Qatar embargo by it's GCC neighbours
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 1:56 pm
To wake up one morning in Doha and learn that it's only land border and access to sea and airspace has been closed over night was quite a shock to many residents - although there was some panic buying in the first day leading to some shortages of basic goods most people have generally not been affected. With its immensely deep pockets Qatar was able to react and fly in supplies from far away alleviating any shortages quickly. (Qatar has the highest GDP per person in the world).
I only had a few colleagues, citizens from the boycotting countries, who were ordered home within 2 weeks - some heartbreaking scenes where kids were separated from their fathers or mothers. Qatar was good throughout and has not retaliated with any similar steps. Imagine that in the KSA, UAE and Bahrain a simple expression of sympathy with Qatar will lead to a 15 years prison sentence...
I have lived and worked in Bahrain, KSA, Oman and Qatar since 2005 - and I was in Bahrain when the Saudi tanks rolled across the causeway during the Arab spring. We have seen a lot, talked a lot with our local colleagues - but yet this indeed has been surprising and especially how quick it escalated (from the hacked (by the UAE as the FBI said) Qatari news agency to a complete blockade within 2 weeks).
In my view it is jealousy at Qatari's ability to have its more independent foreign policy (Iran, Muslim brotherhood) and it's hugely successful gas business that generates plenty more wealth and has a far greater future than Saudi's oil which is on a terminal decline over the next decade or so. KSA is suffering badly from low oil prices (largely self inflicted via its OPEC games to push out US shale producers) and it's criminal war in Yemen. Their hothead Crowne prince also has a far larger population to satisfy.
Qatar definitely is pushing above it's weight, and it can afford to do so (world cup, Neymar at PSG, largest landlord in London etc.). It is by no means a saint but to claim that it's neighbours are any better is just pure ridiculous!
The 2 articles below summarise the situation well - the first is a recent overview from the Washington Post and the second one is from the Guardian showing a little know background into the old family feuds that always play into daily politics in the Middle East.
Two months into Saudi-led boycott, tiny Qatar goes on the offensive
The tiny nation of Qatar is defiantly weathering a boycott by four of its neighbors in a deepening crisis that has roiled the region and threatened U.S. interests.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severd ties and imposed an economic blockade on Qatar in early June, accusing it of backing terrorism. Qatar has denied the allegations and has since gone on the offensive.
Two months into the isolation campaign, the energy-rich Persian Gulf nation has used its billions to strengthen its economy and security. It has announced reforms and bolstered ties with Turkey and Iran that could potentially reshape the region and its alliances for years
Efforts by the United States to mediate between its close allies have not succeeded. Instead, the crisis is acrimoniously playing out in diplomatic and legal venues.
“It’s now personal, which in some ways makes it more difficult to find a way for both sides to step down,” said Perry Cammack, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is likely to fester for some time.”
The bloc, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has long been at odds with Qatar over its ties to Iran and support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist group that governments of the bloc view as a threat to their rule. The countries pulled out their ambassadors, ordered citizens to leave Qatar, closed their borders, and shut air and sea routes to Qatari flights and vessels.
President Trump jumped into the crisis with a tweet taking credit for the bloc’s decision to sanction Qatar. But senior State Department and Pentagon officials have tried to defuse tensions — not least because Qatar is home to 10,000 U.S. military personnel at Al Udeid Air Base, the main staging area for U.S. air operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In June, the bloc made 13 demands of Qatar, including that it slash ties with Iran, sever links with the Muslim Brotherhood, expel several Islamists and make reparation payments.
In particular, the bloc has demanded that Qatar shutter Al Jazeera, a Doha-funded media network that has covered the region and its governments critically. Saudi Arabia and its allies view the network, which insists it operates independently, as a mouthpiece for Islamists backed by Qatar.
The countries have blocked Al Jazeera’s website and shut down its offices; Israel announced over the weekend its intention to close down the network’s offices and ban its journalists. Qatari officials dismissed the demands as “neither actionable or reasonable.”
