Regional Outlook : Lines in the Sand Drawing Gulf Nations Into Disputes : It’s not just Iraq. Across the region, skirmishes are breaking out over old colonial borders.

Somewhere amid the tomato plants and garlic fields in the U.N. Demilitarized Zone here, there once stood a date palm tree. When a young British officer named Maj. John More set off on foot to draw what has become one of the world’s most contentious and embattled lines in the sand 69 years ago, that “southerly palm” was about the only natural landmark he could find in the desert wasteland between what are now Iraq and Kuwait.

So, from the foot of the palm, More walked 1,000 paces due south, and there he planted a little signboard that declared, “Iraq-Kuwait Boundary.”

Seven decades later, not even the most sophisticated U.S. spy satellites, the most learned British historians and the most efficient European photo interpreters could find More’s palm tree. His signboard vanished sometime in 1939. And so, to this day, no one is really certain about the exact location of an international border that brought the U.S. and 30 other nations to war with Iraq last year.

Nor do the two dozen or so Iraqi farmers whose families have owned and worked the fields here for at least 30 years have the slightest idea which country to call home.

Nevertheless, the United Nations this week will begin planting concrete pylons every 1.25 miles along the entire 125-mile length of what it, after an 18-month investigation by the Western world’s most skilled border detectives, has decided is the proper line, running directly through those tomato and garlic fields. The world body insists the border will be accurate to within inches, but Iraqi President Saddam Hussein vows it will “create a permanent center of boiling tension.”

Such, it seems, is the legacy of many of this volatile region’s lines in the sand--the often arbitrary international borders drawn on colonial maps yet never clearly drawn on land, which are now erupting in clashes, controversy and growing instability throughout the Persian Gulf.

More’s missing date palm is just one of many mysteries of history that continue to plague the oil-rich region. The continuing dispute over the Iraq-Kuwait border is just the most extreme of a whole series of boundary battles now pitting many of the region’s neighbors against one another.

In the past few weeks alone, border skirmishes and escalating wars of words have broken out between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Qatar and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Two died and several were injured in a gun battle two weeks ago at a disputed border post between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Substantial armed forces are ominously deployed along both sides of the oil-rich Saudi-Yemeni border. And Iran has escalated its rhetoric over the disputed Abu Musa island near the choke point for the world’s oil supply, warning Arab leaders in the Gulf that all their borders are “arbitrary” and that their land claims against Tehran are tantamount to “grabbing a lion by the tail.”

The sudden deluge of border bashing is largely coincidental, and each dispute is fueled by its own set of local political imperatives.

But analysts--including some of the men who helped draw those original lines in the sand--say most of the region’s new flash points share common roots. Directly or indirectly, most appear to be an outgrowth of last year’s Gulf War muscle-flexing by all nations in the regional power vacuum that a decimated Iraqi military machine left behind.

Also, in virtually every case, the skirmishes can be traced to the fuzziness of the borders that the region’s British colonial administrators once carved into desert sheikdoms--borders defined not by rivers, lakes and mountains but by the location of wandering tribes and armies.

“When you talk about borders or territorial boundaries here, you’re imposing a Western idea on Arab Bedouin states,” said Sir Julian Walker, a British diplomat who helped mark out the boundaries that turned the United Arab Emirates into a serpentine mosaic that, at one point, actually cuts Oman off from itself.

“So a lot of these disputes have been rumbling along for a long time. I’d like to think that people are talking about them more now because some, at least, are moving along toward a solution for the first time--a new-found resolve to dissolve the tension.”

Senior delegations from Saudi Arabia and Yemen did sit down in Riyadh early this month in an effort to define for the first time a border on which billions of dollars are at stake. U.S. and other Western oil companies have been drilling in the border region under contract with the Yemeni government for years now. But earlier this year Saudi officials sent formal notices to those companies informing them they were on Saudi territory.

The influential Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper reported that both sides have shown a “clear concern to resolve the issue in a brotherly manner.”

A very different spirit has accompanied negotiations between Iran and the U.A.E. over the fate of Abu Musa--a dispute which diplomats fear could plunge the Gulf into its third major land war in 13 years. Talks aimed at defusing the situation broke down after less than 36 hours in late September when U.A.E. ruler Sheik Zayed ibn Sultan al Nuhayan insisted that the negotiations also include two nearby islands--the Greater and Lesser Tunbs--that were seized and annexed by the late Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1971.

Tehran Radio’s response: Back off or risk transforming the entire Gulf into “a living hell of disputes.”

The conflict over Abu Musa most reflects the post-Gulf War power shifts behind the recent border controversies. It began when, despite a 1974 agreement giving Iran and the emirates joint custody over the strategic island, Iranian troops turned away a ferry bringing non-Iranian residents home to Abu Musa from their summer vacations.

