Foreign

Home page

Foreign

Saudi Arabiaâ€™s ambassador: If Qatar doesnâ€™t fulfill our demands, we will resort to other means

04 July 2017 17:04 (UTC +04:00)

- What is the breach in the relations between Saudi Arabia and Qatar based on?

- The Qatar crisis is not a problem between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have also been involved in this issue. These countries have been negotiating with Qatar for nearly 20 years and demanded it not to give asylum to leaders and representatives of terrorist groups. Even, relevant agreements were signed in this regard in 2013 and 2014. Qatar agreed that it wouldn’t support terrorists in the country. However, it ignored those agreements. This country provided financial aid to terrorists and gave them asylums as well. As a result, those four countries were forced to suspend their diplomatic relations with that country in order to protect their national security interests. In this way, we tried to force Qatar to change its policy.

- Along with this issue, such demands were put forward to suspend the Al-Jazeera channel, terminate relations with Iran and Turkey's military presence to be ended in Qatar. Doesn’t it mean interference in the sovereign rights of a country?

- Financing of terrorists and giving them asylum are key issue among the demands. The issues on other bilateral demands are option of this country. These are the second-grade issues. The persons, which were granted asylum in Qatar, have been declared wanted by their countries and included in the list of terrorists in the big countries. This steps damage national interests of Gulf countries. This is also in contradiction with Qatar’s interests. We have no problem with Qatar’s people. We have a sense of brotherhood about this people. Our main problem is the issue of their support to terrorists.

- Another 48 hour period given to Qatar is about to expire. What will be if the demands are not fulfilled?

- We hope that everything will be good and Qatar will answer in the affirmative. The demand to stop financing the terrorists is not made by one country. This was made by whole world. If the demand is not fulfilled, we’ll use other ways, including financial sanctions. We are trying Qatar to avoid these issues which are not useful for it. This issue causes isolation of the country.

- How Qatar crisis can affect the relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia?

- We hope that Turkey will share positive or, at least, neutral position in this issue. We want Turkey to make Qatar, which supports the terror, avoid this issue.