Page 177 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

174 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

come to examine the oil question. This readiness to vilify the West at every
available opportunity - a readiness which smacks forcibly of chocolate soldier­
ing, since the West poses no danger whatever to Kuwait - added an unnecess­
ary degree of acrimony to the lengthy negotiations for the nationalization of the

Kuwait Oil Company in the early 1970s. Even when the Kuwaitis achieved
everything they desired in the final agreement signed in December 1975, they
accepted it with the same excess of ill grace that had characterized their
conduct throughout.
Kuwait has also displayed what may be politely termed equivocality in her
attitude to Arab and other terrorists who have sought refuge on Kuwait’s soil.
In so doing, she has plainly indicated to the world at large - since the adage that

a man is known by the company he keeps still holds true - just where Kuwait is
believed by the international terrorist fraternity to stand in these matters. That
this should be so is scarcely surprising, since Kuwait has desperately sought to
project (at least in the Arab world) an image of herself as an enlightened
sympathizer with radical movements. The cultivation of this ‘radical’ posture
has led the Kuwaitis to plumb some murky, at times positively Stygian,

depths. When in March 1973, after the murder of the American ambassador
and other diplomats in Khartum by Black September terrorists, the then ruler
of Kuwait, Sabah ibn Salim Al Sabah, was asked whether in view of this
atrocity Kuwait would continue her financial assistance to the Palestinians, he
replied: ‘Of course it is continuing, and it is unlimited.’ For the past decade
and longer the Kuwaiti government has allowed the University of Kuwait,

opened in 1964, to become a centre of political agitation, to the inevitable
detriment of its academic purpose. It has also permitted Kuwait to be used as a
clearing-house for the distribution of radical propaganda, funds and possibly
arms in the Gulf, and to serve as a transit point for the movement of
revolutionaries into and out of the region.
By and large Kuwait’s appeasement of the political extremists in the Arab

world has paid off. The shaikhdom has been exempted from the revolutionary
targets of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and its offshoots, the Popular
Front and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One
obvious reason is Kuwait’s contribution of funds to the Palestinian cause.
Another, less publicized, reason is that for years the ANM branch in Kuwait
served as the movement’s politburo for the Gulf region. One of the foun ng
members of the ANM, and a fellow medical student of George Habash an
Wadi Haddad at the American University of Beirut, was a Kuwaiti, ^ma

Muhammad al-Khatib. On his return to Kuwait after graduating, al-
organized a branch of the movement in the shaikhdom and led an agitauon^^or
the grant of a constitution and a representative assembly. When e rs
national assembly was elected in 1963 al-Khatib was among its mem er:

natural demagogue, he soon came to constitute, along with half a ozen
spirits, a permanent opposition in the assembly, stridently championing