Dubai: Anwar Gargash, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, will represent the UAE at the Gulf summit which kicks off in Kuwait on Tuesday Gulf News has learned.
On Monday, Kuwait’s First Deputy Prime Minister Shaikh Sabah Al Khalid welcomed the ministers, saying that their presence will contribute to the success of the summit.
Internal Gulf solution sought to Qatar crisis
He said that despite recent challenges, Gulf unity and solidary remained “intact”.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain have decided not to send high-level delegates in protest of the attendance of Qatar’s emir, Shaikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.
Saudi Arabia will be represented by its foreign minister Adel Al Jubeir according to Saudi media reports and Bahrain will be represented by Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Bin Mubarak.
On June 5, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt severed their ties with Qatar accusing it of promoting extremist ideology and funding terrorist groups in the region.
Summit overshadowed by killing of Saleh
The summit was overshadowed by Monday’s assassination of former Yemeni President Ali Saleh, which could represent a turning point in the three-year civil war in the country, according to opinions expressed in the summit halls in Kuwait.
Saleh was killed in execution-style by his former allies, the Iran-backed Al Houthi militia, as he tried to escape the capital Sana’a to his hometown Sanhan.
The way his death was covered by the Qatari media, especially by the news channel Al Jazeera, further dismayed the three countries boycotting Qatar - Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain - a Gulf source said in Kuwait. “What the Qatari media did was shameful,” the source said, adding that Al Jazeera sounded like “an official mouth piece of Al Houthi militias which killed in cold blood a Yemeni leader who had finally broken his unholy alliance with an Iranian proxy and tried to liberate Sana’a from Iran’s grip”.
The participation of the three countries in Tuesday’s summit, despite the Qatar crisis and the latest development in Yemen, is aimed at keeping the GCC institution intact and preserving the spirit if the GCC as the main body that brings together the six member states politically, economically and socially, Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai said.
An informed source told Gulf News that the Qatar crisis is not on the Kuwait summit agenda. “This summit is about preserving the GCC as a united umbrella in the face of the deteriorating conditions in the Middle East,” the source noted.