Instead, Qatar — one of the top producers of natural gas — has sought to diversify its economy and wean itself off its dependence on its gulf neighbors for food and other supplies. Food from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that once filled supermarkets in Qatar has been replaced by products from Turkey and Iran.
Last week, Qatar signed a $262 million deal to bring one of soccer’s biggest stars, Neymar, to Paris Saint-Germain, the nation’s most prominent sports asset. The astronomical sum was widely seen as a good investment ahead of the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar is scheduled to host, as well as a public relations boost.
Qatar also unveiled a draft law last week that would allow some foreigners to acquire permanent residency. For the first time, they will have access to free health care and government-run education, and will be able to own land and operate some businesses without a Qatari partner, according to the country’s state-run news agency.
If enacted, such rights would be unprecedented in the Persian Gulf: Countries rely heavily on a foreign workforce but rarely grant foreigners citizenship or privileges afforded to their nationals. Foreigners make up nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s population of 2.7 million.
The draft law also gives permanent residency to the children of Qatari mothers and non-Qatari fathers. Under current laws in Qatar and other gulf countries, children take the citizenship of their father.
The measure is widely seen as a way for Qatar to thwart the economic blockade by providing incentives for its workforce to stay while attracting more investors and companies to choose Doha, its capital, as a regional business hub.
“One reason is they fear they can lose a significant number of people, especially foreign workers, because of the crisis,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The other side is that they are sending a signal to the West, and to others outside, that Qatar is more modern and more willing to seek reform.”
Qatar has aggressively fought the boycott by filing complaints with the U.N. Security Council and the World Trade Organization. It has urged the International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. aviation body, to look into whether Saudi Arabia and its allies violated an air travel treaty by banning Qatari flights from their airspace.
Qatar also is strengthening its ties with the West to counter the loss of its former gulf allies. Last week, it announced the $6 billion purchase of seven Italian warships, and in June, it bought $12 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets from the United States.
And over the weekend, Turkey and Qatar staged joint military exercises, the latest sign of their burgeoning alliance. In June, Turkey greenlighted a plan to send several thousand troops to a Turkish base in Qatar, ostensibly to support anti-terrorism efforts. Shutting down that base is one of the demands of the anti-Qatar bloc to lift the blockade.
As the crisis drags on, U.S. officials are increasingly concerned the diplomatic row could hamper efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. All sides are part of the U.S.-allied coalition fighting the militants.
“The longer this goes on, the harder it is, even if you get an agreement, to get anyone to trust anybody,” Cordesman said.
(Washington Post, 9 Aug 2017)
The long-running family rivalries behind the Qatar crisis
It is a row that is roiling the Middle East, pitting the wealthiest and most influential Arab sheikhdoms against each other, and sparking weeks of shuttle diplomacy. However, behind the Saudi Arabia-led blockade of Qatar’s air, land and sea ports lies a long-running family feud.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic ties last month with the uber-rich Gulf state of Qatar, which shares the world’s largest reservoir of gas with Iran, Riyadh’s hated rival. The bloc accuses Qatar of supporting terrorism, a charge it denies.
The blockade attempts to cut Qatar off from the rest of the world: the land border has been sealed, Qatari overflights banned and shipping lanes closed. The Saudi-led coalition issued 13 demands to lift the blockade, which included shutting al-Jazeera, the TV voice of the Arab spring, and dropping support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite US intervention, little has been resolved.
Diplomats in the region say the issues cannot be resolved, partly because they are not just political – they are personal, too.
“The rulers have familial relationships and the kinship ties between the Saudis, the Emiratis and the Qataris … they are very, very close to each other,” said one highly-placed source in the region. “This means big political issues are also family issues. Those become very difficult to solve, especially when the Saudis and the Emiratis want regime change.”
