On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain declared a full blockade of Qatar by land, sea, and air. They cited Qatar’s alleged support for terrorism as justification.
Now, 60 days into this blockade, revelations about the origin of the Qatar crisis provide ample reasons why the world community should no longer remain neutral but stand firmly with Qatar against the actions committed by its neighbors.
During the month of Ramadan, a month when Muslims fast from food and water, neighboring nations blocked off food and water supplies to Qatar, leading to panic. Luckily, Qatar was able to quickly respond to this momentary food shortage. More painful and perplexing was the “human blockade” that quickly followed: Qatari citizens were expelled from the blockading nations, and citizens of these nations who were living and working in Qatar likewise had to leave Qatar.
These measures are extremely harsh, given how intertwined Qatari society is with the societies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in terms of the long history of intermarriage and family relations. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman are the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, a federation of states sharing very similar language and customs.
To this day, no evidence has been provided to justify the claims of the blockading nations. In fact, the State Department’s Report on Terrorism for 2016 provides in-depth information on the many ways in which Qatar has denounced and fought terrorism. On July 11, 2017, Qatar became the first country to act in the spirit of the Riyadh Summit 2017 in signing a memorandum of understanding with the United States further strengthening counterterrorism efforts.
In addition, Qatar fights terrorism indirectly by empowering youth through education. Qatar’s greatest legacy is its Education City, which houses branch campuses of Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, and Texas A&M, and graduates thousands of students from all over the Arab world every year.
Although it is a monarchy, like many other nations in the Middle East, Qatar surpasses other Gulf monarchies in its efforts to advance society through education, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. It has thus made tremendous strides in commerce, education, arts, healthcare, press freedom, diplomacy, climate change mitigation, and sports. Qatar played roles in providing humanitarian aid for various world crises, educating millions of refugee children, and mediating international conflicts.
What’s more, the immediate cause of the blockade — supposed words of praise for Iran from Qatar’s emir — has been identified as a false-flag provocation. U.S. intelligence sources have concluded that the UAE actually launched a cyberattack on Qatar’s government news agency to plant a fake news article ascribing false statements to the emir. The UAE and Saudi Arabian governments then used these false statements as the occasion for launching the blockade.
Despite the flagrant aggressions taken against it, Qatar has not retaliated with aggression and continues to request negotiations.
In 1990, when Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait, the whole world stood with Kuwait in the face of the aggression against it. The cyberattack on Qatar and the blockade that followed are similarly unjustified acts of aggression against a country whose only real crime was to be too progressive compared to its parochial neighbors.
This blockade has fractured the Gulf Cooperation Council and caused unnecessary human pain and suffering. All nations in the world should come together to put aggressors in their place and demand immediate lifting of this blockade, so that peace can once again return to the Gulf. After all, the Gulf is the only area of relative stability remaining in the Middle East.
Noor AlKhori is a Qatari citizen and a graduate of Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. She completed her residency training in radiology at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York, and fellowship training at Stanford hospital in California.
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