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In an interview with a Russian TV, the Yemeni President Ali Abdalla
Saleh made a frontal verbal attack on al-Jazeera. He said the channel
peddles lies and those who are behind it are liars. He also accused the
channel of stirring trouble throughout the Arab world. Actually, he even
went beyond that and charged the state of Qatar of helping the
opposition and financing the revolt in his country. But why is Qatar
doing this? Ali Abdalla Saleh’s explanation was that Qatar is a country
with little population and a lot of money that also wants to play a big
role, so it is using its money and al-Jazeera channel to achieve that
purpose.
Up to here, what the Yemeni president said about Qatar is all true. But
he did make one mistake in his description of what Qatar is doing: he
called it a conspiracy. He is dead wrong on that. What Qatar is doing is
not a conspiracy, it is “as obvious as the sun” (wadhah wuduh al-shams)
as Arabs say, and one would either have to be blind not to see it, or
just not want to see it. Blame this poorly chosen word on the Arab habit
of calling everything that is a little complicated a conspiracy, or you
could blame it on Ali Abdalla Saleh’s limited vocabulary and his near
lack of formal schooling. One would have thought, he would have been
careful not to have used the word conspiracy again given the problem it
got him in the last time he used that word and accused Israel and the US
of supervising the revolt in his country from an operations room in Tel
Aviv. (After making those charges, Ali Abdalla Saleh had to quickly
backtrack and had to call the US government to apologize and say that he
was misunderstood. To show the US government’s displeasure with him and
to underscore his new and diminished status as a dictator on his way
out, rather than an indispensable ally, his call was taken by the
Homeland security adviser John Brennan rather than the president of the
US).
In a way, Ali Abdalla Saleh’s portrayal of Qatar sheds further light on
the dual track policy that Qatar, and to some extent the Gulf
Cooperation Council are pursuing in the Middle East and North Africa,
that we have pointed to several times in these pages. The broad features
of this policy, with some modification here and there, is to support the
revolts in non-Gulf countries and to shield the Arabian Gulf itself from
such revolts. The fact that the Gulf Council’s troops which crossed to
Bahrain to quell the uprising there are called “al-Jazeera’s shield
(Dar’ al-Jazirah)” may be an interesting coincidence or a Freudian slip,
nevertheless, the name provides not just a clear signal of the mission
of the troops, but wittingly or unwittingly highlights the dual track
policy of Qatar, al-Jazeera and the Gulf Cooperation Council of
shielding their countries from revolts and encouraging revolts
elsewhere.
The double game that Qatar and al-Jazeera are playing in Yemen and
elsewhere are so obvious, Ali Abdalla Saleh does not need to produce a
whole lot of new evidence to make his case, but he himself is also
playing a game of deflecting and blaming others for his problem. Yes
Qatar and al-Jazeera manipulate events, spin it a certain way and are
promoting a specific outcome to the Yemeni conflict, but they did not
create the situation in the first place-Saleh did.
Ali Abdalla Saleh’s charges against al-Jazeera and Qatar are like the
reactions of Mubarak of Egypt, too little, too late, for already Qatar
(through al-Jazeera) has direct connection and following in Yemen, and
is about to help in kicking him out, as it had helped in kicking out
Mubarak and to a lesser extent Bin Ali of Tunisia. The Qataris and al-Jazeera
are probably already looking forward to the day that a new post-Abdalla
Saleh president will visit Qatar and thank them for the job that they
had done in getting rid of Ali Abdalla Saleh, the same way in which the
new Egyptian prime minister visited them. But still, no one should write
off Ali Abdalla Saleh, who may not have much formal education, but has a
lot of Yemeni tribal and street smarts.
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