
social construction of belonging to that locale was not undermined in the process.
The following year, I began a fourteen-year close association with this
small nomadic pastoral tribe. My role was to assist the government of Oman in
extending social services to this remote community. A Royal Decree had been
issued indicating that government services were to be extended into the interior
desert “without forcing its migratory people to settle.” A policy had been
formulated by the Sultan which needed to move through a descending hierarchy
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of bureaucracy and emerge as a set of discretionary decisions made locally and on
the groundxi. Sultan Qaboos had encouraged the government ministries to push
‘development’ forward into the remote interior of the country to offer its people
the same services which the government had extended to the rest of the country
during the first ten years of his reign. His perception of the desert landscape as a
‘created’ physical, social, and cultural environment inhabited by nomadic
pastoral, was undoubtedly informed by his own mother’s origins as a Qara
tribeswoman in Dhofar. Yet prior to this, in the 1970s, a British white paper –
recognizing the significance of oil discoveries in the region - had encouraged
Sultan Qaboos to declare the central deserts terra nullius; a land legally empty of
people. These two contradictory positions at the highest level of authority in the
country have since resulted in a contestation over identity and landscape.
Over a two-year period, as a ‘Technical Assistance Expert’ with the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and with the help of two
Peace Corps volunteers, I was allowed by the Minister of Health and the Minister
of Education to set up both mobile and sedentary health services as well as a
weekly boarding school for boys with day-enrollment for girls (Dyer 2006).
Other government services with a relevance to these mobile pastoralists were
more difficult to organize. It seemed that the contradictory “hilltop” policy
formulations of the Sultan had been manipulated and interpreted by the
descending bureaucratic hierarchy to create a landscape in the desert which
attempted to reproduce the settled, “civilized” landscapes they were familiar with
in the coastal and mountain valley settlement. For example, opening government
offices in the remote tribal centre of Haima and staffing it with Omani
government employees generally meant borrowing all the rules and regulations of
a civil service developed around hadari, settled, needs. Thus government welfare
benefits became possible for unmarried, widowed, and divorced women, the
handicapped and disabled. But to the surprise of the Harasiis community, elderly
15
widowers or bachelors with no family to support them were excluded from
government support.xii
Shelter and housing were particularly problematic as government officials
and ministers were unable or unwilling to conceive of the desert as being
previously occupied by temporary camps; they set about creating specific
permanent housing settlements. The urban concepts of settled space ruled
supreme. The reality of the wide-spread dispersal of small impermanent
household camps over the 40,000 square kilometres of the Jiddat was
inconceivable to government bureaucrats, whatever the Royal Decrees might have
suggested. Hence our 1982 highly-successful UNDP programme of canvas tent
distribution among the Harasiis households met with obstruction and eventually
failure when we tried to set it up as a recurrent government programme after the
formal end of the UN project the following year. In an interview with the Minster
of Housing in Muscat in 1984 to plead for a continuation of the tent distribution
programme, I was told that the Ministry had to be seen to be doing something
useful in the interior and tents were not useful or progressive. The Minister added
that he needed to show that the Ministry was active and that could only be done
with permanent “mortar and cement”; canvas cloth was temporary and
undignified. His conclusion as that the government had to build cement housing–
units of twenty to thirty British-designed two-story town houses; no matter that
such architectural space was more suitable to an English suburb than an Arabian
desert.xiii
The units were built in 1985 and stood empty for more than a decade.
The general lack of cooperation among the Harasiis slowly gave way to limited
and begrudging use by some as who used the structures to shelter Harasiis goat
herds, or hired them out to expatriate labourers imported by local traders and oil
company sub-contractors. Nonetheless, the government civil servant’s outsider
view of the desert landscape became more powerful than that of the insider
inhabitant.
16
The distribution of potable water was another area of critical concern to
the Harasiis tribe, but not fully understood by government where rules of
auctioning time for watering of agriculture was well established (see Wilkinson
1977). In the mid-1980s, Harasiis tribal elders petitioned the government to
finance a carefully constructed decentralized plan to distribute water to
households spread out over the Jiddat il-Harasiis based on a horizontal
organization in which all seven of the tribe’s lineages were involved. These
petitions reached mid-level government bureaucrats who found the demands
unfathomable. Much easier, they felt, to extend the system which worked in
Oman’s towns and villages; to hand over the keys to the water bowser trucks to
the tribal leaders recognized by the government and the national oil company,
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO). For many years thereafter, water
distribution rested in the hands of a few powerful individuals who were
cultivating ties with the multinational oil companies and urban leadership rather
than with an egalitarian, but untied, syndicate as the tribal elders had hoped for.
