For Some Kuwaitis, Savior Is Now Enemy

The glass-and-steel shopping mall glitters at night. Inside, luxury boutiques offer gold and jewels, Mont Blanc pens and Lacoste sportswear. At the designer coffee shop on the ground floor, patrons sip espressos and lattes around a baby grand piano that revolves beneath laser lights.

This seems a strangely Vegas-like venue for a meeting with a leading member of the country’s burgeoning Islamist movement.

But that’s Kuwait, where the baubles and luxuries of the West abound thanks to the oil bonanza, yet the most potent political force calls for a return to fundamental Muslim values and tribal heritage.

Clearly, even Kuwaitis -- who arguably should be America’s best friends in the Arab world, given that their country owes its continued existence to a U.S.-led rescue 11 years ago -- have a love-hate relationship with the West.

So much so that traffic patrolman Khaled Shimmiri, who stopped two American soldiers on a highway last month for allegedly speeding, drew his pistol without warning and shot both. In October, a pair of extremists ambushed U.S. Marines on training exercises, killing one before other Marines killed them.

After the highway incident, the Kuwaiti government put out word that the officer -- who was arrested in Saudi Arabia -- was mentally unbalanced. U.S. officials, meanwhile, assured journalists that this nation remains firmly in the pro-American camp.

But Kuwaitis and longtime expatriates here say they have seen a steady and disturbing rise in Islamic extremism.

“I have been here 22 years, and in that time I have seen the country becoming more and more fundamentalist,” said a European businessman, who asked that his name not be used. “This country is going backward, not forward.” As for any residual gratitude toward the U.S., he scoffed: “Eaten bread is soon forgotten.”

The attacks on the Americans have raised alarms about the reliability of Kuwait, which could be the jumping-off point of any U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The government here already has restricted its citizens’ access to one-fourth of the country where U.S. exercises are taking place. The move does not appear to have caused much resentment among Kuwaitis, but it was at least a blunt acknowledgment that some of them might pose a threat to the more than 12,000 U.S. troops on the ground.

Like Arabs elsewhere, Kuwaitis say there is a widespread sense of rage and humiliation among ordinary people caused by the actions of Israel against the Palestinians and a sense that the U.S. campaign against terrorism is a thinly disguised religious war against Muslims.

“Every day we watch on TV the scenes of Israel killing people in Palestine. Every day. What do you expect to happen in the Arab person’s mind? You should expect huge anger, and sometimes it does not stay only as anger. It develops into action,” said Ismail Shatti, the Islamist meeting a journalist at the Galleria 2000 mall.

Shatti runs a consulting business from a luxurious wood-paneled office and wears a close-trimmed goatee rather than the long wild growth favored by the fundamentalists. He deems himself a moderate and supports the U.S. presence in Kuwait as a protector from the Hussein regime. If there is an invasion of Iraq, he will back the United States as a way of repaying the Americans for their role as Kuwait’s savior -- even though he would be opposed to the invasion, he said.

But any society has extremists and fanatics, said Shatti, who believes that other Kuwaitis might want to follow in the footsteps of those who have already taken up arms against their American guests.

“Any society consists of some fragile people, and pressure will guide them to lunacy and fanatic actions,” he said.

So far there has been one U.S. victim in Kuwait: the Marine killed Oct. 8 by two men investigators have linked to Al Qaeda. The attackers’ funeral drew a large crowd of supporters and a mullah -- later arrested -- who lionized them as martyrs.

Although the heavily armed U.S. presence in the country is able to take care of itself, it is an awkward reality that as forces are built up in the region for a possible invasion, they must be wary of the very people they originally came to help.

Some in Kuwait, especially the U.S.-educated elite, believe that Western-style liberal democracy is the answer to the problems here and in the rest of the Arab world. But the liberals admit that they lack the financial support, mass appeal and organization of the Islamists, though the Sept. 11 attacks spurred them to press for democratic reforms and to oppose religious intolerance.

The limited democracy that the U.S. helped foster here after the ouster of Iraqi troops in 1991 gave Islamists their foothold on power here, said Shamlan Essa, chairman of political science at Kuwait University.

“This is the problem with democracy -- it allows Islamic fundamentalists to pop up like mushrooms,” he said.

In the Kuwaiti parliament, 15 to 20 of the 50 members are Islamists and about 10 are liberals. The balance is held by “tribal” independents. In reality, however, the conservative tribal representatives tend to side with the Islamic bloc.

