In Doha these days the “situation” – a week-old blockade of Qatar by its Gulf Arab neighbours led by Saudi Arabia which has closed most air routes, shut borders and seen Qatar’s neighbours order its citizens out – is unavoidable.
It is the talk of expat dinner parties and casual meetings between academics at the foreign universities and thinktanks, and it dominates the media. Government officials ask visiting reporters for their opinion of the “situation” as if the reassurance of a supportive view might make it go away.
A week after Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed the embargo – in a move backed overtly by the US president, Donald Trump – Qataris are still attempting to unravel what triggered it and where the crisis is heading.
The blockade threatens to split thousands of families across the region where one partner is a Qatari, and it has forced planes arriving in Doha – a major transport hub – to enter via a narrow corridor over Iran that undermines the national carrier’s viability.
Dairy products that once came from Qatar’s neighbours – and briefly disappeared from supermarket shelves –
now come by air from Turkey, which last week passed a law allowing it to send troops to Qatar along with the supplies of yoghurt and leben.
Iran sent four cargo planes of food on Sunday and plans to provide 100 tonnes of fruit and vegetable every day, officials in Tehran have said.
The blockade has also led to s
hortages of US currency in exchange houses used by foreign workers, who make up 90% of the population, to send money home.
“I spoke with my wife this morning. She said: ‘Send your savings to me now.’ I am not panicked, but my family are scared,” said John Vincent, an air-conditioning repairman from the Philippines queueing at one exchange house.
For most residents, however, the Gulf’s worst crisis in three decades has been marked by a strained sense of normality.
Families crowded the shops in Doha’s vast City Centre mall on Friday to collect traditional gift bags of sweets for the Ramadan festival of Garangao. The big hotels, while quieter than usual, have filled up each evening with Qataris coming to eat at the Ramadan iftar buffets
The anxiety is more discreet. Lawyers for big construction projects are quietly digging out their contracts as shipments of building materials are delayed or dry up.
“Where is it all heading? That’s the question everyone is asking here,” said Nader Kabbani, the director of research for the Brookings Institution in Doha. “At the moment everyone is just trying figure stuff out ... but a lot of it is guess work.”
The ostensible reason for blockade is the claim that the Qataris have, in Trump’s words, “historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level”. This, however, is as easily applicable to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
The reality appears to be an attempt led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to punish Qatar for its independent foreign policy underwritten by an expansive and canny global investment strategy from London to Tokyo.
The county has hosted members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and pursued a conciliatory relationship with Iran, with which it shares a large gas field.
“The Qatar-Saudi feud seems to have come out of thin air,” says Junaid Ahmad, an academic based in the US who studies the Gulf. “But the reality is that this has been going on for quite a while.
“All this hyperbolic language we have seen in the last week from Saudi and its allies – how Qatar supports the Houthis in Yemen or the Shia opposition in Bahrain - is about Qatar being neutral. And neutral cannot be tolerated, especially where it comes to Iran.”
The
embargo brings its own risks for Saudi Arabia. As Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheik Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, has toured foreign capitals, t
he tiny emirate has garnered increasing international sympathy
More serious still, say some observers, is that
far from distancing Qatar from Iran and Turkey, the blockade could push the emirate ever closer to them.
The pressure on Qatar may have financial consequences too for its neighbours as it is forced to seek alternative port and supply arrangements which, if the crisis endures, could become more permanent. Doha is also briefing teams of international lawyers in London, Washington and elsewhere to challenge those behind the blockade – not least its impact on the national airline – with a view to seeking reparations.
There is also the question of how the apparently highly-coordinated move has focused attention as much on Qatar’s neighbours and their agendas as on the allegations against the emirate –
including claims that cyberwar tactics were used to trigger the crisis.
Qatari and FBI investigators now believe a virus was introduced into the country’s state news agency on 20 April. It lay dormant until 24 May, when hackers allegedly introduced false remarks attributed to the emir that appeared friendly to Iran and Israel and questioned whether Trump would continue in office.
Qatari officials have also linked the hacking attack to what they say has been a coordinated lobbying campaign against the emirate around the same time and a series of visits – both publicised and private – by senior officials involved in thecoalition against it to Washington and elsewhere going back to December.
“To us this is an act of aggression and the focus should be the crime of the hacking that occurred. We should not move away from that focus,” said Sheik Saif Ahmad al-Thani, the director of Qatar’s government communication office.
Doha has also homed in on reports of an alleged series of hacked emails exchanged between the UAE’s ambassador to the US and the neo-conservative Foundation for Defence of Democracies thinktank in the run-up to announcement of the blockade discussing the role of al-Jazeera and Qatar.
Leaked to The Intercept and several other media organisations it suggests – if nothing else – strong and private lobbying against Qatar.
“I think Qatar’s opponents were certainly lobbying,” said Christopher Davidson, the author of The Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East.
“I think the future that they see for Qatar, if not regime change, is that it needs to be stripped of its foreign policy and independent political resources. It needs to be a vassal.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...e-situation-as-blockade-against-emirate-bites