In the fractious world of Middle Eastern politics, where absolute monarchs trade on their bloodline and piety, family dissent is often stalled by dispersing privilege and cash. However, these are tumultuous times in the Arab world, which makes this “Game of Thrones” dispute all the more dangerous.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are both trapped in a costly and open-ended war in Yemen. Plummeting oil prices hit both economies hard. Qatar, which is more dependent on gas, is tightening its belt, too, but its population is smaller and wealthier in per capita terms than its two larger neighbours.
On paper, the current ruler of Qatar is Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the 37-year-old son of Sheikh Hamad, who formally abdicated in Tamim’s favour in 2013.
However, Simon Henderson, an influential analyst at the Washington Institute, wrote recently that Hamad, now known as the “father-emir,” was still pulling the strings – a view widely shared in the Middle East.
In many ways, Hamad is the founder of the new assertive Qatari identity. He picked his fight with the Saudis first on the battlefield when commanding a brigade of Qataris against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf war almost 30 years ago.
The soldiers of the Hamad brigade were among the first coalition troops to engage Iraqi forces at the battle of Khafji in February 1991. When Saudi forces joined the battle, however, US marines ended up protecting Saudi troops because their Arab allies from Qatar were accidentally raining “friendly fire” on them.
Things were patched up swiftly after the war but worry lingered, especially as Hamad returned as supreme military commander and a newly decorated war hero. He continued to rile Riyadh, telling the Saudis over a border dispute in 1992 that they would answer to the “barrel of a gun”.
These fears were realised when the young sheikh deposed his father, Khalifa, who had left the country for Geneva, where he was allegedly undergoing medical treatment. Hamad sent tanks to surround the royal court, which surrendered meekly.
Since then, he has been a disruptive force in the region. Sheikh Hamad founded al-Jazeera, which, along with social media, has in recent years stirred public opinion in ways Arab governments – especially the Saudis – did not appreciate.
Many believe the current conflict may be rooted in these old rivalries. The source agreed, telling the Guardian: “The Saudis and the Emiratis told the current emir ‘you make your father submit to us’. They moved very aggressively against the father. How can the son do that?”
The Sauds’ influence in Qatar has long been through prominent families, most notably that of the Attiyahs, who are their blood relations. Hamad was brought up not by al-Thanis but in the house of his maternal uncle, an Attiyah.
However, rather than marry an Attiyah to continue ties with the Sauds, Hamad cemented his powerbase in the Thanis by marrying the daughters of two powerful uncles.
But his favourite spouse and mother of the current emir is Sheikha Mozah, the only wife he is seen in public with and who hails from a radical tradition. Her father, a commoner, had been jailed by Hamad’s father after making public call for the fair distribution of wealth in the country.
Hamad’s most influential adviser is not an Attiyah – another break from tradition – but a Thani, Hamad bin Jassim, who bet that buying influence within the rising force of political Islam would carve out long-term stability for the tiny state, a departure from the rest of the Gulf states.
Qatar’s foreign policy has its detractors. Fawaz al-Attiyah, a former Qatari diplomat, said that to him “and others who had to step back or be sidelined it was obvious that the ad hoc policy objectives and reckless strategies [by Doha] were bound to fail”.
This was the backdrop to a rivalry between the Sauds and the Thanis, said a Qatari familiar with both, who are bound together by marriage and religion. Both the Thanis and Sauds originate from the peninsula’s Nejd interior, from where austere Wahhabism sprung. Both seek to claim their version of Wahhabism is the right path.
In Qatar, women are allowed to drive, unlike in Saudi Arabia. There are no religious police forcing businesses to shut during prayer times. Hamad has gone as far to claim the Thanis are related to al-Wahab, an affront to the Saudis who claim proprietorship over the austere version of Islam.
Allen Fromherz, academic and author of Qatar: Rise to Power and Influence, said: “Qatar really claims a Wahhabism of the sea. It’s a more open and flexible notion of Wahhabism than that of the desert. Sheikh Hamad’s claim of lineage to al-Wahhab may be a way of shoring up the legitimacy of this alternate vision of Wahhabism and a way of disarming those who would claim that Qataris are not truly Wahhabi. In essence, Sheikh Hamad is trying to take the high road and move forward even faster than the Saudis.”