Even the request for agricultural extension - a national programme wide
spread along the coast and in the interior towns of the country and well-funded by
various international agencies such as USAID and the PDO, national oil company
- failed to be transferred to the desert interior. In this case, it was the official status
of terra nullius which compromised Harasiis efforts to access development
assistance. Despite numerous requests for assistance from Harasiis tribal elders to
government to help them improve breed stock and experiment in growing salt-
resistant fodder, there was no government response. Those in power were
ignorant of and disinterested in tribal subsistence and its potential for marketing.
Government livestock extension programmes in the country were restricted - and
continue to be - to the coast and interior towns.xiv
For decades the PDO was perceived locally as the government in the
desert. Its exploration activities had resulted in three water wells being left open
Comment [TM5]: Tanker? Yes water tanker is OK
Comment [TM6]: State owned? Name of company here?
Comment [TM7]: Specify the company?
Comment [TM8]: Same question as above
17
and maintained for the use of the local Harasiis, a service which was widely
appreciated. As the major employer in the region – albeit generally for unskilled
and short-term work – it had a grasp of the social makeup and organization of
these nomadic pastoralists. Thus, when the international demand for greater
social responsibility resulted in the requirement that environmental and social
impact assessments be conducted prior to any further oil extraction in the Central
Desert of Oman, much could have been expected with regards to the complex
nature of the Jiddat “landscape.” However, in numerous conversations with local
and expatriate petroleum engineers, a technical view of place emerged; the desert
in their opinion was a landscape full of promising mineral resources [gas and oil]
and devoid of people. These company engineers maintained that people emerged
opportunistically from other regions whenever the oil company set up camp.xv
This particular representation of the desert was mirrored in the expert reports
commissioned by the oil companies regarding social impact assessments. As late
as 2006, Occidental Petroleum carried out a preliminary environment impact
assessment of an important tribal grazing area, Wadi Mukhaizana (Fucik 2006).
The “findings” of that report was that the area was devoid of people and thus no
social impact assessment was necessary.
Although Mukhaizana may have been physically empty of people at the
time of the brief visit of the European consultant, the absence of people and herds
at that moment was related more to the lack of rain in that season than an a lack of
tribal use rights to the Wadi. Only five years earlier the largest oil company in
Oman had commissioned a social impact assessment of the same Wadi and found
significant numbers of authentic local Harasiis there (Rae and Chatty 2001).
Those findings were ignored and Occidental has since developed a spaghetti
junction of oil and gas infrastructure in the Wadi, devastating the grazing area for
a large number of Harasiis families. Their rights to this land have been denied
and no adequate compensation or restitution has been considered. Overall, the
Comment [TM9]: Sounds like the same type of manufacturing evidence Oxy uses in Colombia against the Uwa people! Yes and
it is infuriating that they get away with it
each time!
Comment [TM10]: I am suggesting a break here as this is a very long paragraph.
Fine
18
major oil companies in the central desert of Oman take the government view that
these concession areas are terra nullius (Gilbert 2007). They lay their pipe lines
across important tribal migration routes causing disruption if not obstruction for
Harasiis herders trying to transport or move their herd from one grazing area to
another.xvi
A slow and gradual process of dislocation is taking place based on the
oil companies’ unwillingness to recognize the authenticity of the Harasiis
seasonal presence on their traditional grazing lands. This is followed by a process
of displacement which is gradually forcing some Harasiis off their lands
altogether and into shabby and crowded government low-cost housing at Haima.
Furthermore, conservationists – both national and international - have
regarded the central desert of Oman as land empty of people as well. Their
immediate and closer contact with the local people is at odds with the fiction of
terra nullius, and as such must ignore the presence and authenticity of its local
human inhabitants. Conservationists working in Oman generally do regard the
desert as a constructed landscape, but one shaped by plants and animals, not
people. Their concern is to restore a balance to this landscape by first returning to
it an animal that had been hunted to extinction in the 1970s.
Planned in the late 1970s, the international flagship conservation efforts,
the Arabian Oryx Re-introduction Project, was set up and put into effect in the
Jiddat il-Harasiis. This process was envisaged from abroad and created in the
offices of the His Majesty, the Sultan’s Advisor for the Environment without any
consultation with the local Harasiis tribesmen in the desert. Between 1980 and
1996, 450 Arabian oryx were either returned to “the wild” or were born in the
Jiddat il-Harasiis with Harsusi males hired to track these animals. In 1994, Oman
succeeded in getting this conservation project recognized formally as the
UNESCO World Heritage Arabian Oryx Sanctuary. But ongoing and constant
friction between the western managers of the conservation project and the local
Harasiis tribesmen regarding their “rights” to graze their domestic herds in large
19
parts of their territory – then officially a UNESCO nature reserve - eventually
resulted in a distancing from the project by the Harasiis and general lack of
cooperation for the conservation project.
