Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Fat cats in Kuwait

BBC Radio Four and the World Service, January 1997

(Hazhir Teimourian was invited to attend the summit meeting in Kuwait of the leaders of the Gulf Co-operation Council: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. He had expected it to be unmemorable and almost a waste of time. Was it?)

My apprehensions began when I arrived at my hotel. Between the entrance and the lobby, my luggage and my body were searched three times each for concealed weapons, and when I asked whether the six leaders of the Gulf Co-operation Council themselves also stayed in the building, I was told: "Oh, no, they're staying at the Palace. This place is only for reporters".

So, it was with relief that at last I reached my room and threw the windows open to breathe in the sea air, only to find yet another cordon of security thrown around the little country. Western warships - certainly American, also perhaps British - were anchored in the bay, right in front of the royal palace to remind the Amir's enemies - Iran and Iraq across the water - just who protected him and his guests.

Later on, I was told that normal life in several parts of the city had been distorted for weeks by the approach of the summit. Traffic had been re-routed and the top hotels had been placed out of bounds to their normal user.

British friends of mine, who were members of my hotel's gymnasium, were not even allowed to approach the building to collect me for dinner one night. I had to make my own way to them.

Still, with neighbours like Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs, Kuwait's paranoia was perhaps understandable and I set about the real task of my visit: To meet as many local experts as I could manage. Thankfully, the body searches were reduced to two, each time I returned to the hotel.

So it went on, until the high point of the summit, its formal opening, when I found that we reporters, too, had been turned into 'players'. With unaccustomed solemnity, we were led in procession to one corner of the hall of red and gold - with its 35 chandeliers - at the centre of the palace and sat beside robed Arabs and Western ambassadors. Then I saw that pageant here was different from where I came from. Whereas in England, great state occasions were often meticulous copies of past gatherings, here they were still being improvised as instruments of nation-building, to instil into the local populations of disparate origins the sense of belonging together.

Whether it succeeded, I thought, was open to doubt, for as the six leaders tried to look all meek and pious while verses from the Koran were broadcast over us, millions of families out there who watched the ceremony on television surely knew that the patriarchs led - shall we say - "colourful" lives. Equally, their profession of unity took a lot of convincing. The Amir Hamad of Qatar over there, for example, who had overthrown his father, was telling everyone how the Amir Issa of Bahrain, who sat beside him, plotted a coup for the old man, and as I watched Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, I could not help reflecting that he was only there because his father, Sheikh Rashed, had once machine-gunned to death all his own uncles and cousins at a family wedding!

Much more serious was the awesome arrogance of Prince Abdallah, the effective ruler and crown prince of Saudi Arabia. His family's insistence on absolute power, as if nothing had happened since the Crusades, had given rise to a thousand corrupt princely families and the possibility of another revolution rivalling the Iranian uprising of 1979 that swept away the Pahlavi dynasty.

As we watched the frail and stooping figure of the Amir of Kuwait preparing to deliver his opening speech, an element of the untamed Bedouin spirit of the recent past crept into the proceedings. A fierce, but handsome, man in Arab head-dress and robes insisted on moving among the kings and sheikhs and whispered words in their ears, even as the Koran was being recited.

The summit's subsequent negotiations, of course, took place away from the reporters' gaze, and I heard that there had been quite a number of shouting matches over Iran and Iraq. But the final communique still managed to surprise me, as it suggested that the gathering had not paid the slightest attention to the strategic facts of life of the region. Its resolution on Iraq almost identified the unfortunate people of that land with their despot, Saddam Hussein, and, on Iran, the leaders diverged completely from the policy of their main protector, the United States, which sought to isolate the ayatollahs.

The rulers clearly hoped that the government of the United States would understand their need to be seen expressing solidarity with other Arab and Islamic countries, without necessarily meaning it. But would the people of the United States understand? It had obviously been forgotten by the grand men in the hall how much president Bush had wobbled before finally going to war with Saddam Hussein in 1991, and if Saddam tried to grab Kuwait once more, American public opinion had a chance of preventing their government from sending their young people to their deaths for oil a second time.

If only the rulers had asked, everyone in my hotel would have reminded them that the world was now awash with cheap oil, that whoever overthrew them would need to sell their oil at market prices as usual, and that those Western warships in the bay could, just could, leave for home as easily as we, the world's press, would, the day after the conference.

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