Another factor is Hamad’s public backing of democracy; he told US television in 2003 that “any people that want to develop their countries ... have to practise democracy. That’s what I believe.” Although he did not make good on a promise to have an Qatari elected parliament in 2013, his backing of the ballot box annoyed neighbouring ruling families.
One of those angered by such talk was UAE’s crown prince and its de facto ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who has long harboured misgivings about Qatar. Cables obtained by WikiLeaks show him raging in 2009 that Qatar was just “part of the Muslim Brotherhood”.
In fact, the UAE has often intervened in royal politics, backing different branches of the Thani clan. This began as soon Britain announced it would be leaving the Gulf in 1968 and plans were hatched for Qatar to be part of the UAE.
This idea was buried was in 1972 when the then Qatari emir, Sheikh Ahmad, who had proposed creating a greater federation of Arab Emirates and ruled languidly from his villa in Switzerland, was ousted while on a hunting trip in Iran by his cousin Sheikh Khalifa. Sheikh Ahmad ended up in Dubai and married the daughter of the city state’s fabulously wealthy emir.
UAE has since taken sides in Thani family rows, most notably for years allowing Hamad’s father to stay in their territory where he plotted counter-coups, all of which failed.
This was the setting when a pro-Saudi newspaper splashed on 1 June with the sensational news that the descendants of Sheikh Ahmad had “apologised” for Qatar’s present day rulers, whom they allegedly had “disowned”.
However, a Qatari with links to the royal court told the Guardian that this was “fake news from the Emirati intelligence”. The UAE has denied it orchestrated the hacking of news sites in order to post incendiary false quotes or that it is destabilising the current regime.
The Qatari source said few sheikhs or family members wanted to be found on the wrong side of Doha’s power game, pointing out that dissident Thanis who had supported coup attempts faced dire consequences in the past. In 2001, Thanis had been sentenced to death for conspiring for the overthrow of Hamad. The source added: “Sheikh Ahmad’s family [are] keeping their heads down. No one is saying anything.
(The Guardian, 21 July 2017)
I only had a few colleagues, citizens from the boycotting countries, who were ordered home within 2 weeks - some heartbreaking scenes where kids were separated from their fathers or mothers. Qatar was good throughout and has not retaliated with any similar steps. Imagine that in the KSA, UAE and Bahrain a simple expression of sympathy with Qatar will lead to a 15 years prison sentence...
I have lived and worked in Bahrain, KSA, Oman and Qatar since 2005 - and I was in Bahrain when the Saudi tanks rolled across the causeway during the Arab spring. We have seen a lot, talked a lot with our local colleagues - but yet this indeed has been surprising and especially how quick it escalated (from the hacked (by the UAE as the FBI said) Qatari news agency to a complete blockade within 2 weeks).
In my view it is jealousy at Qatari's ability to have its more independent foreign policy (Iran, Muslim brotherhood) and it's hugely successful gas business that generates plenty more wealth and has a far greater future than Saudi's oil which is on a terminal decline over the next decade or so. KSA is suffering badly from low oil prices (largely self inflicted via its OPEC games to push out US shale producers) and it's criminal war in Yemen. Their hothead Crowne prince also has a far larger population to satisfy.
Qatar definitely is pushing above it's weight, and it can afford to do so (world cup, Neymar at PSG, largest landlord in London etc.). It is by no means a saint but to claim that it's neighbours are any better is just pure ridiculous!
The 2 articles below summarise the situation well - the first is a recent overview from the Washington Post and the second one is from the Guardian showing a little know background into the old family feuds that always play into daily politics in the Middle East.
Two months into Saudi-led boycott, tiny Qatar goes on the offensive
The tiny nation of Qatar is defiantly weathering a boycott by four of its neighbors in a deepening crisis that has roiled the region and threatened U.S. interests.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severd ties and imposed an economic blockade on Qatar in early June, accusing it of backing terrorism. Qatar has denied the allegations and has since gone on the offensive.
