Page 179 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

176 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

declining to exact their due in any transaction. Nor was it coincidence that the
development fund was started in 1961, the year of Kuwait’s independence and
of the threatened invasion by Iraq. Given these antecedents, and the steady
debasement of political standards in the Arab world since then, it is not
surprising that the fund has come to be used for some very questionable

‘development’ purposes. To give money, for instance, as Kuwait has done, to a
regime like that of South Yemen, which for the past decade has oppressed its
own people, instigated violence and murder abroad and succoured the worst
kinds of international terrorist, can only be regarded as futile and worse. Far
from placating the regime or persuading it to moderate its excesses, the money
merely serves to sustain it while engendering contempt for the donor. Much
the same can be said of the subventions to the Palestinian extremists, and the

uses to which these are put. Indeed, one of the more bizarre sights among the
many incongruous doings on the international stage of late years has been that
of the wealthy oligarchs of Kuwait lavishing favours and flattery upon groups
bent upon the destruction of the traditional political order to which they
themselves belong.

Set beside the annual revenues Kuwait derives from oil, and the surplus that
has been accumulated from these revenues, the development fund appears as
no more than incidental to the financial preoccupations of the shaikhdom. It is
also incidental to the economic well-being of the immigrant community, none
of whom, as already remarked, is entitled to benefit from the state welfare
system or even permitted to own land, businesses or homes in the shaikhdom.
The refusal of the Kuwaiti government to provide housing for the Uidanders,

or to allow them to buy houses for themselves, is prompted by the calculation
that they should not be given any incentive to settle in Kuwait permanently.
But many of the Uitlanders have to all intents and purposes already settled
there, and others, like the 200,000 Palestinians in the shaikhdom, have no
other home. Moreover, Kuwait cannot function without their skills and ser­

vices. Yet the cost of living, and of housing in particular, has risen so high as to
make it barely worth while for foreigners in the more humble occupations to
come to work in Kuwait. Even the highly skilled are no longer assured of a
decent living.
The Uitlanders’ resentment of the economic disabilities to which they are
subjected is sharpened, in the case of the more educated among them, by their
also being denied civil or political rights. While they are aware that the various

rights and freedoms enumerated in the Kuwaiti constitution are for the most
part illusory, the fact that these rights and freedoms are reserved to Kuwaiti
citizens rankles. This is especially so in the case of the educated and technically
skilled Palestinians and Egyptians, who believe themselves to be more sophis­
ticated politically than the enfranchised Bedouin of Kuwait. As the Kuwai

government has imposed almost insuperable obstacles in the way °b™"ing
Kuwaiti nationality, only a small minority of Palesumans and other Arabs,