A Hastings company is playing a crucial role in sorting out a long-running border row in the Middle East.NZ Aerial Mapping (NZAM) has been contracted by a joint Saudi Arabia-Kuwait technical committee to accurately mark out and map the border between the
A Hastings company is playing a crucial role in sorting out a long-running border row in the Middle East.
NZ Aerial Mapping (NZAM) has been contracted by a joint Saudi Arabia-Kuwait technical committee to accurately mark out and map the border between the two nations -- an issue which took a high profile when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein triggered the first Gulf War by invading Kuwait.
Now the two nations have signed a contract for the New Zealand company to carry out the demarcation process.
NZAM's aircraft have worked extensively throughout Asia and the Pacific, including a large photography programme in East Timor and operations through to Nepal.
"More recently increases in opportunity and proven capability has required NZAM to base an aircraft in the Middle East for the majority of the year," the company said on its website.
Major General Abdullah Al-Muhanna, who signed the contract on behalf of Kuwait, told the Kuwait News Agency that the contract required maps drawn according to extremely accurate standards. He said the New Zealand company will start the job soon, with technical field teams from both countries monitoring the operation.
The New Zealand work will clean up a mess inadvertently triggered by another New Zealander, Major Frank Holmes, a mining engineer who was a quartermaster in the British Army at Basra -- in what is now Iraq -- at the time that Britain split Kuwait from the Ottoman Empire into a separate sheikhdom.
After hearing of the region's first successful oil well in neighbouring Persia -- now Iran -- Maj Holmes set up his own Eastern and General Syndicate, and ended the 1920s to trying to win concessions from impoverished Arab sheiks.
Author Daniel Yergin said in his book The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power that to some the New Zealander was a man of considerable personal charm, with a bluff, breezy, blustering, buccaneering way, but to others he was simply a buffoon.
Maj Holmes brought in American investors and in 1927, Gulf Oil took over a concession that he had obtained for Bahrain, the small island off the coast of Saudi Arabia, as well as a "somewhat questionable one" he had gained from Kuwait.
Development of his oil concessions -- particularly the 1938 oil discovery in Kuwait's southern Burqan fields -- intensified years of debate over the border, which included a diamond-shaped "Divided Zone" of 5790 square kilometres directly south of Kuwait.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait agreed in 1965 to split the zone geographically, with each country administering its half but retaining rights to the natural resources in the whole zone.
Each country annexed its half of the zone in 1966.