Two months into the isolation campaign, the energy-rich Persian Gulf nation has used its billions to strengthen its economy and security. It has announced reforms and bolstered ties with Turkey and Iran that could potentially reshape the region and its alliances for years
Efforts by the United States to mediate between its close allies have not succeeded. Instead, the crisis is acrimoniously playing out in diplomatic and legal venues.
“It’s now personal, which in some ways makes it more difficult to find a way for both sides to step down,” said Perry Cammack, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is likely to fester for some time.”
The bloc, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has long been at odds with Qatar over its ties to Iran and support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist group that governments of the bloc view as a threat to their rule. The countries pulled out their ambassadors, ordered citizens to leave Qatar, closed their borders, and shut air and sea routes to Qatari flights and vessels.
President Trump jumped into the crisis with a tweet taking credit for the bloc’s decision to sanction Qatar. But senior State Department and Pentagon officials have tried to defuse tensions — not least because Qatar is home to 10,000 U.S. military personnel at Al Udeid Air Base, the main staging area for U.S. air operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In June, the bloc made 13 demands of Qatar, including that it slash ties with Iran, sever links with the Muslim Brotherhood, expel several Islamists and make reparation payments.
In particular, the bloc has demanded that Qatar shutter Al Jazeera, a Doha-funded media network that has covered the region and its governments critically. Saudi Arabia and its allies view the network, which insists it operates independently, as a mouthpiece for Islamists backed by Qatar.
The countries have blocked Al Jazeera’s website and shut down its offices; Israel announced over the weekend its intention to close down the network’s offices and ban its journalists. Qatari officials dismissed the demands as “neither actionable or reasonable.”
Instead, Qatar — one of the top producers of natural gas — has sought to diversify its economy and wean itself off its dependence on its gulf neighbors for food and other supplies. Food from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that once filled supermarkets in Qatar has been replaced by products from Turkey and Iran.
Last week, Qatar signed a $262 million deal to bring one of soccer’s biggest stars, Neymar, to Paris Saint-Germain, the nation’s most prominent sports asset. The astronomical sum was widely seen as a good investment ahead of the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar is scheduled to host, as well as a public relations boost.
Qatar also unveiled a draft law last week that would allow some foreigners to acquire permanent residency. For the first time, they will have access to free health care and government-run education, and will be able to own land and operate some businesses without a Qatari partner, according to the country’s state-run news agency.
If enacted, such rights would be unprecedented in the Persian Gulf: Countries rely heavily on a foreign workforce but rarely grant foreigners citizenship or privileges afforded to their nationals. Foreigners make up nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s population of 2.7 million.
The draft law also gives permanent residency to the children of Qatari mothers and non-Qatari fathers. Under current laws in Qatar and other gulf countries, children take the citizenship of their father.
The measure is widely seen as a way for Qatar to thwart the economic blockade by providing incentives for its workforce to stay while attracting more investors and companies to choose Doha, its capital, as a regional business hub.
“One reason is they fear they can lose a significant number of people, especially foreign workers, because of the crisis,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The other side is that they are sending a signal to the West, and to others outside, that Qatar is more modern and more willing to seek reform.”
Qatar has aggressively fought the boycott by filing complaints with the U.N. Security Council and the World Trade Organization. It has urged the International Civil Aviation Organization, the U.N. aviation body, to look into whether Saudi Arabia and its allies violated an air travel treaty by banning Qatari flights from their airspace.
Qatar also is strengthening its ties with the West to counter the loss of its former gulf allies. Last week, it announced the $6 billion purchase of seven Italian warships, and in June, it bought $12 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets from the United States.
And over the weekend, Turkey and Qatar staged joint military exercises, the latest sign of their burgeoning alliance. In June, Turkey greenlighted a plan to send several thousand troops to a Turkish base in Qatar, ostensibly to support anti-terrorism efforts. Shutting down that base is one of the demands of the anti-Qatar bloc to lift the blockade.
