DOHA, 12 October — Qatar, a maverick Gulf emirate boasting barely 100,000 citizens, sits on vast gas reserves and, promoted by controversial television channel Al-Jazeera, punches well above its political weight on the world stage.

The small peninsula — with a surface area of 11,437 square kilometers (4,575 sq miles) — is home to just 522,000 people, four-fifths of whom are expatriates, and is bordered by Saudi Arabia.

But US charges of “inflammatory rhetoric” in Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Afghan crisis has turned the spotlight on the Gulf state, which — as the station’s main backer — has projected itself as a champion of the free press.

“Qatar’s emir wants to promote freedom of the press,” Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad ibn Jassem Al-Thani said Wednesday.

Qatar — set to host a ministerial World Trade Organization summit next month — is “preparing to develop press freedom, political and social freedoms in the framework of the democratic process taken on by the emir,” he said.

But Al-Jazeera’s coverage has proved too much for the White House.

It warned Wednesday that prime terror suspect Osama Bin Laden may be using videotaped statements made exclusive to the station to order his followers to kill Americans, and urged television networks to reconsider airing them in their entirety.

After a conference call with Condoleezza Rice, US President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, executives from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox agreed not to broadcast videotapes of remarks by the suspected terrorist or his aides without reviewing them first.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier charged Al-Jazeera, launched in Doha in November 1996, with giving too much air time to Islamic extremists and others with radical views in its coverage of the US-led war on terrorism. Powell said the station, which has tremendous viewership throughout the Middle East and is the only 24-hour news channel allowed to operate in the Taleban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, should offer more balanced programming.

He was interviewed by Al-Jazeera in September but raised the coverage issue last week with Qatar’s emir.

That move drew angry responses from the network as well as press freedom advocates who said the United States was trying to muzzle one of the few independent voices in the Arabic-language media.

“We will continue our work in a professional manner whether it be in Afghanistan or elsewhere ... offering a margin of freedom in the Arab world,” Al-Jazeera chairman Sheikh Hamad ibn Thamer Al-Thani vowed yesterday.

“There have been comments from the United States and we have listened to them. If there are errors, which is possible in any journalistic work, it will be normal to rectify it. “Yes, we will do it,” he said when asked if the channel would continue to broadcast video messages of Bin Laden, adding it would also go after “scoops whatever their origin ... and news wherever we find it.”

Sheikh Hamad added that during the 1991 Gulf War “CNN broadcast speeches by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein without being accused of incitement” against the West.

The rule of Qatar’s current emir, Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al-Thani, who took power from his father Sheikh Khalifa in a coup in 1995, has been marked by policies independent from other Gulf monarchies.

Qatar sits on top of the world’s third largest gas reserves after Russia and Iran. Its huge offshore north field contains proven non-associated reserves of more than 10 trillion cubic meters (350 trillion cubic feet).

With an OPEC production quota of a modest 691,800 barrels of crude per day, Qatar has undertaken an ambitious industrialization program focused on liquefied gas, petrochemicals and heavy industry such as aluminum smelting.

The emirate has long called for a regional initiative to end the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Israel opened a trade office in Doha in 1996 despite criticism from other Gulf Arab states. But Qatar froze ties with the Jewish state on the eve of an OIC summit last year amid criticism from Muslim countries.