Greater and Lesser Tunbs

Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb 18th centuryDuring the 1720s, the Qasami had emigrated from the Persian coast and established themselves as a force in Sharjah and Julfar (Ras al-Khaimah, now part of UAE). In the period 1747-59, a branch of the Qasemi from Sharjah established itself on the Persian littoral, but it was expelled in 1767. By 1780, the Qasemi branch was re-established on the Persian coast and began to feud with other coastal tribes over pasturage in the islands off Langeh. The Iranian argument for the ownership of the disputed islands is that the Qasami controlled the islands while they were located on the Persian coast, not when they later emigrated to the UAE coast. In April 1873, the islands were reported as a dependency of the Persian Fars province to the British Resident, which the Resident acknowledged. In the period 1786-1835 the official British opinion, surveys, and maps identified the Tonbs as part of Langeh, subject to the government of the province of Fars. Chief among them were the works of Lt. John McCluer (1786), political counselor John Macdonald Kinneir (1813), and Lt. George Barns Brucks (1829).19th centuryIn 1835, the Bani Yas attacked a British ship off Greater Tonb. In the ensuing maritime peace arranged by the Resident Samuel Hennell, a restrictive line was established between Abu Musa and Sirri islands, and pledges were obtained from the tribes of the lower Persian Gulf not to venture their war boats north of the line. In view of Sirri and Abu Musa being pirate lairs themselves, Hennell's successor, Major James Morrison, in January 1836, modified the restrictive line to run from Sham on the Trucial Coast to a point ten miles south of Abu Musa to Sáir Abu Noayr island. In either of its configurations, the restrictive line placed the Tonbs outside of the reach of the war boats of the Qasemi, Bani Yas, and other tribes of the lower Persian Gulf. The 1835 maritime truce was made permanent in 1853 after a series of earlier extensions. Force being no longer a viable option for settlement of disputes, especially on the part of the Qasemi of the lower Persian Gulf, the enforcement of Qasemi's claims to islands such as Abu Musa and Greater Tonb became a subject for the British colonial administration in the Persian Gulf. In that context, the Resident and its agents on several occasions (1864, 1873, 1879, 1881) had been seized with the question of the ownership of the Tonbs, but the British government had refused to go along with the claims of the Qasemi of the lower Persian Gulf.