Baker Cautions Kuwait on Rights : Diplomacy: The secretary is impatient with the pace of reconstruction and political reform. He says aid will be affected. The emir assures him abuses have ended.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, clearly concerned about reports of summary executions and business-as-usual autocracy in postwar Kuwait, told the emir Monday that Washington’s future political and military support will be affected by the country’s human rights record.

Baker interrupted his Arab-Israeli peace mission for a brief visit to Kuwait, where he lectured the royal family on democratization before getting a firsthand look at the hellish landscape of burning oil fields that were left by Iraq’s retreating occupiers.

Although Baker sought to avoid public criticism of the government of Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, the emir, he left little doubt that he was impatient with the pace of reconstruction and political reform.

“What I said was that the ability of the United States to continue to support Kuwait politically and from a security standpoint in a manner in which we supported them against the brutal aggression of Saddam Hussein would be enhanced if they evidenced full respect and commitment to the preservation of human rights,” he told reporters after the hourlong meeting.

Baker said he asked Sheik Jabbar and the crown prince, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, who is also prime minister, about an Amnesty International report accusing Kuwaitis, including some members of the security forces, of summary torture and execution of Palestinians and others suspected of collaboration with the Iraqi occupation.

“The crown prince made clear there were human rights abuses following the early days of the liberation,” Baker said. “The government of Kuwait regrets what happened during the time it took to regain control of the situation.”

Baker said the crown prince assured him that the abuses had ended and said Kuwait was ready to invite international human rights groups such as Amnesty International to visit the country “and interview representatives of the minority groups.”

Baker said the emir reaffirmed his pledge, made originally in a speech earlier this month, to hold elections before the end of 1992. The secretary of state said the emir promised to consider extending the ballot to women.

However, shortly before Baker arrived from Saudi Arabia, Kuwaiti police broke up a press conference in which representatives of seven secular and religious opposition groups had planned to protest the composition of the emirate’s new government, which was sworn in last weekend.

The opposition leaders had planned to protest the continued domination of the Cabinet by members of the royal family and to call for legalization of political parties. There are five members of the Sabah family in the new Cabinet, two fewer than in the outgoing regime, which resigned under intense criticism for its hesitation in restoring public services after the end of the occupation.

Kuwait authorities said the opposition group failed to obtain a permit for the press conference. When the opposition leaders began to talk to reporters, police cut off electricity in the hotel ballroom and clamped hands over television camera lenses.

After his meeting with the Kuwaiti leaders in the sitting room of an opulent home where the emir is staying while his even more sumptuous palace is being refurbished, Baker plunged into the smoke and flame of Kuwait’s burning oil fields.

Dressed in a white knit shirt with a University of Texas Longhorns emblem on the breast, khaki pants and immaculate white sneakers, Baker stopped at Well 57 in the Ahmadi oil field to watch workmen from the Red Adair Co., the Houston oil well firefighting firm, spray water into the orange flames.

It was almost dusk, hours after the firefighters’ usual quitting time, and Well 57 was the only one where workers were still present, presumably kept on overtime awaiting the VIP visit.

Scores of other fires shot flame and smoke into the air.

Baker’s departure for Kuwait from Saudi Arabia was delayed about two hours to give him a chance to hold an unscheduled meeting with the kingdom’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal.

The meeting apparently was a damage-control session after Saudi Arabia confirmed Sunday that it would not attend the proposed regional peace conference that Baker envisions as a ceremonial start for direct “two-track” negotiations between Israel and Arab states on one track and between Israel and the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on the other.

Prince Saud responded with a statement to reporters endorsing the conference, although Saudi Arabia has not changed its decision not to attend.

“Saudi Arabia believes it is time to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and to achieve a comprehensive and just solution to the Palestinian question,” Saud said, reading from handwritten notes. “Therefore, Saudi Arabia supports the efforts of the United States for the convening of an early peace conference to achieve this objective.”

But he said his country believes that the meeting should be limited to Israel and its immediate neighbors. As for Saudi participation, Saud said, “We cannot go ahead of ourselves.”

A Bush Administration official asserted later that “it has never been contemplated that Saudi Arabia would be at the table with Israel when it is negotiating its political differences with each of the Arab states.”

Saudi Arabia has long bankrolled Arab opposition to Israel and is technically still in a state of war with the Jerusalem government. However, it has no territorial dispute with Israel because Israeli troops did not seize Saudi territory in the 1967 Middle East war when Israel acquired the Jordanian West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Egyptian Gaza Strip, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

From Kuwait, Baker flew to Damascus, where he meets President Hafez Assad today. Syria is considered one of the toughest nuts that Baker has to crack in his effort to line up Arab states to attend the proposed conference.