Kuwait’s Exiled Leaders Ready to Allow Reforms

The Kuwaiti government is preparing to make important concessions for democratic reforms to counter growing criticism of the ruling Sabah family that has threatened to breach Kuwait’s united front against the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion.

As hundreds of prominent Kuwaiti intellectuals and political leaders gather in Saudi Arabia for an unusual summit on Kuwait’s future, opposition leaders have begun to raise charges that the ruling Sabah family may have invited the invasion by an antagonistic oil policy and then lost Kuwait by ignoring warnings by Kuwaiti military officers that an attack was imminent.

Top government officials, alarmed at the prospect of a break in the Kuwaiti political alliance so crucial to combating the Iraqi occupation, appear ready to agree to demands for restoring Kuwait’s Parliament and holding free elections once the country is liberated, according to a number of former Parliament members and opposition leaders.

Some Kuwaiti leaders will go even further in the sessions that open today and demand the immediate dissolution of the current Cabinet, dominated by the Sabah family, and appointment of a new cabinet in exile representing all political currents within the country.

However, it appears clear that nearly all the political leaders here are prepared to agree to the return of the Sabah family as the head of the government and to a resolution urging the United Nations to move forward with military action to liberate Kuwait.

“We have lost Kuwait, and to regain it we have to have a national consensus, and to have a national consensus, the government has to have the support of the people,” a prominent Kuwaiti economist said. “This is the only way, I think, to have a strong Kuwaiti stand against the invaders.”

Former Parliament member Mubarak Dowailah went further, warning that the Kuwaiti public will settle for nothing less than guarantees of democratic reforms before going back into Kuwait.

“We want their word that we are going to practice the constitution of 1962,” he said in an interview Friday. “If they say so, then I think we will make a good thing. If not, then they are going to lose--not us. We already have lost everything, so there’s nothing more to be afraid of.”

The debate that will emerge over the next three days is being closely watched by Western diplomats and Arab governments all over the Persian Gulf region, raising questions about other autocratic regimes nearby and the role of Western forces in restoring a non-democratic government to power in Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government has “invited representatives of every single government entity, every social and political grouping, since 1961,” said one Western diplomat. “This means that this is probably going to be the most representative group of Kuwaitis since independence in 1961, which is an extraordinary thing. . . . All these guys are going to set in motion a process of democratic consultation that will have repercussions for a long time to come.”

In fact, Kuwait is one of the few countries in the Arab world with a democratic history, but its Parliament was dissolved by the government in 1986 at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. In the months before the Iraqi invasion, it was in the process of being replaced by a national consultative assembly that would have included a large number of appointees of the emir in addition to some elected members.

The government said the assembly was designed to pave the way for full restoration of Parliament, but opposition leaders boycotted the June elections for its members.

Now, a number of opposition leaders are threatening a united Kuwaiti front against the invasion by raising questions about the Sabah family’s management of the country and its handling of the crisis with Iraq.

In several public statements over the last several days, Ahmed Khatib, leader of the Kuwaiti Democratic Movement, and Jassem Qatami, leader of the Patriotic Movement, have accused the Kuwaiti government of being intransigent in its negotiations with Iraq before the invasion. Khatib, elected to Parliament in 1985, has called Kuwait’s decision to produce oil from a disputed oil field and to exceed its OPEC production quota “clearly an act of hostility.”

In an interview Friday, Dowailah said the Sabah family ignored repeated warnings from Kuwaiti military officers that Iraq was about to invade.

“Many officers in the military, they are very angry now. They say, ‘We mentioned many times the situation is very bad, Iraq intends to interfere, the situation at the borders is very bad.’ But unfortunately, nobody listened,” Dowailah said. “It happened because the political situation is one that gives the decision to one person, the sheik (emir), without sharing it with the people.”

A Kuwaiti business leader said many Kuwaitis are angry that the government failed to place its military on alert and then went so quickly into retreat.

“They didn’t make any alert in the army, they did not warn the people, they listened to different promises from Arab governments that the Iraqis were not going to invade, while the Iraqis were massing their forces,” he said. “They could have done better defending the country, even a day or a couple of days, and then asking for help from external forces. They were surprised by the invasion, and that, I think, because of complacency.”

The crown prince, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, spent several hours in private meetings with opposition leaders Friday in advance of today’s opening session, and afterward several opposition members said they would withhold further criticisms until hearing the address of the emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, this morning.

The crown prince indicated that guarantees for democratic reforms may be forthcoming provided that the opposition leaders rally a united front behind the move to liberate Kuwait and to restore the Sabah family as Kuwait’s monarchs, several sources said.

Many opposition leaders said they would not object to the return of the Sabah family provided that democratic reforms were in place, including reforms assuring that Kuwait’s billions of dollars in assets abroad are held in the name of the Kuwaiti government, not the Sabah family.

But Kuwaiti government leaders are anxious that the debate over democratic reform not eclipse the need to concentrate on ejecting Iraq from Kuwait.

“The first step is to free Kuwait, right? Do we agree on that? OK. Let me put my hand with your hand and free Kuwait--and then talk about the other issues,” said a member of the Sabah family. “We need to get a clear answer from this meeting, because we don’t want to have walls between us.”

“We’re all on the same boat. There is maybe a little disagreement on how fast the boat should go,” said Abdul-Rahman Awadi, minister of state for Cabinet affairs. “We have been arguing for the last 70 years, and we can go on arguing for another 70. . . . There are going to be no differences on liberating Kuwait, but when we go back to Kuwait, we have a fight to fight.”