Saudi rift with Qatar exposes growing division in the anti-Iran alliance

US and Gulf Cooperation Council forces conduct field training, in Kuwait in 2017.
U.S. Army, Francis O'Brien/

This is the worst diplomatic crisis in the Gulf region in decades.

On June 5, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt decided to break off ties with Qatar, accusing the Gulf state of supporting terrorism and of destabilising the whole region.

Qatar had fired the opening shot by what seemed to be open criticism of the Saudi-led and US-assisted anti-Iran alliance pushed by Donald Trump after his visit to Riyadh on May 21.

On May 24, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the ruler of Qatar, allegedly criticised the US-Saudi move and described Iran as an “Islamic power”. The Qatar News Agency quoted the emir as saying, “There is no wisdom in harbouring hostility towards Iran”. This infuriated Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Qatar then questioned the veracity of the comments and said its news agency was hacked. Nevertheless, the diplomatic rift been deepening, culminating in the current crisis.

Not the first diplomatic imbroglio

This is not the first time that Qatar, a thumb-shaped emirate of the size of the US state of Connecticut, has become embroiled a diplomatic imbroglio with its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.


These three Gulf Arab states withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar’s capital Doha in early 2014, on the pretext that the country had links to the Muslim Brotherhood and gave refuge to its leaders after the fall of Egypt’s first democratically elected government in July 2013.

Saudi Arabia declared the Muslim Brotherhood, which it views as an alternative source of authority that’s opposed to hereditary monarchical rule, a terrorist organisation in early March 2014.

But the current crisis is much more serious than the 2014 diplomatic spat, which was resolved after eight months, with Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini ambassadors returning to Doha in November of the same year on the condition that Qatar would never allow the Muslim Brotherhood to operate from its territory.

Iran in the centre

Unlike the 2014 crisis, the current Qatari–Saudi rift is not just an intra-GCC falling out, as it involves Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran.

Qatar is seen by the Saudi government and its Emirati and Bahraini counterparts as a spoiler of efforts to forge a unified Arab–Muslim position, undergirded by the Trump administration, against Iran’s so-called “terrorist agenda” in Arab countries.

A week before US President Donald Trump visited Riyadh to consolidate the anti-Iran alliance, the Saudi arabic-language daily newspaper Okaz reported a secret meeting between the Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad Bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, who was officially visiting Baghdad at the time, and the Iranian Quds Force Commander Qasim Sulaimani.

The newspaper accused Qatar of exiting “early from the Arab-Islamic consensus” on Iran, adding “its defence of the Iranian terrorist regime shows the secret Doha-Tehran alliance intends to strike at Arab and Islamic solidarity.”

All of this while Qatar signed the anti-Iran Riyadh Declaration issued after the Arab-Islamic-America summit on May 21 2017.

But why would Qatar, a country that hosts the largest US air force base in the Middle East (Al-Udeid), veer off the Saudi-led GCC military and diplomatic track?


Gulf watchers know that Qatar is suspicious of Saudi goals under the GCC umbrella, and it wants an independent foreign policy, free from Saudi or Iranian influence.

Qatar hardly sees Saudi Arabia as a harmless neighbour. Tensions in Saudi-Qatar relations started right after the former emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khaifa Al Thani (1995 – 2013) came to power via a bloodless coup in 1995 by overthrowing his father Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad Al Thani. Sheikh Khalifa was visiting Saudi Arabia at the time, which embarrassed the Saudi government.

Sheikh Hamad’s takeover in 1995 was preceded by a Saudi attack on a Qatari border security post in September 1992, in violation of a mutual defence treaty the two states had signed in 1982.

Riyadh also thwarted Qatari initiatives to export liquefied gas to other GCC member states in the 1990s. Emir Sheikh Hamad began to pull Qatar out of the Saudi shadow, a policy that Emir Sheikh Tamim is also pursuing.

Qatari satellite news channel Al Jazeera occasionally broadcasts programs criticising Saudi Arabia and, much to the anger of Riyadh, it hosted Saudi dissidents in a popular talk show in June 2002.

The incident led to Saudi Arabia recalling its ambassador from Doha in September 2002. Full diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored five years later, in September 2007, on Qatari assurance that Al Jazeera would refrain from broadcasting anti-Saudi programs.

A big push in the region

At the same time, Qatar, with the massive amount of oil and gas-generated income in its coffers (US$191 billion GDP in 2012), has been pushing for a bigger foreign policy and diplomatic profile in the region.

