Recently, a 3-day conference entitled "New Perspectives on Recording UAE History" was held in Abu Dhabi. Here is what some of the participants had to say...[Gulf News, Monday, 24 November, 2008, p.7]
DR ABDUL KAREEM AL RAYES [Director-General of the Centre for Documentation and Research] - The UAE will emerge as an advanced country in a matter of years, given the 37-year journey which has made it a country with one of the highest levels of income per capita.
PROFESSOR FATIMA AL SAYEGH [UAE historian] - The UAE, given its contribution to the IMF will become a major player in the international economic and political policies. She said: "The UAE Federation, which was a product of the extraordinary statesmanship of its founding president, the late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, will remain strong and will endure in the same effective way thanks to the political leadership."
DR JOHN DUKE ANTHONY [President and CEO of the National Council on US-Arab Relations and Adjunct Professor of the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies] - "The UAE is the foremost example of effective political engineering in the Arab countries, the Middle East and the Islamic world". He added that few countries rival, let alone match or surpass, the UAE in terms of the relative success of governance. The Gulf News points out that: "He portrays the UAE as a living laboratory of politics as defined by the art of compromise" [p. 7].
