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2 Singapore courts the
sheikhs By Andrew Symon
SINGAPORE - Singapore is bidding to
position itself at the center of growing
diplomatic and business ties between the Middle
East and East Asia, a state-led strategy aimed at
enhancing the city-state's standing as a regional
finance and energy hub.
Despite the
heightened political tensions surrounding the
Middle East - or, indeed, perhaps because of them,
as Middle Eastern businesses have looked to East
Asia as an alternative destination
for
their investment and commerce beyond the petroleum
trade since September 11, 2001 - extraordinary new
linkages are emerging between the two regions.
And Singapore is at the front edge of the
engagement. Since September 11, there have been
more than 50 visits of a ministerial or higher
level from Middle Eastern countries to Singapore,
more than double the total over the preceding
decade. Over the past two years, senior
Singaporean government ministers, including Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong and President Sellapan
Ramanathan, have made official visits to the
Middle East and North Africa, sometimes
accompanied by big business delegations.
Those have been reciprocated royally, with
high-profile visits including the Crown Prince of
Bahrain Shaikh Salman Bin Hamad Al-Khalifa this
March, when he launched a new local Middle East
group set up by the Singapore Business Federation
(SBF). He was preceded by the Saudi Crown Prince
Sultan bin Adbul Aziz Al-Saud in April 2006 and
King Abdullah of Jordan in March last year.
Former prime minister and current Minister
Mentor Lee Kuan Yew urged a delegation of Middle
Eastern businessmen to the island state late last
year and encouraged them to use Singapore as a
"launch pad" for embarking on new regional
investment initiatives. Lee said Singapore is
uniquely placed to help Middle Eastern investors
make inroads to Chinese markets because of the
government's close ties to China's leaders.
The diplomatic exchanges have gone
hand-in-hand with upgrading bilateral political
representations, the establishment of new joint
chambers of commerce, trade and investment
agreements and other business initiatives,
including the recent promotion of Singapore as a
regional center for Islamic banking. Singapore
signed in May 2004 a free-trade agreement with
Jordan and is now negotiating similar agreements
with Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab
Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia - the latter six
acting together as an economic group known as the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Transcending commerce Yet
Singapore's outreach to the Middle East transcends
plain trade and investment. Senior Singaporean
officials speak about a multi-dimensional and
long-term approach to building relations with the
region, pointing to plans to establish an academic
Middle East Institute at the National University
of Singapore and institutionalizing Arabic as a
language option for the island state's secondary
and university students.
Former prime
minister Goh Chok Tong, the intellectual architect
of Singapore's Middle East push, is still actively
involved with the wide-ranging initiative in his
current capacity as senior minister. In
interviews, he often speaks of a new era of deeper
and wider relations between the Middle East and
East Asia, which he describes as a "mutual
rediscovery" of the ancient cultural links between
the two regions.
One step in that
direction has been the Singapore-inspired
Asia-Middle East Dialogue, which Goh initiated.
The first intergovernmental meeting was attended
by representatives of some 50 states. The meeting
was first held in Singapore in June 2005, with the
next scheduled for Cairo this year and then in
Bangkok in 2009.
Singapore and the Middle
East have a long history of commercial and
cultural ties, but until recently this was widely
as a residue of the imperial or colonial past.
Arab traders, commonly from the Hadramut region,
in and near today's Yemen, were for centuries
active in Southeast Asia and settled in British
Singapore in the first days after its founding in
1819.
Before World War II, Arab merchant
families such as Al Juneid and Al Kaff were among
the wealthiest in all of Singapore. They
controlled the pilgrim trade to Mecca from
Singapore, which served Muslim populations across
the region, maintained interests in much of the
small-scale shipping trade in the Indonesian and
Malayan archipelagos, and had sizable land
holdings in Singapore itself.
Many of the
colonial-period buildings still standing in
Singapore were commissioned by these Arab
families, and other reminders of Middle Eastern
influence can be seen around Arab Street in the
shadow of Singapore's largest mosque, the
183-year-old Masjid Sultan, where descendants of
earlier traders still maintain shops.
Ancient links, modern flows
Those ancient links are nowadays often
cast as trendy, and entrepreneurs are capitalizing
on that notion through an array of recently
established Middle Eastern-style restaurants, many
run by new arrivals from Egypt and countries on
the Persian Gulf. In the modern era, the most
important trade connection has been the steady
supply of crude oil to Singapore, home to perhaps
Asia's most important fossil-fuel processing and
export hub.
Middle Eastern investment in
Singapore's petroleum sector is still small,
though there are growing indications this may be
changing. Middle Eastern investment has played a
role in pumping up Singapore's property market,
including recent big outlays in commercial
properties.
Recent statistics show that
Middle Eastern investors are increasingly looking
for new business opportunities in Asia as a way of
hedging their exposure to North America and Europe
after
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