DOHA, Qatar — The new emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, signaled both continuity in international affairs and change on the domestic front with the appointment of a new cabinet, one that will be headed by a longtime secret policeman but also the first with a woman in it.
cabinet from the government’s Qatar News Agency when it was appointed Wednesday, Qatari newspapers on Thursday published a complete list of the members. It will be headed by Sheik Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani, holding the roles of both prime minister and interior minister. His age was not announced, but he was a 1984 graduate of Durham Military College in Britain, according to his official biography, which would make him about 50.
In addition to running internal state security for many years, the new prime minister has also been in charge of his country’s antiterrorism efforts.
The new emir, 33, took office Wednesday after his 61-year-old father, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, abdicated after 18 years in power. In a televised speech Wednesday, Sheik Tamim repeatedly referred to the former emir as “his highness the father.”
“He left office in a unique, rather unprecedented step,” he said. “He left Qatar a nonstop construction site. Crime is virtually nonexistent. He transformed Qatar from a state struggling to survive to a state with a sovereign and confident stature,” he said. “His highness the father decided to leave his reign while he can give his best. He handed all the banners to me as an expression of confidence.”
The outgoing prime minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, for many years also held the portfolio of foreign minister and was a key architect of Qatar’s aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. The new emir suggested that he would continue his father’s foreign policy, and the appointment of the longtime deputy foreign minister, Khalid al-Attiyah, as foreign minister suggested as much. He was both close to the previous emir and deeply involved in many of Qatar’s international mediation efforts.
But a new prime minister whose second portfolio is the Interior Ministry, which controls the police and internal security affairs, was widely read as a signal that the new emir would be refocusing on domestic affairs. There has been no suggestion of any internal security threat, and dissent in wealthy Qatar, which has only 250,000 citizens, is nearly unknown.
Sheik Abdullah, the new prime minister, had been the minister of state for internal affairs since February of 1995, and remained in that post after Sheik Hamad toppled his father in a bloodless coup in June of 1995. That suggests that he would have played a key role in the coup events and had the confidence of both the outgoing emir and his son, to whom he is distantly related.
The first woman in the Qatari cabinet, and one of few to hold such a position anywhere in the region, is the minister of communication and information technology, Hessa Sultan al-Jaber.