On June 5, an elderly lady from Qatar was arrested while visiting Mecca and Medina during Ramadan. She was dragged by police to the airport and immediately deported. Not even the Holy Sites were willing to offer shelter when the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt imposed their total blockade on Qatar that day.
She shared the fate of thousands of Qataris working or studying in the country. All Saudi and UAE citizens were ordered home too, leaving jobs and social ties in the Qatari capital Doha behind. All land borders of the tiny emirate were closed, as were ports and airspace for vessels and planes heading for Qatar or transiting out of the gas-rich country.
Messages of sympathy on social media were outlawed with prison terms of up to 15 years. Panic emptied shelves in the supermarkets of the glitzy capital, construction works for the Football World Cup 2022 ground to a halt and visitors had to worry how to ever leave the tiny peninsula.
When US President Donald Trump had performed the traditional sabre dance with the Saudi king and 50 Arab leaders in Riyadh on May 21, tweeting with glee, he may well have nodded off the attack on a fellow member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, not aware of the fact that 11,000 US soldiers are stationed at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, the biggest US Army operational centre in the Middle East and main hub for all Afghan and anti-IS operations in Syria and Iraq.
A few days into the blockade the aggressors finally presented a list of demands to the independent-minded emirate – at the behest of more level-headed and knowledgeable figures in the US administration, who were flabbergasted by this Arab attack without apparent pretext. They were also trying to quell the flood of incompetent presidential tweeds, celebrating Saudi friendship and the “end of terrorism”.
Qatar is surrounded by Saudi Arabia and the only way to fly in and out and for vessels to bring provisions is through Iranian airspace and its ports
The list of demands, which was never published in its entirety, included the shut-down of a Turkish military base, the closure of the successful broadcaster Al Jazeera and demands for “reparation” payments. It also included a barrage of wild, contradictory accusations, like financially supporting Hezbollah and the Islamic State, deadly foes fighting each other in Syria and Iraq with utmost determination. Only someone with the thinking capacity of Donald Trump could have found this persuasive, particularly when such assertions were aired by Saudi Arabia, a notorious sponsor of radical Islam. It was an ultimatum akin to the Austrian-Hungarian demands to Serbia, which triggered WWI: they were never meant to be met, as many observers have stated.
What might have swayed the President to fall for such flapdoodle is Qatar’s less hostile relationship to Iran, Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s most feared regional adversary. Qatar, which in all conflicts is prone to hedge its bets with aloof neutrality, very much to the chagrin of its bullying neighbour Saudi Arabia, is sharing the South Pars/North Dome gas condensate field with Iran. And as this represents the sole source of its prodigious wealth it can ill afford to be on less than correct terms with Iran. The two countries both suck gas from the same shared and vast reservoir in the Gulf.
Qatar nevertheless supported the war against the Iran-sponsored Shia rebels in Yemen, with devastating consequences for the civil population which is carpet-bombed on a daily basis. And it did not protest when Saudi tanks flattened and murdered desperate Shia demonstrators in Bahrain. They were Sunni brothers, after all, for good or bad. But now they look more like Cain and Abel.
When the West was still celebrating Arab Spring, it was Al Jazeera reporting from the streets in Tunisia and Egypt – providing at the time the best news coverage of the events. But times have changed. The US is now, to the relief of all Middle Eastern dictators, firmly supporting El-Sisi in Egypt, who overthrew Mubarak-style the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood and its president Mohamed Morsi (who himself very quickly assumed dictatorial powers through constitutional change).
The Qataris were the last to financially support the doomed Egypt government by providing a currency stabilisation loan of 3 billion USD dollars, money given to a Muslim Brotherhood government. The Brotherhood is without doubt now high on the list of “terrorists” of the US, the UAE and the Saudis, to who the Brotherhood represents a real and material threat. Some of their leaders are evicted now from Doha under duress.
The blockade is total. Qatar is surrounded by Saudi Arabia and the only way to fly in and out and for vessels to bring provisions is through Iranian airspace and its ports, making a close collaboration with the Islamic Republic a sheer necessity. Qatar’s politeness towards Iran is now its only lifeline.
Saudi Arabia, who has always looked at Qatar as one of its satellites, and the Emirates who see Qatar as one of its rightful provinces (“Qatar has always been a part of the U.A.E. that cannot be taken from it,” UAE’s security chief tweeted only a few days ago), appears to want to dismantle Qatar and take it over – with all its vast wealth and its gleaming capital Doha.
A run has been orchestrated on Qatar’s banks, financial institutions worldwide instructed to stop exchanging the Qatari Rial and unidentifiable cyberattacks, North-Korea-style, have been taking place. If US troops had not been stationed in the country they might have taken military action already. How would the West react to this? Would it be another Kuwait?
I sincerely doubt it. The Saudis have brought too many gifts to the Trump table: weapon systems to the tune of hundreds of billions, behind-the-curtain support for Israel, a suggestion to let the US take over the vast LNG market, for the time being occupied largely by Qatar. It will be more like another Crimea: once accomplished it will be irreversible. The only difference being that the ethnic Russian population overwhelmingly voted to embrace Anschluss, while the Qataris will put up a desperate fight.
As long as they have the funds to back up their resistance, they will fight. It is a struggle for sovereign survival.
Andreas Weitzer is an independent journalist based in Malta.