Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has said a Saudi and Emirati plan to impose “stability” on the region by supporting authoritarian governments and military councils in Africa, Egypt, Libya and throughout the Arab world was a recipe for chaos, Middle East Eye has reported..
Sheikh Mohammed was addressing reporters in London on Sunday. He said the Saudi-UAE narrative was creating more terrorism, conflict and chaos and that “anyone who utters a contrary opinion is (in their view) a terrorist”.
He questioned whether designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, which both countries have done and the US promises to do, was either a “wise or pragmatic” decision. “In Egypt, maybe there are five million Muslim Brotherhood members. Can you imagine if 10 percent of them decided to be real terrorists, using violence? That would make 500,000,” said Sheikh Mohammed.
While the Islamic State group counted on about 70,000 members, he said: “We had a coalition of 64 countries to defeat them and they still are not defeated. Can we afford 500,000 more terrorists in the region? I do not think we can.”
Sheikh Mohammed said Qatar has been the subject of efforts to demonise it by a quartet of Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and that some states had been blackmailed into pursuing the same policy. This “creates a lot of instability in the Horn of Africa and the sub-Saharan area”, Sheikh Mohammed said.
He said Saudi and the UAE policies aimed at isolating Iran are not working. “Right now, they are continuing with the same policy that has not worked for the last three years. I think we need to revisit this,” Sheikh Mohammed said.
He criticised the recent summits in Makkah, in which Prime Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani participated, saying the final summit statement was not prepared either at an expert or ministerial level before being issued. The GCC was not united in its view of Iran, as the Makkah summit communiqué claimed, he said.
Sheikh Mohammed said the crackdown that recently took place in Sudan was “a massacre” and added Qatar supported the Sudanese people but had had no contacts with the military council since the April 11 coup that overthrew Omar Al Bashir.