The foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the island of Abu Musa as a “provocation”. It was most certainly that. The ministers who gathered in an extraordinary session in Doha on Tuesday also said that the visit was a violation of UAE sovereignty and that it contradicted “peaceful attempts from GCC countries to find a solution”. Abu Musa and the two Tunb islands which belong to the UAE have been illegally occupied by the Iranians ever since they were seized on 30 November 1971, just two days before the UAE became fully independent from the UK. The Arab inhabitants of Greater Tunb were expelled. The former Kuwaiti Information Minister Saad Bin Tefla has said that the visit was designed to divert attention from the Syrian crisis. Certainly the fall of the Syrian regime would pose a serious threat to Iran's attempts to impose a hegemony over the region. Its ability to interfere in Lebanon would be heavily curtailed without the Assad regime at it side. But visiting Abu Musa is not going to divert either GCC or Arab and or international attention from events in Syria. And Ahmadinejad knows it. What he was doing was less an attempt to divert attention than a deliberate and puerile attempt to insult and provoke. He does not like the GCC for going against his friend Bashar Al-Assad so he sets out to offend it. The GCC has tried time and again to reach out to Iran and improve relations. It was in Doha that it took the unprecedented step of inviting Ahmadinejad to its December 2007 summit in order to break the ice between both sides of the Gulf. And with good reason. If there is to be peace in the Gulf, Tehran has to be involved. There is no chance of regional stability and security without its active participation. But exactly how committed is Ahmadinejad to Gulf stability — other than as an Iranian controlled region? It may well be that there is another, similar, reason for Ahmadinejad's visit to Abu Musa. He has lost a lot of popularity at home because of his government's economic failings. The easiest way to reverse that trend — and it comes naturally to a populist such as him — is to create a foreign diversion. In other words, he went to Abu Musa knowing that it would be a provocative act because he wanted to provoke the UAE and its GCC allies. He wanted to do so because he wants to rally sliding Iranian opinion behind him. The GCC will continue to try to improve relations with Iran — over this and over the nuclear issue. Indeed, it has at times set the issue of the three islands aside in its efforts. However, it is not easy when the government in Tehran is using both issues for its own PR purposes. Moreover, the fact remains that the islands were stolen. They may be small and with just a few inhabitants, but their case is as much one of theft as Palestine. People were expelled. The islands have to be returned to their rightful owners. Until they are, they will continue to be a thorn in the side of not only GCC-Iranian relations but Arab
