Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 23, 104

Personality

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani: Foreign Minister of Qatar

By Andrew I. Killgore

"There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood brings on fortune; omitted, the rest of their lives are spent in shallows and in miseries."–From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

A decisive and brilliant young man from one of the smallest Middle East countries is breaking with tradition at home by taking foreign policy stands that excite controversy in the Arab world but earn praise in the United States. He is 38-year-old Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, foreign minister of Qatar since 1992 .

His most controversial move, obviously concurred in by his cousin and brother-in-law, Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, has been to initiate and pursue Qatari official and commercial contacts with Israel. An open question, highlighted by Qatar's role in hosting the Fourth Middle East, North Africa (MENA) economic conference in its capital, Doha, in November 1997, is whether the visionary and strongly pro-American ruler and his dynamic foreign minister can continue this bold approach to break open the half-century-old Arab-Israeli deadlock.

Or, to put the question another way, whether the May 1996 election victory by the Likud Party in Israel, plus the craven failure of the United States to put any pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to advance the peace process, has doomed even the best-intentioned efforts from the Arab side to achieve movement on the Arab-Israeli dispute.

In March 1996 the Labor Party's Shimon Peres was prime minister of Israel. At the Summit of Peacemakers in Sharm al- Sheikh, Egypt, that same month, Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim was among the first Arab leaders to meet with officials of the Israeli government.

But in May 1996 Prime Minister Shimon Peres was narrowly defeated in Israel by Likudist Netanyahu, recently called by the Economist of London a "serial bungler" after his Mossad intelligence assassins botched an attempt to murder a Hamas official in Amman, Jordan and because of his other heavy-handed efforts to wreck the Middle East peace process.

Qatar has exchanged trade representatives with Israel, although the Israeli representative in Doha seems in fact to be ignored, if not actually boycotted, by Qataris. Moreover, Doha kept its commitment to host the fourth MENA conference in November 1997 despite the non-participation of key Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and the fact that no date or place was designated for a fifth annual conference.

In fact, Qatar has pursued both an independent foreign policy and independent domestic policies in the Middle East. It permitted U.S. Air Force planes to use its air bases during the Gulf war and in the years since has agreed to the pre-positioning on its territory of equipment for a brigade of U.S. troops. It also has offered to store equipment for a second U.S. brigade.

At the same time, however, Qatar was one of the first two Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (AGCC) states to call for a major relaxation of the U.N. embargo to allow vastly increased relief shipments of food and medicines to the Iraqi people, a clear departure from U.S. policy at the time, although the U.S. now is moving reluctantly in the same direction.

At home, Qatar has moved rapidly in the direction of more liberalization of its political system and more privatization of the economy. Women will vote and will be permitted to stand for office in municipal elections in Qatar in 1998. The government also has ended press censorship, going so far as to abolish its Ministry of Information and put its state-run television service under a separate authority.

The only sign of American recognition of Qatar's simultaneous moves toward internal liberalization and peaceful approaches to Israel was an invitation by President Bill Clinton to the emir to make an official visit to Washington in mid-1997.

The ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, was accompanied by the foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, who was at the emir's side during a lengthy question-and-answer session with Washington journalists and academics at Georgetown University and a number of other events in which the Qatari entourage met with a wide cross-section of the media and the diplomatic corps in the U.S. national capital.

A casual look at the foreign minister's curriculum vitae a few years ago would have provided few hints that he would appear on the Arab stage as an iconoclastic mover and shaker in the traditionally deeply conservative heart of the Islamic world. In fact Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim's entire working career, which began in 1982, has been in the public service of Qatar.

From the beginning, however, he has been the total opposite of a cautious career official who gets ahead by avoiding controversy. Instead he has demonstrated that he is imaginative, quick to make decisions, and not afraid to stick to them. There is no question that he strongly supports the decision of the emir to conduct the first municipal elections in Qatar's history and to lift traditional press censorship.

Earlier, as the first minister of the combined Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim helped modernize Qatar's important fishing industry and beautified Doha and other towns with many more parks and recreational areas.

In fact, the foreign minister served in key roles all over the government in the 10 years before he assumed his present position. He was acting minister of electricity and water; president of the Central Municipal Council; and director of the emir's Special Projects Office. He also has served on the boards of the Qatar General Petroleum Company and the Higher Planning Council.

Before meeting the foreign minister, who also is a man of great personal wealth and an investor in many of the projects which have changed Doha's skyline over the past decade, I had heard another retired American ambassador describe with awe Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim's performance at a press conference before a room full of Arab and international journalists. For more than two hours he answered questions fully and with aplomb, dodging nothing.

His reputation for having extraordinary mental powers is fully corroborated by diplomats presently serving in Qatar, who describe him as brilliant and decisive. He displayed both of these qualities yet again during and after the MENA conference in November, which had attracted a large international press corps and had become highly politicized as a result of the attendance of Israeli businessmen and government officials despite failure of the peace process.

The staging of the opening ceremonies, at which the emir delivered a dignified but outspoken condemnation of the peace- breaking tactics of Israel's prime minister while U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright listened from the head table, showed brilliance in reconciling the Arab states which attended and those that stayed away.

According to those who deal regularly with him, when Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim is presented with adequate information, he generally decides issues on the spot. On particularly sensitive decisions the foreign minister may say, "Telephone me tomorrow." This presumably means he will confer with Qatar's ruler, to whom he has ready access, maintaining separate offices in both the foreign ministry and in the emiri diwan. Decisions are never delayed beyond 24 hours.

The foreign minister, who is married and the father of four sons and two daughters, enjoys hunting, falconry and skiing. His university studies were in Egypt and he later studied English in Britain. As a result, his English is as fluent as that of a native speaker.

As William Shakespeare pointed out in the quotation at the beginning of this article, good timing can produce success, bad timing failure. Undoubtedly Qatar's foreign policies following its new ruler's accession in 1995 initially caused tensions with some of its Arab neighbors, and these increased as U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright permitted the peace process to languish.

Following the emir's frank welcoming remarks at the Doha conference, however, and the spirit of unity that prevailed at the subsequent Islamic summit at Tehran in December, Qatar seems firmly ensconced in a unifying Arab camp. From this position it undoubtedly will continue to play a leading and sometimes tradition-breaking role in the Arab world's rush to modernization. As it does so, its dynamic and brilliant foreign minister will continue to be a man to watch as he plays a key role at the side of one of the Middle East's most innovative and creative rulers.