Oil Politics

Not robed sheiks but zealous dark-suited young Arab technicians dominated the first Arab Petroleum Congress in Cairo last week. The 420 delegates looked at the $6,000,000 worth of machinery exhibits and held seminars in drilling techniques--but their real interest was oil politics. The Arabs were out for more money and more control over their oil (the Middle East has two-thirds of the world's supply). In the Cairo hotel lobbies, the man everyone wanted to see was a Saudi Arabian with a bright, quick smile, and a profile as sharp as a scimitar.

Native's Return. Abdullah Tariki, chief of the Saudi office of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs, is the unquestioned spokesman of the new generation of ambitious Arab experts in oil. "Absolutely incorruptible," say U.S. oilmen, who quiver at some of Tariki's ideas. "The only Arab who knows anything about the oil business."

A black-tent Bedouin who left off camel herding to study in Egypt and Texas, Tariki is often represented as anti-American (TIME, Oct. 27). At the University of Texas he got a master's degree in petroleum engineering, found an American wife, and then joined the U.S.-owned Arabian American Oil Co. at Dhahran. "I was the first Arab to penetrate into the tight Aramco compound," he said last week, "and I never saw such narrow people." American matrons took his wife aside and reproved her for marrying an Arab. Says Tariki bitterly: "It was a perfect case of an Arab being a stranger in his own country." For "purely personal reasons having nothing to do with nationality," Tariki's marriage broke up, and his wife and son Sakhr now live in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. But he insists: "My best friends are still in Texas, and I'd like to go back there. I send all my assistants to Texas University."

At 40 the greying elder statesman of Arab oil diplomacy, Tariki is not satisfied with the 50-50 split in oil royalties and says: "It is only a matter of time before we get the same 60-40 split that the Venezuelans announced in December." When Western oilmen remind him that their contracts run into the next century, Tariki replies: "Any concession between a government and a company is not worth a damn if it does not please the people."

The Integrators. Tariki and his young assistants are no mere nationalizers; they saw how Mossadegh nationalized Iran's oil only to find that he simply could not sell it. Instead, Tariki wants to develop "integrated" operations down to the distant gas pump, with the Arabs taking a share in producing, transporting and marketing the oil. Aramco is willing to give him more money in future concessions but no part in company operations outside Saudi Arabia. Last week the talk of Cairo was about a Tariki plan for an Arab-owned tanker fleet and a new Arab-owned pipeline from the Persian Gulf across Syria to the Mediterranean.

But what made Tariki's global ambitions less of a threat to the oil companies than they might otherwise have been is the current, worldwide oil surplus, which caused crude prices to drop 18-c- a barrel in February (complains Tariki: "We lost $34 million and weren't even consulted"). Last week a high-powered Venezuelan deputation at Cairo urged the Arabs to join in limiting production to stabilize prices. But as always when Arabs get together, agreement was hard to come by. The Iraqis, feuding with Nasser, were not even present. And Iran, remembering how increased production by Arab neighbors thwarted its plans, was unreceptive to Arab plans for a common front.

The Arab technicians who gathered in Cairo would have to be taken more and more into account as the years go by, but at the moment they are in no position to make everyone else jump to their tune.

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