Tribune News Network
Doha
After omitting Qatar from a map exhibited at the recently opened Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, the UAE has now shown the Omani governorate of Musandam as part of the UAE on the same map, provoking widespread anger in Oman.
Omani activists have launched a fierce attack on the UAE and the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum, pointing out that UAE officials are peddling lies and deliberately distorting facts.
They said the UAE has drawn an imaginative map of Oman to include the whole of Musandam governorate within the borders of the UAE to distort the geography of the Gulf.
Social media activists have said this was not for the first time that the UAE has done something like this.
A map of Oman had already been placed on the website of the Mohammed Bin Zayed Award for teachers months ago showing Musandam as part of the United Arab Emirates.
HITTING out at the UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Anwar Gargash who said the removal of Qatar from the map was an unintended lapse, activists asked him: how do you explain the annexation of the Musandam province of Oman in your country? Is it also an unintentional lapse?
Omani citizens stressed that the province of 'Musandam' belongs to Oman even if Abu Dhabi faked thousands of maps.
A researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies has earlier revealed that the section for children at the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum displays a map of the Arabian Gulf, without Qatar.
"The rivalry between the UAE and Qatar is on the rise," said Simon Henderson, a Gulf expert at the institute.
Henderson said Qatar had been"completely removed" from the map displayed in the children's section of the museum, which was held after obtaining a special licence from the Louvre, one of the world's most famous museums.