Qatar wasted an entire week

Its foreign minister visited leading capitals, but made the mistake of skipping Riyadh and Abu Dhabi

etermined to hold out against a growing number of countries that accuse them of supporting terrorist organisations and extremist leaders, senior Al Thani ruling family members sought international support for a negotiated solution to end the embargo on Qatar, even if the exercise wasted precious time. The Qatari Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, was everywhere this week — in Moscow, Berlin, Paris and London, and spoke with United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, among other leaders, with whom he exchanged views on how best to end the calamity. For his part, Shaikh Tammim Bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, received numerous envoys, but kept his views private, and postponed a planned address to his nation.

Both looked far away, cautioning that Saudi Arabia and the UAE contemplated a military coup in Qatar — the product of fertile imaginations that dwell in fantasy rather than reality — even as they overlooked closer trips to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as the two required stops to resolve the ongoing catastrophe.

At every stop, Shaikh Mohammad repeated that Qatar was still waiting for specific demands from the Saudi-led bloc that has severed ties with the Gulf state, which meant that he saw no basis for a diplomatic solution, even though Kuwait is actively mediating the dispute.

In fact, there are 10 specific items on the table, led by two non-negotiable stipulations for Qatar to distance itself from anti-Arab Iranian policies and to stop funding extremist groups. Of course, Qatar denied and continues to refute accusations that it coordinated with Tehran (or, at least, with certain Iranian officials) or that it sponsored terrorists. Rather, it accuses the Saudis of seeking to dominate smaller neighbours, though relying on Iran to supply the country with foodstuffs and on Turkey to deploy 5,000 of its troops to the promontory will not solve anything. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu insisted that his country’s military base in Qatar was aimed at contributing to the security of the entire Gulf region, and was not aimed at a specific Gulf state. Even the US military presence in the country is a tangential concern because the very purpose of the Al Udaid Air Base, where an estimated 10,000 US troops are deployed, is to defend the entire region from hegemons, not to protect the Al Thanis.

Be that as it may, what was truly surprising this past week was what Shaikh Mohammad heard more or less everywhere, which was to heed neighbourly concerns. Equally puzzling was Qatar’s unwillingness to activate the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) dispute settlement mechanism.

Both of these items deserve reflection because whenever the minister advanced the view that Qatar rejected any interferences with its foreign policy choices, and that Doha could not surrender and will not compromise on the independence of its foreign policy, he heard the kind of responses that ought to awaken the Al Thanis. From London to Berlin and even in Moscow, the message was the same: Fall back on the GCC to help resolve what appears to be a fundamental ideological dispute. Except for Tehran and Ankara, no country counselled Doha to embark on a maverick adventurism, because everyone understood that there could be no compromises over backing extremists determined to wreak havoc around the world.

An amazing declaration

In Paris, Shaikh Mohammad was asked whether the Arab League and the GCC would not be useful forums, though he acknowledged that neither institution approached Doha. This was an amazing declaration since Qatar, as a member-state in each body, could and ought to take it upon itself to request assistance, and it behooves the diplomat to remember that when the GCC was created in 1981, founders established a ‘Dispute Settlement Commission (GCC-DSC)’, which sits beneath the Supreme Council, and which is empowered to settle disputes amicably.

More recently, and in the aftermath of the 2014 crisis that led Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Manama to withdraw their ambassadors from Doha for several months, a full-scale reconciliation was arranged as Shaikh Tamim accepted recommendations advanced by the late Saudi King, Shaikh Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz. Included in that covenant, and it is worth repeating that the pact was apparently breached, were unprecedented coordination efforts to share intelligence, deny border crossings to known extremists and expel individuals who preferred to toe anti-Arab views.

Lest mistaken interpretations that Riyadh is trying to transform Doha into a vassal entity further confuse everyone, the legitimate Al Thani ruling family ought to come to terms with its fundamental ideological preferences, which cannot promote anti-Arab agendas. There is no time to waste.

Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the just-published The Attempt to Uproot Sunni Arab Influence: A Geo-Strategic Analysis of the Western, Israeli and Iranian Quest for Domination (Sussex: 2017).