inside the glass house

Tiny Qatar rubs shoulders with mighty superpower
DOHA - The oil and gas-rich emirate of Qatar, which hosted one of the most lavish UN conferences in the capital Doha last week, is walking on a political tightrope in a remarkably skillful balancing act.

A study in political contrasts, Qatar is not only home to the rebellious Al-Jazeera television network, largely perceived as being anti-American, but is also the rarely-publicised headquarters of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), which has moved virtually all its troops from neighbouring Saudi Arabia to within the friendly Qatari national borders.

The two coexist side by side but with little or no physical evidence of any of the thousands of American troops who use a desert outpost deep inside Qatar as a forwarding base for its widely unpopular Iraq war that has triggered anti-US sentiments throughout the Gulf and the Arab world.

At the five-star Marriott Hotel in Doha, one could distinguish American civilians in military-style crew cuts frequenting the restaurant there. Last week, one of them was clearly identifiable as an American GI not only because of his mannerisms and speakng-style but also because he was sporting a tee shirt which read: ‘University of Connecticut’.

Asked about this, a senior US diplomat in Doha laughs it off, perhaps by rightly pointing out that tee shirts bearing the names of American universities could be purchased at any of the swanky shopping malls in the fast developing modern city of skyscrapers.

The love-hate relationship between Qatar and the US goes as far back as the late 1980s when the Qataris made the mistake of displaying some of their US-made Stinger shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles obtained from an unnamed country without US approval. The missiles were first seen in public on a local television broadcast in 1988 prompting the US to demand that the 12 missiles be either returned to Washington or, in the alternative, Qatar would face the threat of a cut-off of American security assistance and a ban on weapons sales.

The Qataris not only rejected the demand but also refused to provide the serial numbers of the missiles thereby preventing the US from tracking the source of the unauthorized US weapons transfer. And it was only after the dispute was amicably resolved that the US Congress lifted the ban on arms sales to Qatar in November 1990.

Since then, there has been a dramatic change in the relationship between the two countries, including a defence cooperation agreement signed in June 1992. The Pentagon has also built a huge weapons supply base in Qatar, described as one of the largest outside the US.

Qatar’s al-Udeid air base, which has been revamped at a cost of over $1 billion, was used as a military staging area for two US-led military operations in recent years, first against Afghanistan, and later against Iraq. But the occasionally frosty relationship between the two countries has been triggered mostly by the presence of Al-Jazeera in Doha.

Despite the fact that Qatar was the chairman of the 132-member Group of 77 developing countries last year, the US refused to invite Qatar as an ‘observer’ to the G-8 summit of industrial nations in Georgia because the Qatari government had failed to curb the ‘excesses’ of Al-Jazeera for its aggressive reporting on the war on Iraq.

But the Qatari government, led by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has so far refused to cave into US pressure to shut down one of the fastest growing television networks, which now rivals Cable News Network (CNN) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the Arab world.
Considering the fact that the upstart nine-year-old Al-Jazeera is largely funded by the Qataris, there is a symbiotic relationship between the government and the network.

The US, which subscribes to the concept of a free press, came under fire for initiating a campaign against Al-Jazeera. As Professor Michael Botein, director of the Media Centre at the New York Law School, said: “The Bush administration’s pressure to shut down Al-Jazeera, the leading Arabic satellite television station, is an embarrassment.”

He also pointed out that US pressure came at a time while President Bush boasted that US-supported broadcasters such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Marti were helping his policy of democratising the world. “Broadcasters cannot be subsidized in the United States and banned in allied countries,” Botein said.

But US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher had a different take on Al-Jazeera’s reporting: “We have very deep concerns about Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts because, again and again, we find inaccurate, false, wrong reports that are, we think, designed to be inflammatory,” he told reporters last year.

Perhaps one of the primary reasons why Qatar has succeeded in fending off US retaliation is its economic strength. The country’s annual per capita income is predicted to rise from about $38,000 to over $50,000 in the next few years as income from oil and natural gas is expected to rise sky high. If it hits the $50,000 mark, as predicted by the finance ministry, that would be the highest per capita income in the world for any nation state.

Qatar also plans to spend about $100 billion over the next five years, primarily on infrastructure. Currently, the US is a key equipment supplier for Qatar’s gas and oil industries. The US-based ExxonMobil says the Gulf emirate possesses one of the world’s largest gas fields, enough to meet the US demand for the next decade.

A stronger admirer of the US educational system, the Qatari government has opened satellite American campuses in Doha and established a branch campus one of best known Ivy League universities in the US, Cornell University.

Backed by its oil and gas revenues, Qatar is also trying to play a key role in international affairs. After chairing the Group of 77 last year, it hosted the South Summit last week. In the year 2000, Qatar chaired the Organisation of Islamic Conference, and in 2006 it is slated to be a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.

For a country with a population of about 850,000, of which nearly 75 percent are expatriates, Qatar has come a long way -- from being a relatively unknown Gulf state to one of the world’s richest and fastest growing economies.

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