Who is Sultan Al Mansouri, Qatar’s first UAE ambassador in 6 years?

DUBAI — Qatar announced the appointment of Sultan Al Mansouri as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates after a six-year vacancy in the position beginning with the prolonged 2017 Gulf crisis. 

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, appointed Mansouri as “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” wrote the state-run Qatar News Agency in a press release on Sunday. 

The appointment takes place months after the two countries reopened their respective embassies in June, two and half years after Qatar and the UAE reconciled in January 2021. The Gulf dispute began in June 2017 with the suspension of diplomatic ties and a blockade on Qatar imposed by Egypt and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council countries Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

Mansouri is a career diplomat who previously served as Qatar’s ambassador to Austria in 2019 and also held the position of permanent representative to the United Nations and international organizations in Vienna. Before that, he was the ambassador to China starting in 2014. 

Just before receiving his title as ambassador to the UAE, Mansouri ended on July 12 his tenure as the nonresident envoy to Slovenia, reported the Slavic country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

While in Vienna, home of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mansouri was recognized for his pivotal role in working with the global body on nuclear safety, of which Qatar has been a member since 1976. His cooperation with the global nuclear agency extends to the present day. 

In July of 2023, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi lauded Mansouri for Qatar’s financial contributions to financing various projects at the agency, according to Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In exchange, the IAEA provided cooperation and expertise to help Qatar develop programs and scientific development. 

Mansouri has maintained his cooperation with the IAEA, as his country sits on the agency’s Board of Governors for the third term, from 2022 to 2024. Before that, Qatar occupied membership in the policy-making body from 2013 to 2015 and again from 2016 to 2018, according to the Qatari government. 

Qatar, along with Arab states, had joined the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and adopted all international resolutions calling for the Middle East to be free of nuclear weapons. 

Mansouri led other Arab states in calling out Israel for refusing to join the treaty. In June of 2021, he urged Israel to cooperate with IAEA and open its nuclear facilities and atomic reactors to inspectors, as Israel’s nuclear capabilities had been inaccessible to the global agency and subject to speculation since the 1960s, reported London-based publication Nuclear Engineering International (NEI). 

The IAEA partner “urged the international community and its relevant institutions to support the goal of freeing the Middle East from nuclear weapons and to take practical steps to achieve that goal based on its legal and moral responsibility,” reported NEI, referencing a statement issued by the Qatari minister at the time.  

Background: 

In 2017, Qatar was accused of supporting extremism because of its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood — which the four blockading countries had branded a terrorist organization — and for maintaining economic ties with Iran, with which Qatar shares its largest natural gas field. 

The three-and-a-half-year blockade of almost all trade, work and travel by air, land and sea ended in January 2021 with the signing of the Al-Ula Declaration in Saudi Arabia between the involved countries, brokered by the United States and Kuwait.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt were the first to reappoint ambassadors to Doha that same year, while Bahrain has not reopened its embassy in Doha despite reaching a deal to restore diplomatic ties in April 2023.