Two representations of the desert landscape came to a head: a Western
conservation protectionist vision of a pristine landscape of plants and animals and
local tribal vision of a landscape where there were sets of cultural and historical
concepts relating people and domestic animals to desert spaces and places. When
between 1996 and 1998 poaching and illegal capture of the oryx by rival tribes
resulted in the loss of more than 350 animals, the Harasiis could do little to stop
this downward spiral. Other tribes were actively acting out their disaffection.
For the Harasiis, their youth had become alienated, and the elders were no longer
interested in the transformed landscape in the part of their traditional territory
which had been taken from them without their consent. In 2007, the Arabian Oryx
Sanctuary became the first World Heritage site to ever be deleted from the
UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. The justification for this unprecedented
step was the rapid decline in oryx number (from 450 to 65) and the supposed
degradation of its grazing area.
Even place names have not been immune to this contemporary move to
homogenize the diverse social and cultural landscapes of the modern Omani state.
Throughout the country place names that reflect a tribal origin are being changed
by civil servants somewhere in a mid-level hierarchy in the public authority
responsible for maps and map names. The Wahiba Sands [of the Wahiba tribe]
are now officially being labelled as the Eastern Sands. Attempts to drop the name
Harasiis from the Jiddat il-Harasiis are also afoot. At a meeting of the Omani
Historical Association in 2006, which I attended, it was clearly articulated that
there were official government efforts to “neutralize” place names so that they did
not reflect tribal affiliation. This pertained particularly to the deserts but did not
extend to the interior mountainous valleys of the hadar such as the Wadi Beni
20
Kharus or the Wadi Beni Auf. These interior valleys were closely associated with
the large and often powerful families serving in government. It seems the
neutralization of place names and their separation from peoples traditionally
associated with them is only effectively being carried out in deserts where bedu
live but not in ‘civilized places’ of the hadar interior towns, valleys and cities.
Such moves support the government’s action of declaring all land state land and
declaring Oman’s deserts terra nullius, whereas Oman’s coastal plain and
mountain valleys are inhabited by hadar and there, the rights of traditional
occupancy are respected.
Oman’s six south Arabian languages were recognized in the early
linguistic work of Tom Johnstone in the 1970s. The Diwan of the Royal Palace,
on the command of the Sultan, commissioned Miranda Morris in 1980 to write
lexicons and dictionaries of each of the six languages. A project of the Palace of
nearly thirty years duration was initiated as a “hilltop” policy formulation to
recognize the unique contribution that these languages make to Omani and world
culture. Despite this programme – or perhaps because of the way a “hilltop”
policy has not been translated effectively through the bureaucratic hierarchy into
local practice - in 2009, five of these six languages – Bathari, Harsusi, Hobyot,
Jibbali, and Mahri – are on the UNESCO List of endangered languages
(UNESCO 2009). It is one thing to record the linguistic contribution these
minorities speak, it is another to encourage and promote their use. The Omani
education system teaches only Arabic; there is no programme to support
traditional and local languages, much to the concern of native speakers. Rightly or
wrongly Omani bureaucrats have not acted on the Sultan’s interest in the
authentic languages of the country; instead they have interpreted the Sultan’s wish
to see a homogenized Omani national identity requiring all Omanis to speak
Arabic. The six south Arabian languages of the country are being systematically
disregarded, while world bodies seek to safeguard these unique elements of
21
intangible cultural heritage.
Conclusion
The authenticity of the Harasiis and other nomadic pastoral tribes has been
challenged by national government and multi-national bodies which have their
own views on the constructed landscapes of Oman. Recognizing the tensions
which exist between the traditional and modern, as well as the bedu and the hadar
has meant that representations of landscapes are subject to the power of the
hegemonic. Space and place are not resolved in a singular representation that
encapsulates the political fiction of a unified state. There is no one absolute
landscape, but rather a series of related and also contradictory perspectives.
Omani policy formulations recognize elements of the authenticity of the Harasiis
vision of their desert landscapes. But bureaucratic hierarchy prioritizes and puts
into practice landscape perspectives quite contrary: hadar landscapes imposed
upon bedu territories; multinational extractive industry’s perspectives of
landscapes of no human imprint, but replete with natural resources under the
surface; and conservation landscapes of pristine import momentarily unbalanced
by humans’ disregard for the equilibrium of flora and fauna. These visions
explain the lack of interest in the authenticity of Harasiis culture and language, in
the lack of government interest in developing or promoting Harasiis livestock
raising economy; and the disinterest by oil companies to Harasiis claims to spaces
and places they have inhabited at one time or another for centuries.