Doha successfully mediated a series of conflicts in the 2000s. It broke the political impasse in Lebanon by persuading the Sunni-led Lebanese government and the opposition Hezbollah to sign the May 2008 Doha Agreement; it mediated the conflict between the Yemeni government and Houthis in February 2008 (though it failed subsequently to find a permanent solution to the conflict); and, in February 2010, it facilitated a ceasefire agreement between the Sudanese government and the opposition Justice and Equality Movement.

Sudanese parties sign Darfur truce deal.

These successful mediations brought the tiny country enviable diplomatic plaudits from home and abroad.

In 2011, to the surprise of many regional states, the Qatar military participated in the NATO-led intervention to dislodge the Gaddafi government in Libya. It wanted to achieve a similar goal in Syria – to topple the Bashar Al-Assad government – but did not succeed primarily due to Iranian and Russian opposition.

Despite being an autocracy, Qatar presented itself as a frontline Arab state for politically transforming the Arab world, under the rubric of the Arab Spring movements.

Its objective was to strengthen Qatari national security and foreign policy autonomy in the Gulf region, a neighbourhood dominated by giants such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

What next?

Nonetheless, the diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia does not bode well for Qatar. The Saudi-led diplomatic offensive has isolated it from the rest of GCC and the Middle East region by cutting off air, land and sea routes to Doha.

Doha has been accused again of supporting regional terror groups – al-Qaeda and ISIL in Iraq and Syria - and cooperating with Iran.

Qatar has always denied funding extremist groups, but the small country has been accused in the last few years of allowing terrorist financiers to operate within its territory with impunity.

The Qatari government has also pledged support for Hamas, the Palestinian group regarded as a liberation force against Israeli occupation by most Muslim countries, but as a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, Egypt and Canada.

Qatar can expect no serious help from Iran either, as any possible Iranian political or diplomatic help runs the risk of further embittering Saudi-Qatar relations and permanently subject Doha to Saudi wrath.

The Trump administration is definitely not on Qatar’s side, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking in Australia, indirectly hoped to resolve the intra-GCC irritants and put Qatar back in the Saudi-driven GCC orbit.

Cracks in the Saudi-Qatar relationship would undercut the joint Arab-US fight against regional terror and extremist groups. It’s difficult to say how long Qatar would be in the position to resist the Saudi diplomatic offensive.

But backing down from the fight with Riyadh looks set to produce two outcomes. First, Doha would be obliged to downgrade its support to rebel groups in Syria, linked to either Muslim Brotherhood or al-Qaeda. And second, it must be willing to shed some degree of its foreign policy autonomy to participate in the Saudi-led offensive against Iran.

In either case, Qatar has undermined the anti-Iran alliance, giving Tehran more time to reassess the situation and consider its options.

Mohammed Nuruzzaman, Associate Professor of International Relations, Gulf University for Science and Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

People’s vote held on Zuma

Civil society organisations are holding polls at train stations

By Tariro Washinyira
6 June 2017

Members of the public cast their vote on Zuma’s presidency outside Observatory train station. Photo: Tariro Washinyira

 

On Monday and Tuesday, a coalition of civil society organisations under Unite Behind and Save SA held a public poll at three train stations – Observatory, Rosebank and Mowbray, asking people to “vote Yes or No to the Jacob Zuma presidency”.

Since April, the two organisations have been holding the polls in different areas – Maitland, Plumstead, Tableview and Khayelitsha.

Lynne Wilkinson, one of the organisers, said, “The intention is to count the votes and present it in Parliament during the no-confidence vote against Zuma, and say this is what people want.”
“Different organisations are fighting for health care, clean safe toilets, social grants and education, but we believe Zuma is a barrier because of his corruption,” she said.

Wilkinson said commuters had been responsive and took time to vote even though they were rushing to work or home.

After casting her vote, Ma Dlamini [she did not give her first name] said Zuma should go because many black people were suffering.

David Lydall of Save SA said a few people, who want Zuma, were not happy with the campaign, but a lot of people were saying he should go.

A number of civil society organisations support the “People’s Vote”. These include: Alternative Information and Development Centre, Centre for Environmental Rights, District 6 Working Committee, Equal Education, Financial Sector Campaign Coalition, Ndifuna Ukwazi, PHA Food & Farming Campaign, Right 2 Know, SAFCEI, SA First Forum, Save SA, SECTION27, the Social Justice Coalition, Sonke Gender Justice, the Treatment Action Campaign, Triangle Project, Trust for Community Outreach and Education, the Women and Democracy Initiative and the Women’s Legal Centre.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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South Africa's in a recession. Here's what that means

The bad news keeps piling up for South Africa’s economy.
Shutterstock

South Africa has been rocked by news that it has slipped into a recession after its gross domestic product (GDP) declined 0.7% during the first quarter of 2017 after contracting by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2016. Jannie Rossouw explains what it means.

