After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (33 page)

Meanwhile, it was reported in late 2009 by the Toronto-Harvard OpenNet Initiative that—as something of an exception to the country’s massive increase in internet censorship—the UAE had quietly unblocked internet access to web sites based in Israel with the ‘.IL’ suffix. All such sites were suddenly found to be ‘consistently accessible via the country’s two ISPs’ and it was stated that ‘…it is not clear why the UAE authorities have decided to remove the ban on .IL Web sites and whether this unblocking will continue’.
⁹⁰
Even more curiously, in late 2010 it was reported by a Kuwaiti newspaper that a female member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family had been flown to Israel to undergo ‘complex heart surgery’. The entry procedures were reportedly facilitated by a member of the Knesset, after the sheikha’s doctor had recommended a specific hospital in Haifa. Interestingly, the sheikha’s picture was featured in a report on Israel’s Channel Two which emphasised the way in which ‘medicine does not differentiate between patients and should be a means of rapprochement between the peoples of the region’.
⁹¹
And in February 2011 Amnesty International highlighted the disappearance of a UAE national teacher who had previously been detained in late 2008 for ‘demonstrating in solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli military attack’.
⁹²
In years past it is likely that a Gulf national taking such a stance would have had the tacit approval of the authorities, rather than face any difficulties.

In some ways Bahrain has gone even further than the UAE in improving its relations with Israel, at least on an official level. For the past few years government personnel have been instructed not to refer to Israel as the ‘Zionist Entity’ or ‘The Enemy’ and in 2005 the kingdom closed down its equivalent boycott office.
⁹³
Moreover, according to leaked US diplomatic cables from the same year, the king confided to US diplomats that ‘He [the king] already has contacts with Israel at the intelligence/security
level (i.e. with Mossad) and indicated that Bahrain will be willing to move forward in other areas’. When pressed on trade ties with Israel, however, the king did admit that it was ‘too early, and that the matter would have to wait until after a Palestinian state’.
⁹⁴
Indeed there are signs in Bahrain, as with the other Gulf monarchies, that revelations of any formal ties with Israel would be met with strong condemnation from the national population. In summer 2010, for example, large demonstrations were staged in Bahrain’s principal mosques—both Sunni and Shia—to denounce the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Flotilla. Worryingly for a king nurturing security and trade links with Israel, the crowd’s main slogan described the US president as being a liar for ‘not exposing Israel as being a terrorist state’.
⁹⁵

There is some evidence that the governments of both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also been relaxing their stance on Israel. Up until 2009 there was an Israeli ‘commercial interest section’ based in Doha,
⁹⁶
and in 2010 it was reported that the Qatar Investment Authority and the Saudi Olayan Group had partnered with Credit Suisse and Israel’s IDB Holdings in order to form a new fund to ‘opportunistically pursue credit investments in emerging markets’. With each partner putting in $250 million, the $1 billion fund is one of the largest new funds created since the 2008 credit crunch. Although the resulting media coverage noted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were still technically part of an Israel boycott group, analysts were quoted as stating that ‘the Arab boycott is mainly on paper’ and that ‘there is a flow of Israeli know-how and products to the Arab world’.
⁹⁷
Interestingly, it appears that Qatar’s relaxations on Israel have now also extended to education. According to documents leaked to
Al-Arab
newspaper in summer 2011, documents and course material supplied to trainee Arabic teachers in the emirate were written in both Arabic and Hebrew and seemingly sourced from the Israeli Ministry for Education. When questioned on this matter, the distributors simply argued that ‘there had been a mistake’.
⁹⁸

With regards to security ties, as with Bahrain an open channel of communication now exists between Qatar and the Israeli security services. In late 2010 a large delegation of senior Israeli policemen was in the emirate, ostensibly taking part in an Interpol assembly, with the head of the Israeli police’s investigations and intelligence branch being among them. Remarkably, it was reported by Agence France Presse that the Israeli delegation also met with Dubai’s chief of police ‘by chance’ and
that ‘there was no apparent tension… despite the dispute between their countries’.
⁹⁹
Thus far there is little firm evidence of growing security ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, or at least there have been no blatant admissions as with Bahrain and Qatar. Nevertheless, for the past few years there have been frequent and powerful rumours circulating that the two powers are cooperating, mostly as a result of Saudi Arabia’s stance on Iran and the existence of a mutual enemy.
¹⁰⁰

