After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (41 page)

As a further response to the petition the authorities also moved to weaken the civil society organisations involved by dismissing their elected board members and replacing them with government-appointed individuals. A group of loyalist lawyers then began preparing a counter petition and a ‘statement of allegiance’ to demonstrate the profession’s supposed commitment to the regime, with their spokesperson stating that ‘we, the lawyers, call upon all citizens to deny activists’ allegations denouncing our government. We ourselves are united in refuting these false claims, and remain fully loyal to His Highness President Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan… and all other crown princes and rulers’. Moreover, their statement also claimed that ‘…activists who try to incite others against the government are therefore creating unnecessary civil unrest and attempting to destabilise the country’.
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Although the lawyers were careful not to refer specifically to the political prisoners, stating that ‘this is not directed at the detained people, as the independent judiciary in the UAE classifies everyone innocent until proven guilty’ there was nonetheless little doubt that the government attempted to manipulate the trial of the UAE Five. In particular, loyalist rallies outside the court buildings were staged while relatives of the accused were harassed upon entering and leaving the buildings. Most interestingly, the authorities also attempted to influence public opinion by encouraging a number of tribal leaders to denounce the men and even file law suits on behalf of tribes that felt the activism had ‘offended the state and nation’. The state-backed media, however, provided details of only one such tribal meeting and resulting denouncement
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—an Abu Dhabi-based tribe which includes one of the ruler’s key advisors among its senior members and which for historic reasons has been extremely loyal to the ruling family.
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Interestingly, a senior member of Al-Shehhi’s tribe—the Shihuh—was reluctant to condemn him, being quoted as saying ‘we still do not know the nature of the accusations directed against Ahmad Al-Shehhi as of yet, nor if he has been officially charged… thus, how are we expected to denounce him before any official accusation takes place?’
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With the UAE Five in prison and with
www.uaehewar.net
eventually going offline after the website’s owners were unable to renew its subscription
from their prison cells, the government shifted its focus to top-down reforms and distributing largesse to the national population. In addition to an expansion of the electorate for the September 2011 Federal National Council elections, massive salary increases were also announced for public sector employees, in some cases of up to 100 per cent, while welfare benefits were increased by up to 20 per cent and a $2.7 billion package to assist poorer nationals with outstanding loans was set up. Interviewed by a state-backed newspaper, ministerial employees benefiting from the salary increases stated ‘this is not the first time the President has surprised us with his generosity… it is not about the financial benefit, but about how the people of the country are taken care of’ and ‘it was a big surprise that makes everyone happy, it is like a prize for all’. Similarly, other interviewees stated they planned to use the increases to buy new cars, indulge their wives and children, and upgrade rooms in their houses.
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A seemingly minor perk, highly symbolic free parking permits for UAE nationals in Dubai, was also announced.
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In parallel to this spending programme, it was exposed in May 2011 that the UAE had been hiring a private army of foreign soldiers. Much like the focus on mercenaries in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it seemed that the UAE authorities were similarly unwilling to take any chances on uncontrollable street protests in the wake of the Arab Spring. Revealed by the
New York Times
in an extensive report, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi had been employing the founder of Blackwater, a private military company, to create a secret 800-strong force made up of Columbian and South African fighters. At a cost of over $500 million, a base had been constructed in Abu Dhabi’s interior and the men brought into the UAE posing as construction workers. According to documents associated with the project, the force’s
raison d’être
was to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks, and—crucially—‘put down internal revolts’. Further to this latter objective, the report also stated that the Blackwater founder was under strict instructions to hire no Muslim mercenaries as ‘Muslim soldiers… could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims’, while another document associated with the project described ‘crowdcontrol operations where the crowd is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons such as clubs and stones’.
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Within days of a November 2011 report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which concluded that the imprisonment of the
UAE Five was arbitrary and that the UAE government should release the men and pay them reparations,
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they were freed in time for the UAE’s national day celebrations on 2 December. Although the men were convicted of ‘publicly insulting the UAE’s leaders’, sentenced to three years imprisonment, and then pardoned within 24 hours—seemingly in an effort to portray Abu Dhabi’s ruler as being magnanimous—their names were not cleared of the supposed crime. Nonetheless, soon after their release UAE Five immediately resumed their online activities, appearing stronger than before. They renewed most of their demands and were quickly followed by thousands of UAE nationals on various social media platforms. By the end of the year the opposition seemed to have broadened, with the government facing further criticism for stripping seven Islamist critics, including a judge, of their citizenship. Referred to as the ‘UAE Seven’, they claimed they were ‘unjustly targeted for their political views’ after having earlier signed a petition on behalf of an indigenous Islamist organisation entitled the Reform and Social Guidance Association
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which was calling for an end to ‘all oppressive measures against advocates of reform in the country’.
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Over the course of 2012 the situation has greatly deteriorated. In March a young UAE national
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was arrested for tweeting about the Arab Spring. He was accused of ‘damaging national security and social peace’ and handed over to a state security court,
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before being re-arrested at a mosque in April. In May a prominent stateless person
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—one of the original UAE Five and well known for running a website detailing the plight of the UAE’s bidoon—was arrested, stripped of his residency papers, and deported to Thailand—a country he had never visited before.
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By the end of July dozens more activists had been arrested, bringing the total number of political prisoners to fifty-four. These included academics, human rights activists, Islamists, and even a ruling family member.
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The former of director of Abu Dhabi’s educational zone
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and former president of the Jurists’ Association
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were arrested along with a number of lawyers,
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some of whom were detained when they tried to represent arrested activists.
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In some cases the sons of these have men were imprisoned
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and lawyers from Kuwait and Qatar trying to travel to the UAE to defend the detainees were denied entry. Interestingly, the fifty-four prisoners represent all seven emirates, almost all had active Twitter accounts prior to their arrests, and they represent more or less the full spectrum of opposition in the country. Most are being
held without charge and several have reported incidents of torture, with some having been beaten or followed by plain clothes security prior to their detainments. One prisoner, originally detained for being a member of a terrorist organisation, was then accused of Muslim Brotherhood membership, before finally being officially accused of embezzlement at his workplace.
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Qatar: champion or charlatan?

