Royal Heir Home; Role Uncertain

Crown Prince Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah returned Monday to a capital city alive with celebratory gunfire, even as Kuwaitis vowed that the powerful ruling family would never again enjoy pre-eminence over one of the world’s wealthiest oil sheikdoms.

The beaming prince stepped down from a Saudi military transport plane at Kuwait International Airport and immediately stooped to pray on the tarmac of the country he left seven months ago, less than half an hour ahead of an Iraqi invasion force.

“I’m very, very happy indeed to be back home,” said Saad, who is Kuwait’s prime minister as well as heir apparent to the throne. He was accompanied by most of the remaining members of his 22-man Cabinet to finish setting up the government in a city and country struggling back to life under the haze of hundreds of oil well fires, with a public infrastructure in ruins.

Still without telephones, water or electricity, the Kuwaiti capital is under virtual occupation by thousands of allied military forces. Citizens who had not emerged from their homes for months crowd into the streets from noon until after nightfall, waving flags, cheering or simply milling about. The air is alight with gunfire almost every minute of the day, frequently punctuated by the boom of exploding mines and the flash of tracer bullets.

“We hope, of course, that this will be the start of a new era to rebuild Kuwait,” said Abdul-Rahman Awadi, minister of state for Cabinet affairs, as Crown Prince Saad returned to head an interim, three-month martial-law government.

It has not been determined when the emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, will return from exile.

But Kuwaitis who remained behind when the ruling Sabah family fled to Saudi Arabia on the morning of Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion noted that they endured the terrifying, seven-month occupation on their own and said they will expect significant democratic reforms when the Royal Family returns.

These sentiments come from a broad range of Kuwaitis, from the Kuwaiti Popular Resistance’s mysterious spokesman, Abu Fahad, to former members of Parliament, students and government employees--many of them previously reluctant to criticize too strongly the Sabahs’ domination of politics in Kuwait.

“I feel that we are free now, and we have waited (the prince’s) coming since seven months ago,” said Yahia Matruk, a 36-year-old police officer who joined an impromptu celebration that backed up traffic along the waterfront for several miles.

“The Iraqis took everything from us: our clothes, our TV, they even stop me on the street and take my car. All we have are the clothes that are with us. So we await him. But I think all Kuwaitis--we need more things now from our government, change many things, not like before,” he said. “As America, as France, as Britain, the democracy not like anything the Gulf has had before.”

Allied officials will be pressing the Kuwaiti government to make good on its pledge to restore Parliament and hold national elections as soon as possible.

“The U.S. is a country founded on democracy and principles of public participation, and it is going to stand strongly on those principles here and everywhere,” said the new U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Edward W. (Skip) Gnehm Jr. “We don’t care if they call it a Parliament or a National Assembly, we don’t care if they call the head of state an emir, as long as people indeed have a right to participate in the government.”

Political analysts predicted that Kuwait’s ruling family is likely to have trouble re-establishing authority over a population that has suffered on its own during a long and brutal enemy occupation.

“I think it’s going to be a real challenge,” said one. “Because it’s like your teen-age kid who comes home from school and you say, ‘You’ve got to be home by 1 o’clock,’ and he says, ‘You’re kidding.’ You can’t come in and impose authority over people who were basically ruling their own affairs and expect them to be happy about it.”

At its first news conference, the Kuwaiti Popular Resistance said it would be willing to dissolve itself in the coming months and hand over its weapons to the government, but leaders said they expect democratic concessions from Kuwait’s rulers in return.

“We’ve been promised by the prime minister and the leaders of this country, and we believe them, and we think it’s going to happen,” said Abu Fahad, who has acted as a spokesman for the resistance but has refused to give any name other than his nom de guerre.

He and other resistance leaders spoke with their headdresses wrapped around their faces because, they said, there are still Iraqi secret police agents here in Kuwait city.

Abu Fahad insisted that he has no pretensions to political leadership, saying: “I prefer disappearing. But I believe from the experience we got, we learned some lessons. Someone else is going to take care of this, not myself.

“We do still and we will remain supporting the Sabah family, who were chosen by our grandfathers 100 years ago,” he added.

Abu Annas, another resistance leader, added: “We think it is a necessity to have democracy in our country. We have been with these Iraqi soldiers for these seven months, and we think we’re in a big, big jail. . . . We are going to have democracy, and we are prepared to fight for it, but in a kind of peaceful way, without guns.”

There has been much concern in recent days about the thousands of weapons left behind by the fleeing Iraqis that are now in the hands of Kuwaiti civilians--some of them bent on celebration, some on avenging the deaths of their friends and family members against Palestinians, Jordanians or other civilians who cooperated with the Iraqi invaders.

The government has pledged to bring accused collaborators fairly to trial, but officials admit that they are perplexed about how to disarm an entire population that seems entranced with its new weaponry.

Casualties in the Kuwaiti army from the thousands of bullets raining down on the city are said to be higher than those suffered during the war of liberation. An unspecified but probably substantial number of civilians have also been killed or injured.

Kuwaitis this week were gleefully detonating mines off the beach by throwing stones into the water until the French Foreign Legion moved in to clear them.

Equally confounding has been the problem of restoring water, telephones, food and electricity to a city that is virtually cut off from contact inside and outside the country and that plunges into total darkness each night at dusk.

U.S. Army engineers have been brought in for consultations, and they report that partial electricity service to the capital could be restored within three days if officials are able to connect the capital’s main generating station, operating again at 80% of capacity, to a single remaining transmission facility linking the plant with the city.

Otherwise, they report, power service will have to wait until transmission lines can be re-strung along the 85-mile route between Kuwait city and a second generating plant in southern Kuwait at Doha.

Other services are further down on the priority list.

“The planning that we did was on a worst-case basis . . , and in the power and phone systems, the damage is perhaps a little worse than what we hoped, but in other areas it’s better, definitely better,” said one official.

“We’re all concerned that if the Iraqis would have been here a few more days,” the situation would probably have been much worse, he said. “The fact that it collapsed so fast leads us all to believe that we just lucked out.”

Texas oil-fire expert Red Adair arrived here Monday to begin tackling the first of an estimated 500 oil well fires raging throughout Kuwait. Adair’s company is one of four U.S. and Canadian firms contracted for the task. Smoke from the fires is so thick that it has been impossible to determine exactly how many wells are ablaze, officials said.