Suddenly, the tiny Gulf emirate is the Middle East’s superpower
In late October, Syrian state television aired a 17-minute documentary unmasking what it said was the real force behind the country’s seven-month-old revolt: the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. ‘The name of Qatar surfaces once a disaster or conflict breaks out in the Arab and Muslim world,’ the programme begins. ‘Qatar intervenes in major and minor issues, seeking to wield influence by backing rebel and extremist movements as well as armed Islamic groups.’ Along with sowing ‘sedition’ everywhere from Egypt and Tunisia to Sudan and Yemen, Qatar had been ‘financing and arming the rebel movements in eastern Libya.’ Now the super-rich Gulf nation was ‘defaming’ Syria, as part of an aggressive scheme to create a ‘new Middle East’.
Such extravagant claims might be written off as the ravings of an increasingly desperate leadership in Damascus. After all, this is a regime that has accused Al Jazeera, Qatar’s government-backed news network, of fabricating the Syrian uprising by building vast ‘cinematic replicas’ of Syrian cities in the Qatari desert. And there is little about Qatar — a hereditary monarchy jutting off from Saudi Arabia in the most conservative corner of the Middle East — that would seem to make it a likely instigator of popular revolution or Islamist rebellion.
But with the Arab League’s recent announcement of sanctions against Syria — a remarkable step orchestrated in no small part by Qatar, which now chairs the League — it is hard not to see a glimpse of reality in the Syrian movie. Indeed, the emirate has been far from a mere bystander in the Arab upheavals of 2011. While Al Jazeera has bombarded Middle Eastern homes with pictures of the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, an influential Qatar-based Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has stirred up support for the Islamist parties that — as elections in Tunisia and Egypt now dramatically affirm — stand to gain most from their outcome. At the same time, Qatar has breathed new political life into regional bodies like the Saudi-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, while engaging in background diplomacy for groups like Hamas and the Taleban. (Both have reportedly been considering setting up permanent bases in Qatar in recent months — something particularly irksome to the Syrian government, whose ties to Hamas’s Damascus-based leadership have meanwhile unravelled.)
Nor has the Qatari government shied from robust military intervention: it fought alongside Nato in Libya’s rebellion, while simultaneously (and much less publicly) joining the Saudi-led forces that helped crush Bahrain’s. The Libyan effort has been particularly eye-catching. From the outset, Qatar was the most prominent Arab supporter of the Nato mission, sending fighter planes as well as its own special forces to train the rag-tag Libyan militias. But it also flouted the UN arms embargo, providing, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, some 20,000 tons of weapons through at least 18 separate arms shipments to specific rebel leaders. It is hard to overestimate the effect of these shipments, which some Nato powers were squeamish about and which may well have been decisive in the more important ground war against the Gaddafi regime.
For a country less than half the size of Belgium and whose own armed forces, by one count, are the second smallest in the Middle East, such entanglements have at times left even Gulf specialists scratching their heads. All the more so given that Qatar is blessed with a rare combination of attributes that seem to have immunised it from political upheaval. It doesn’t have any aggrieved job-seekers to speak of (though most of its population consists of migrant workers with few rights); with huge gas reserves and a dominant position in the world LNG market, it can offer virtually guaranteed employment to its 225,000 citizens and the highest living standard (measured by share of GDP) in the world. It also lacks a sizable population of Shia that might expose it to the sectarian tensions inflaming neighbours like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia — it is overwhelmingly Sunni.
Doha, Qatar’s shopping-mall-and-hotel-strewn capital, is hardly the kind of place you might expect grand political ideas to ferment. Civil organisations are almost nonexistent, and according to recent polling data, Qatari youth have the least interest in democracy of any of their Arab cohort. Aside from the hugely successful Al Jazeera network, Doha’s distinguishing features include camel racing and some large US military bases discreetly tucked away in the desert; its reputation for bland affluence and western-friendly stability (it has been run by the same family since the 19th century) have made it the kind of place where the World Trade Organisation likes to have meetings and Fifa has decided (in 2022) to hold a World Cup.
But Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, its emir, has a habit of defying expectations. Almost from the moment he took power in 1995 (not coincidentally, by deposing his father), Sheikh Hamad has engaged in an astute game of pro-action in a neighbourhood where stasis had become something of a chronic ailment. Thus he established low-level relations with Israel, built a billion-dollar air base for the US, and — without any pressure from below — announced a raft of political reforms, including new rights for women, the writing of a new constitution and plans for an elected legislature (now promised for 2013). All of which has sat extremely well with Washington and Europe, while leaving largely intact the country’s deeper grounding in the emirati system, sharia law and Wahhabi Islam.
Meanwhile, with the launch of Al Jazeera — an Arab network unafraid to criticise Arab governments — the emir got instant street cred across the Middle East along with a potent form of soft power for Qatar itself. (A glance at WikiLeaks cables from almost any Arab country will suffice to show this.) Equally important, the network solidified Qatar’s ties to more radical groups, providing air time to Islamic militants and other political actors in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan to Lebanon, and turning Sheikh Qaradawi, the exiled cleric, into one of the most-watched television personalities in the Middle East.
With such pro-western and pro-Islamic credentials, the emir was laying the ground for a high-velocity plunge into regional diplomacy, where Qatar has quickly gained status as the country that talks to the US and Iran, Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni and Hamas leader Khaled Mishal. And since there is plenty of gas revenue pouring in, there is always the option of ‘throwing money at the problem — all sides of it’ as one Gulf analyst puts it. When the Qataris persuaded Hezbollah to end an 18-month stand-off with pro-western Lebanese factions in 2008, they could leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to South Lebanon.
From the Qatari perspective, then, the 2011 uprisings have been rife with opportunity: a chance to show off Qatar’s democratic and diplomatic bona-fides to the international community while at the same time ensuring that its own interests are looked after. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Libya, where a great deal of Qatar’s far-reaching support for the rebels has not gone to the National Transition Council itself but directly to Libyan Islamists with ties to Doha. But it has also been apparent in Egypt, where, days after the fall of Mubarak, Qaradawi addressed hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square; and in Qatar’s energetic efforts this autumn to buttress Arab backing for Hamas.
Clearly Qatar understands that the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots may emerge as the next big political force in the region; if Assad falls, religious pa rties linked to Syria’s Sunni majority may take over in Damascus as well. It is also true that these movements have long been backed by the Gulf states and are most likely to adopt policies that are congenial to Qatar and its immediate neighbours. It is worth noting, for example, that shortly after Gulf forces crossed into Bahrain to prop up the Sunni regime there, Sheikh Qaradawi declared the uprising ‘sectarian’ rather than popular, thus giving religious backing to the brutal government crackdown on protestors.
Of course the intervention in Bahrain shows the pitfalls of Qatar’s high-profile embrace of Arab revolutionaries. But even there, criticism has been muted by the bold coverage of Al Jazeera English, the Qatari network’s English language offshoot, which caters mostly to an elite international audience and, unlike the Arabic channel, has largely avoided the charge of selective reporting. If Qatar can continue to play this double part with such panache, it may well position the anti-democratic Gulf region as one of the key beneficiaries of the popular revolutions that have swept the Arab world.