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KUWAIT (Reuters) – The Emir of Kuwait, a steadfast defender of Arab détente amid wars and regional turmoil, helped lift his country from the ruin of the 1990 Iraqi invasion to new riches and a mediator role. in the Gulf, first as its top diplomat and then as its ruler. .
Well aware of Kuwait’s small size and enormous oil wealth, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah saw shrewd diplomacy as crucial to his recovery from the seven-month occupation of Iraq, navigating the frequent tensions between Saudi much larger neighbors. Saudi, Iraq and Iran.
But he saw his dream of Gulf unity implode after a new generation of aggressive leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates spearheaded a boycott of Qatar in mid-2017, breaking the 39-year-old Gulf Cooperation Council bloc that helped build and defend. external threats.
An official statement read on state television on Tuesday said 91-year-old Sheikh Sabah had died. He had been hospitalized in the United States since July following surgery for an unspecified condition in Kuwait that same month.
Dubbed the “dean of Arab diplomacy” after four decades as Kuwait’s foreign minister, the emir tried until his death to resolve the dispute over Qatar, which he said left him “bitter.”
Sabah blurted out comments shortly after the embargo that he helped prevent a military strike in Qatar, sparking an irate denial by boycotting the states in a rare personal rebuke against him.
“The emir was concerned about the Gulf, Yemen, Qatar,” said a Kuwaiti source who met with the emir regularly, summing up his surprise at the behavior of the younger and more assertive Gulf Arab rulers with the phrase: “Just watch what the young people did. “
“After Sheikh Sabah, we will be weaker,” he said, noting that none of the other senior family figures has the same experience in navigating regional tensions, a view shared by other sources close to the ruling family and diplomats.
Sabah maintained strong ties with the United States, which led a coalition that ended the 1990-91 occupation of Iraq and used Kuwait as a launching pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite some public concern over the rapprochement, in 2012 he visited Iraq to begin rebuilding ties with Baghdad.
He declined when his close ally Riyadh sought greater control over the shared oil fields during a September 2018 visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 34, sources familiar with the talks said. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia finally agreed on shared oil fields last December, ending a five-year dispute.
One diplomat described Kuwait’s ties to Saudi Arabia, which protected the al-Sabah family during the Iraqi occupation, as its closest but most complicated foreign relationship.
“Kuwait does not want to back down on sovereignty issues,” said a second source close to the family.
Sabah also turned away from other Gulf leaders by refusing to back Syria’s rebel fighters with weapons, believing that would only fuel the conflict there. Instead, he made fundraising for humanitarian aid in Syria one of Kuwait’s priorities.
He criticized the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen and took a firm stand in favor of Palestinian rights, as other Gulf states welcomed the Israeli proposals and, in the case of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, they sealed diplomatic agreements.
DOMESTIC TENSIONS
A petite figure with a beaming smile and a husky voice, his negotiating skills at home were repeatedly put to the test as mounting tensions between the handpicked government and the elected parliament delayed economic and investment reforms.
In a rare 2010 interview, Sheikh Sabah traced Kuwait’s political troubles back to the constitution, which describes a system that is both presidential and parliamentary.
“The legislative and executive authorities overlap. This has led to a conflict between the two, in which everyone tries to restrict the powers of the other,” he told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Illness at the top of the ruling family left Sabah the de facto policy maker for years before he became emir, chosen as a pair of experienced hands to rule the country.
Analysts say that parliament’s endorsement of his leadership in 2006 gave him a solid political foundation. He was actively involved in policymaking and regularly used his executive powers to dissolve parliament, which plays a key role in the succession and has in the past ousted a sick emir from office.
Sabah’s successor and half-brother, Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah, is expected to assume power. Nawaf, who is 83, would appoint a new crown prince after a meeting of high-level family members to reach consensus. Parliament would also have to approve the new crown prince.
ACT OF BALANCE
The older members of the family have been fighting for a position, some of them quite openly, and a rift between the two most powerful branches of the dynasty lies below the surface.
The split emerged in 2006 after Sabah disrupted the tradition of alternating power between the Jaber and Salem family branches.
Sheikh Sabah also broke the grip of opposition groups, both Islamist and liberal, in parliament by using executive powers to amend the voting system in 2012. Kuwaitis angered by the move staged some of the largest marches in the history of the country.
Although Kuwait managed to escape the Arab Spring riots in 2011, protesters stormed parliament that year when deputies were unable to question the prime minister, a nephew of the emir, on allegations of corruption. The prime minister later resigned.
“He showed steadfastness, even with members of his own family,” a Kuwait-based diplomat said at the time of the protests.
Dozens of Kuwaiti opposition figures were arrested for openly criticizing the emir. The constitution says that the emir, who has the last word in state affairs, is “immune and inviolable.”
Sabah acted firmly against sectarianism. After an Islamist militant blew himself up in a Shiite Muslim mosque in 2015, the emir consoled families and called the victims “my children.”
(Gulf office report; William Maclean edited)
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