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MIDEAST: Lebanon Deal Confirms Qatar’s Honest Broker Role

Analysis by Meena Janardhan

DUBAI, May 25 2008 (IPS) - While Lebanon rejoices over the power-sharing deal among its rival factions that ended 18 months of political conflict and saved it from the brink of civil war, deal-broker Qatar revels in the glory of yet another diplomatic coup.

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, who is also his country’s foreign minister, chaired six days of Arab League talks in Doha that ended on Wednesday with a deal between the United States-backed ruling coalition and the Hezbollah-led opposition.

The agreement which allowed for the election of Gen. Michel Suleiman as Lebanese president – a post lying vacant since November – approved a parliamentary election law and cleared the opposition’s demand for veto power in the cabinet.

‘‘We never doubted when we called for this inter-Lebanese dialogue in Doha that it would succeed,’’ Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, was quoted as saying in the media. Qatar hosts the headquarters of the U.S. central command for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Qatar’s latest diplomatic success could be attributed to its ties with the rival factions and regional powers with influence in Beirut.

While Doha is a close ally of Washington, which also supports the government in Beirut, it has maintained good relations with Tehran and Damascus, which back the Lebanese opposition led by the Shiite militant movement Hezbollah. Recent reconciliation with Saudi Arabia, which also supports the Lebanese government, helped in the process too.

The mediation efforts, according to Doha-based political analyst Mehran Kamrava, is consistent with Qatar’s ‘‘increasingly proactive diplomacy’’ over the last few years both in the Gulf region and larger Middle East.

A small country of less than a million people, most of them expatriates, Qatar has pursued an aggressive role pushing mediation efforts on Middle East issues ranging from Sudan to the Palestinians to the Israeli prisoners’ stalemate. Such efforts have overridden Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia on whom Washington has long relied upon to check the influence of radical groups.

In June 2006, Qatar hailed Hezbollah’s ‘‘resistance’’ for the first Arab ‘‘victory’’ against Israel, a stand which opposed the regional heavyweights, which had accused the Lebanese group of triggering the summer war with the Jewish state.

Several reasons are given for Qatar’s diplomatic overdrive. The attempt to draw international mileage goes beyond oil and gas and serves as an advertisement to expand its diversifying economy; the desire to be a regional hegemon and win a seat on the U.N. Security Council; and to either be one up on Saudi Arabia or try to fill in wherever Riyadh lost out with Washington after 9/11, as was evident in the U.S. forces being accommodated at the Al-Udeid air base in 2002.

Kamrava, who is director of the Centre for International and Regional Studies at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, identified “three key, inter-related factors’’ to clarify Qatar’s increasing attempts at conflict resolution.

First, since ‘‘Qatar is a small state, its national security needs dictate proactive diplomacy, particularly in light of the chronic regional turmoil and instability,” he told IPS.

The second factor, is the ‘‘increasing self-confidence due to significant rise in oil and gas revenues during the last few years.’’

Sitting on the world’s third largest gas reserves, Qatar’s GDP in 2007 was estimated to be 66 billion US dollars, compared to eight billion dollars in 1995. The International Monetary Fund estimated Qatar’s per capita income to be 70,754 dollars last year. This has reportedly allowed Qatar to pursue ‘‘checkbook diplomacy’’ to buy influence among the region’s radical groups.

The third factor for the proactive role, Kamrava explained, ‘‘is a deliberate attempt to carve out a distinct identity for Qatar as a significant regional and global actor compared to the other regional players like Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.’’

‘‘We have seen these factors at work not only in Qatar’s efforts to mediate in a number of regional conflicts, but also in what many consider to be its broader ‘maverick’ foreign policy pursuits,’’ the academic added.

Kamrava cited Qatar’s voting record in the United Nations, the extent of its non-official relations with Israel compared to its neighbours, and its continued, cordial ties with Iran despite U.S. efforts to the contrary as some examples of the country’s maverick foreign policy pursuits.

Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni attended the opening of a forum on democracy in Qatar in April, sparking boycotts by other invited guests.

‘‘I have seven cancellations because of your arrival. Don’t cause any more problems,’’ Prime Minister Al Thani jokingly told Livni, according to media reports.

Qatar is among few Arab countries to have political contacts with Israel and also hosts a commercial interests office in its capital Doha. In January 2007, President Shimon Peres, who was deputy prime minister then, became the highest ranked Israeli to visit the Gulf region in more than 10 years.

Earlier this month, Qatari mediators returned to Yemen’s volatile northern province of Saada to salvage a truce brokered last June that ended six months of intense fighting arising out of a conflict since 2004 between government forces and rebels belonging to the Zaydi sect of Shiite Islam.

The diplomatic enthusiasm has occasionally had its downside too as was evident in the fallout of Qatar’s bid to resolve the Somalia conflict.

Ethiopia broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar this April, saying that it has become ‘‘a major source of instability in the Horn of Africa.’’

Citing Qatar’s relationship with its arch enemy Eritrea, the Ethiopian foreign ministry said, ‘‘Qatar has left no stone unturned to cause harm to Ethiopia’s national security…All those who are prepared to foment instability in Ethiopia and undermine the country’s security have been given support and encouragement by Qatar.’’

However, given the political capital such deals yield, which may also translate into economic gains, Qatar is unlikely to be perturbed by such odd setbacks.