Otaiba: Foreigners Who Visited Keio University

On July 8, 1980, Keio University awarded an honorary doctorate to Mana Said Al-Otaiba, the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The preceding year, 1979, was a tumultuous time: in February, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile, completing the Islamic Revolution; in March, the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, based on the previous September's Camp David Accord, went into effect; in November, the Grand Mosque seizure occurred in Mecca, Saudi Arabia; and in December, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. In the Middle East, criticism of secularist regimes intensified, and an era of rising Islamic revivalism and Islamist movements was about to begin.

Reflecting on those times, I would like to discuss Mr. Otaiba's upbringing, his career as the UAE Oil Minister, the development of Japan-UAE relations based on oil, his connection with the Juku, and the significance of the Gulf oil-producing nations for modern Japan.

Born into a wealthy family in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in 1946, Mana Otaiba received his primary education in Doha (Qatar) because there were no elementary schools in Abu Dhabi at the time. He was later sent to Baghdad University as part of the first group of Abu Dhabi students to study abroad for the sake of future nation-building. Upon graduating in 1969, he joined the Abu Dhabi Department of Petroleum, becoming its Director in 1971. That same year, with the formation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), he was appointed the UAE Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources. Other members of that first group of Abu Dhabi overseas students included Suwaidi and Habroush, who would later become the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Finance, respectively.

Following India's independence, Britain decided on an early withdrawal from the Arabian Gulf and felt the need to modernize Abu Dhabi. Consequently, in August 1966, the leadership of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi was transferred from Shakhbut of the Al Nahyan family to his brother, Zayed. Upon his accession, the new Ruler Zayed set the "return of oil revenues to the people" as his goal and immediately began administrative reforms, infrastructure construction, and educational system reforms. In the seven years from Zayed's accession to the first oil crisis (the 1973 Arab oil strategy), Abu Dhabi's oil production increased from 360,000 barrels per day (1966) to 1.3 million barrels (1973), and oil revenues expanded from $250 million to $1.2 billion. Abu Dhabi was transformed by the implementation of the new Ruler's modernization plans.

In July 1967, the British government announced that it would withdraw its forces from the Arabian Gulf by the end of 1971. The following year, 1968, discussions began on forming an Arab Gulf federation after the withdrawal. Initially, Bahrain and Qatar participated, but in July 1971, it was decided that six emirates would form the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with Ruler Zayed of Abu Dhabi as President and Ruler Rashid of Dubai as Vice President. This restructuring of the national system was a measure taken in preparation for the end of the British protectorate.

During the era of massive production increases following Ruler Zayed's accession, among the Japanese companies that newly entered Abu Dhabi's oil development, Abu Dhabi Oil Co., Ltd. won the bid for a concession area that the British and French-capitalized Abu Dhabi Marine Areas Ltd. (ADMA) had abandoned as unpromising. In December 1967, a 45-year concession agreement was signed between the Ruler of Abu Dhabi and three Japanese parent companies. The first exploratory well struck oil in August 1969, and the first shipment to Japan was made in June 1973, four months before the outbreak of the Fourth Arab-Israeli War. The company maintained a good relationship with Ruler Zayed and Oil Minister Otaiba thereafter. Since becoming the UAE Oil Minister, Otaiba visited Japan almost every year, even having an audience with Emperor Showa and fostering pro-Japanese sentiment. In January 1971, he was appointed as a director of Abu Dhabi Oil.

In 1967, the year after Zayed became the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi joined OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) as its ninth member. OPEC, formed in 1960, gradually gained power, securing the initiative to raise crude oil prices through the Tehran Agreement of 1971 and the Geneva Agreement of 1972. Through the Riyadh Agreement of the same year, it also won capital participation in oil-producing companies, attempting to turn the market into a seller's market for oil-producing developing nations.

At that time, movements to recover from the defeat in the Third Arab-Israeli War accelerated in the Arab world. On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria simultaneously invaded Israel, starting the Fourth Arab-Israeli War. While military combat ended quickly, the member states of OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) launched an oil strategy on October 17, linking oil and economics to military and political goals. They aimed for: 1) Israel's complete withdrawal from territories occupied during the Third Arab-Israeli War, and 2) the restoration of Palestinian rights. This involved a total oil embargo against the hostile United States and the Netherlands, and supply restrictions to non-friendly countries. This OAPEC oil strategy, combined with significant price hikes by OPEC, plunged industrialized nations into the first oil crisis.

