The oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar is seemingly never out of the news in France, where its investments include businesses, property, the media and, notably, the Paris Saint-Germain football club where its deep pockets allowed the high-profile signings of Zlatan Ibrahimović and David Beckham. But while PSG fans are happy, Qatar’s mooted scheme to set up an investment fund for France’s most deprived urban zones prompted a call by members of the conservative opposition for a parliamentary enquiry.
Just what is Qatar’s political aim in what often appears to be a high-spending PR campaign, what is the reality of its relationship with the West and France in particular, and what lies behind the authoritarian state's support for regime change elsewhere in the Arab world? Mediapart's Arab affairs writer Pierre Puchot turned to two specialists on Qatar to debate these and other issues surrounding one of the per-capita richest, and geographically smallest, states in the world: Nabil Ennasri is the author of a book just published in France entitled L’Énigme du Qatar (The enigma of Qatar) in which he analyses the social and political agenda of Qatar’s rulers. Karim Sade is an expert and consultant on issues concerning the states of the Persian Gulf, and who recently contributed to a special edition on Qatar of the review Confluences Méditerranée.
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MEDIAPART: Nabil Ennasri, in your book you refer several times to a ‘Doha Spring’. In Qatar, the poet Mohammed al-Ajami is imprisoned for ‘insulting the emir’ and ‘incitation’ to overthrow his rule. The court of appeal in Doha has just reduced his sentence to 15 years. Can one really call this a ‘Doha Spring’?
Nabil Ennasri: The ‘Doha Spring’, if it existed and which I put between quote marks, I would situate as of the late 1990s. That was when several elections were held in Qatar, and in 2004 the constitution was adopted by referendum. For the first time, women have the right to vote and to be elected. Qatar is the first Gulf state to have established this opening. But there remains the fact that the Qatari regime, like the other Gulf states, remains an authoritarian regime, as the imprisonment of the poet shows. From this point of view, Qatar finds it increasingly difficult to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries, because for ten years we have seen how, and notably in Kuwait, there has been a will to hook up with liberal current that is blowing through the Arab world.
This region is, however, very far from reaching international standards of human rights. [French press freedom NGO] Reporters Without Borders placed Qatar in 110th position out of 180 countries. For a country that boasts of being the stage of freedom of expression, notably via [TV channel] Al Jazira, there are still a lot of efforts to be made.
Karim Sader: The reasoning whereby Qatar is compared to its neighbours in order to minimise its autocracy does not seem pertinent to me. If there is one state in the region that can be cited for democratic avant-gardism it is Kuwait, the first to establish a true parliamentary process, with elections open to participation by women. Certainly, Qatar practices a Wahhabism that is softer than that in Saudi Arabia, but when you have a native population of 220,000 your situation is more favourable than if you had to face several million inhabitants who suffer from the lack of redistribution of the god-sent oil [wealth].
Another important element: when you are stuck between Saudi Arabia and Iran, your first priority is not democracy. It is security and the feeling of national pride. They are proud of what the emir does, who makes them exist on the international stage. Lots of opinion surveys have shown it, notably in 2011 at the height of the Arab uprising. In the same way, and I regret this, the poet’s cause doesn’t touch many Qataris, who are very afraid of any element that could destabilize the country. Qatar is not a democracy. Indeed, the legislative elections have twice been cancelled, and we’re still waiting for them to happen. There is no Qatari political life, the political parties were banned during the last municipal elections. And when the emir adjourned the elections in 2011, the press campaigned on his side to justify the decision. There is no major voice of dissidence.
Nabil Ennasri: I agree with Karim. But one observation all the same: the sentencing of the poet was covered by the English-language service of Al Jazira, which invited a human rights activist to condemn the trial. In the same vein, during the first trial in November 2012, this time the Arab service of Al Jazira gave a chance to comment to the Syrian representative at the United Nations, during the 1 p.m. news bulletin. He criticized Qatar, which is very opposed to the Syrian regime.
Qatar remains an authoritarian regime, for a simple reason. When, to curry favour, you satisfy the needs of the population, when the income per inhabitant is the highest in the world, few people are motivated to change things.
MEDIAPART: One of the paradoxes of Qatar’s foreign policy, and which reflects the ruling regime’s conception of democracy, is the dichotomy between its support for the Libyan revolution, largely financed by Qatar in the name of freedom, and its active support in the crushing of the revolt in Bahrain.
