ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the origins of Kuwait' s ownership of the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan in the northwestern reaches of the Gulf and the constantly voiced Iraqi demand in the years since the late 1930s that the islands should be ceded or, at the very minimum, leased by Kuwait, so as to improve Iraq's access to the high sea. It takes us up to but not beyond the 1990-1 Kuwait crisis and Gulf war. Readers are referred to Chapter 1 for information on the recent deliberations of the United Nations. The chief charaeteristic of the territorial relations hip between the two states during the past half-century has been Iraq's total inability to reconcile itself to the boundary delimitation it agreed with Kuwait in an exchanges of notes of 1932, which clearly specified Kuwaiti ownership of the islands. This is despite the conclusion, during Oetober 1963, of an agreement in which the Baghdad Government recognized an independent Kuwait with its boundaries (according to the 1932 correspondence) for the first time since Iraq's admission to the League of Nations as an independent state in October 1932. Both before and after the false dawn of 1963 the Iraq-Kuwait islands and bord er questions have generally remained entrenched in the following intractable pattern of dispute: Iraq would agree to the final demarcation of the land boundary as defined by the 1932 exchange of notes, or, more accurately, Britain's 1951 interpretation of the alignment introduced by this correspondence, l only if Kuwait first agreed to the cession or lease of Warbah and Bubiyan; conversely Kuwait, which has tenaciously resisted all suggestions that it might cede or trade portions of its northern land and islands territories, has traditionally refused to consider leasing Warbah unless Iraq first agreed to the demarcation of the existing land boundary.
