Rulers and leaders are most critically tested when their ability to weigh matters out and make the right decisions is elucidated, when the stormy winds blow in their way or threaten their people, or when their vital area and their wider surroundings are struck by significant events, like war and various forms of turbulent upheaval. These situations demand the wisest of policies and that the leaders choose the most appropriate roles for themselves to protect the country from the gravest of threats.
Among the Arab leaders who passed this test distinctively is Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad, the Emir of Kuwait. The man of balance in the era of imbalance; he was a man of powerful diplomacy. This applies to his role as one the most present and prominent of Kuwait’s foreign ministers, leading the ministry soberly and intelligently, diligently and meticulously- following up on solving the crises forced in the region. The consensus is not that he was a traditional mediator, but a source of trust with all that this requires.
Sheikh Sabah’s diplomatic successes and the distinctiveness of his leadership in the Gulf and the Arab world are sorely missed during these particular circumstances, as we Arabs undergo terrible circumstances, the likes of which we have never lived through before. Crises and challenges revolve around us together and individually; and the collective Arab action, of which the deceased had been a pillar and guarantor, has been suffering from turbulence, rifts, and collapses. Some of these developments had led to some of history’s most dangerous and costly internal wars, and others have been so grave as to make Arab unanimity on any issue far-fetched, if not impossible.
When speaking about Sheikh Sabah, Kuwait, and Palestine, the fleeting negatives do not cancel out the enduring positives. Who denies the Kuwait’s role in supporting and endorsing the Palestine cause since the very beginning, and that Kuwait stretched out a strategic helping hand to the people of Palestine, so much so that hundreds of thousands came to live there? They were not treated like refugees, but expatriates, and the doors of decent work were opened for them, in cooperation with the country’s people, with the young Kuwaiti state providing the best opportunities for work and production; it is as though they had been in their country.
In the era of fear-mongering about the Palestinian revolution’s eruption, Kuwait embraced it early on- as the engineer Yasser Arafat used to say - a confident supporter of the Palestinian peoples’ right to belong to their revolution and partake in all of its activities.
When one visited Kuwait, he would see the best manifestations of the Palestinian movement. There, professional and syndical unions were the most effective, organized, and present in the lives of the revolution and the people. Whenever the revolution was in danger, Sheikh Sabah was the go-to fireman.
Among the Palestinian movements’ mistakes was its reprehensible refrain from condemning the invasion of Kuwait, and one of the best things it did was apologize for it. Because of Sheikh Sabah and his countrymen’s refined sense of responsibility, they opted for forgiveness. They accepted the apology without deviating in the slightest from their conscious and responsible endorsement of Palestine and its people’s imperative to attain their rights.
May Sheikh Sabah’s soul run in peace. He was a man whose death deserves the entire Arab nation’s grief, the world as a whole as well. The Emir was a necessity to all of us during his lifetime. Nonetheless, he will remain present through his legacy and the unstable national and moral impact he left behind for Kuwait, its people, its leadership, and the entire Arab nation.
