Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani
Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani was emir of Qatar from June 1995, when he deposed his father while the old man was in Geneva, to June 2013, when he abdicated in favour of his son Tamim at sixty-one, the first Gulf ruler to leave the throne alive and voluntarily. In eighteen years a peninsula the size of Connecticut with three hundred thousand citizens became a power. The North Field's gas was liquefied and shipped from 1997 in a fleet of tankers to Japan, Korea, India and Britain, so that Qatar was the largest exporter of liquefied gas in the world by 2006 and the richest country per head. There was the sovereign fund that bought Harrods, the Shard, Paris Saint-Germain and a share of Volkswagen. There was Al Jazeera, founded in November 1996 with a hundred and fifty million dollars of his money and the BBC's sacked Arabic staff, which changed what Arabs could watch and made every Arab government his enemy. There was the American air base at Al Udeid from which the Iraq war was run, and the mediations in Lebanon, Darfur, Yemen and Palestine. There was the money for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and, after 2011, for the rebellions in Libya and Syria. There was the World Cup won in December 2010 by a vote that the Americans later called bought, and the Education City of American universities that his wife Moza built. He was born in Doha in 1952, was educated at Sandhurst, commanded the army from 1977 and was defence minister and crown prince from that year. He ran the state's modernisation through the 1980s and took the government from his father in fact before he took it in law. The counter-coup of February 1996 that his father backed failed and its officers were tried. The settlement of 2004 brought the father home. The constitution of 2003, approved by referendum, gave the country an elected assembly that was never elected until 2021, and the reign was his and Moza's and their cousin Hamad bin Jassim's, the prime minister and foreign minister who was the world's busiest dealmaker. The abdication of 2013, announced in a television address, put the son in and the cousin out. He is the Father Emir, with a palace, a fortune, the chairmanship of nothing and the deference of everything. The blockade of 2017 by his neighbours was, the neighbours said, about the country he had made.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Qatari
- Roles: monarch, emir
