Egypt Is Arena for Influence of Arab Rivals
Published: July 10, 2013 106 Comments
(Page 2 of 2) N,Y TIMES
“This is clearly a setback for the ideology that Qatar and Turkey support and encourage,” said one Arab official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize two powerful nations. “If political Islam was a stock, it would have gone down dramatically over the past week.”
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Qatari officials declined to comment on the rivalry. But one Qatari official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Qatar’s financial aid in the past had been to the Egyptian people, not any individual figure or party.
The Qataris suffered two other, lesser setbacks in recent days: on Monday, 22 journalists at Al Jazeera resigned en masse, citing what they said was the station’s biased coverage of the Brotherhood. Al Jazeera’s bias in favor of the Islamist group has often been cited as a grievance against Qatar’s rulers, who are accused of using the station as an arm of their activist foreign policy.
Also on Tuesday, Ghassan Hitto, the prime minister of the main Syrian exile opposition group — who was seen as favorable to Qatar — resigned. Although the reasons for his resignation were not clear, it was generally viewed as a concession to Saudi Arabia, which had signaled its discontent with him.
Some analysts say Qatar has already begun to rein in its aggressive and eclectic foreign policy, which has included a willingness to engage with Iran that infuriated its Saudi neighbors. Last week, Qatar’s government joined Saudi Arabia and others in issuing a message of support to the transitional government installed by the Egyptian military, even as its allies in the Brotherhood protested furiously against what they called a military coup.
“It’s starting to look as if the Qataris have ceased playing the role of troublemaker and freelancer in the region, and falling in behind the Saudis,” said Peter Harling, an adviser with the International Crisis Group. “Events are allowing the Saudis to assume a regional leadership role that no one else can play right now.”
Despite Qatar’s strong financial support for Mr. Morsi’s government, some analysts say Qatari officials had privately become very critical of his many blunders over the past year. “The Qataris were not happy with the decision to take Morsi out, but they were not so happy with Morsi, either,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
The shift in Qatar’s role may also be related to the accession last month of the new Qatari emir, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Mr. Alani said. The emir led a joint Saudi-Qatari committee formed in 2007 to reduce tensions between the two countries, and he is widely thought to take a less aggressive approach to foreign policy than his father, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the former emir.
Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood was seen by some analysts as a policy based on pragmatism rather than ideology — it was viewed as a populist group that could deliver results, unlike its more secular and often more fractious rivals. That perception, too, may change now that the Brotherhood has been deposed in Egypt. Turkey’s support for Brotherhood affiliates was more a matter of shared principles: Turkey’s governing party is a mildly Islamist and populist group. But Turkey’s own struggles with a domestic protest movement in the past two months is likely to curtail its appetite for foreign adventures.
The Qatari and Turkish financial aid to Mr. Morsi’s government last year helped him to avert painful economic reforms being urged by the International Monetary Fund as the price for its own $4.8 billion aid package. The United States believes those changes — including a reduction of food and electricity subsidies — are necessary to help bring Egypt out of its crushing deficit and economic malaise.
But the Saudi, Emirati and Kuwaiti aid may serve the same purpose, staving off unpopular decisions and limiting another potential avenue of American influence over Egypt’s next government.
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