Qatar and Saudi decry lack of attention to Middle East conflicts amid war in Ukraine
- ‘Suffering we have seen in Ukraine … has been the suffering of a lot of countries in this region … and nothing happened,’ said Qatar’s foreign minister
- In a video message to the annual Doha Forum earlier on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Qatar to increase natural gas production
Saudi Arabia and Qatar expressed regret on Saturday at a lack of attention to Middle East conflicts, as the West pushes them to show more solidarity with Ukraine.
“The humanitarian suffering that we have seen in Ukraine, and everyone is talking about it right now … has been the suffering of a lot of countries in this region for years and nothing happened,” Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani told a round table at the annual Doha Forum.
“We have never seen a global response to address those sufferings,” he added, evoking “the brutality against the Syrian people, or against the Palestinians or against the Libyans or against the Iraqis, or against the Afghans”.
Neither oil kingpin Saudi Arabia nor gas-rich Qatar, both close to the West but with ties to Russia, have taken a strong position for or against Moscow since it invaded Ukraine last month.
Europe and the US hope the two countries will boost oil and gas production to help reduce Western reliance on Russian supplies.
The Qatari diplomat expressed hope that the Ukraine conflict would serve as “a wake-up call for everyone in the international community, to look at our region and to address the issues … with the same level of commitment that we have seen between Russia and Ukraine”.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen have been killed, directly or indirectly, and millions have been displaced as a result of its years-long conflict, in what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.