Defiant Qatar emir meets Iran’s Zarif
Iran’s foreign minister held talks with the emir of Qatar yesterday aimed at strengthening “co-operation,” nearly four months into a Saudi-led blockade against the Gulf emirate. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and Iran’s Mohammad Javad Zarif met at a time of heightened Gulf tensions, with Qatari officials warning the ongoing Arab blockade would only drive Doha towards regional powerhouse Iran.
Qatar’s state news agency said the pair discussed the impasse in the region, which has seen Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut ties with Doha over its ties with Iran and accusations that it supports extremists. “During the meeting, they reviewed relations of cooperation between the two countries in various fields as well as exchanged views on the current situation in the region,” read the statement from Qatar News Agency.
The meeting also comes as a new academic survey published this week suggests that the average citizens in the Arab nations of the now-fractured Gulf Cooperation Council do not see Iran
as an existential threat in the same way their leaders do. “None of the regional crises have a military solution,” Zarif said at the meeting, according to Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency. All sides should “give priority to regional initiations for restoring collective stability and security”.
Yesterday’s visit was notable as it was Zarif’s first since Qatar’s political isolation began on June 5. The Iranian foreign minister on Monday visited Oman - which has remained neutral on the Gulf crisis - meeting with Sultan Qaboos in Muscat. Qatar’s relationship with Shiite-dominated Iran, seen as the major rival to Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, is one of the major factors underpinning the crisis between Qatar and its former allies.
Last week, Qatar’s foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani warned that the political and economic boycott imposed on Qatar was pushing Doha closer to Tehran. “They accuse Qatar of being close to Iran but with their measure... they push Qatar towards Iran. They are giving Qatar like a gift to Iran,” Sheikh Mohammed said in a speech in Paris.
Doha in Jan 2016 had pulled its ambassador from Tehran in solidarity with Saudi Arabia over attacks on its diplomatic mission there - attacks spurred by Riyadh’s decision to execute a prominent Shiite cleric in the kingdom. But in August, Qatar announced it was restoring full diplomatic relations with Iran by returning its ambassador. Qatar and Iran share the world’s largest natural gas field which Doha calls the North Field and Iran South Pars - and which has been responsible for the emirate’s dramatic transformation over the past 20 years.
Leaders in the Sunni Arab countries of the Gulf, those in Saudi Arabia and the UAE especially, view Iran with suspicion after its advances on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State group. They also worry about Iran’s nuclear program and the 2015 deal that Tehran struck with world powers over it.
But face-to-face surveys of over 4,000 GCC citizens conduced in recent months found that with the exception of Bahrain, the spread of extremist organizations like the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda represented their biggest worry, said Justin Gengler, a senior researcher at the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute at Qatar University.
Gengler said the survey, funded by the Qatar National Research Fund before the diplomatic crisis began and conducted along with researchers from the University of Michigan, was conducted in every GCC country except the UAE. Gengler first published his results Monday in Foreign Affairs. The margin of error was below 4 percent among the surveys in each country.
Asked about the results, Gengler said Iran offered a convenient foe for Gulf nations struggling with internal problems and low global oil prices. “If it’s not the case that people feel threatened militarily by Iran, how is it that governments continue to talk about it?” Gengler told AP. “At the end of the day in the Gulf, regime stability is the No. 1 priority guiding every decision rulers make . ... Elites have their objectives and citizens have their own priorities in daily life and they don’t always match up.” — Agencies