Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (13 page)

Precisely why Qatar has chosen hedging whereas others have not is a product of policy preferences by state leaders, on the one hand, and the structural opportunities and circumstances that have enabled them to articulate and pursue those preferences, on the other. As the country’s Heir Apparent Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani once told the US ambassador to Qatar, the country cannot afford not to pursue a pragmatic policy. In its relations with Iran, for example, he remarked that “Qatar’s boycotting Iran will not hurt Iran but will hurt Qatar—including our shared gas supply.”
²⁴
Compared to its neighbors, the Qatari state also benefits from a number of comparative advantages that have bestowed on it high levels of autonomy vis-à-vis Qatari society, some of the most notable of which include high rent revenues accrued from LNG, a small and relatively homogenous population, ruling elite cohesion, and policymaking agility. These comparative advantages have enabled the Qatari elite to choose from a wider menu of foreign policy options. In other words, Qatar’s hedging has been made possible through a confluence of structural constraints and opportunities and state elite choices and agency.

One of the unconventional tools that Qatar uses in its foreign policy hedging is the Al Jazeera satellite television network. Had it not been for Al Jazeera, there would be much greater ignorance of Qatar around the world than is currently the case. Notwithstanding the network’s own vocal protestations to the contrary, the links between Al Jazeera and Qatari foreign policy—whether they actually exist or are generally perceived around the world to exist
²⁵
—cannot be denied or overlooked. Wikileaks cables show what at times appear to be close coordination between the Qatari government and the television channel. In 2005, for example, when Lynne Cheney, wife of the former US vice president, complained to the Qatari ambassador in Washington about “a particularly virulent essay on [Al Jazeera]’s website,” the Qatari prime minister saw to it that the essay was removed.
²⁶
In the same meeting, the Qatari prime minister offered to arrange for a softer Al Jazeera interview for Karen Hughes, at the time the US undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. In an earlier interview with the channel, the PM maintained, Hughes has been “asked the wrong questions.” “It is important that we know what she wants,” he told the US ambassador, “so we can have the right result.”
²⁷
A few days later, the channel’s managing director Wadah Khanfar met with the embassy’s public affairs officer and mentioned that the contents of the objectionable essay had been “toned down” and that soon it would be removed from the website altogether.
²⁸

The network has pursued a similarly nuanced approach toward Saudi Arabia, a neighbor with whom Qatar has not always had cordial relations. Tensions between the two countries date back to border clashes in 1992, followed by alleged Saudi support for a countercoup in 1996 designed to oust Sheikh Hamad and to restore Sheikh Khalifa back to power. In 2000, Saudi crown prince Abdullah boycotted a summit of Islamic states held in Doha because of Qatar’s hosting of an Israeli trade office, and in 2002 Riyadh recalled its ambassador from Qatar due to controversial remarks on Al Jazeera by a Saudi dissident. Things got personal when in the mid-2000s, Saudi-funded newspapers and senior Al Thanis, including the emir’s wife Sheikha Moza, traded insults and accusations, a dispute eventually settled, in favor of the Qataris, in a London courtroom.
²⁹
In February 2004, Al Jazeera reported that Saudi authorities had banned it from covering the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca by millions of Muslims from across the world.
³⁰
Throughout this time, Al Jazeera’s coverage of Saudi Arabia was hard-hitting and, similar to its overall reportage, often critical of the Saudi establishment.
³¹
But by late 2007, when relations between the two countries began to improve, Al Jazeera’s tone toward Saudi Arabia began to soften. According to one Al Jazeera newsroom employee, “orders were given not to tackle any Saudi issues without referring to the higher management…. All dissident voices disappeared from our screens.”
³²
Later on, in 2011–2012, following the mass protests that swept across the Arab world and therefore brought Saudi and Qatari leaders closer together in their efforts to save the threatened Bahraini monarchy and to assert their own leadership over the Arab world, almost all critical reports on Saudi—and Bahraini—affairs disappeared from the network. As Bahrain dove deeper into turmoil, for a few critical months it appeared as if for the network’s news editors and programmers it simply did not exist.