Karim Sader: Bahrain, which has few oil reserves, is the exclusive preserve of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer. It is also the home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. At the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’, a non-aggression pact was agreed between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were anxious at the idea that the unrest could spread to Bahrain, and saw Qatar encouraging the Libyans and Tunisians etc [to revolt]. So Saudi Arabia told the Qataris ‘do what you want elsewhere, but leave the Gulf alone’.
Thus it was that Al Jazira didn’t mention the revolt in Bahrain, and Qatar sent soldiers to back up Saudi forces that dispersed demonstrators from Pearl Square [in the Bahraini capital]. All that shows that Qatar’s activism is a selective one. It consists not of encouraging the emergence of those who have carried out the revolutions, but of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has confiscated the revolutions.
Nabil Ennasri: In the ideological confrontation that is going on in the Middle East, one must take measure of what’s happening. The Sunni-Shiite cleavage is one of the major elements in the strategic equation. Unfortunately, this cleavage is splitting the Arab world in two. This gap is also apparent on the internet, on satellite TV channels, in religious sermons. And you cannot understand what’s happening in Bahrain without taking this cleavage into account. It was in this light that Qatar participated in the repression in Bahrain, and why it supports the moves for democracy in Libya and Syria. As for these revolutions, it must all the same be remembered that the Ennahda Movement [in Tunisia] and the Muslim Brotherhood [in Egypt] came to power via the ballot box.
Karim Sader: Two organisations that are financed by Qatar.
Nabil Ennasri: Certainly so. For me, Qatar believes, in a pragmatic approach, that structured popular forces that win elections, which shape the political edifice in the Arab world, are almost all from the political matrix of the Muslim Brotherhood. Adding to this calculation is an ideological connivance, because in Qatar the principle religious influence is that of [prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure, living in exile in Qatar] Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a sort of unofficial Mufti who advises the emir. Thus Qatar becomes a sort of patron of these parties. However, I’m not sure that Ennahda or the Muslim Brotherhoodwill manage the same scores at the next elections.
MEDIAPART: Is there to be an evolution of Qatar’s foreign policy or is the country’s ultimate aim an ideological one, that of encouraging the overthrow of lay dictatorships, such as that which ruled in Tunisia, for their replacement by conservative Muslim regimes?
Nabil Ennasri: It’s complicated because, in his vision of the world, the emir of Qatar is ‘Islamisating-nationalist’. Notably because, for the first time, the Arab world was united, in the language of literary Arab, by the Al Jazira channel.
Karim Sader: I am more categorical and my answer is no. There is, above pragmatism, an ideological connivance. Over the recent decades, Qatar has become the land of exile for the prototype of what is the oppressed Islamist. Qatar has a hatred for these regimes that were in place, because they were regimes that were lay and left-wing – not in the French sense of the term but in the sense of their repression against Islamists – and didn’t abide by the Koran. So I think that Doha wanted, and continues to want to, consolidate the power of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s why the Qataris are today arriving in Egypt like the fire brigade, and invest all over the place.
Another very important point: Qatar is not a secret power that would come along and determine events from the wings. It is a subcontractor of the United States. It didn’t go from being a financial power to becoming a geo-political one by accident. There is a consensus for sub-contracting to Qatar, and to Turkey also, the supervision of the region. The new Islamist parties in power arrived with the agreement of the United States, and of NATO. What is Qatar’s role? To make them good disciples of economic liberalism, and that they make peace with Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood in fact pledged, as soon as they won power, not to question the [Egyptian] agreements with Israel. Domesticate on behalf of the United States, that is part of Qatar’s role.
MEDIAPART: Nabil Ennasri, you refer to this alliance with the United States, notably during the first Gulf War, in your book. But you also note that, as of 1992, Qatar renewed diplomatic relations with Iraq which was then banished by the Arab world.
Nabil Ennasri: The decision by Qatar, and particularly the emir, of becoming the biggest American base outside of the United States was above all a forced one, more than a heartfelt one. For all the countries in the region, excepting Iran today, the choice is simple. Either they accept the pax americana or they run the risk of suffering the same sort as [Iranian prime minister] Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, or Saddam in 2003, and so on. Clearly, Qatar is within a situation that I would call ‘limited sovereignty’. It uses its diplomatic margin for manoeuvre to oppose, systematically over the past 20 years, the policies of Saudi Arabia. That took a radical form when the emir realised that the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates were ready in 1996 to organize a Coup d’état against him to replace him by his father. The emir in power today himself unseated his father in 1995. Al Jazira is regularly used to settle his scores with the Saudis. It gives open house to its studios for opponents of the Saudi regime exiled in London, something that regularly creates diplomatic crises.