As the crisis drags on, U.S. officials are increasingly concerned the diplomatic row could hamper efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. All sides are part of the U.S.-allied coalition fighting the militants.
“The longer this goes on, the harder it is, even if you get an agreement, to get anyone to trust anybody,” Cordesman said.
(Washington Post, 9 Aug 2017)
The long-running family rivalries behind the Qatar crisis
It is a row that is roiling the Middle East, pitting the wealthiest and most influential Arab sheikhdoms against each other, and sparking weeks of shuttle diplomacy. However, behind the Saudi Arabia-led blockade of Qatar’s air, land and sea ports lies a long-running family feud.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic ties last month with the uber-rich Gulf state of Qatar, which shares the world’s largest reservoir of gas with Iran, Riyadh’s hated rival. The bloc accuses Qatar of supporting terrorism, a charge it denies.
The blockade attempts to cut Qatar off from the rest of the world: the land border has been sealed, Qatari overflights banned and shipping lanes closed. The Saudi-led coalition issued 13 demands to lift the blockade, which included shutting al-Jazeera, the TV voice of the Arab spring, and dropping support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite US intervention, little has been resolved.
Diplomats in the region say the issues cannot be resolved, partly because they are not just political – they are personal, too.
“The rulers have familial relationships and the kinship ties between the Saudis, the Emiratis and the Qataris … they are very, very close to each other,” said one highly-placed source in the region. “This means big political issues are also family issues. Those become very difficult to solve, especially when the Saudis and the Emiratis want regime change.”
In the fractious world of Middle Eastern politics, where absolute monarchs trade on their bloodline and piety, family dissent is often stalled by dispersing privilege and cash. However, these are tumultuous times in the Arab world, which makes this “Game of Thrones” dispute all the more dangerous.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are both trapped in a costly and open-ended war in Yemen. Plummeting oil prices hit both economies hard. Qatar, which is more dependent on gas, is tightening its belt, too, but its population is smaller and wealthier in per capita terms than its two larger neighbours.
On paper, the current ruler of Qatar is Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the 37-year-old son of Sheikh Hamad, who formally abdicated in Tamim’s favour in 2013.
However, Simon Henderson, an influential analyst at the Washington Institute, wrote recently that Hamad, now known as the “father-emir,” was still pulling the strings – a view widely shared in the Middle East.
In many ways, Hamad is the founder of the new assertive Qatari identity. He picked his fight with the Saudis first on the battlefield when commanding a brigade of Qataris against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf war almost 30 years ago.
The soldiers of the Hamad brigade were among the first coalition troops to engage Iraqi forces at the battle of Khafji in February 1991. When Saudi forces joined the battle, however, US marines ended up protecting Saudi troops because their Arab allies from Qatar were accidentally raining “friendly fire” on them.
Things were patched up swiftly after the war but worry lingered, especially as Hamad returned as supreme military commander and a newly decorated war hero. He continued to rile Riyadh, telling the Saudis over a border dispute in 1992 that they would answer to the “barrel of a gun”.
These fears were realised when the young sheikh deposed his father, Khalifa, who had left the country for Geneva, where he was allegedly undergoing medical treatment. Hamad sent tanks to surround the royal court, which surrendered meekly.
Since then, he has been a disruptive force in the region. Sheikh Hamad founded al-Jazeera, which, along with social media, has in recent years stirred public opinion in ways Arab governments – especially the Saudis – did not appreciate.
Many believe the current conflict may be rooted in these old rivalries. The source agreed, telling the Guardian: “The Saudis and the Emiratis told the current emir ‘you make your father submit to us’. They moved very aggressively against the father. How can the son do that?”
The Sauds’ influence in Qatar has long been through prominent families, most notably that of the Attiyahs, who are their blood relations. Hamad was brought up not by al-Thanis but in the house of his maternal uncle, an Attiyah.
