However, the event that stands out in my memory is the 1995 summit held in Riyadh under the Kingdom’s chairmanship. It was a unique experience in terms of the challenges it presented and also because it marked a watershed in GCC news coverage then and now.

Another important factor from the news perspective is the fact that the GCC as a regional grouping has come a long way since its establishment in May 1981. Though it has achieved substantial progress in regional integration, transparency and resolving differences on various important issues like the GCC monetary union hinder the free flow of information. The scenario is pretty much the same now as it was then. Even today, the GCC does not issue press statements in English and its secretariat has no English-speaking media officers.

The event in question was the GCC summit that I covered along with my colleagues Javid Hassan, an Indian veteran, and Afshin Molavi, an American laconic master. Though the summit itself was off-limits to the media, the GCC secretariat had set up a media center at what was then known as Hyatt Regency Riyadh on King Abdul Aziz Road. When we arrived at the media center, we were in for a shock. There was hardly any news feed, except the routine SPA transmission about the audiences of the late Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd with the leaders of various GCC states in which the king “discussed matters of mutual interest.”

“Let’s check out the other wire services,” Hassan said. The news format was pretty much the same as we discovered, hopping in and out of the five other booths belonging to the news agencies of the other Gulf states. We were on tenterhooks. The GCC summit was in session and here we had the national news agencies of the six Gulf countries dishing out the same stuff with some minor variations, conveying nothing new. To complete the “news round-up,” there was the brochure on the history of the GCC.

We were trying to figure out how to gauge the reports that were churned out by these news networks when Hassan got a brainwave.  “We’ll go around and see if we can catch hold of experts on the GCC,” he said. His suggestion made a lot of sense to me. So we left the news booths in search of greener pastures when we bumped into John Duke Anthony, president of the National Council on US-Arab Relations and a veteran Arab watcher.

With his expertise on intra-Gulf relations, he filled us in on the political undercurrents lurking behind the parade of names and “matters of mutual interest.” Armed with his briefing, we filed the report that was placed on the front-page of Arab News. The newspaper was a sellout that day. Certain broad conclusions can be drawn from this investigative story. True, Anthony still shuttles between Washington and Riyadh and can delve deep into subjects ranging from diplomacy to problems arising from failed Saudi/American marriages.

While he still holds the forte as an expert on US-GCC relations, his country no longer alone dominates the Gulf political or economic scene. China, now one of the biggest trading partners of the Gulf states, was a nonentity in the Gulf region during the mid 1990s when Taiwan was the key economic player. With the Chinese economy moving full throttle, Beijing is increasingly looking toward the GCC states to meet its burgeoning energy needs, which they discussed at the first GCC-China Business Forum in Manama, Bahrain, last month.

“China is the second-largest oil consumer after the United States and is one of the fastest growing economies in the world,” said Saleh Mohammed Al-Shanfari, managing director of the Global Omani Investment Co. “Its energy needs are projected to increase by 150 percent by 2020, so it has to cultivate the GCC states with an eye on the future.”

While the GCC has witnessed fluctuation in the power dynamics, there has been a cosmetic change on the news front. As participants in the World Economic Forum discussed in Davos, though there is a marginal improvement in terms of transparency concerning the regulatory framework for access to information, “we hesitate too much: we walk the talk, but we do not talk the walk,” said Ali Al-Shihabi, founder and chairman of Dubai-based Rasmala Investment. Citing the fall of Lehman Brothers as an example, Al-Shihabi explained: “Banks in the UAE have never been in danger of defaulting. But because officials did not communicate publicly that there was a gentleman’s agreement among GCC governments to guarantee the banks’ liquidity, people in the UAE started worrying and extrapolated the turmoil that happened in the West to a regional scale in the Middle East.” As the GCC goes ahead with its economic reforms, it is equally important to facilitate free flow of information to the media and investors, among others.

The other aspect that has largely remained unchanged is the shortage of skilled manpower in key sectors of the Gulf economy. As Al-Shihabi puts it, there are two main issues in the region. High revenues from oil and gas export cannot cover two deficits in the Gulf region: missing talent and the lack of transparency. Equally important is the need to develop manpower in the financial market. The sukuk market in the GCC countries has shown a remarkable turnaround from the difficult days of early 2009.

The GCC market tried to catch up with developments in the Asian sukuk market in 2009, in which Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan led the sector’s recovery with issuances starting in February 2009, largely with government local currency sukuks and a number of sovereign international sukuks.

As the GCC is poised for the creation of a monetary union this year after taking the first step to launch the GCC Monetary Council in Riyadh, the region needs to develop expertise in the financial market on a priority basis. But economic reporting on the GCC has remained timeless. One important point in this context is the slightly more active role played by the GCC in terms of inviting newsmen to cover its major meetings. About 300 journalists were invited to cover the GCC summit in Kuwait in December last year. They included a number of high-profile journalists, editors in chief and broadcasters who participated in group discussions and seminars that were held on the sidelines of the event. They debated for the first time the GCC’s achievements and experience since its foundation in 1981. The GCC as a major defense and economic bloc has several challenges to face today.

The GCC faces challenges from Iran’s nuclear program, a possible water crisis, and danger in Yemen because of multiplying terror cells. But, the member states of the GCC — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE — still enjoy special relations with each other. They share more or less similar political systems, joint destiny and common objectives. In fact, the geographic proximity of these countries and their general adoption of free trade economic policies, besides their common security interests, are factors that encouraged them to establish the GCC. Based on their policies that an aggression against any one of them is deemed an aggression against all GCC states, a unified cooperation in the military field is receiving the attention of the GCC states.  Moreover, security challenges in an unstable regional environment like the Gulf forces the GCC states to coordinate their policies and mobilize their capabilities.