MEDIAPART: What is this ‘soft Wahhabism’ that you referred to earlier, Karim Sader?
Karim Sader: There is no ‘soft Wahhabism’, it doesn’t exist.
MEDIAPART: Yet you linked those two words together at the start of this interview.
Karim Sader: I put myself in the shoes of a westerner who observes that ‘in Saudi Arabia they cut off the hands of thieves, not in Qatar’. But I made clear that it was notably demographic and economic factors that allow the Qataris not to display this type of archaic practice. The expression ‘soft Wahhabism’ could be used in a political sense. This is to state that ‘we are the hereditary descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’. The Al Thani family in power in Qatar descends from the tribe that is affiliated to him. In the 18th century Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab became the founder of Wahhabism, a rigorous form of Islam that called for a return to the values of the Koran. But in Qatar there is a Wahhabism of the 21st century, unlike in Saudi Arabia with a regime from another era.
Qataris nevertheless remain Muslims, with an identity that remains that of Wahhabism. To illustrate this, the biggest Mosque, completed last year in the centre of Doha, was named ‘Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’. If Qatar [‘s ruling regime] is careful not to anger the large part of the population who are, from an ideological point of view, close to Saudi Arabia, it is trying today to become a true centre of 21st-century Wahhabism.
MEDIAPART: A sort of Islamic Hub?
Karim Sader: That is already what Saudi Arabia is, but in its archaic manner, while its legitimacy comes solely from the fact that it is home to the sacred sites. Qatar, in its geopolitical, and above all Islamic, pretension of being the centre of gravity of the world’s Islamic powers, to be the West’s interlocutor on these issues, moves behind Saudi Arabia. It is also for that reason that it today hosts a representation branch of the Taliban. It has also taken over from the Saudis all the claims to [managing] Islamic issues. In Lebanon, In Palestine with the Hamas, the Yemen and recently with the Afghan question.
Nabil Ennasri: Sudan.
Karim Sader: Qatar is everywhere.
MEDIAPART: Nabil Ennasri, you speak little about those people invited or even financed by Qatar, although you do cite the name of Tariq Ramadan who, while being critical of the Doha regime, has his Oxford University chair of contemporary Islamic studies funded by Qatar. What role does he play?
Nabil Ennasri: The presence of Tariq Ramadan, who also teaches in Qatar, meets two objectives. In its desire to become a model, Qatar needs, in its ‘soft power’ strategy, to capture people who have a strong symbolic dimension. That is shown in football, culture and the academic field. Tariq Ramadan is a recognised figure in Anglo-Saxon academic circles, even though in France he still carries a nefarious reputation. He was notably named by Time magazine as an ‘innovating’ thinker. He is also the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But one should avoid simplifying the Qatari religious field. There is a Wahhabism of the tribes, as with the Tamims, a tribe that comes from the centre of Saudi Arabia. But at a time of globalised Islam, the primary vector of Islam for new generations is no longer the Mosque nor the school of studies of the Koran, but the internet. Then there is a third layer, born from the Qatari desire to distance itself from the nefarious image of Wahhabism, a desire that is represented by [the Qatari emir’s wife] Sheikha Mozah. It is she who finances Tariq Ramadan’s centre, who represents the aspirations of a section of the young, of women, to escape this dust-covered and mediaeval Islam, towards an ‘enlightened Islam’. The place of women is the fundamental difference between Saudi and Qatari Wahhabism. In Doiha, women work, drive and study. Some of Qatar’s universities are mixed. For 30 year-olds in Qatar, Wahhabism is completely outdated.
MEDIAPART: What do you mean by ‘enlightened Islam’?
Nabil Ennasri: Getting rid of conservatism and giving greater place to [the research for knowledge], which Tariq Ramadan does in an interesting manner. In this way, Islam can be opened up to questions of the genus, about economy, ecology, to social and educational issues. That is also what Sheikha Mozah is trying to do.
Karim Sader: It is no doubt here that I will have more disagreement with Nabil. Sheikha Mozahdoes not have the influence she’s made out to have. She is nothing more than window dressing, to polish the image of the Emirate in the West. In Qatar, I came across reticence over her role.
Nabil Ennasri: So what do you make of the efforts of the Qatar foundation?
