Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani
Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani was emir of Qatar from February 1972, when he deposed his cousin Ahmad in a bloodless coup while Ahmad was hunting in Iran, five months after independence, to June 1995, when his son Hamad deposed him in a bloodless coup while he was in Geneva. In twenty-three years the pearl-diving sheikhdom of a hundred thousand people became an oil state of half a million with the highest income per head in the world, on the Dukhan field and the offshore fields nationalised from Shell and BP in 1976-77. The North Field, the largest gas reserve on earth, found in 1971, sat undeveloped because the emir did not see the point of gas. He built the ministries, the roads, the port, the university in 1973, the hospital, the free housing for citizens and the welfare state. He ran the country through a cabinet of relatives and a provisional constitution that stayed provisional. He joined the Gulf Cooperation Council at its founding in 1981 as the Saudis' junior. He was born in Rayyan in 1932, the son of Hamad bin Abdullah, who had been the heir apparent and died before succeeding. He was made heir apparent himself in 1960 when his uncle Ali abdicated in favour of the cousin. He was the country's first education minister, its finance minister and, from 1970, its prime minister, the man who ran the state while Ahmad hunted and spent, which was the coup's justification. The reign's last years were the son's. Hamad, the crown prince and defence minister from 1977, had taken the gas, the foreign policy and the government by the early 1990s. When the father moved in 1995 to take them back, the son moved first, with the family's and the army's consent and Washington's acquiescence. The father kept several billion dollars of the state's money in his own accounts. He backed a counter-coup attempt in February 1996 that the Saudis and the Emiratis were said to have supported and that failed. He lived in Abu Dhabi and on the Riviera until a settlement of 2004 that returned the money and let him come home. He died in Doha in October 2016 at eighty-four. The state he had built and lost had by then hosted the Taliban's office, Al Jazeera and the American air base, and won the World Cup.
- Lived: 1932 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Qatari
- Roles: monarch, emir
