Staff Reporter
OIL has done more harm than good to the Middle East, a majority of participants at the latest Doha Debates series felt.
A total of 63.3% of the audience on Tuesday evening believed that “oil has been more of a curse than a blessing for the Middle East”.
Participating in the debate at the Qatar Foundation on Tuesday evening, Iran Professor of International Business and International Affairs at the George Washington University, Hossein Askari, said that oil became a curse as it motivated wars in the region, such as the American-led invasion of Iraq and the Iraq-Iran conflicts during the 80s.
He believed that the money generated from oil was used to purchase weapons, instead of investing in public welfare.
Askari said that oil could have been a blessing had the governments of the region used it correctly.
He said the citizens of oil-rich countries are “disabled” to fill certain jobs, which is a waste of their human resources.
London-based independent petroleum analyst, Carole Nakhle, also believed that oil was a curse as the performance of the countries in the region have been disappointing because of the states’ complete reliance on oil.
She compared them with Norway and Malaysia, the two countries “which used their national resources to the welfare of their people.”
She said that figures showed that since 1974 there has been a decline in the Middle East region’s sustainable development.
“The Gulf states came only in the 40th place in the global development index.” Nakhle said that there are now 60mn illiterate people in the oil-rich countries.
She believed that the democratisation process in Iraq, following the war, did not make oil a blessing either.
However, Ramzi Salman, adviser to Qatar’s Minister of Energy and Industry, believed that oil was “a gift from God that we have to feel thankful for”.
He said that it was not proper to blame the resources by describing them as a “curse”, but bad management only was to be blamed.
“We can use knife for preparing food, but it can be used to kill as well. In the case of oil too, there have been unfortunate cases of misuse.”
He said that without oil there would have been no education or infrastructure such as hospitals and roads that now exist in the region.
Saudi national security consultant and the managing director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, Nawaf Obaid, believed that oil was a blessing as “it eradicated poverty”.
He said that oil has nothing to do with dictatorship as “it exists in some other countries as well”.
The Saudi oil expert said that oil defeated communism, as “it helped to send the Russians out of Afghanistan”.
Asked about corruption in oil-rich countries, he admitted that there were “mistakes” in the administration, but said that oil caused an “economic boom” in the region.
The Doha Debates, supervised and sponsored by the Qatar Foundation, is organised monthly. The debates, now in their second year, are chaired by internationally renowned journalist Tim Sebastian. |
