Despite new mediation efforts this week by Kuwait, Gulf states Saudi Arabia and Qatar are struggling to overcome their differences, with mutual suspicion that each is supporting the other's opponents, diplomats say. "Qatari authorities accuse Saudi officials of involvement in the attempted coup in 1996" against Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, an Arab diplomat said Friday.
For their part, "Saudi officials accuse Qatar of financing the Saudi opposition exiled in London, including Saad al-Faqih," who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), the diplomat added.
| Ohoh! Wheels within wheels! I didn't know that... |
| It's a Ptolemic theory of subversion. |
The Qatari emir and Riyadh governor Prince Salman bin Abdel-Aziz, a brother of Saudi King Fahd, held talks on a yacht off Monte Carlo on Thursday in a meeting organized by Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah. "The meeting was held ... in a brotherly atmosphere and concerned relations between the two countries and the situation in the region, and it could be followed by other meetings," Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani told Al-Jazeera television Thursday. The objective of the talks was to "improve relations between the two countries," he added. Asked about future relations, the minister said: "So far, there is nothing clear, but we have today's (Thursday's) negotiations and this could be followed by others." MIRA, headed by Faqih since 1996, is a splinter of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), which was formed in 1993 and immediately banned in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities last month implicated Faqih and Masari in a May 1 attack in the industrial Red Sea city of Yanbu which killed six Westerners. In the framework of Kuwaiti mediation, "Qatari officials requested to discuss their accusations implicating Saudi Arabia in the 1996 coup," another Gulf diplomat said. "But the Saudis refused, totally rejecting their (Qatar's) accusations."
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