Perhaps the most critical test of Al Jazeera’s political independence occurred during the 2011 Arab Spring, when, according to most observers, it aligned its coverage of the Arab revolts, sometimes more subtly than others, with Qatari foreign policy. Although the network provided extensive coverage of the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt, describing the events there as “revolutions” early on, and later of Libya, Yemen, and Syria, it failed to give similar airtime to Bahrain. This prompted one observer to comment that, similar to the Saudi-owned and -funded Al Arabia channel, Al Jazeera is “tongue-tied by the Saudi military intervention” in Bahrain in March 2011.
³³
As the
International Herald Tribune
observed,

The threat posed by Bahrain’s protests was closer to home. Their success would have set a precedent for broader public participation in a region ruled by Sunni dynasties. More alarming for those dynasties, it would have given more power to Bahrain’s majority Shi’ites, distrusted by Sunni rulers who fear the influence of regional Shi’ite power Iran.
³⁴

According to another observer, “There has been fantastic pressure from Saudi Arabia on Qatar to join in (the Gulf military operation) in Bahrain, and to at least rein in Al Jazeera.”
³⁵
This prompted yet another observer to claim that “Bahrain doesn’t exist as far as Al Jazeera is concerned, and they have avoided inviting Bahraini or Omani or Saudi critics of those regimes” to comment on camera.
³⁶
One of the station’s Beirut-based reporters allegedly resigned over the network’s lack of coverage of events in Bahrain.
³⁷
After much criticism for its uneven coverage of regional uprisings, the network aired what was regarded as a “powerful” documentary on Bahrain, but showed it only on its English channel, in limited airings, and did not run it on its more widely watched and more popular Arabic channel.
³⁸
Media observers were not impressed. In the words of one,

The bias on the English channel may be more subtle than on the Arabic channel but can be plainly seen on its YouTube pages. Take, for example, the report on the human rights violations that occurred during the uprising in Bahrain. Al-Jazeera English disabled comments on all five videos uploaded on Bahrain yet no such restriction was placed on the videos about Syria, Yemen and Egypt uploaded on the same day. Let’s not forget that Qatar, the home of Al-Jazeera, also sent troops to Bahrain to restore “order and security.”
³⁹

The reporter went on to suggest that “Al-Jazeera English might consider changing one of its slogans from the ambitious ‘all sides, all views, always’ to the more realistic ‘all sides, all views, sometimes’.”
⁴⁰
There have been similar criticisms of the network’s uncritical—and at times even sensationalist—coverage of opposition rebels fighting the Syrian state in 2011–2012 and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in May 2012 to the Egyptian presidency.
⁴¹

This is not to imply that Al Jazeera’s editorial choices are simply dictated by the foreign policy agendas and preferences of the country that houses it. That there is an overall, at times tenuous, coordination between the two, sometimes more pointedly than others, and sometimes more pronounced in the Arabic than the English channels, cannot be denied. Nevertheless, the channel’s own internal dynamics, particularly insofar as path dependence is concerned, cannot be overlooked. The Qatari state established Al Jazeera for branding purposes and it did not mind if the station’s broadcasts furthered its regional and global interests. But before long the station, as a complex institution and an important change agent, developed its own internal dynamics and preferences. Editorial choices were made based on the preferences of the station’s editorial directors, many of whom had their own political and ideological backgrounds to promote. Wadah Khanfar, for example, who resigned as the network’s director in 2011 after eight years of service, was often seen as anti-American by the US authorities.
⁴²
The pan-Arabist leanings of other network decision makers often crept through their coverage of events as they transpired. In a candid article on Al Jazeera’s programming and overall posture during the Arab Spring, the channel’s program director admitted to the station’s staff that reporters could not help but be influenced by the gravity of the events occurring around them, often in their own mother countries. “The Arabic speaking Al-Jazeera station was simply closer to the hearts of many Arabs because the latter related to its employees as one of them,” he wrote. “This was the case, for in Al-Jazeera’s newsroom one can find reporters and producers from every Arab country—with a fair distribution and representation—who are all impassioned about Arab and Islamic issues. They use the term umma (nation) a lot.”
⁴³