Arab analysts have charged that the move is part of “the Iranianization of the Gulf”--a design to replace Iraq as the Gulf’s regional superpower, which also includes Tehran’s recent acquisition of three second-hand Russian submarines.

Tehran also links the dispute to the Gulf War, but charges that it was the U.A.E.’s pro-West monarchy that whipped up the controversy to help justify a continuing U.S. military presence in the region.

Many Gulf experts contend there is an Iranian angle to Qatar’s recent border clash with Saudi Arabia as well.

The battle, during which Qatar says two of its border guards were killed and a sentry post riddled with machine gun fire, climaxed months of quiet Saudi concern about Qatar’s improving ties with Tehran. The two nations have signed a series of agreements paving the way for joint exploitation of the largest off-shore natural gas field in the world, located near Qatar’s coast.

The Saudis, ever-suspicious of Iranian motives, earlier this year closed the main transit road that is Qatar’s only land link with the outside world--a move viewed as part of Saudi Arabia’s attempt to assert itself as the region’s new, U.S.-armed superpower.

“No doubt, a lot of these recent border disputes are the result of power shifting after the Gulf War,” said Richard Schofield, deputy director of the Center for Geopolitics and International Boundaries Research at the University of London.

But for Schofield, who is also the author of a 60-page volume examining the history of the Iraq-Kuwait border, the most common of denominators in the recent rash of boundary disputes is their shared history of ambiguity.

“A lot of the boundaries in the desert were completely arbitrary,” Schofield said. “It was only the advent of oil that made every square inch of the desert important.”

And nowhere is that more dramatically illustrated than on the disputed line between Iraq and Kuwait--the line More marked with his errant “southerly palm” and now-purloined signboard in April, 1923.

“It was vague,” Schofield concluded with academic understatement. “It was very, very vague.”

It’s so vague that the task of the U.N. Border Demarcation Commission, created by the cease-fire resolutions that ended the war with Iraq in March, 1991, must rank high among history’s most elaborate efforts to convert cartographic ambiguity into modern-day reality.

During the past 18 months, U.S. surveillance satellites have mapped every fraction of an inch of the border region. Border experts such as Sir Julian Walker, hired as a consultant to the commission, have pored over old photographs and consulted with Iraqis and Kuwaitis living in the area to try to match them with maps that More and others left behind. And commission teams so secretive they have never answered a single reporter’s question have spent months combing over the 9.4-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, armed with plumb lines and the most advanced surveying instruments.

So contentious is their assignment, particularly around these farms south of Safwan, that Iraq decided to boycott the commission meetings, rejecting the notion that any line should separate it from an emirate it continues to claim as its 19th province.

Asked which side of the border he was on during a daylong tour of the Demilitarized Zone last week, a U.N. escort laughed heartily and admitted, “I don’t know.” As his jeep rumbled along a desert track designated “Bad Boys Route” because it was blanketed with live ammunition in the war’s aftermath, he added: “Iraq? Kuwait? Really, I don’t know. That’s why we’re here, I guess.”

The commission is supposed to sink the last of its 100 concrete border pylons by the end of December.

Meanwhile, hundreds of military observers from more than 33 countries have been patrolling the border region 24 hours a day since the war’s end.

From 18 tiny observation bases, complete with beds, barbecue pits and air-conditioned trailers, the unarmed observers have found themselves negotiating between Kuwaiti police and their Iraqi counterparts, whose posts are just a few hundred yards apart at some points along the border.

They have attempted to defuse gun battles at a smugglers outpost called “the sheep’s market”--a desert marketplace rumored to sell everything from whiskey to shoulder-fired Stinger heat-seeking missiles. And the observers have acted as arbiters in disputes between Kuwaiti police and the Iraqi farmers south of Safwan--in one instance finding themselves in a cross-fire that left one Swedish observer wounded and a Kuwaiti policeman dead. Just last week, three more Kuwaiti policemen were injured in yet another Demilitarized Zone gun battle.

“Sure, it seems a little crazy sometimes--especially when you’re driving around these little roads to nowhere in the middle of nowhere and people start talking about missing palm trees and 50-year-old signposts,” said one of the U.N. observers, who asked not to be identified. “But, when you think about it, maybe this is progress.

“Maybe, if we can figure out just where these borders ought to be, then really draw them down into the sand, well, maybe everyone’ll stop fighting over them. Maybe.”

Carving Up the Empire

After World War I and the decay of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France divided much of the Mideast between them. But they found few natural borders on the vast Arabian Peninsula, home to wandering clans. As a result, boundaries set by British colonial officials for Kuwait and other areas were often arbitrary, leading to conflict today.