The 31st summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council has just ended in Abu Dhabi. It has spurred some memories, since as it happened I had the opportunity to attend the first, founding summit of the GCC in May of 1981. It was also in Abu Dhabi, and marked my first ever trip to the Gulf. I was working for a small publication at the time, but the press advisor to the UAE Embassy was an old friend from grad school, and got me an invite. I found myself rubbing elbows with such legendary correspondents as Peter Mansfield and Patrick Seale (but few Americans were in attendance: I recall only John Duke Anthony and myself).
The founding summit was in May, though later summits have been in November or December, when the temperatures are more tolerable. Already then, when the UAE was not quite 10 years old, Abu Dhabi was building everywhere, though many streets were just pavement in the desert, awaiting houses. The airport was an earlier one, not the current one. The Iran-Iraq war was less than a year old, and was the catalyst for the formation of the GCC. Of the six rulers who attended that summit, only Qaboos of Oman is still on the throne.
It was still the era of filing by telex. Old timers like me will remember having to punch those tapes. The UAE telecom people gave us a press room with open phones and telexes: call anywhere you like. I called friends in the States just to check in. Trying to locate the home number of a friend posted to Riyadh, I called his father in Pennsylvania. He lived in the Philadelphia area. To my puzzlement, he asked me to drop by, "since you're close by." I noted that I was in fact in the Gulf. It turned out he'd heard "Abu Dhabi" as "Upper Darby." For 30 years now I can never pass Upper Darby, PA, without thinking of Abu Dhabi.
No great point to this post; just reminiscing.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
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2 comments:
When I was at school, there was a girl whose father worked in the oil industry, and spent a lot of his time in a place I heard as Aberdubby, and presumed was in Wales, near Abergavenny or Aberystwyth.
GCC summits and regular ministerial meetings have become so routine that they usually do not grab the attention of non-GCC media. In fact, the mostly empty rhetoric of the public sessions and official communiques mask some really serious work that often takes place in the closed sessions and bilateral consultations. By and large they are more substantive than the Arab League summits and ministerials. Of course, the GCC falls way short of its real model, the EU. Each state is very jealous of its independence, but they often find that a strong GCC position enables them to take positions they would otherwise shrink from.
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