As the smallest of the Gulf monarchies, with a tiny national population and one of the world’s highest GDP per capita, the Qatari ruling family and its government have largely escaped the past year unscathed, with few serious opponents emerging and with no significant calls for political reform. Indeed, the November 2011 announcement that elections would be held in 2013 for Qatar’s Advisory Council was less a concession to popular demands and more a case of being a top-down, pre-emptive strike by a forward-thinking ruler. Moreover, with 2011 and 2012 witnessing Qatar’s public and diplomatic support for various Arab Spring movements elsewhere in the region—as an extension of its described role as peace-broker and mediator—the emirate has been careful to distance itself from its neighbouring Gulf monarchies and their predominantly anti-Arab Spring, counter-revolutionary stances. This strategy, although high risk, has allowed Qatar’s ruler
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to avoid losing legitimacy in the manner of his peers, and in many respects has allowed him to capitalise on the Arab Spring despite being one of the region’s most autocratic rulers.

Most notably, after Qatar’s Al-Jazeera news network seemed to have played a pivotal role in galvanising support for the Tunisian and Egyptian protestors in early 2011 by relentlessly broadcasting the events that led to their dictators’ respective downfalls, Qatar then took a leading role in efforts to solve the Libyan crisis, ultimately backing the Benghazi-based rebel government in its campaign to oust Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. In April 2011 Qatar became the first country in the world to offer diplomatic recognition to the Libyan National Transitional Council, and Doha hosted a meeting of the Libya Contact Group—a collection of entities committed to finding a ‘new political direction’ for the war-torn country.
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Remarkably, Qatar then despatched six of its fighter jets to contribute to the NATO-led no fly zone over Libya,
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and in the latter days of the conflict was believed to have provided weapons and even small detachments of special forces to facilitate the rebels’ storming of Tripoli. Since then Qatar has been similarly supportive of the Syrian opposition, having formally recognised the Free Syrian Army and the coalition of rebel movements working towards Bashar Al-Assad’s ouster. Most dramatically, in January 2012 the Qatari ruler made a public call for Arab troops to intervene in Syria, stating in a high profile interview on CBS News that the rest of the Arab world had a duty to ‘stop the killing’.
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Since then, there have been very frequent reports that Qatar is among a handful of countries actively arming the Syrian rebels.
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Qatar’s Arab Spring policy has not been without its obstacles, however. Despite the official line, as summed up by a prominent member of the ruling family, being that ‘we believe in democracy, freedom, dialogue, and we believe in that for the entire region’ and despite the aim seeming to be ‘[hoping] that the people of the Middle East will see us as a model, and they can follow us if they think it is useful’,
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the Qatari ruling family is still treated with suspicion by revolutionary forces in the region. A number of Gulf nationals and even Qatari nationals have voiced their suspicions, seemingly believing that the emirate’s maverick foreign policy and public support for democratic movements is simply another aspect of the monarchy’s wily survival strategy. The most obvious discrepancy has been the Qatari position on the Bahraini revolution, as although Qatari forces did not contribute to the Saudi-led military intervention, and although Al-Jazeera did eventually broadcast the ‘Shouting in the Dark’ documentary, this seemed to be an inconsistent response when compared with Qatar’s vociferous and high profile support for Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian protestors. Notably, Qatar did not publicly condemn the brutal crackdowns in Bahrain, and the Arabic version of Al-Jazeera has been heavily criticised for shying away from covering the events in Manama. Moreover, when a live discussion programme on Al-Jazeera English was scheduled following a repeat broadcast of ‘Shouting in the Dark’, the producers removed a prominent Bahraini human rights activist from the three person line-up at the last minute, permitting only a member of the Bahraini government and the author to put forward their views.
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Following senior resignations at Al-Jazeera Arabic in 2011, seemingly as a result of the network’s inability to offer fair coverage of the Arab
Spring, suspicions over Qatar’s intentions continued to mount. These were further exacerbated following the widespread dissemination in 2011 of a leaked US cable, originally dating from 2009, which described the Qatari regime’s apparent manipulation of the network to suit its policy objectives. Referring to several memoranda, the cables claimed that Al-Jazeera was being built up by the Qatari ruling family as a ‘bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries’, and cited the example of Qatar’s improved relations with Saudi Arabia being based on the network’s ‘toning down of criticism of the Saudi royal family’. Before concluding that Al-Jazeera was ‘proving itself a useful tool for the station’s political masters’, the cable also damningly claimed that the Qatari prime minister
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had told a prominent US senator
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that Qatar had proposed a bargain with Hosni Mubarak which involved ‘stopping [Al-Jazeera] broadcasts in Egypt for one year in exchange for a change in Cairo’s position on Israel-Palestinian negotiations’.
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