The Japanese government, which had been treated as a "neutral country," hastily made a cabinet decision to shift its Middle East policy (recognizing the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people). Deputy Prime Minister Takeo Miki was dispatched as a special envoy to Abu Dhabi and other Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. As a result, at the OAPEC meeting in December 1973, a decision was made to "recognize Japan as a friendly nation and supply the necessary quantities." At this OAPEC meeting, Mr. Otaiba reportedly spoke in favor of treating Japan as a "friendly nation," stating, "Through meetings with the Japanese Prime Minister and key cabinet members, I am fully aware that they hold a pro-Arab stance on the Palestinian issue."

In the 1970s, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi's oil production exceeded 1.5 million barrels per day even after the first oil crisis, and oil prices remained at $13–$14 per barrel, leading to an unprecedented period of increased oil revenue.

In February 1979, the Islamic Republic regime, which had overthrown the Pahlavi dynasty in the Iranian Revolution, strengthened its policy of reducing oil production. This triggered the second oil crisis. In the two years of 1979 and 1980, the official price soared by $25. However, Abu Dhabi's oil revenue from 1979 to 1982 exceeded $10 billion each year, supported by this surge and the sustained high price of oil.

Between 1971 and 1982, Otaiba served as the President of the OPEC Conference six times. During this period, OPEC struggled with setting production ceilings to protect the price structure, country-specific production quotas, and responding to increased production of non-OPEC crude oil from the North Sea and Alaska. It was during this period that Keio University awarded Mr. Otaiba an honorary doctorate.

We have looked at the situation of the Gulf oil-producing countries and Mr. Otaiba's role up to the early 1980s. In his address at the 1980 honorary doctorate ceremony, President Tadao Ishikawa evaluated Mr. Otaiba with high expectations for two points: 1) his consistent advocacy for policies that consider the oil-consuming economy regarding oil pricing, and 2) his enthusiastic stance toward academic and cultural exchange between Japan and the UAE.

At the time of this visit, I was studying abroad at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, striving to master Arabic at the university's Arabic Language Unit. Mr. Otaiba donated $50,000 to the Juku at this time, and I received a letter from the then Dean of the Faculty of Law, Gishu Toki, asking me to think of ways to use Mr. Otaiba's donation to contribute to Middle Eastern studies within the Faculty of Law.

I immediately proposed to collect as widely as possible Arabic-language books (including some Western-language books published locally) regarding the politics, economy, society, and culture of the modern Middle East available in Egypt, and to house them in the Keio University Library. I received permission. During the final six months of my two-year study abroad, I traveled around bookstores, book fairs, universities, and research institutes in Cairo and Alexandria. More than 2,000 volumes were piled up in our flat in Garden City. Furthermore, after returning to Japan, through an introduction from Dr. Michael Albin, Director of the Library of Congress Cairo Office, whom I met during the collection process, I continued to purchase Arabic social science books and magazines published in various Arab countries in the 1980s by participating in the Library of Congress's "Middle East Acquisitions Program," and these were also housed in the Keio University Library. The several thousand volumes from the Cairo and LC collections are currently kept in the Yamanakako storehouse as the "Faculty of Law Arabic Books."

Subsequently, Mr. Otaiba visited the Juku in October 1981 and September 1986, giving lectures titled "OPEC and Oversupply" and "OPEC at a Crossroads," respectively (the transcript of the latter was published in the November 1986 issue of this magazine). In both lectures, he mentioned the impact of oil consumption reduction, noting that industrialized nations had started oil stockpiling following the first oil crisis and had moved toward developing alternative energy sources after the second oil crisis.

In Japan-UAE trade relations, the UAE, centered long-term on the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, has supplied approximately one-quarter of Japan's total crude oil imports (24.4% in 2014). It is the second-largest source of crude oil imports after Saudi Arabia.

In Abu Dhabi, alongside Abu Dhabi Oil, United Petroleum Development and Japan Oil Development have participated in oil field development and production since 1970, shipping nearly half of Japan's total "independently developed crude oil." In 2012, Abu Dhabi Oil renewed its 30-year concessions for three existing oil fields and signed a new concession agreement for a new block.

During the oil price collapses of 1986 and 1998, oil-exporting countries managed to escape the crisis by coordinating production cuts. However, the situation surrounding the oversupply and falling oil prices as of 2016 is significantly different from before. Gulf oil-producing countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are unable to commit to production cuts, fearing that Iran—freed from economic sanctions by the nuclear deal—will use its oil exports to become a regional hegemon in the Middle East.