By James Reinl /Al Jazeera/ – When world leaders mount the marble podium during the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), they often spout a lot of doom and gloom.
Not so for Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah. When he entered the global spotlight in October 1963 as foreign minister of a newly independent Kuwait, he gushed with more passion and optimism than your average diplomat.
He said, “genuine hopeful signs of lasting peace on Earth are appearing on the horizon” and issued a call to “banish colonialism, racial discrimination, religious intolerance” while also ending war, poverty and hunger.
He never let up. Sheikh Sabah, who died on Tuesday aged 91 after a series of medical setbacks, will be remembered as a steadfast optimist in a volatile region who spent a 70-year career putting out fires at home and abroad.
“Sheikh Sabah was known internationally as a conciliator,” Gregory Gause, head of global affairs at Texas A&M University and a former scholar at the American University in Kuwait, told Al Jazeera.
“He frequently took the lead in trying to mediate among the other Gulf monarchies when they had spats, including the boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. His mild-mannered style was more successful at bridging gaps in the world of diplomacy than in Kuwait’s domestic politics.”
‘Positive neutrality’
Sheikh Sabah was born in June 1929 in Kuwait, then a British protectorate, the son of the Emir Sheikh Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah.
He attended school in Kuwait and later worked several government posts. After Kuwait gained independence in 1961, he began a four-decade stint as foreign minister that covered the latter half of the emirate’s so-called “golden era”.Advertisement
Kuwait began developing its oil wealth earlier than some of its neighbours and was known for fast-rising living standards, good universities, fun theatres, a relatively free press, and one of the region’s liveliest parliaments.
According to Clemens Chay, a scholar of Kuwaiti and Gulf politics at the National University of Singapore, Sheikh Sabah was “one of the architects” of the fledgeling Kuwaiti foreign policy and steered a course of “positive neutrality”.
Sheikh Sabah “preferred not to take sides in a world that was under the shadow of the Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union, Chay told Al Jazeera.
“Instead, he used Kuwait’s economic leverage and resource wealth to make friends and win the country recognition on the world stage.”
In the early 1970s, regional power Iran revived its territorial claims on Bahrain, which was readying for independence from Britain. Sheikh Sabah helped establish a UN survey that smoothed the island’s path to self-rule, said Chay.
During the tanker war of the 1980s – a spillover of the Iran-Iraq conflict that saw merchant ships attacked – Sheikh Sabah managed to cut deals with the Americans and the Soviets to secure protection for vulnerable vessels in the Gulf, added Chay.
Against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war, Sheikh Sabah was instrumental in the formation in 1981 of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a bloc of six, booming hydrocarbon-rich Arab states that was designed to boost members’ clout.
After Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Sheikh Sabah played a key role in Kuwait’s government-in-exile in Saudi Arabia, using contacts at the UN and overseas to “rally support for Kuwait’s cause”, said Chay.
Sheikh Sabah spoke of what he called the “excruciating experience” of his homeland being occupied by Iraqi forces. He spent the following years calling for compensation and the return of detainees, hostages and the remains of dead Kuwaitis.
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