The Wall Street Journal - Arab States Demand Qatar Close Al Jazeera, Shutter Turkish Base

The Wall Street Journal - Arab States Demand Qatar Close Al Jazeera, Shutter Turkish Base

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June 23, 2017. Nicolas Parasie, Summer Said.

Document also demands Qatar curb ties with Iran and sever any relationship with Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah.

DUBAI—Saudi Arabia and other Arab states that have severed ties with Qatar issued a list of severe demands to end the worst regional diplomatic crisis in years, telling their Persian Gulf neighbor to close state broadcaster Al Jazeera, curb ties with Iran and end Turkey’s military presence on its soil.

Qatar also must cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Lebanese military and political movement Hezbollah and other groups that Saudi Arabia and its allies deem extremist and a threat to their rule, according to the 13-point list.

The government of Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani has 10 days to accept the demands, which include paying reparations and providing information on all opposition groups it has supported, the document says, without specifying what penalties the Saudi-led group will impose if Qatar fails to comply.

In the Qatari capital Doha, officials had no immediate response to the list of sweeping demands, a draft of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and matches the official version delivered Thursday to Qatari authorities by Kuwait, a senior Saudi official said.

But the demands represent a radical overhaul of the longtime pillars of Qatari policy and includes conditions the government has already said it won’t meet. Officials in Doha have described the Saudi-led moves to force its compliance as a blockade of their country and have demanded they be lifted before any talks to resolve the crisis.

In a signal the crisis could deepen just as most of the region breaks for a long holiday to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan, Turkey said within hours of the disclosure of the demands that it had no plans to re-evaluate its military base in Qatar.
Trump administration officials said they were assessing the conditions. In a bid to help resolve the crisis among America’s Persian Gulf allies, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had urged Qatar’s adversaries earlier this week to present Doha with a list of “reasonable and actionable” demands.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain broke ties with Qatar earlier this month, accusing Doha of fomenting extremism in the region and meddling in their internal affairs, allegations that President Donald Trump has echoed and Qatar has denied. The countries also severed transport ties to Qatar, disrupting airline traffic, snarling shipping routes and squeezing food supplies to the Gulf nation.

The regional diplomatic crisis and Saudi Arabia’s move to bring its fellow Sunni Muslim monarchy into line coincides with a period of deep political change in the kingdom, the region’s richest economy.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman earlier this week made his 31-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman next in line to the throne, a sign that Riyadh is gearing up to more vigorously pursue what it sees as its vital interests in the region.

Prince Mohammed has overseen far-reaching economic reforms at home and supported a costly war in neighboring Yemen to check what the kingdom sees as the creeping influence of its main regional rival, Iran.

The list of demands passed to Qatar on Thursday calls on it to reduce diplomatic representation with Iran and expel elements of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military arm of the Iranian government that has funded armed groups in the region partly through extensive business dealings.

One seed of the crisis appears to have been the posting late last month on the official Qatari news agency of comments, purportedly by Qatar’s emir, that praised Iran. An outraged Saudi Arabia and its allies responded by blocking websites of Qatari news outlets. Doha said the news agency had been hacked and denied the emir had made the comments.

In recent years, gas-rich Qatar, a nation of 2.3 million people, has come under criticism for using some of its vast wealth to back political and armed groups that other Sunni Muslim monarchies in the region view as a threat to their rule and their brand of Islam.

Qatar has countered that it has served an essential mediating role between other feuding countries and such groups, including Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgency and Hamas, a militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.

For Qatar, closing Al Jazeera would mean pulling the plug on a global news network that in recent years has aggressively covered the region’s political and social upheavals and given the tiny nation an international profile and influence far beyond its size. The broadcaster wasn’t immediately available to comment.

Saudi Arabia already had closed the local Al Jazeera office while the broadcaster’s website remains blocked in the U.A.E.

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