Oil prospecting on the Trucial Coast made the local oil company, Petroleum Development Trucial Coast (PDTC), keen that the boundaries between the various Shaikhdoms there should be defined
— Julian Fortay Walker, 1991
Walker's senior, Gordon started the arbitration work by touring the boundary between the two sheikhdoms of Umm al-Quwain and Ras al-Khaimah. He began his work in April 1954 and was so disillusioned by his first day's experience in the field, that he decided that it would not be possible for him to carry out the work necessary for boundary arbitration and abandoned it in preference for his normal office work. In his place, he delegated the boundary work to his assistant in the Political Agency, Julian Walker
Walker travelled across the territories of the emirates and sheikhdoms in a government-owned Land Rover vehicle where he used to engage with tribesmen and then consult with Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Shakbut while drawing up the borders.[17] His interest in cartography and boundary disputes earned him the nickname Boundary Walker by his colleagues.
Mapping and survey
According to the report Walker submitted in March 1955 on Trucial States frontier settlement, the following principles to establish ownership of a territory were taken as the basis for internal boundary settlement, listed in approximate order of importance:
Control of several years' standing in an area, and tribal recognition of that control.
Historical evidence: divided into 5 subjects as follows: agreements, zakat, settlement of disputes, past occupation and development and use of territory
Ownership of property
In his 1954 survey, Walker found out that the relationship between tribes and boundaries is crucial and political boundaries are defined by tribal loyalties to specific sheikhs, the very reason internal boundaries shown on the Trucial States map being based on tribal loyalties. Those loyalties are conditional and subject to change. Boundaries between the Trucial States and its neighbors, and boundaries between individual Trucial States, periodically shifted during the 19th and 20th centuries due to the boundaries being based on the dirah of the tribes. Dirah in Eastern Arabia were flexibly defined areas, changing in size according to tribal strength.[16]
During the survey Walker encountered many obstacles. What maps of the area existed were far from accurate, and for some areas there were no maps at all. Thus, he had to make his own maps and he started by climbing mountains to sketch the countryside around about. The heat of summer proved to be another obstacle for Walker, which overtook him and his small team and made travel more difficult. Accordingly, he was trying to hurry to finish his survey in the cooler months. The most pressing difficulty was the requirement for speed and progress.[16]
After several years of surveys and negotiations, Walker was able to settle only some of the conflicting territorial claims, with the rest remaining unresolved. In May 1955, Walker presented the boundaries report, including his recommendations on disputed boundary settlements.[16]
Following the completion of Walker's field survey, J.P. Tripp, the Political Agent in Dubai, sent official letters during 1956 and 1957 to the Trucial Coast sheikhs informing them of their sheikhdom's boundaries.[16]
In a 2002 interview with the Gulf News, he said that he also took the help of a map of Abu Dhabi made by British explorer and military officer Wilfred Thesiger[18] and had completed the mapping of the emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman and Fujairah by the 1950s and 1960s before he was transferred back to London and then to Oslo, Norway.[18] In February 1963, based on the information provided by Walker, the Research Department of the Foreign Office prepared the first official map of the internal boundaries in the Trucial States.
His 31 hand-drawn maps were used to create proper formal maps by British Foreign Office for government use. Owing to the complexities, exclaves and enclaves the boundaries of the emirates and sheikhdoms shared with each other, the maps were informally called as Mr. Walker's Jigsaw Puzzle,[15] and to this day, constitutes much of the present-day federal borders of the Emirates of the United Arab Emirates. Walker argued in a July 1991 interview with a researcher in Durham, England that "the concepts of nation states, of territorial sovereignty, and of fixed linear frontiers are Western ones, which have been imposed on the traditional society of the Arabian Peninsula".[16]
Return to the Trucial States and formation of the United Arab Emirates
The British government under prime ministerHarold Wilson in January 1968 had publicly announced his administration's will to initiate the withdrawal and disengagement of the United Kingdom from the Persian Gulf by the end of 1971.[19] This announcement came as a surprise for the Gulf rulers, especially of Trucial States, Bahrain and Qatar. His policy was carried forward by his successor, Edward Heath. In January 1971, Walker was reposted in the Trucial States, this time as London's last political agent to oversee the Britain's smooth withdrawal[20] and to take part in an ongoing effort to bring the sheikhs and emirs to the negotiating table to discuss the future of the region once the Britain leaves.[21] In an interview given to a researcher in Durham, England on 19 July 1991,[16] Walker said:
Dubai and Abu Dhabi were about to be alone, but the others were too small and if they became independent alone they will not stay long. Fujairah might go to Oman, Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah would follow Saudi Arabia and Dubai is friendly with Iran, that might have created problems. The British role was to get the Council of the rulers to be strong enough to provide an umbrella for them.