Division and disunity

Despite a range of current shared threats, perceived or otherwise, and despite the invasion of Kuwait remaining fresh in the minds of many Gulf nationals, the Gulf monarchies nevertheless seem further away than ever before from enjoying basic cooperation and collective security. Although, as discussed in the following chapter, there have been a number of recent actions that have been branded as ‘collective action’ in the wake of the Arab Spring, in practise these have been effectively unilateral or bilateral efforts on the part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to head off regime collapse in their most precarious neighbours. Indeed, while formal councils and various mechanisms now exist on paper, there is still no effective body to bind together these largely similar states into a meaningful alliance. In the short term this means the Gulf monarchies remain highly vulnerable to foreign aggression and petty disputes between themselves, and in the long term means that their dependency on external security guarantees and the resulting exposure to its associated pathologies will remain high.

The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, better known as the ‘Gulf Cooperation Council’ is the organisation many had expected to present a ‘united front’ for the Gulf monarchies. Founded in 1981 in Abu Dhabi, the Council’s creation was spurred by the Iran-Iraq War and, in particular, Kuwaiti concerns of collateral damage or attack from its warring neighbours. On an economic level the Council was supposed to foster joint ventures between the monarchies, remove barriers to trade, and establish a common GCC currency by 2010. While there has been some limited success in establishing a GCC customs union, more serious economic integration has remained elusive, as a number of disputes have prevented stronger ties. In particular, Oman announced in 2006 that it would be unable to meet the requirements of the common
currency, while in 2009 the UAE announced its complete withdrawal from the project, seemingly as retaliation to the GCC’s announcement that its central bank would be located in Riyadh, not Abu Dhabi. Within days of the UAE’s secession thousands of its truck drivers were left stranded at the border with Saudi Arabia. Described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ the problem was publicly blamed on a new, unexpected Saudi fingerprinting system,
¹⁰¹
but most analysts agreed that it was a tit-for-tat response to the UAE’s currency stance. Moreover, although a GCC common market was launched in 2008, some Gulf monarchies have continued to sign bilateral free trade agreements with other states. Bahrain, which has developed an extensive FTA with the US, has been viewed by Saudi Arabia and other GCC members as having bypassed the GCC’s common market.

On a military level, the GCC was intended to provide collective security for all members via its Peninsula Shield Force. Founded in 1984, the force was supposed to comprise 10,000 soldiers representing all six monarchies. However, even after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 the force only had 5,000 servicemen, and because it had played no active role in the conflict it was temporarily disbanded, with participating units being returned to their respective national armies.
¹⁰²
In recent years there have been claims that the force has grown to 40,000,
¹⁰³
but it is unclear how many how many soldiers are actually based at its headquarters in Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid Military City, while its command and control structure remains ambiguous. The force’s existence has also been continually undermined by security disputes and even clashes between the Gulf monarchies. Even in the twenty-first century there is much evidence that nineteenth-and twentieth-century border problems and other old grievances remain unresolved. Between Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, for example, there continues to exist a bitter dispute over their frontiers. Dating back to the earliest Wahhabi attacks on Abu Dhabi’s territory, a 1950s standoff over the Buraimi Oasis, and a contested border settlement in the 1970s, the subject remains highly controversial. Several institutions in Abu Dhabi today continue to produce maps that show the emirate’s territory still including land that was ceded to Saudi Arabia years ago, and in March 2010 it was widely reported that a naval clash took place in disputed waters. According to
The Daily Telegraph
’s UAE-based reporter, a UAE vessel had opened fire on a Saudi vessel that had allegedly strayed into UAE territory. The Saudi vessel surrendered, but its sailors
were taken to Abu Dhabi and held in custody for over a week before being deported. Although a spokesperson for the UAE’s Ministry for Defence confirmed that the incident took place he was unable to provide any details. However, a Gulf-based diplomat stated that ‘…it looks as though attempts were made to keep this quiet, which is predictable given the important relationship between the two countries… But it does remind us of the simmering rows that there are in this part of the Gulf’.
¹⁰⁴