However, rather than marry an Attiyah to continue ties with the Sauds, Hamad cemented his powerbase in the Thanis by marrying the daughters of two powerful uncles.
But his favourite spouse and mother of the current emir is Sheikha Mozah, the only wife he is seen in public with and who hails from a radical tradition. Her father, a commoner, had been jailed by Hamad’s father after making public call for the fair distribution of wealth in the country.
Hamad’s most influential adviser is not an Attiyah – another break from tradition – but a Thani, Hamad bin Jassim, who bet that buying influence within the rising force of political Islam would carve out long-term stability for the tiny state, a departure from the rest of the Gulf states.
Qatar’s foreign policy has its detractors. Fawaz al-Attiyah, a former Qatari diplomat, said that to him “and others who had to step back or be sidelined it was obvious that the ad hoc policy objectives and reckless strategies [by Doha] were bound to fail”.
This was the backdrop to a rivalry between the Sauds and the Thanis, said a Qatari familiar with both, who are bound together by marriage and religion. Both the Thanis and Sauds originate from the peninsula’s Nejd interior, from where austere Wahhabism sprung. Both seek to claim their version of Wahhabism is the right path.
In Qatar, women are allowed to drive, unlike in Saudi Arabia. There are no religious police forcing businesses to shut during prayer times. Hamad has gone as far to claim the Thanis are related to al-Wahab, an affront to the Saudis who claim proprietorship over the austere version of Islam.
Allen Fromherz, academic and author of Qatar: Rise to Power and Influence, said: “Qatar really claims a Wahhabism of the sea. It’s a more open and flexible notion of Wahhabism than that of the desert. Sheikh Hamad’s claim of lineage to al-Wahhab may be a way of shoring up the legitimacy of this alternate vision of Wahhabism and a way of disarming those who would claim that Qataris are not truly Wahhabi. In essence, Sheikh Hamad is trying to take the high road and move forward even faster than the Saudis.”
Another factor is Hamad’s public backing of democracy; he told US television in 2003 that “any people that want to develop their countries ... have to practise democracy. That’s what I believe.” Although he did not make good on a promise to have an Qatari elected parliament in 2013, his backing of the ballot box annoyed neighbouring ruling families.
One of those angered by such talk was UAE’s crown prince and its de facto ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who has long harboured misgivings about Qatar. Cables obtained by WikiLeaks show him raging in 2009 that Qatar was just “part of the Muslim Brotherhood”.
In fact, the UAE has often intervened in royal politics, backing different branches of the Thani clan. This began as soon Britain announced it would be leaving the Gulf in 1968 and plans were hatched for Qatar to be part of the UAE.
This idea was buried was in 1972 when the then Qatari emir, Sheikh Ahmad, who had proposed creating a greater federation of Arab Emirates and ruled languidly from his villa in Switzerland, was ousted while on a hunting trip in Iran by his cousin Sheikh Khalifa. Sheikh Ahmad ended up in Dubai and married the daughter of the city state’s fabulously wealthy emir.
UAE has since taken sides in Thani family rows, most notably for years allowing Hamad’s father to stay in their territory where he plotted counter-coups, all of which failed.
This was the setting when a pro-Saudi newspaper splashed on 1 June with the sensational news that the descendants of Sheikh Ahmad had “apologised” for Qatar’s present day rulers, whom they allegedly had “disowned”.
However, a Qatari with links to the royal court told the Guardian that this was “fake news from the Emirati intelligence”. The UAE has denied it orchestrated the hacking of news sites in order to post incendiary false quotes or that it is destabilising the current regime.
The Qatari source said few sheikhs or family members wanted to be found on the wrong side of Doha’s power game, pointing out that dissident Thanis who had supported coup attempts faced dire consequences in the past. In 2001, Thanis had been sentenced to death for conspiring for the overthrow of Hamad. The source added: “Sheikh Ahmad’s family [are] keeping their heads down. No one is saying anything.
(The Guardian, 21 July 2017)