The Harasiis are increasingly becoming dislocated by the current
prospecting and extractive activity of the oil and gas industry. Their restricted
access to areas adjacent to the former Arabian Oryx Sanctuary has also impacted
heavily on their sense of mobility and grazing rights. Contemporary government
unwillingness to recognize the importance of mobility in their way of life is
Comment [TM11]: Unified state? Yes unified is better
22
threatening their freedom of movement as families are increasingly finding
themselves tied to government centres in order to access education, health and
welfare for the vulnerable weak, the young and the old.
For the first three decades of Oman’s modern nation-building history
(from 1970 to the present) a truly integrationist approach seemed to hold where
all Omanis from whatever background were called upon to work together to build
a new “modern” nation. Now, however, with much of the building in place, an
assimilationist outlook and approach seems to reign supreme which is curiously
out of step with global trends. The first few decades after World War II were
marked by an assimilationist flavour to nation-state creation as characterized by
the International Labour Organization (ILO) Resolution 107 of 1957 regarding the
treatment of traditional and local peoples. After successful lobbying by interest
groups and member countries from Latin America, in particular, this Resolution
was replaced by an the integrationist ILO Resolution 169 in 1989 to reflect the
transformed vision of nation-building held by most of its members. Yet Oman, in
its recent failures to recognize the authenticity of its minority tribes in their desert
landscapes, seems to have replaced an open-minded, ahead-of-its time,
integrationist vision of the development of the modern state with a backward-
looking assimilationist perspective at the expense of the country’s unique bedu
heritage, landscape and linguistic tradition.
One might ask how those who are rejected from the central construct of
national identity and marginalized in the construction of special landscapes
maintain their own special forms of collective authenticity (Lindholm 2008, 125).
The Harasiis tribe appears to be addressing the challenges to its authenticity and
its desert landscapes in several ways. Attachment to place and space is difficult to
transform. Disassociation is even harder. Many families are responding by setting
up part of the extended group in government housing, while still maintaining their
mobile herds of goat and camels with hired shepherds from Baluchistan and the
23
Indian Subcontinent. During school breaks and national holidays, these family
groups return then to the desert camps where their livestock are being held. Often
the older generation of male Harsuusi remains with the herds and the hired help
throughout the year. Younger Harsuusi men achieving success in trade and
transport businesses and living in permanent accommodation are transforming
part of their profits into building up herds of camels and goats with hired help;
they visit these livestock camps regularly to “maintain their roots.” Others with
less means, living in government housing, stubbornly hold on to their cultural
identity by keeping a few head of goat or camel in small fenced enclosures
adjacent to their cement housing. A few have moved part of the extended family
group across borders to the United Arab Emirates where the national perception
of the desert landscape and the place of the bedu in it are mirrored by their own
vision. These transnational families generally maintain their herds in their
traditional desert landscapes of Oman. For the Harasiis, identity and authenticity
is tied to the desert landscape which includes people, livestock and wild life. And
although mobility is important, it is not the only defining feature of the self-
perception and identity. Although some western images of an “authentic
primitivism” has begun to creep into government discourse - viewing pastoralists,
like those Harasiis, who no longer migrate with their animals as somehow no
longer authentic - the Harasiis themselves, do not make such distinctions
(Lindholm 2008, 131).
These moves are not permanent, nor are the settlements static. The
Harasiis continue to move back and forth across the borders of Oman. They
continue to embrace their marginality in the Gellnerian sense and thus proclaim
the continued importance - to them - of a political and social order outside the
state. In Abu Dhabi, their sense of “being bedu” is reinforced by other tribal
groups also moving into these created desert landscapes from Saudi Arabia, Qatar
and Oman. Furthermore, mass education and mass communications (Eickelman
24
1992) also reinforces their sense of authenticity.xvii
The United Arab Emirates
national identity is closely tied with both the bedu in the interior and the hadar
merchants in the coastal towns. Here several representations of landscapes
encapsulate the imagined state including that of the hadar and that of the bedu. As
with the Kingdom of Jordan (see Layne 1994; Shryock 1995) bedu culture and its
role in the development of the notion of national identity is important in the UAE.
Unfortunately this is not, at present, the case of Oman. There seems to be in
Oman no recognition, yet, that assimilating traditional or aboriginal people is not
the way to build a strong country (Blackburn 2007). Recognition of the tribes and
their authenticity in the desert of Oman would not radically pluralize Oman nor
negatively impact on state-building processes. It would instead be a step in the
celebration of the unique character and diversity of the Oman nation and its many
social and cultural landscapes.
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