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Qatar sees WTO meeting as boosting global profile

The Gulf state of Qatar offered to host next month's ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation to boost its international profile, its ambassador in Geneva said on Friday.

But over the past few weeks it had to pull out the diplomatic stops to squash suggestions that the venue be changed because of security fears following the devastating September 11 attacks in the United States.

"It was a tense period, but we never really had any doubts that the meeting would go ahead in Doha (the Qatari capital)," the envoy, Sheikh Fahad Awaida al-Thani said in an interview two weeks before the gathering from November 9-13.

"We are totally confident that everyone attending will be perfectly safe," he told Reuters.

The danger -- and events had reached a point where Singapore was offering itself as a backup venue -- passed last weekend after the United States withdrew its veiled objections.

Other trade diplomats in Geneva, home of the currently 142-member WTO, say the back-stage battle over Doha has in fact served to give an extra boost to Qatar's image, proving that it is a doughty fighter for its own corner.

"They were really tough, but they were dignified with it," said one envoy whose government leant towards a venue switch -- which was never openly raised directly by other countries with the Qataris themselves.

The Qatar ambassador, whose peninsula homeland is one of the WTO's smaller members, says the idea of staging the trade body's fourth -- and crucial -- ministerial meeting came from its ruler, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

HOSTING PROPOSED IN 1999

The Emir suggested the idea to Qatar's delegation heading for Seattle and the last WTO ministers' conference in December 1999, the ambassador said.

"He believed this would be an ideal opportunity to really put Qatar on the map," said the envoy, himself a member of the ruling royal family of the gas-and-oil rich state which only joined the WTO in 1995.

The offer, formally tabled in Seattle as thousands of anti-globalisation demonstrators on the streets outside tried to stop the conference, was approved early last year by the WTO's ruling General Council.

Some non-governmental organisations immediately accused the body of "scuttling away to hide in a despotic desert state", but Qatari officials firmly reject that version.

And Western diplomats who have worked in the region say that over the past decade the emirate has emerged as a modernising society while remaining close to its Islamic heritage.

"Joining the WTO," said ambassador al-Thani who headed the negotiations after arriving in Geneva in 1992, "gave us the stimulus to change our laws on trade, on investment, on intellectual property, and really become an open economy."

Qatar has also attracted international attention in the last month as the home of the free-wheeling al-Jazeera television station, which in its six years of existence has become required viewing for millions of people in other Arab countries seeking a wider world view than that provided by their own broadcasters.

"Al-Jazeera's discussion programmes have often got us into problems with some of our neighbours, who say we should not let them talk so openly," said the ambassador.

Its coverage from Afghanistan of the US 'war on terror' and its transmission of statements by Osama bin Laden, accused by the United States of being behind the September attacks, also attracted the anger of the United States and Britain.

Ambassador al-Thani said requests from the two governments that al-Jazeera be reigned in were politely rebuffed. "We said: 'You have been telling us we should be more democratic and now you want us to censor them?'" he said. "We've heard no more of it."

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