Manama: A decision on the much-anticipated union between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will be announced before the next GCC summit later this year, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said.
Saudi daily Okaz on Wednesday reported the statement attributed to Prince Saudi Al Faisal, saying that he was answering a question about the date to announce the Gulf union.
Al Faisal on Tuesday took part in the meeting of the GCC foreign ministers in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
According to Okaz, the 130th meeting of the GCC foreign ministers was exceptionally long and addressed several regional and international issues.
The GCC, made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was established in Abu Dhabi in 1981.
In 2011, Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud called on the member states to move from the phase of cooperation to the phase of a union, within a single entity.
The members agreed, but some of them said they needed more time to look into the details of the proposal.
In December, Nizar Bin Obaid Madani, Saudi Arabia’s state minister for foreign affairs, pressed for the union as an urgent matter that should not be delayed.
“Moving to the union has become a necessity imposed by the great importance of the Gulf region and the strategic political and economic aspects that have also brought numerous risks and problems,” he told the Manama Dialogue, an international security conference held annually in the Bahraini capital.
“This has imposed on the GCC the quest for integration and the union in order to maintain the gains and achievements and prevent risks and threats.”
He added that the “current stage requires the GCC states to rectify the identity of the Council so as to be based on a consensus of views with an emphasis on the common GCC destiny and the collective interests of the GCC countries”.
However, Yousuf Bin Alawi, the Omani Minister Responsible for Foreign Affairs, who was among the audience listening to the Saudi speech, said that Oman had a different view on the issue of the Gulf union.
“We in Oman understand the current situation of the GCC. We believe that when the GCC was founded, the agreement was to preserve security and stability in this region and to support the international community with the independence of the six countries in the region.
“Now more decades later, we find that we have achieved a lot within the goals for which the GCC was established. We all have bigger and larger ambitions for the GCC, but there is a fact that all Gulf nationals know and that is that we as governments did not agree on the main pillars of the GCC, especially in the economic area,” he said.
“I would like to say clearly that the failure of the GCC to build a genuine economic system that would be a more important platform for the future is because of the views held by some of us to leave it to the future and it was left to the future. However as a result, when events unfolded quickly and new requirements emerged, we wanted to look into various forms and patterns of common action at a time of conflicts,” Bin Alawi said.
“We are not at all with the union. But if the union does happen, and there does not seem to be a wish from the other brothers at least on an agreement on steps at a time when there are strong winds, we are part of the region and we will deal with it,” he said.
Commenting on the issue, Prince Turki Al Faisal, the Chairman of the Board of the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, said that the Gulf union was inevitable.
“It will happen because people in the region are keen on it,” he said. “People in the GCC want a closely-knit union and such a union has now become inevitable,” he said at the conference.
Observers said that some of the GCC countries could set up a core union of at least four states and that the other members could join at their own pace.
Officials in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been openly enthusiastic about the union.
