Obituary: A Failed Prince - Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah

The beginning went well.

Shortly after coming to power Jaber al-Ahmad expressed his desire to “renew” the Kuwaiti state: “These days in Kuwait there is a clear movement for renewal…” he said in 1978. In 1976 the Kuwaiti parliament had been suspended and political dissidents in the country were chaffing. In 1981 Sheikh Jaber embarked on a dubious policy that would eventually prove the undoing of the Kuwaiti national project. While on the one hand the constitution was re-instated and new elections were called for a new parliament, on the other, a process of wholesale naturalization and enfranchisement of Bedouin tribal groups allied to the regime was begun and the government redrew electoral district lines as part of its strategy to bolster support for the ruling family in the face of the imminent return to constitutional rule and new elections. Tribally dominated election districts proliferated at the expense of urban constituencies, which also were redrawn in this large-scale effort to limit the size and cohesion of opposition parliamentary coalitions.

In his 1978 speech Sheikh Jaber had added “And what about religion? The constitution declares Islam to be a source of legislation – so what is new here? The renewal is in the Islamization of the state, in the way that the state will apply religious rules in all spheres… Renewal means changing the present order into a new order.” And he meant it. Islamists won the elections for parliamentary seats in 1981 and, together with tribal leaders who shared many of their values and political goals, speeded up the Islamization of Kuwaiti society just as the rulers had intended.

In this sense Kuwait was flowing with the tide. Despotic rulers across the Arab world had reacted to the threat posed by left wing nationalism, so dramatically unleashed by Nasser in the 1950s and 60s, by draping themselves in pages of the Quran. Even Sadat, Nasser’s very anti-nationalist successor in Egypt, had done the same. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American programs for an Islamic Jihad against the Russians all fit in quite nicely.

But democracy is a fickle tool for autocratic control. It is little wonder that almost all Islamist groups are anti-democratic; as they realise that they would never be long tolerated by the electorate. By the time of the next election in 1985 most Kuwaiti voters (limited to men over 21) had seen through the religious veneer. Many Islamic candidates lost and various radical reformers were elected. The Kuwaiti parliament of 1985 was by far the most progressive government body in the entire Arab world. Even the remaining Islamic members saw the writing on the wall and joined the democrats in criticizing the regime's economic policies. The Emir and his crown prince spoke of “red lines” which parliament should not cross, but neither parliament nor constitution recognised such boundaries.

This was the key moment for Jaber AlSabah. He could have been a visionary prepared to accept a constitutional monarchy. Instead he chose to be a reactionary autocrat. Parliament was dissolved and the constitution suspended in July 1986. But the political process unleashed five years earlier would not quietly die away. The populace had developed a taste for democratic and accountable government.

Suspending the constitution was the grand error in internal politics committed by Jaber AlAhmed. The second grand error was in foreign policy in his decision to bring Kuwait into an alliance with Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. This was folly of the grandest order. The Iraq-Iran war was a disaster started by Saddam on a fantasy pretext of swift victory. It had soon descended into a bloody battle of attrition from which no side would or ever could emerge victorious. This was war at its worst: war for war’s sake. The geographic and political position of Kuwait, its long history as a trading post at the azimuth of the Arabian gulf between Arabia, Persia and the route to India … all these precluded against a policy of taking sides in this insane conflict – as if the insanity of the conflict was not reason enough. Yet Jaber AlAhmed and his two brothers Sabah, Minister of Foreign affairs and Nawaf, minister of Defence, did just that.

Kuwait was too small to make any difference in the war – yet another good reason to remain neutral – and it never became directly involved in hostilities. Yet it made its preference for the Iraqi side perfectly clear. The consequences were obvious: on the one hand Iranian military threats brought a vastly increased Kuwaiti military budget – that could never make any difference anyway, except to a handful of arms traders. On the other hand Kuwait was drawn into an Iraqi sphere of influence, with the Iraqi embassy in Kuwait becoming a de facto state ministry.

So by the time Iraq and Iran finally agreed a ceasefire in August 1988 with Saddam claiming an imaginary victory, after a million dead and nothing gained by either side, Kuwait owed a considerable degree of allegiance to Saddam Hussein. At the same time, the internal political scene was in turmoil, with the ruling family, led by Jaber AlAhmed, trying to force an alternative parliament with far reduced powers and electoral accountability, on a public that was, quite frankly, having none of it.

The Kuwaitis were in opposition to their ruling family, and Saddam Hussein’s pictures were everywhere. Wouldn’t he be tempted to invade under these circumstances? Especially if it also meant instantly rubbing out billions in debt?

There is no doubt that Jaber AlAhmed’s policies both internally and externally were a major contributing factor, if not the major contributing factor, to the Iraqi invasion of August 1990. Under his misguided and short-sighted leadership, he had alienated the population while committing Kuwait to supporting the Iraqi army. Would not the people of Kuwait now welcome that army on their streets?

This second (or first, depending on the counting system used and whether a war in which no western soldiers die counts) Gulf War to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait is well documented. What is not so well documented are the political frictions between the Kuwaiti populace and their popular political leadership, mostly in exile during the conflict, and the ruling AlSabah family, entirely in exile during the conflict.

The Kuwaiti populace widely held the ruling family, and especially the trio of Jaber AlAhmed and his two brothers, at least partially responsible for the invasion. In addition, their less than dignified flight from Kuwait did not earn the ruling family any respect or redemption.

