False
start for the French-Qatari
connection By Emanuele Scimia
France has lately called for a more
assertive role of the European Union (EU) in the
civil war that has been scouring Syria since early
2011, demands that have routinely fallen on deaf
ears, while European countries keep on holding a
cautious position on this crisis.
EU
foreign ministers on November 19 welcomed the
establishment of the National Coalition for Syrian
Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the cartel
that opposition forces to Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad’s regime had set up in Qatar a few days
earlier.
Yet, unlike Paris’s auspices, the
European bloc was careful not to accord full
diplomatic recognition to the new Syrian
opposition grouping. It did not commit itself to
providing rebels with
"defensive" weapons as
well. The fear of accidentally arming extremists
in Syria runs high in both Brussels and
Washington.This sentiment has grown stronger after
Islamist and Salafist fighters in the northern
Syrian city of Aleppo scornfully rejected the
Western-backed National Coalition.
During
their meeting, EU foreign ministers also
underscored the EU's pledge to boost humanitarian
support to both the civil population within
Syria's boundaries and Syrian refugees in
neighboring countries. In reality, humanitarian
agencies could dispute this assertion, since EU
countries would be aiming to cut spending in
development and humanitarian assistance as part of
the planned slash in the 2014-2020 budget of the
European Union. France has been the first
Western power to recognize the National Coalition
as the Syrian people's sole legitimate
representative. French President Francois Hollande
has allowed Syria's restyled opposition to appoint
an ambassador to Paris.
Britain also
acknowledged the National Coalition on November
20. London ruled out sending in arms to the
opposition rebels, but it earmarked a first
package of support worth US$3.1 million for
communications assistance, deployment of a
Stabilization Response Team into the
opposition-held areas (so as "to meet basic needs
of people there", the British Foreign Office said)
and humanitarian medical aid.
In addition
to supplying anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels,
the French government is pressing on its European
counterparts to create a no-fly zone along the
Syrian-Turkish border. Turkey, along with the six
Gulf states, has also officially acknowledged the
National Coalition and is finding common ground
with France on how to bash Assad. While shelving
their quarrel over the World War I-era genocide of
Armenians, Paris and Ankara, with the support of
Qatar and Jordan, are promoting the creation of
protected civilian zones in northern Syria.
In this regard, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) does not seem to be springing
to France's aid either. The trans-Atlantic
military organization is mulling over a demand
from Turkey for the deployment of ground-to-air
missiles along its southern border, after mortar
shells fired from the Syrian side landed within
its territory.
However, NATO secretary
general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has stressed that
the stationing of Patriot missiles in southern
Turkey would have essentially a defensive nature
and not result in the creation of a no-fly zone
over the Syrian northern region. Rasmussen has
also underlined that "it is up to the individual
NATO countries that have available Patriots -
Germany, the Netherlands and the United States -
to decide if they can provide them for deployment
in Turkey and for how long".
Going it
alone in the Syrian crisis, Paris appears much
more intent on offsetting the EU's amnesia about
the Middle East than filling the geopolitical
vacuum that Washington might leave in this area if
its "pivot" to Asia-Pacific were eventually to
materialize.
Quite surprisingly, indeed,
the proposal for a new EU Common Security and
Defense Policy, which Germany, Italy, Poland,
Spain and the same France sketched out in Paris on
November 15, did not include the Middle East among
the areas singled out for future crisis-management
support by the European Union. On the other hand,
in their bid for updating the EU military policy,
these five countries would prefigure Europe's
proactive engagement in the Horn of Africa, Sahel,
North Africa, West Balkans, Caucasus and Central
Asia.
Divisions among European countries
over the vote for Palestinian non-member status at
the United Nations represent yet another sign of
the chaotic course of the EU foreign policy with
regard to the Middle East.
France already
tried to revive its outdated "grandeur" in 2011 by
playing a leading role in NATO's military campaign
in Libya. The active involvement in the Syrian
quagmire, the efforts to fight jihadist groups in
the Saharan-Sahelian basin and the accelerated
military withdrawal from Afghanistan - Paris will
pull out from the Afghan terrain all its combat
troops as early as in December, two years before
the main NATO's departure - appear to be all part
of the strategic rebalancing towards the Maghreb
and Mashreq that the French government is carrying
out today.
In pursuing this aim, France is
teaming up with Qatar, the more energetic sponsor
of the Arab Spring. To date, Doha is one of the
largest investors in France: a lifeblood for the
nation, which has been recently stripped of its
triple-A rating by Moody's Investors Service.
Qatar has a 2% share in French oil company
Total and owns the Paris Saint-Germain football
club. It controls 13% of Lagardere, the French
media group that has an 7.5% interest in EADS, the
European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company.
Qatar is set to invest US$130 million in
the French "banlieues", the peripheral areas where
the majority of the six million Muslim immigrants
in France are concentrated. This investment, which
Hollande's administration approved in September,
has the scope to sustain small businesses managed
by the country's Muslim citizens.
Qatar
also became in October 2012 an associate member of
the International Organization of the Francophonie
(IOF), a body representing French-speaking
communities throughout the world. This move has
raised many doubts among the IOF countries, which
find it hard to believe in the Francophone
identity of the nation ruled by emir Sheikh Hamad
bin Khalifa al-Thani.
The quite fresh
French-Qatari connection should work on the basis
of a mutual convenience: Doha helps France's plans
in the Levant, while Paris props up Qatar's
diplomatic and commercial expansion in Africa.
Yet, apart from widespread suspicions that
Qatari sheikhs are bolstering jihadist forces from
the Levant to Mali, the current evolution of the
crisis in Syria highlights that the new "dynamic
duo" has made its debut in the geopolitical
business with a false start.
Simply put,
the French-Qatari strategic joint-venture is
collecting one misstep after another, as its
failed mediation to stop Israel's Operation Pillar
of Defense against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip has
of late demonstrated. Indeed, France's and Qatar's
attempt to broker a ceasefire between the two
belligerent sides was bluntly dismissed by Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who privileged
the US-backed (and successful) mediation of Egypt.
Emanuele Scimia is a journalist
and geopolitical analyst based in Rome.
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