What is a technical recession?

It’s when an economy suffers two consecutive quarters of negative economic performance. It refers to shrinking economic output, sometimes also known as negative economic growth or economic decline.

In short, it implies that the economic activity of a country is declining. This is never a good thing. In South Africa’s case it’s particularly serious because the country needs strong economic growth to make inroads into unemployment, which currently stands at more than 27%.

South Africa desperately needs a strong economy for other reasons two. The first is that the living standards of its citizens can’t improve without economic growth. The second is that the economy needs to grow for the government to be able to increase revenue to meet its growing social welfare budget.

There are other ways to describe a recession, although the technical definition is one that’s generally accepted. Other definitions include “an economy performing below potential” or “an increase in the output gap”. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that there’s a technical definition for a recession, but no agreed definition for a depression (as in Great Depression of the 1930s).

South Africa’s economy showed marginal positive growth for 2016, although it then contracted in the fourth quarter of the year. With similar contraction in the first quarter of 2017, the country entered a technical recession.

If the economy shows positive growth for the remaining three quarters of this year, South Africa will avert a recession for the calendar year 2017.

What caused it?

Economic activity contracted over a wide range of sectors, including construction, manufacturing and transport. Only mining and agriculture made a positive contribution to output growth. All other sectors contracted.

This reflects subdued demand throughout the South African economy. The data on the first quarter confirms what many small and medium business owners have been saying since the beginning of 2017 – that demand is down and that business conditions are tough.

The important question is whether this recession will continue in the second quarter – April to June, or whether there will be a turn around to economic growth.

Who’s to blame?

It’s difficult to say who is to blame. But it must be noted that recessions are rare events, as policies are generally aimed at economic growth. This is the second recession experienced in the post 1994 South Africa.

Rapid economic growth depends on investment, which in turn is dependent on confidence and positive expectations of the country’s future. President Jacob Zuma’s administration doesn’t instil confidence. This partly explains subdued investment. The recent credit risk downgrades into sub-investment grade has made South Africa a less attractive investment destination.

The lack of confidence is also reflected in suppressed demand, which in turn results in contractions in economic output.

How do we get out of it?

Investment is required to get South Africa out of its depressed economic conditions. Investment will boost demand in the economy, with positive spill-over effects into a number of sectors.

Naturally restoring South Africa’s credit risk rating to investment grade would help boost investment. A better credit rating would reduce the risk of investing in the country.

The upcoming credit rating decision from global credit rating agency Moodys’ is going to be a critical moment. This after two big rating agencies Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poors downgraded some of South Africa’s instruments into sub-investment grade. A downgrade from Moodys’ will trigger massive capital flights which will exert further pressure on the economy.

What company are we keeping? Are other countries in the same boat at the moment?

South Africa is joining a growing list of countries which have slipped into technical recessions. These include Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea and Venezuela. It’s important to remember that a country’s status can change from quarter to quarter depending on its growth rate. This means that an assessment of economic growth or recession status needs to be made based on the most recent data.

Jannie Rossouw, Head of School of Economic & Business Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Is Mexico actually the world's second most murderous nation?

Some 13 people ‘disappear’ in Mexico every day, and the country is on track to record 30,000 homicides this year. Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

This year Mexico celebrates the centennial of Juan Rulfo, one of the 20th century’s greatest Mexican writers.

His first novel, Pedro Páramo (1955), tells of a man travelling through Comala, a ghost village that “sits on the coals of the earth at the very mouth of hell.” Comala is haunted by Páramo, a brutal local potentate who, offended by the villagers’ indifference to the demise of his loved one, has starved them into half-alive shades.

Rulfo’s work embodies the mad violence that the country endured in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921).

And today, a hundred years after Rulfo’s birth, Mexicans are once again facing a rancorous power struggle and unforgiving bloodshed.

According to an International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) survey on armed conflicts released in May 2017, Mexico is now the second-deadliest country in the world, with 22,967 homicide victims in 2016.