Al Jazeera is only one—albeit important and highly visible—element in Qatar’s delicate hedging between multiple actors. Equally important are Qatar’s relations with many of the region’s Islamist groups and actors, particularly those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar’s relationship with the movement is one of the “smaller bets” in its larger hedging strategy. There are several aspects to this seemingly inexplicable friendship, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, Emir Hamad is a masterful balancer of countervailing political trends and tendencies at home. As such, the Qatari state has long given refuge to the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926) who for much of his life has been one of spiritual fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood. By providing patronage and giving a platform to one of the most outspoken and controversial clerics in the contemporary Muslim world, the Qatari state has been able to effectively place itself above religious criticism and to largely stem the possibility of the emergence of a home-grown Islamist movement.
⁴⁴

Reinforcing this shielding from Islamist criticism has been Qatar’s support—at times more overt than others—for Muslim Brotherhood activists throughout the countries in which the Arab Spring has unfolded, from Tunisia and Libya to Egypt and Syria.
⁴⁵
The precise reasons for Qatar’s support for the movement’s sympathizers in the Arab Spring have been subject to much speculation and controversy.
⁴⁶
Two primary considerations appear to underlie this development. First, when the Arab Spring broke out, Qatari leaders appear to have calculated relatively early on that political incumbents were spent forces whose days were numbered. Thus former friends (e.g., Bashar Assad) were quickly jettisoned and instead military and diplomatic support was given to the groups opposing them. Second, given the destruction of organized opposition by these regimes, their opponents were bound to be Islamists, among whom Qatar found more affinity with the comparatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood activists and sympathizers. The Brotherhood’s relatively radical counterparts, who are often lumped together under the general label of Salafists, are closer in sensibility to Saudi Arabia’s more austere brand of Wahhabism. Once again, Qatari diplomacy, this time in relation to a re-emergent Muslim Brotherhood, is part of a carefully calibrated policy of hedging bets in multiple directions, and, in this case, choosing between what Doha considers as the lesser of two evils. That support for the Brotherhood addressed both a foreign concern and further blunted the potential for a similar domestic development was an added bonus. Both before and throughout the civil wars that wracked Libya and Syria in 2011 and 2012, Sheikh Qaradawi’s Friday sermons often closely paralleled the positions taken by Qatar both in relation to these conflicts in specific and in the international arena in general.
⁴⁷
So did, incidentally, Al Jazeera’s coverage: detailed and often sympathetic coverage of the ongoing anti-Assad rebellion in Syria and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi’s presidential election win in May 2012, for example, but continued muted coverage of the repression in Bahrain, and virtually nothing on Saudi Arabia at a time of important palace developments in the kingdom.
⁴⁸

In addition to Al Jazeera and its relations with Islamists, Qatar’s balancing act between its primary military protector and major trading partner, the United States, and its northern, restive neighbor Iran offer a textbook example of hedging. This is not to imply, however, that the nature of the bilateral relationships that Qatar maintains with Iran and the United States are identical. In fact, Qatari-Iranian and Qatari-American relationships are qualitatively different, though, one might argue, each in their own way quite strong. Qatar’s relationship with the United States is anchored in three central pillars: military and security arrangements; commercial and economic interests; and educational and cultural initiatives. Qatar’s relations with Iran, however, feature at best minimal elements of each of these three pillars. Instead, they revolve around what might be termed “expressions of friendship” and the frequent official visits that political leaders and high-ranking officials from each side pay one another.