Article catch up 27, May 2009
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Egypt, French IR, Saudi Arabia, The Emirates.Tags: Abu Dhabi torture, GCC monetary union, Obama, Sarkozy, Saudi, Shia politics
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– Reuters have an interesting article about Saudi’s dealings with their Shia minority. The most interesting sentence is in the middle:
Saudi King Abdullah removed the governor of the Najran region last year after the Ismaili Shi’ites, a majority in the area, complained about efforts to settle Sunni Yemenis and give them housing and jobs in an effort to marginalise them further.
– The Independent on Sarkozy’s recent trip to the Gulf. It is a neat summary, though quite how it fails to mention the recent case Abu Dhabi torture case (here and here) or their nuclear ambitions is beyond me.
The presence in Abu Dhabi is seen by President Sarkozy as part of a radical shift of French foreign and security policy away from the independent or “multi-polar” approach taken by the former President, Jacques Chirac. Together with the decision to rejoin the military structures of Nato, the Gulf base is intended as a move towards the “Anglo-Saxon” way of looking at the world. At the same time, both moves are intended to give France a greater stake in Western decision-making.
– It appears as if Obama will be speaking at Cairo University and not at the Al Azhar as some had hoped.
– The extraordinarily optimistic Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Abdulrahman Al-Attiyah is still hopeful that the Gulf monetary Union will go ahead, despite the UAE pulling out of the deal this past week. I am not that sure how, exactly, the Emirates could have made their wishes any clearer…
The Gulf blog 