Put It in Neutral


Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

What would a good sci-fi romp be without a forbidden zone? The Cathedral is where the protagonists from “Logan’s Run” encounter a “Lord of the Flies”-like gang of preteen outlaws, proving that there is life outside the domed city’s strict regimen of recreational sex and ritualized murder. In “Escape from New York,” the entire island of Manhattan is off limits to United States authorities, a post-apocalyptic prison run by its inmates. Almost all the action in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” takes place in “the zone.” And “Star Trek”’s Federation vessels regularly skirt a Neutral Zone [1], their careful avoidance or bold invasion thereof being an oblique indication of whether their captain is a dovish liberal or a hawkish conservative [2].

Forbidden zones come in two categories. As in the first three examples, there are those lawless areas where governments are unable or unwilling to enforce their writ [3]. In general, these legal loopholes teem with outcasts – both the wanted (by the law) and the unwanted (by society). Raucousness is the rule. Yes, you’re free to express yourself outside the straight and narrow of accepted laws and norms, but you’re more likely to succeed if you’re an escaped convict with a few menacing scars and enough ammo to last until kingdom come.

In contrast, zones of the second category are marked by the silence of the tomb. These zones are set up by two adjoining powers surrounding an area where they touch, but can’t agree on how. Ironically, they then have to agree on a delineation of a zone surrounding the area in dispute, which is then clearly marked, and sterilized of life and commerce. Until and unless a deal on the disputed border can be reached, nobody lives there. These are the true neutral zones [4].

While they do exist outside the distant, fictional future of “Star Trek,” actual neutral zones are exceedingly rare. By a freak of history, the small emirate of Kuwait was bordered by two of them for most of the 20th century. Both have since disappeared. These two neutral zones were twins, both born in 1922, of the same border settlement. The smaller, and shorter-lived one overlapped the present Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border. Like froth on a cappuccino, neutral zones are impermanent, impractical embellishments of cartography, destined to evaporate and leave us to wonder what the heck they were there for in the first place.

In pre-modern times, the whole area around Kuwait was part of an undefined, lawless frontier region between the nomadic and seasonally rapacious tribes from the Arabian Peninsula’s interior and settled centers like Basra. Southern Mesopotamia’s Shiite metropolis was sacked several times by proto-Saudi Wahhabis before the Ottomans asserted their authority over the region in the early 19th century.

Toward the close of that century, Mesopotamia’s strategic intermediacy between Europe and India brought it the envious attention of the Russian, German and British Empires. The latter won out, prying a British-sponsored autonomy for Kuwait from the weakening grip of the Ottomans in 1913. With that recognition came a curious definition for the border of the Emirate: “a semi-circle [5], 40 miles in radius, with the town of Kuwait at its center.” The outbreak of the First World War allowed Kuwait to sever all remaining ties with the Ottoman Empire, and officially side with the British.

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

In 1922, the Uqair Convention between Kuwait and the Nejd [6] extended Kuwait’s circular border to the one recognizable as today’s Kuwait-Saudi border – except for a neutral zone [7] of 2,228 square miles south of the Kuwait Circle’s southern arc. Both governments agreed to share any proceeds from the zone while they figured out what to do with it.

A solution became a little more pressing in 1938, when oil was discovered in Burqan, inside Kuwaiti territory but just a few miles north of the neutral zone. However nervous the imminent discovery of oil inside the zone must have made some of the local sheiks, emirs and princes, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia adhered to their compact and shared the proceeds from the oil that eventually was found in the zone.

But even between good neighbors, the neutral zone represented the geopolitical equivalent of a drafty open window. In 1960, both governments agreed to close it by partitioning it. In 1967, they signed a demarcation agreement, which was enacted in 1970. Henceforth, a 33.5-mile long straight line [8] divides the former neutral zone in two almost equal parts, the northern one Kuwaiti, the southern one Saudi.

As one could expect of anything to do with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the history of the other neutral zone’s extinction is draped in malevolent mysteriousness.

The now former Saudi-Iraqi neutral zone was a 2,720 square-mile, lozenge-shaped piece of desert, the eastern corner of which touched Kuwait’s westernmost point [9]. It came into being in 1922 by the same Protocol of Uqair that created the other neutral zone. Even though proximity and synchronicity point in that direction, Kuwaitis had nothing to do with this one. Rather, it directly involved their British overlords, who were in the process of setting up an Iraqi client state in formerly Ottoman Mesopotamia [10]. This required a geopolitical first: a border across the Arabian Desert.

The concept of straight, fixed borders was alien to the local Bedouin tribes; Ibn Saud, the future first king of Saudi Arabia, objected to the attempts “to curb, by an imaginary line in the open desert, the movement of tribes who are accustomed to roam widely in search of pasturage and water.” But that line would be drawn nevertheless. By way of compromise, the basis for the eventual border was still tribal: the Muntafiq, Dhafir and Amarat tribes would be Iraqi, and the Shammar Nejd would belong to Nejd (thereafter Saudi Arabia), with each allowed access to the wells and pastures they historically used.

