5 Riyals - Jan Palach

Jan Palach was a Czech student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in January 1969 to protest the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion that had crushed the Prague Spring the previous August. He died three days later. Ajman, one of the smaller Trucial States on the Persian Gulf, issued a series of commemorative coins in the late 1960s and early 1970s explicitly for the collector market — pieces that rarely if ever circulated within the emirate itself.

These issues were a revenue scheme, not a monetary policy, produced in coordination with foreign coin dealers and marketed internationally to collectors sympathetic to Cold War political causes.