Qatar No more own goals The new emir wants more discipline at home and less risk-taking abroad Sep 28th 2013 | DOHA |From the print edition Tamim keeps the ball low BARELY two months since Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani passed the crown to his son, Tamim, a new mood is taking hold in Doha, Qatar’s capital. Continuity is the official name of the game, but such catchphrases as “rebalancing”, “discipline” and even “the need to centralise” have crept into the political lexicon, heralding a shift in emphasis both at home and abroad. The achievement of the departing emir, who is still only 61, was astonishing. When he ousted his father in 1992, Qatar was a sleepy Gulf statelet, with only 50,000 citizens. He turned it into a hub of diplomacy and even revolution, while giving its nationals the highest average GDP per person in the world (more than $80,000 at last count). Sheikh Hamad can plausibly claim to have been the most dynamic and charismatic Arab leader so far this century. Yet in the past few months a less complimentary buzzword—“overreach”—has also been bandied about. It is no exaggeration that all the other monarchs of the Gulf, bar none, wanted Sheikh Hamad and Qatar taken down a peg or two. Sheikh Tamim, aged 33, knows he has a job on his hands to keep the little peninsula at the forefront of the Arab world. The biggest change since Tamim took over has been the ousting of his powerful cousin, Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. He had been foreign minister since 1992 and simultaneously prime minister since 2007. HBJ, as he is generally known, had become the dominant figure in government after the emir. He put “90% of his energy into foreign policy”, says a recent ambassador to Qatar, to the detriment of domestic policy. Moreover, his own business interests had become inextricably and awkwardly interwoven with those of the state. Meanwhile, a plethora of agencies, institutions and committees in such areas as health, education, culture and sport had been allowed to spring up, often encroaching on the ministries supposedly responsible for the same things. The word is out, under Tamim, that his newly appointed ministers will be “re-empowered” and “given more space”. Even the mighty Qatar Foundation, run by the former emir’s dynamic wife, Sheikha Moza, and the Qatar Museums Authority, under the leadership of Sheikha Mayassa, the new emir’s most prominent sister, may have to kowtow a bit. “Government”, a resident diplomat suggests, “will be regularised.” The new prime minister, Abdullah bin Nasser al-Thani, is a military man who is less flamboyant than his predecessor. He has been promoted from the interior ministry, which he will continue to run, making domestic issues the new priority. Foreign policy will be the trickiest part of Tamim’s brief. Qatar had been the most vigorous opponent of Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime. But even before Sheikh Hamad’s retirement, the Saudis had taken over the leading role among Arabs seeking Mr Assad’s downfall. Yet Syria remains top of Qatar’s foreign agenda. The al-Thanis are aghast at the failure of the American administration to go ahead with bombing Syrian military facilities in response to last month’s chemical attack. A standard conspiratorial view among Qataris, including advisers to the government, is that the Americans, at Israel’s behest, are content to “let Syria bleed”, ensuring that it remains impotent for the foreseeable future. In other foreign parts, the Qataris have been set back, most obviously in Egypt, where they were enthusiasts for the Muslim Brothers and Muhammad Morsi, whose government was overthrown by a military coup in July. The Qataris now say they “support the Egyptian people”, not any particular party. They have continued to send free shipments of oil that were promised to Mr Morsi. But nobody in Doha’s establishment likes seeing generals running Egypt again. Qatar’s eagerness to serve as a mediator in regional disputes, from as far afield as Chad and Darfur to Eritrea, Palestine and even Cyprus, may now dwindle. And the credibility of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel that was the loudest cheerleader of the Arab revolutions, has been dented; it, too, may be told to quieten down. In his first set-piece speech to his people, Tamim dwelt on the need to fill in potholes and improve sanitation, entirely omitting to mention Syria or foreign policy. The big issue in the past month has been the football World Cup due to be staged in Qatar in 2022. Recent calls abroad for the tournament to be held in winter because of the baking summer heat may have to be heeded. The whisper is that the ever-generous Qataris may compensate European football leagues for the disruption to their timetables if the cup were switched to the winter. It is seen as vital to local pride that the event goes ahead in Qatar. As a mark of the emirate’s new modesty, it is now being sold as an “Arab event” rather than a purely Qatari one. Taming the al-Thanis The one thing which almost nobody in Qatar discusses is democracy at home. Elections to a toothless assembly previously promised for this year have been quietly shelved. Qataris invariably cite Kuwait, farther up the Gulf, as a prime example of the perils of parliamentary democracy. Unseemly bickering and administrative paralysis—as Qataris see it—have been the woeful result there. Power is still, in essence, held by the extended royal family. “It is a formidable task for any emir to handle the al-Thanis,” says another seasoned observer. “It’s a very large family, voracious and difficult,” with a history of plots and coups. The key for any emir is to balance power among a handful of families and tribes, most of them interrelated. Perhaps Tamim’s biggest challenge is to encourage a younger generation of energetic and dedicated Qataris actually to run their own country. At present, under a layer of Qataris at the top, the place is still largely managed by expatriates from such countries as Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, as well as from western Europe. Most of the menial work is done by people from Asia, especially India. Of the 2m-plus residents, fewer than 300,000 are Qatari citizens. As long as the emir lavishes largesse upon them—no one pays tax of any kind—most of them seem happy to let foreigners do the bulk of the work. That is hardly a recipe for genuine national pride.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:00:19 +0000
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