That makes Mexico, now in the eleventh year of its war on drugs, more violent than war zones such as Afghanistan or Yemen, the study claims. Its death toll is surpassed only by Syria’s 50,000 conflict deaths in 2016.

The country where life is worth nothing

The IISS report found an eager reader in US President Donald Trump, who retweeted a Drudge Report link to an article on Mexico’s violence.

But in a joint statement by the foreign and interior ministries, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called IISS’s assertions “unsubstantiated” and said the report was based on “dubious methodologies”.

He also argued that the report incorrectly used legal terms related to armed conflicts, asserting that not all homicides in Mexico are related to the war on drugs and that neither organised crime groups nor the involvement of the army in law enforcement can be legally considered evidence of an armed conflict.


Trump officials recanted his citation of the IISS report after conferring with Mexican officials.

Technically, the Mexican government’s critiques are correct. Criminologists usually calculate crime rates as the number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies for every 100,000 persons – not as a gross figure, as IISS has done.

Using that methodology, UN figures places Mexico’s homicide rate at 16.4 murders per 100,000 residents, which is significantly lower than Brazil (25.2), Venezuela (53.7) and Honduras (90.4).

But the numbers are still bleak: according to the Peña Nieto administration, Mexico had 7,727 homicides from January to April 2017. If this trend continues, warns Alejandro Hope, a public security expert in Mexico, some 30,000 people will have been killed by the end of this year. This would be Mexico’s highest murder rate since the 1960s.

This nightmare of unremitting violence is inflicted by both criminal organisations and agents of the Mexican state: national death by anomie, or lawlessness.

A bloody May

The same day that the government denounced IISS’s report, the Mexican news agency Diario Cambio published a video of the Mexican army carrying out what appeared to be an extrajudicial execution. After a skirmish with suspected fuel smugglers in the town of Palmarito, Puebla, a soldier fired directly into the back of an injured man’s head.

Mexico’s army has been accused of extrajudicial killings for a decade. (Warning: graphic content)

The video reveals, in cold blood, the worst of the human rights violations perpetrated by the army during the decade-long war on drugs.

Just hours later, in the northern state of Tamaulipas, a group of gunmen killed a human rights activist, Miriam Elizabeth Rodríguez Martínez. Rodríguez had become a leader in the movement of families searching for missing loved ones after she found the remains of her 14-year-old daughter Karen, who disappeared in 2012, in a hidden grave in the town of San Fernando in 2014.

In Mexico, 13 persons “disappear” each day, according to a research developed by the weekly magazine Proceso and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE).

Five days after Rodríguez was murdered, Javier Valdéz, an award-winning Mexican journalist known for covering the drug cartels, was killed in Culiacán, the capital of the western state of Sinaloa and former home of the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Valdéz was pulled from his car by several gunmen and shot dead in the street around noon. He was the sixth journalist murdered in Mexico in 2017, making the country the world’s third-deadliest place for reporters, after Syria and Afghanistan.

The guilty silence

Mexico’s president responded to the violent events of May by gathering his cabinet and the country’s governors and promising more resources to help journalists and human rights advocates under threat. He also increased funding for the special prosecutor’s office tasked with investigating crimes against these groups and called for better coordination between federal and state authorities.

After announcing these measures, Peña Nieto held a moment of silence for the murdered journalists. In a symbolic and emotional scene, shouts of “justice!” were heard from reporters covering the event – an indictment of the Mexican state’s guilty silence in the face of so many murders.

The state, simultaneously bloated and impotent, has few answers to offer the Mexican people, in part because it is simply waging a war owned by someone else, namely, the United States.


On May 18, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged the role American drug consumers play in driving Mexico’s lawlessness crisis, telling reporters that Americans “need to confront” that the US has caused the ongoing drug-related violence in Mexico.

“But for us,” Tillerson said, “Mexico wouldn’t have a trans-criminal organised crime problem and the violence that they’re suffering. We really have to own up to that.”

Yet days later, the Trump administration, full of contradictions, released a budget proposal foreseeing US$87.66 million in counter-narcotics aid to Mexico in 2018 – a 45% reduction from the 2016 outlay.

And so Mexico has become Rulfo’s Comala, the phantom realm of damnation in which “those who die come back to get a blanket after going to hell.”

Voices of hope

Amid the bloodshed, though, there is hope.

On May 28, hundreds of indigenous representatives came together at the National Indigenous Congress to nominate María de Jesus Patricio Martínez as their independent candidate for Mexico’s upcoming 2018 presidential election.

