مجموعة ٦/ ٦٦ "المملكة العربية السعودية: حدود السعودية-شرق الأردن" [و‎‎٨‎٢] (٤٢٧/١٦٣)

THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
EASTERN (Arabia).
July 18, 1935.
CONFIDENTIAL.
Section 2 .
'[E 4422/341/25]
Record of Second Part of Fifth Meeting with Fuad Bey Hamza at the
Foreign Office on July 15, 1935.
THE first part of this meeting was devoted to a brief discussion of the
question of the dues paid on goods imported through Bahrein into Saudi Arabia,
and is recorded separately.
The following were present:—
Mr. Ren del. Fuad Bey Hamza (Deputy Saudi-
Sir A. Ryan. Arabian Minister for Foreign
Mr. Ward. Affairs).
Mr. Malcolm.
Transjordan-Nejd Frontier.
Mr. RENDER recalled the protest which the Saudi Government had made,
in their note of the 3rd February, 1935, to His Majesty’s Minister at Jedda,
against the use by Transjordan car patrols of the track at a point named
Thaniyya Taraif, and he reminded Fuad Bey that before leaving Jedda
Sir A. Ryan had informed the Saudi Government that this question was
necessitating exhaustive study owing to defects in the maps, but that His
Majesty’s Government would be prepared to discuss it with his Excellency Fuad
Bey in London. In fulfilment of this promise, Mr. Rendel now wished to explain
the situation which had arisen.
Local investigations, which were still proceeding, had shown that many
places on the Nejd-Transjordan frontier were not by any means in the positions
in which they were shown on the 1918 “ International ” Asia 1 : 1,000,000 map,
referred to in article 1 of the Hadda Agreement. In fact, that map had now
been shown to be very seriously inaccurate. It had been compiled on reports
supplied by travellers, but those reports were now being found to have contained
progressive errors, which had caused a correspondingly progressive series of
inaccuracies in the map. The final result was that many of the features on the
1918 map either were in a totally different position from that shown on the map,
or lay in an entirely different relationship towards each other from that shown,
or, in some cases, did not exist at all. As a typical example, Mr. Rendel cited
the route shown on the map as followed by Carruthers in 1909. This route was
shown as passing diagonally from north-west to south-east through an apparent
gap between the Jebel Tubeik and a small hill to the east of it called Thaila
Maizila, and in this gap it was shown as crossing Captain Shakespeare’s route
of 1914, so that on the map there was a continuous route round the Jebel Tubeik
within Transjordan territory. But it now turned out that there was no such
gap, and that the Thaila Maizila was merely a rocky spur of the Jebel Tubeik
itself, and an integral part of the Tubeik massif.
Mr. Rendel, turning to the map, explained the indications it gave of the
main intentions of the negotiators of the Hadda Agreement. It was clear that
King Abdul Aziz, on the one hand, had sought to keep the whole of the Wadi
Sirhan for Saudi Arabia, and that Sir Gilbert Clayton, on the other hand, had
sought to keep for Transjordan the whole of the Jebel Tubeik. This was the
only explanation of the general line of the frontier, particularly at its southern
end. The natural inference was that Sir G. Clayton, relying on‘the fact that the
map showed Carruthers’ and Shakespeare’s routes as passing round the eastern
end of the Jebel Tubeik, had drawn the southern end of the Transjordan-Nejd
frontier, where it is shown on the 1918 map, with the object of leaving the route
round the eastern end of the Jebel Tubeik entirely within Transjordan. Now. as
Mr. Rendel had said, Carruthers’ route had proved an impossibility, since the
Jebel Tubeik massif and the eminence called Thaila Maizila were all part of the
[456 s—2] b