During the months of exile, however, the Kuwaiti opposition arguably made the same utopian error that the founders of the constitution had made: they maintained that a change of leadership in the membership of the ruling family elite was inappropriate, citing the ludicrously irrelevant proverb that you do not change captains during a storm. On that ridiculous basis, neither the Free French or Polish or any other occupied peoples should have formed a government or leadership in exile. The Kuwaiti opposition somehow believed they could reconcile their demand for constitutional law with the reality of reactionary autocratic princes. On hindsight, the opposition, when they gathered for their conference in Jeddah late in 1990, should have at least have tried to push Jaber AlAhmed aside, forcing him to abdicate in favour of the crown prince Saad AlAbdullah AlSalem. But they did not.

After the eviction of Saddam the ruling family was too weak to resist a return to constitutional rule. Jaber AlAhmed had been returned to Kuwait by an American army and was in no position to resist calls for political reform. But the antipathy the ruling elite was held in was reflected in the fact that his brothers Sabah and Nawaf where excluded from the post war government.

But Jaber and other members of the AlSabah family had been even further radicalised by their exile, becoming even more reactionary. They viewed with some envy the absolutist rule that AlSaud wielded over Saudi Arabia and its peoples. But unable to abolish the parliament and suspend the constitution as before, they now intensified their campaign to undermine democracy and popular political representation by accelerating the processes they had started in the early 80s: speeding up the promotion of Bedouin and arriviste elements in Kuwaiti society, who owed total allegiance to the ruling family, and intensifying the alliance between that family and extremist religious groups.

The 1990s saw fundamental changes in Kuwait, which continue to this day. Unknown people with low educational abilities and calibre from obscure Bedouin backgrounds were rapidly promoted to positions of great seniority in the state infrastructure. At the same time, corruption, previously unknown in Kuwait, became a mainstay of everyday life. Members of the ruling family openly endorsed their pet candidates for parliament, lavishly funding their campaigns as well as enabling them to hand out all sorts of favours to their constituents. “Access” to people in power became a valuable commodity as everyday life became more difficult, complicated and increasingly unaffordable for the average Kuwaiti household. Scandals of financial impropriety by senior government officials became the norm rather than the exception.

It would have been easy to stamp out such practices if there was a will to do so. Instead, this was (and continues to be) a deliberate policy by the elite of the ruling family guided by Jaber AlAhmed.

Hand in hand with these developments came the growing power and influence of extreme religious rightwing elements and their parliamentary representatives who were in open alliance with the ruling family. Where once in the mid 1980s people were looking forward realistically to a liberalisation of the country under a democratic parliament, now the picture was reversed, with liberals desperately fighting a rearguard action to try and salvage what few individual freedoms they retained. In a Machiavellian twist, the ruling family started to portray itself as a moderating, even modernising, force, proposing for example the extension of the vote to women. That Jaber AlAhmed had entered into a folly of an alliance with religious extremism came to the fore in 1999 when they were so contentious that parliament was suspended again. This time around, however, the Emir followed constitutional procedures and permitted new elections to take place in July of the same year. The election results returned many of the regime's Islamist antagonists to the legislature, along with members of a new liberal coalition whose popularity was doubtless disquieting. Yet religious fanatics remain the relatively benign opposition of choice for the
ruling family, as they do for many despotic regimes in the Arab world.

The reign of Jaber AlAhmed effectively came to an end in 2001 when a stroke and brain haemorrhage left him incapacitated. At around the same time, the crown prince and prime minister, Saad AlAbdullah also became seriously ill and could no longer pursue his office. The jobs were then split with an independent post of prime minister. This had long been a call by democratic reformers who had intended the post of prime minister to be for a Kuwaiti citizen elected by parliament. Now, however, with parliament neutered through a combination of corruption and religious fanaticism, the posts were divided among family members with Jaber’s brother Sabah, who had since returned from the cold to his usual haunt of minister of Foreign Affairs, promoted to prime minister. In effect, Sabah AlAhmed has been the ruler of Kuwait for the last five years, during which time he has zealously persevered with the policies developed under the reign of his elder brother, as financial corruption in society spiralled out of control, hand in hand with continuing growth in the power of religious extremists and nouveaux riches Bedouin elements. Under the joint reign of Jaber and Sabah, religious extremists were given a free hand to dominate the education system with a result that Kuwait has produced a generation of graduates who are not only religiously radicalised but many of whom, having majored in Islamic studies, are unable to get jobs.

Jaber AlAhmed leaves the world with another, near perfect example of the failed cynical prince whose misplaced sense of self made him believe he could combine a form of parliamentary government whilst maintaining a medieval, almost feudal power structure for him and his family. That he could not see the contradiction between the two is a clear deficit in his ability and fitness to rule in the first place. Further, when the contradiction emerged and stared him in the face, he resorted to type, becoming a reactionary autocrat. In concert with close members of his family he then set about undermining the society over which he ruled in such a way that it would be unable or unwilling to challenge the autocracy of his ruling family. In the end he degraded the country under his rule while bringing no security to his dynasty.

His policies directly contributed to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990 and subsequently the country became little more than an American satellite, beholden to the US troops now permanently based there. During his reign the health, education and telecommunications infrastructure of the country, which had grown impressively during the 1980s, degraded considerably during the last 15 years. It is a telling sign that no one in Kuwait – especially Jaber AlAhmed himself – would seek medical care inside the country if they can afford to get treatment abroad. Kuwaitis now go to neighbouring Saudi for better healthcare and prefer enrolling in universities in neighbouring Gulf States. The opposite was true just twenty years ago.

Sheikh Jaber was buried according to a tradition that forbids formal tombs and epitaphs but yet, a perfect epitaph to his reign was provided by the picture of those soldiers guarding his grave straight after the burial. Slouching and loitering in American-inspired uniforms, they perfectly represent the Kuwait he has bequeathed: undisciplined, disorganised, extremely bored and utterly aimless.