Munich: Secretary of State John Kerry stopped in Munich briefly on Saturday en route to India to visit the ailing sultan of Oman at his German estate.
The 90-minute meeting with Sultan Qaboos Bin Saeed, who has been receiving medical treatment in Germany for months, represented a bow of gratitude to a ruler who served as a back channel to get the United States and Iran engaged in negotiations about curbing Iran’s nuclear capacity.
The talks are scheduled to resume next week in Geneva, and Kerry plans a face-to-face meeting Wednesday with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Kerry and the sultan discussed the status of the Iran negotiations, according to a senior State Department official, although their meeting had earlier been billed as primarily a private one, not policy-oriented.
The two also discussed the situation in Yemen, the Syrian civil war and tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, among other topics, the official said.
The health of the Omani ruler has prompted much angst at home since he left for Germany in July in what was then characterized as partly a vacation, partly a trip for medical tests.
He was out of the country on Oman’s national day on Nov. 18, his 74th birthday, for the first time since he took over from his father in 1970.
Qaboos spoke to his compatriots that day in a televised address from his estate outside Munich. He referred only obliquely to his health, saying the national day “coincides with a time when we are abroad, for the reasons you know.” Rumors abound about his diagnosis, but his lengthy absence suggests he is confronting a serious health condition.
A bachelor, the sultan has no children as heirs and no publicly known successor. Under Omani law, the royal family must designate a new sultan within three days of the position becoming open.
Qaboos lent his beachside villa in Oman as the site of secret negotiations between US and Iranian officials in 2013. Those talks led to formal talks in which six world powers have been trying to reach a deal with Iran to ease international sanctions against the country if it agrees to limit its ability to build a nuclear bomb.
Negotiations are said to be progressing, though a deadline for a deal has been pushed back twice when the parties could not agree on some core issues. It still is not clear whether Iran is willing to make enough concessions to satisfy the demands of the six powers negotiating with it - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany.