Karim Sader: This foundation is above all aimed at impressing the outside world. Robert Ménard, whose experience at the top of the centre for press freedom was cut short, said it very well: ‘Sheikha Mozah meant well, but she had no influence in Qatar’. On the contrary, I think Qatar is in the process of radicalization, and this is a regression. Just one example, the banning of alcohol on the island in 2012 has clearly shown that the emir fears the traditionalist fringe.
MEDIAPART: This radicalisation is one of the threats that you, Nabil Ennasri, say hangs over Qatar.
Nabil Ennasri: There are some in Qatar who say ‘Enough of Sheikha Mozah’s drive for emancipation, we are above all Arabs of Bedouin origin with our traditions’. Indeed, what will Qatar be like in 2022, when tens of thousands of football supporters from around the world go there for the World Cup, with alcohol and no doubt behavior that has little in common with tribal tradition? It is no doubt the most preoccupying element regarding the stability of Qatar. From my point of view, that is what would explain the attempted Coup d’état in February 2009.
It must also be said that, between now and 2022, Qatar must recruit an extra one million foreign workers. They already represent 80% of Qatar’s population, and are paid at best 400 dollars a month, have their passports confiscated and sleep in compounds outside the town, often without air conditioning with temperatures of 50° Celsius. How can Qatar continue to improve its image when exploiting workers in this manner, when it is designated by several NGOs as a slave state? This threat, created by these problems, is joined by that from [its] enemy states, like the regime of [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad, who uses every means possible to blacken Qatar’s reputation.
MEDIAPART: Is it for that last reason that ‘Qatar bashing’ has become omnipresent, notably regarding the accusations of it funding Islamic militias in Mali, for which no evidence has been provided? Is Qatar losing the battle over its image?
Karim Sader: You raise a very important thing here. For Qatar, we are entering a new era. It has succeeded in existing on the international stage, and now it is exposed to a factor that it does not master, [namely] public opinion. Qatar, however, has some trump cards to play, including a powerful financial strike force. For example, when the World Cup scandal came about, they bought David Beckham.
Why is there today ‘Qatar bashing’ when they were welcomed with open arms, exonerated from paying taxes on capital gains from property transactions under [former French President Nicolas] Sarkozy? It is especially exasperating when this ‘Qatar bashing’ is done without proof. We mentioned Mali, everyone’s talking about this, no-one has the slightest evidence. At the end of the day, this communications war no doubt serves Qatar, because it continues to be talked about.
Nabil Ennasri: If Qatar has a negative image in France it’s also to do with a certain Islamophobia among the elite who cannot stand the fact that an Emirate and Bedouins come, as I heard it put in a recent debate, with their camels to buy one by one the jewels of the [French] republic. It’s part of the colonial and paternalistic attitude towards the Arab world. Now that France, which had often been ahead of the march of history, is overtaken by China, Brazil and, on top of that, by the Gulf Arabs irritates those [elite] circles. At the same time, for Qatar, it’s the backlash from compulsive investment-making.
MEDIAPART: Why have the Qataris focused on France?
Nabil Ennasri: For a France plunged into an economic crisis, this Gulf state is a gold mine with which it will necessarily maximize relations in order to increase its share. In a highly competitive environment that is the Middle East, where the Anglo-Saxons take the lion’s share, to have a privileged relationship with an opulent Emirate, to which you can sell arms, building contracts, services, PR, is good for our economy. An interesting little sign: we haven’t heard the French authorities speak out over the sentencing of the poet, even though defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was there, supervising a military exercise, when the sentence was pronounced. However, [French President François] Hollande has not carried on with the advertising campaign [that was] the very personal relation Sarkozy had with the emir. Hollande’s aim, even if he has received the Qataris at the Elysée [presidential palace] more than any other Arab representation, is to diversify his openings, with the United Arab Emirates, with Saudi Arabia.
Karim Sader: And there, too, one must distinguish what is fantasy and what is real. China, for example, invests more in France than does Qatar. For the Qataris, France is simply a label of prestige. That’s why they want to remove ‘Saint Germain’ from the logo of [football club] PSG, because it is ‘Paris’ that sells. And then, on an industrial level, there is twice as much Qatari investment in Britain than in France. Out of an [investment] fund of 100 billion [euros], there is 6% invested in France. I don’t find that enormous. I even have the feeling that the honeymoon between Paris and Doha is behind us now. As Nabil said, on the diplomatic front there is a re-balancing, prompted by the arguments of diplomats who stayed quiet under Sarkozy. And that’s a good thing.
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- Nabil Ennasri's L’Énigme du Qatar is published in France by Iris/Armand Colin, priced 19 euros.
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English version: Graham Tearse