A commission would have to draw the exact line later, according to these customs. The stretch contained within the “lozenge” was the subject of this tussle, and the solution proffered was similar to the one used for the disputed zone south of Kuwait City. This neutral zone, too, would, until a final resolution, belong to both countries simultaneously – as would any profits it would generate. Additional provisions forbade stationing troops or erecting permanent buildings in or even near the zone – but allowed the wandering tribes from either side access to local pastures and wells.

Though Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Iraq was less cordial than that with Kuwait, a similar endgame was pursued with regard to this neutral zone: its extinction by amicable settlement. In 1975, both countries agreed on the division of the zone. Bizarrely, the decision was never publicized; outside a small number of government officials in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, nobody knew about it. Perhaps Saddam Hussein, ever paranoid, feared even the impression of compromise; the answer has never been clear.

More From Borderlines

Read previous contributions to this series.

Abolished in theory, the neutral zone retained its contours on international maps, even after both sides concluded a border treaty in 1981. This may be the only instance in history of a piece of political geography surviving its own demise, and becoming a cartographic revenant.

But cartography caught up with (secret) diplomacy in the shortening shadows of the looming gulf war [11]. Iraq nullified its international agreements with Saudi Arabia, including the division of the neutral zone. But the kingdom retaliated by finally revealing the previously agreed border realignment to the world – and more to the point, to the United Nations. The international border has been recognized ever since as running between the neutral zone’s western and eastern extremities, evenly bisecting it.

Which means that the world is now bereft of proper, on-the-border neutral zones. Unless, of course, you’d care to include those strips of no man’s land [12] that completely seal off two neighboring entities from each other.

These zones seem to involve a lot of shouting. Literally. Consider the family members caught on either side of Gibraltar’s three-quarters-of-a-mile-long land border, sealed off by Spain from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. They were reduced to screaming family news across two sets of fences and the buffer zone between them. Or like the propaganda rants, amplified by competing sets of loudspeakers, across the Demilitarized Zone on the Korean Peninsula (another DMZ ran between North and South Vietnam).

But call me a purist: I like my neutral zones to cover only part of an international border. And if at all possible, lozenge-shaped. So I’d rather accept this border genre’s current extinction, and wait until the next one shows up. Even if that means waiting for the Romulans …


[1] Usually meant to be the one between the Federation and the Romulans, but the series also referenced two other neutral zones, separating the Klingon and the Cardassian empires.

[2] In the future, there are no third-party candidates.

[3] Examples discussed earlier in this series include Alsatia and Zomia, see this previous post.

[4] Not to be confused with exclusion zones, like the one that has existed since 1986 around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, set up solely to safeguard public health and safety.

[5] An arrangement well known to the inhabitants of northern Delaware, the border of which is called the Twelve-Mile Circle, for its radius around the New Castle courthouse. See Strange Maps #67 //bigthink.com/ideas/21116. This particular circular border created its own neutral zone, sort of. See Strange Maps No. 68.

[6] Later to merge with Hejaz to form Saudi Arabia; see also the Borderlines episode on Winston’s Hiccup.

[7] Also called the divided zone, although that kind of contradicts the very nature of a neutral zone as being not part of either country.

[8] Surveyed by the Pacific Aero Survey Company of Japan, since renamed Pasco, and still in the geospatial surveying business.

[9] Creating one of the world’s rare international quadripoints: Kuwait/Iraq/neutral zone/Saudi Arabia. The quadripoint itself was located at another junction, of the Wadi al-Awja and the Wadi al-Batin, two intermittently water-bearing valleys. Those are still there, but the quadripoint has vanished – it is now an ordinary tripoint. See this episode for a mention of another vanished international quadripoint (also thanks to a neutral zone), and this one for a mention of a near-quadripoint.

[10] Britain’s mandate over what was to become Iraq allowed it to establish a strategic land bridge to India, but at the cost of reneging on earlier promises to unite all Arab lands in one state. The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 would become a blueprint for the division of the Levant into British and French zones of influence.

[11] The one in 1990 and 1991, a k a the first gulf war, a k a Operation Desert Storm, so as not to confuse it with the second gulf war, from 2003-2011, a k a Operation Iraqi Freedom, a k a the Iraq war. Neither of which should be confused with the Iran-Iraq war, from 1980 to 1988, a k a the gulf war, a k a the first gulf war (although Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom are almost never referred to as the second and third gulf war, respectively).

[12] First identified in 1320 as “Nonesmanneslond,” which sounds like a title for the next Scandinavian cult crime series.