As a result, Islamic issues dominate public debate. Religious groups recently pushed through a law mandating segregation of the sexes on Kuwait University’s modern, sprawling campus, and there have been calls for more hours of religious training each week in public schools.

One foreign resident said he did not think the Islamic factor would deter Kuwaitis from applauding an invasion to oust Hussein. Kuwaitis are like “kids in a candy store” when it comes to removing the Iraqi leader, the observer said.

Both Kuwaiti officials and Western experts consider the number of hard-core Al Qaeda operatives in the country to be small -- in the dozens rather than the hundreds. And the estimated 70 to 120 Kuwaitis who went to Afghanistan to fight with Al Qaeda reportedly are under close scrutiny by intelligence agencies. The October attack on the Marines at Faylakah island did not have the earmarks of a carefully planned operation.

The consensus of Kuwaiti and U.S. officials is that there could be small-scale attacks that take advantage of targets of opportunity in Kuwait, but that Al Qaeda would not be capable of large-scale actions against Americans here.

How could such hostility develop in a country where Americans were joyously embraced as liberators only a few years ago?

Shatti, a senior member of the Islamic Constitutional Movement, said Islamists like him have had almost no political competition since the death of the Arab nationalist movement in the 1960s and ‘70s and the near-eradication of communism and socialism after the Cold War. Now the only alternative to Islamists is “liberal democracy -- the West,” he said. “And people do not like how the West has been treating us.”

Essa, the university department chairman, blames the Kuwaiti royal family, which runs the government, for giving the Islamist movement too much scope. Part of the reason, he suggested, is that the royals felt “guilty” for not having prevented the invasion by Iraq in August 1990 and were afraid to try to challenge the Islamists openly.

Although the Al Sabah dynasty has led the emirate for more than 200 years, its authority is not absolute -- it has suffered from infighting among different branches of the family as well as frequent conflicts with parliament.

“The whole quandary in the Gulf is that the governments and the Islamic fundamentalists both compete for the popular masses, and their competition inevitably revolves around Islam,” Essa said.

The result is that the government surrenders to the religious groups, he said. For instance, he said, they have been allowed to set up their own “finance house” that is a largely unregulated bank outside the banking system. Islamic groups also have about 120 charities in Kuwait, and “no one knows where the money goes,” though U.S. officials have requested closer auditing of the groups.

In contrast, Essa contended, when liberals tried to set up their own organization -- a Kuwaiti Committee for Human Rights -- the government turned them down.

Islamists control the Education Ministry in Kuwait and neighboring Saudi Arabia, Essa said, and are shaping the thinking of the next generation in the worst ways. Instruction is “full of messages of hate toward the West and Christians and Jews,” he said. Liberals “have been telling them for the last 20 years that this is not right, not right.”

“I never thought it would reach this point,” said Mohammed Jassem, another liberal, who is editor of the Al Watan newspaper and the Arabic edition of Newsweek magazine. He also sees government timidity as the main reason for the rise in anti-Americanism and fundamentalism.

“What we need is a very strong signal by the government to say that the government is working with the Americans and to show that this is in Kuwait’s interest. We should not be shy about saying it,” Jassem said. “And the Americans should push the Arabs to be clear about supporting them.”

Jassem said liberals are outmatched by the Islamists. “Liberals here could not achieve a demonstration of 200 people, but the Islamist groups could get thousands out on the street if they wanted.... We cannot stop them, we just have to contain them.”

Waleed Nusif, editor of Al Qabas newspaper, said there is even a cult-like tendency to try to seduce children into the Islamists’ fold. “They are targeting the ages between 5 and 10” with offers of games and camping trips heavily dosed with religious teachings.

Shafeeq Ghabra, director of the Center for Strategic and Future Studies, believes that the few liberals need to be willing to stand up and challenge the extremists or else the Arab world is going to find itself falling further and further behind.

On a recent evening, addressing a group of expatriate business executives whose questions reflected a deep anxiety about recent happenings, Ghabra was blunt: “The school and the mosque were totally ignored over the last two decades. The state gave up its responsibility in the field of education. Everything -- social science, literature -- became religious,” he said.

“And what is the result? It produces a guy who can go into Faylakah and shoot an American and think that he is serving his country.”