International News
8 FEBRUARY 2021
Qatar Blockade Quashed
Fakhriya M. Suleiman, MA Global Media and Postnational Communications
The New Year marked a turning point for international relations within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The once frosty relationship between Qatar and the neighbouring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is now in the process of thawing. 4 January 2021 saw Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, Sheikh Ahmad Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah, announce that the KSA will be lifting its air, sea, and land blockade on Qatar. Sheikh al-Sabah told Kuwait TV that the two Gulf states had ‘reached [an agreement] to [re]open airspace and land and sea borders’ with one another. The almost 4-year long KSA-Qatar rift began on 5 June 2017 when GCC members KSA, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as non-GCC member Egypt, announced the severing of diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar. Thereafter, several other countries, including the Maldives, Niger, Jordan, and Mauritania, had also either cut or downgraded ties with Qatar. The blockading countries charged Qatar with inciting regional unrest, aiding and
abbeting terrorism, and ‘getting too close to Iran.’ Qatar vehemently denies these charges. Analysts point to the presidency of Donald Trump for having fuelled the fire of the diplomatic rift. Middle East Eye (MEE) noted that the Trump administration had pushed for tough action against Qatar due to its close relations with Iran. MEE’s Alex MacDonald went on to highlight the 2017 Riyadh Summit, where former President Trump called for the KSA to crack down on regional terrorism, giving the ‘greenlight’ for GCC hostilities against Qatar. In a series of tweets after the Summit, Trump appeared to take credit for the blockade that transpired, penning ‘leaders pointed to Qatar’ when he called for a clampdown on radical Islamist ideology and funding thereof in the region. July 2017 saw the blockading nations issue a 13-point list of demands to end the Gulf crisis - demands which had to be complied with within ten days. Among them was the termination of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera (AJ) news network and all affiliated stations. In a tweet, Bahrain’s former Foreign Minister, Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, accused the AJ network of ‘spreading lies and rumours that cause confusion in our countries.’ In the wake of the 13 demands, Marwan
Bishara, AJ’s Senior Political Analyst, commented that the approach of the blockading countries showed ‘total ignorance of international relations and a lack of understanding about what state sovereignty means.’ Qatar’s rejection of the 13 demands lead to a stalemate in the rift. In May 2018, Bahrain’s al-Khalifa told Alsharq Alawsat newspaper that he saw ‘no glimmer of hope’ of an end to the GCC crisis. However, fellow non-blockading GCC members Oman and Kuwait remained neutral in the spat and facilitated mediation geared towards Gulf reconciliation. Despite an initial financial strain and food security scare due to reliance on imports from the KSA, Qatar proved resilient. The National Development Strategy, released in 2018 by Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser al-Thani, roadmapped how the Gulf state would ‘raise its self-sufficiency.’ For the Financial Times (FT), however, the recent turn of events and sudden rapprochement is attributed to the culmination of Trump’s presidency. The FT argued that now the KSA’s crown prince ‘...needs to earn credit with team Biden, which has publicly criticised the [KSA’s] human rights abuses…
Easing the dispute with Qatar was the lowhanging fruit.’ January 2021 saw Qatar’s Emir arrive in the KSA’s heritage site Al-Ula to attend the 2021 GCC Summit. The regional rift symbolically culminated with MBS embracing Qatar’s Sheikh al-Thani upon his arrival. Later during the summit, the pair signed an agreement on regional ‘solidarity and stability.’ For Saudi Foreign Minister, Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, this marked ‘the turning of the page on all points of difference and a full return of diplomatic relations.’ While the remaining GCC members also signed the agreement, Emirati diplomat Omar Saif Ghobash erred on the side of caution during his January interview with CNBC International. For Ghobash, ‘things are not going to be rosy straight away.’ He went on to explain that Qatar was in fact ‘not blockaded,’ but GCC states ‘withdrew cooperation’ therewith based on the former’s problematic ‘fundamental approach to the region.’ According to Ghobash, the Emirates will now be giving Qatar ‘the benefit of the doubt and will see how it goes’ from there.
Dutch government steps down over childcare allowance scandal Charlotte Paule, MSc Politics of Asia Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced on 15 January that his government would resign over a childcare allowance scandal. Thousands of families were wrongly accused of fraud and forced to pay back tens of thousands of Euros. Around 26,000 people were affected, according to Dutch media. The scandal comes after a parliamentary report published in December that revealed civil servants had cut benefit payments to wrongly accused families. It also comes just a few weeks before the scheduled March parliamentary elections in the Netherlands. Most cabinet members have announced that they will stay at their posts in a caretaker capacity until after the elections, in order to maintain a coherent response to the coronavirus situation. This scandal is not a recent revelation in Dutch politics, as State Secretary of Finance Menno Snel resigned in 2019 over his involvement. The scandal returned to headlines in December 2020 with the publication of a parliamentary report titled Unprecedented Injustice. The document stated that the ‘fundamental principles of the rule of law had been violated,’ and showed that minute errors, such as wrongly-filled forms or a missing signature, were used as pretenses to accuse tens of thousands of families of fraud and sometimes demand repayments of as much as €125,000. Some of the affected families were
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financially ruined, forced to move house, denied childcare and other allowances causing some couples to split up. It also revealed that up to 11,000 dual-citizenship families were singled out for special scrutiny, leading to accusations of racial profiling. After a cabinet meeting on Friday 15 January, Prime Minister Mark Rutte handed in his resignation to King WillemAlexander. At a press conference, he admitted that the report was ‘fair’ and ‘scathing,’ and announced his government would step down. While most ministers, including Rutte, will stay as caretakers until the 17 March elections, Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy Eric Wiebes resigned with immediate effect. Opposition Labour Party leader Lodewijk Asscher also resigned over his involvement in the scandal while he was Social Affairs Minister in the former government, stating that the system ‘made the government an enemy of its people.’ The government took steps to try and repair the damage by setting aside more than €500 million, with around €30,000 allocated to each affected parent. Rutte also promised to make policy decisions more transparent by publishing official documents publicly. According to Politico, this is a departure from the ‘Rutte Doctrine’ which posits that civil servants should be able to discuss things and make decisions without these being made public in order to promote a more open civil service culture. Many observers have, however, pointed out the timing of this resignation, which
Mark Rutte was first elected Prime Minister of the Netherlands in 2010, and his party VVD is still expected to win the 17 March elections despite the scandal. (Credit: ErikSmit via Pixabay)
occurred just a month before parliament was scheduled to break up in preparation for the 17 March general elections. Though Rutte takes full responsibility for the injustice done to Dutch families, this move has widely been seen as a symbolic gesture. The Prime Minister has rejected this criticism; during his 15 January press conference, he stated that ‘the government was not up to standards throughout this whole affair,’ and that resignation was ‘unavoidable.’ Rutte’s center-right Party for People’s Freedom and Democracy (VVD), projected
to win 35 seats in the March elections, was polling at around 27% in December. It is followed by Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party with 25 projected seats. Rem Korteweg from the Clingendael Institute told The Guardian that ‘the government is taking political responsibility with little political cost,’ and that this scandal should not affect their overall ability to win the elections. If this is the case, it would be the third coalition government led by Rutte since 2010.
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