Oman's Benevolent Autocrat May Avoid A Similar Fate To Libya's Gaddafi

The pressure for change is contagious, but Qaboos bin Said's good governance makes him less likely to face an uprising 

By Rowland White

Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman. Photograph: Stefan Zaklin/EPA

While the Royal Air Force, alongside Nato allies, does its best to bomb Colonel Gaddafi from power, it's worth reflecting that the next longest serving Arab ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, enjoys a rather different relationship with Britain's military. Since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, Oman has been home to a substantial RAF detachment contributing to Britain's effort there.

The stark contrast in the fortunes of the two rulers is an interesting one given that, at first glance, there appear to have been a number of similarities. Both men have been in power for more than 40 years. Gaddafi seized control in Libya in a military coup in 1969. Less than a year later, Qaboos ousted his father in a palace coup supported by British soldiers on loan to the Sultan's armed forces. Qaboos attended Sandhurst and while Gaddafi did not attend the college, he did receive military training from the British. And both Gaddafi and Qaboos govern autocracies in which absolute power rests with them.

But none of these apparent similarities take into account the way in which the two men have governed. Forty-two years have seen Gaddafi associated with state-sponsored terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, assassination and allies that include Idi Amin, Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, Jean-Bedél Bokassa and Slobodan Milosevic.

By contrast, Qaboos, whatever objection there is to a political system in which power still rests in the hands of a monarch, has been a paragon of good governance. Last year, Oman was named the most improved country in the world over the past 40 years by the UN development fund. The World Health Organisation has assessed Oman's national health system to be the eighth best in the whole world. Oman's stability and strong infrastructure are worlds away from the chaos that often threatens to engulf neighbouring Yemen.

It's hard to see rule by absolute monarchy as anything but an anachronism in the 21st century. And yet it's also difficult to imagine that over the past 40 years Oman, a country with a practically medieval infrastructure and fighting an increasingly bitter counter-insurgency campaign against a Soviet sponsored rebellion in the south when Qaboos took control, would have been better served by any alternative system of government.

So what does the future hold for Qaboos and Oman? It may be that the pressure for change in the region as a whole is irresistible. And certainly previous commentators have drawn attention to the demographic similarity Oman shares with so many of the countries that have seen revolution and overthrown tired autocratic regimes.

Feelings in Oman appear to be more ambivalent; the desire for change more mooted. But if the pressure from within Oman is insufficiently strong or widespread it may be that, once again, the greatest threat to the country's stability comes from Yemen.

In the 1960s and 1970s it was Yemen that provided safe haven and political support for the insurgency in Oman. With Yemen's future in the balance it could be that once again Qaboos has less to worry about from his own people than from trouble fomented beyond his own borders. What seems certain is that Britain, faced with choosing between the dangerous unpredictability of Yemen and the solidity and moderation offered by Qaboos is unlikely to feel the same way about autocratic rule in Oman as it did in Libya.

In 1971, the same year that the founder of the SAS, David Stirling, tried to put together an operation to assassinate Gaddafi, Stirling's old regiment was deploying to Oman in unprecedented numbers to ensure that Gaddafi's contemporary, Qaboos, remained in power. Forty years later, with the SAS sent to Libya to help evacuate British citizens stranded by fighting, the difference in the quality of governance in the two countries remains as critical to their fortunes as the nature of it.

This commentary was published in The Guardian on 15/06/2011