The ongoing disputes between Oman and the UAE have also undermined any sense of GCC collective security. For many years territorial issues were at stake, but over the past decade the situation has become much tenser. In 2003 the UAE began constructing a giant wall stretching across the desert border between the two states. Completed in 2008, it has effectively sealed off the UAE, closing the previously open border between the Abu Dhabi-controlled city of Al-Ayn and the adjoining Omani-controlled city of Buraimi. Greatly resented by residents of both cities and local agricultural businesses, who now have to use checkpoints to cross the border, the wall is seen as damaging centuries-old trade and familial ties between the two communities.
¹⁰⁵
More seriously, especially at an inter-governmental level, was the widely reported cracking of a UAE spy ring in Oman. In late 2010 Omani bloggers began claiming that arrests of ‘UAE agents’ had taken place, and in early 2011 the Omani authorities confirmed these suspicions. Although the UAE authorities initially denied the existence of the spies, stating that ‘The UAE expresses its full willingness to cooperate with… Oman in any investigations that it carries out in full transparency to uncover those who try to mar relations between the two countries’,
¹⁰⁶
the problem was only resolved following Kuwait-brokered personal visits to Oman by the Abu Dhabi crown prince and the ruler of Dubai.

Connected to the Gulf monarchies’ divisions over relations with Iran, it also transpired that the UAE spy ring may have been seeking information on Oman’s possible security links with Iran. As a prominent analyst at a Dubai-based think tank described ‘…one possibility is that the UAE wants to know more about Iran-Oman relations because of Tehran and Muscat’s long ties in security and military cooperation’.
¹⁰⁷
Indeed, shortly before the Omani authorities’ revelation, it was reported in Iran’s state-backed media that their minister for the interior
¹⁰⁸
had recently visited Muscat. Upon meeting with Oman’s ruler the minister reportedly described Oman as ‘an old friend of Iran which has always
been seeking to develop ties with Tehran’ and praised Oman for ‘sending the
Zinat Al-Bihar
vessel to Iran’s southern waters with a message of peace and friendship’ and releasing 101 Iranian prisoners that had been held in Omani jails. Meanwhile Oman’s ruler had reportedly ‘…called for expansion of bilateral ties, especially in economic areas, and said Iran can serve as a route for transition of goods from Oman to Central Asia’ before concluding that ‘Iran and Oman stand beside each other like two brothers and nothing can make a split between them’.
¹⁰⁹

Such spying and bilateral regional security deals with other regional powers—whether real or fictional—understandably attenuate any sense of trust in the GCC and its capabilities. Certainly, there is little doubt that all six of the Gulf monarchies’ governments continue to view separate, international security guarantees as their only effective safety net. Some of the Western powers have seized the opportunities presented by these weaknesses and have now begun to explore the possibility of widening their individual alliances and agreements to form sub-groups of Gulf monarchies. In other words, if two or three Gulf monarchies can be brought together under the umbrella of one Western power, then a sense of collective security can be created for those countries even if it is sponsored by a foreign power and involves bypassing the GCC and its Peninsula Shield Force. Following the founding of the French military base in Abu Dhabi in 2009, the French president’s opinion-editorial in Abu Dhabi’s state-backed English language newspaper hinted at such a possibility. Explaining that ‘…with this first French military base in the Middle East, our country also shows that it intends to be fully engaged in the security and stability of this region’ he then went on to state that ‘France has many allies in the region; our presence in Abu Dhabi will enable us to reinforce our strategic partnership with them’ and that ‘we [France] hope that solid multilateral defence cooperation will develop among our allies in the region’. He concluded that ‘For this reason, we want to fully involve Qatar in the recent French-Emirates “Gulf Shield” military exercise. In a region as troubled as yours, it is essential that the countries defending the same values work together to reinforce their common security’.
¹¹⁰