Patricio Martínez is a Nahua woman and a traditional healer. “Our participation in politics,” she said, “does not seek votes [but rather] pursues life.”

Before representatives of the Mayas, Yaquis, Zoques and other indigenous peoples, Patricio Martínez called for healing, resistance and renewal. The time has come to work for “reconstituting our peoples, who have been beaten for many years,” she said.

In Mexico, as in Comala, survival is the ultimate political challenge. But, alas, the Peña Nieto government does not dare to embrace it.

Luis Gómez Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

London Bridge attack: too right 'enough is enough' – but Britain must tackle uncomfortable questions

“Enough is enough” announced the British prime minister, Theresa May, outside Downing Street in the aftermath of the third terror attack in the UK in as many months.

Lasting change means moving beyond the rhetoric that follows attacks. Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/PA Images

Well I agree. Enough is enough. So maybe we could start by bypassing the call for peaceful vigils – beloved by those who are keener for us to turn the other cheek than to have the “difficult and embarrassing conversations” she now calls for? This is not to dismiss the hurt of those directly affected, but rather to bypass the encouragement of ersatz emotions by those who might prefer us to remain passive and disengaged.

Enough is enough, but what next?
Andrew Matthews/PA Wire/PA Images

Rather than being “united … in horror and mourning”, as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, consoled in her virtue-signalling statement after these attacks, maybe it is time we focused on becoming united in purpose – a purpose that ought not just reflect the “determination” to defeat terrorism as she narrowly defined it? A purpose that might offer something beyond terrorism for us all to focus on and present something more visionary to engage with – including for the nihilistic few to whom we have evidently failed to impart any sense of belief and belonging?

Sixteen years on from 9/11, might it not be time to move beyond the same old calls for more security that emanate from the usual suspects in self-interested quarters at such times? More recently, this has been augmented by demands, including by the prime minister herself, that the internet and social media platforms be censored and policed too. But the fact is that if you or I were to trawl through as many jihadist websites as we could find, we still would not turn into the morally bankrupt murderers that are committing these atrocities. This should give the lie to naive models of media influence impacting on hapless minds.

Likewise, to suggest that British foreign policy is somehow responsible for all that we see, or that supposedly understandable grievances emanate from the experience of racism and exclusion at home, is also to miss what matters most.

Britain has both overtly and covertly interfered in the affairs of others overseas for as long as I can remember, and well before that – usually much more forcefully and murderously than in the ways it does at present. That there is space for some kind of response to this does not dictate the nihilistic form that this now takes. That is what is new today and which most needs answering by those fond of such simplistic platitudes. To think in these terms holds us all back, including those elsewhere who are genuinely interested in liberation.

No racist society

Maybe it is time for some to note too, that British society is not the racist catastrophe presumed of those who prefer to talk up Islamophobia at such times. The new chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, appears to believe that we are all just one terror incident away from launching a pogrom against the Muslim community when she announced that: “The last thing we need is people … taking out their frustrations on people in other communities.” Where is her evidence for that? Not just self-reported slights at presumed offence and injustices, but serious incidents – incidents serious enough to warrant prosecution and conviction for an act of physical violence?

When I was young, I remember friends at school advising that they were going to beat up members of minority groups on a Friday night and inquiring whether others might care to join them. We don’t live in that world anymore and a good thing too. Good riddance to racism and homophobia. But at the same time, the race relations industry and others appear to have gone into overdrive turning every verbal mishap into a recordable offence. Can we talk about this too now?

What we do have is a problem that stretches far beyond terrorism and that will require a national conversation going much further than that envisaged by those proposing this today – a conversation that addresses the disconnection of the many from the political process, as well as the often self-indulgent engagement of the few within it. A conversation that challenges the moral capitulation of the old right as much as the political correctness of the old left.

One that asks why it is that, in an age when – despite there never before having been so many young people having so much focus placed on their emotions within their education – there are still a small, but growing, number of these who appear unable to handle setbacks and disappointment such that, at the margins, a handful think little of acting in this way.

We live in a time when many are told that they may cause offence if they express what they genuinely believe. When rather than engaging in robust debate, we are encouraged not to interrogate the beliefs and behaviours of others – and government legislates accordingly in the name of preventing terrorism. It is a world that the authorities – from all sides – that are calling for change today have helped to create. And this, just a few days away from a general election that ought to have encouraged just such debates to the surface. “Enough is enough”? Too right.

Bill Durodie, Professor and Chair of International Relations, University of Bath

This article was originally published on The Conversation.