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CAIRO: Egypt appears to be on its way to joining the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a senior Kuwaiti official said in comments published by the country’s al-Rai newspaper.
The statement also comes less than one week ahead of the GCC summit in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh.
According to Humoud al-Radhwan, the head of the GCC directorate of Kuwait’s foreign ministry, the GCC is looking also at Morocco and Jordan in joining the gulf alliance.
“We support Jordan and Morocco joining the GCC as full members, but only after two years,” Radhwan told the newspaper.
“The GCC countries share close geographic, linguistic and religious features. The Gulf society is fully integrated and there is no real distinction between a Kuwaiti and an Emirati, for instance. We do have harmony with Jordan [and Morocco], but we need two years of partnerships before we look into their cases and expand on their membership until we reach full integration. I must here point that Egypt is on the list of [countries] joining the GCC and that it has the priority,” he said, quoted by the daily.
Currently, the 6-member GCC is looking at the applications of Morocco and Jordan, the only other monarchies in the Arab world, to join the alliance which began in 1981.
In September, the GCC foreign ministers recommended a five-year development plan for Jordan and Morocco to be discussed by the GCC leaders in their summit in Riyadh.
Egypt, since late October, has been a country that GCC officials would like to see enter the alliance due to its vast resources and large population. Officials were quoted in November as saying that Egypt would add a new aspect of the GCC and develop regional ties with the gulf to progress the economic ties of the GCC with the wider Middle East region as a whole.