After the declaration of the independence of the United Arab Emirates on 2 December 1971, Walker was appointed as the first Consul-General of the United Kingdom to the United Arab Emirates in Dubai, a position he held till 1972.[25] Afterwards, he went to West Berlin where he was posted as a political adviser for the British Military Government between 1973 and 1976. He then went to Shemlan, Lebanon where served as the last director of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) from 1977 to 1978, when the institution was closed down due to the ensuing Lebanese civil war.[26] He was then appointed as the British ambassador to North Yemen in 1979 where he served till 1984, and then as the British envoy to Qatar from 1984 to 1987. Following the end of the 1991 Gulf war, he worked with a United Nations-led committee on resolving the Iraq-Kuwait border issues.[27]
Retirement and later life
Walker retired in 1993. In 1999, he published an eight volume collection of the boundaries of the United Arab Emirates and Oman titled Tyro on the Trucial Coast. He served as the secretary at the Kurdish Cultural Centre Limited from September 2003 till January 2006. He also served as the director of BDG Management Limited from November 2005 to February 2010 and lastly as the director of Forty Grove Park Gardens Management Limited between July 2013 and June 2017.[28]
2004 John Shaw controversy and corruption charges
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004, that Walker was on the board of Guardian Net, whose bid for a mobile contract in Iraq was favored by Pentagon official John A. Shaw, over the objections of two other US officials, Daniel Sudnick and Bonnie Carroll.[29]Mother Jones reported that Walker was on the board of Qualcomm, whose technology would have been used in the Guardian Net bid. It reported that Walker had ties to Shaw and he was hired by him as a contract investigator to look into the illegal arms trade in Iraq, a position that had him working out of Shaw's office in the Pentagon.[30] However, Shaw later dismissed these allegations in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Occasional visits to the UAE
After his retirement from diplomatic career in 1993, Walker would regularly visit the United Arab Emirates to attend seminars and conferences besides having sit-down with journalists and historians during his spare time.[31]
While on his visit to the United Arab Emirates in 2008, he visited the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi in March where he gave a lecture on the history of Abu Dhabi between the 1920s and 1950s.[33] He sat down with the Abu Dhabi-based The National newspaper, where he told that the Dubai had initially hoped that it could survive as an autonomous independent city-state under the protection of the Shah of Pahlavi Iran before Sheikh Zayed convinced Sheikh Rashid to form a union between the two emirates in order to avoid conflict among the northern emirates and avert meddling of other Gulf states in the region.[34]
In November 2010, he was a key speaker at a three-day seminar themed ‘The Memoirs of the Nation through Oral Narratives’ in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.[35]
Personal life and death
After his retirement in 1993, Walker retreated to a house in Chiswick district of London. During his posting as a political officer in the colonial territories of Persian Gulf Residency in the 1950s and 1960s, Walker used to personally meet several sheikhs and emirs of different sheikdhoms and emirates. He had a close relationship with Sheikh Zayed and his brother Sheikh Hazza. He had personally known Sheikh Shakbut and Sheikh Rashid during several meetings that he held with them for the purpose of border demarcations. He enjoyed music, cooking and gardening.[31]
Death
Walker died on 7 July 2018 in London, United Kingdom. He was buried in Weybridge Cemetery, Weybridge.
^ abcdefgHesam Mohammed Jalil Sultan Al-Ulama (June 1994). The Federal Boundaries of the United Arab Emirates. Department of Geography, University of Durham.
