At work last week I got a call from a reporter on Sky News asking if the AGI could advise on how international waters are set and checked. I was alone in the office and could not answer the question so I suggested he contact the UK Hydrographic Office.
The question was asked, of course, because of the abduction by Iran of 15 UK marines who, they alleged, had strayed from Iraqi waters into Iranian territorial waters and were therefore trespassing.
The dispute has now been settled and the marine have been released unharmed. But were they trespassing? Britain categorically says 'no', Iran maintains that they were. And I guess we will never know. On land, counties borders can usually be measured in relation to a river or at least some permanent geographical feature - sometimes a man made on such as a wall. But on the ocean there is no immediate feature. Of course a border can be categorized by its latitude and/or longitude, but presumably borders do not lie directly north-south or east-west, bit can be diagonal, zig-zag or whatever.
In this case we are dealing with the waters of the Shatt al Arab waterway. Apparently the dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters was first agreed in the 1970s and marked by buoys. But two factors have complicated matters. Firstly Saddam Hussain renounced the agreement. Secondly the boundary is defined by its distance from the coastline. But in that area the coastline is constantly shifting with mud flats appearing and disappearing over time.
So effectively neither side can claim with certainty that they were correct. It does seem to me that it was at best rather cavalier of the marines to move out of reach of their mother ship so close to a disputed boundary in a politically sensitive part of the world.
This is of some interest to me as I lived and worked in Iran in the late 1970s during and after the period of the Iranian revolution. It was an interesting time and I had a number of inadvertent adventures including the time being Scottish saved my life and the time the music of Boney M almost cost me my life. But those are long stories which probably do not properly reside in a geog Blog. So I will just sign off with copies of the maps that were used by each side to try to prove their point.
British map
Iranian map
