Kuwait’s last one of the founding fathers of its constitutional system, political icon DR Ahmed Al Khatib, died on Sunday, March 6, at night at the age of 96.
Al-Khatib has been considered society’s moral compass for the past 60 years. He stood when the country faced several political crises since the proclamation of its constitution in 1962 and the election of its first parliament a year later.
Almost all social persons gave condolences to him as their national symbol, and the news of his death came from his family members. They stated that the former politician had passed away.
Al Khatib is a person who was born in Kuwait in 1926 and finished his schooling in 1942; he left Lebanon in order to study for medicine at the famed American University in Beirut, where he completed his graduation ten years later as a doctor.
However, he learned more about medicine in Beirut as he met leading Arab leftists, including George Habash and Wadee Haddad from Palestine and Hani Al Hindi from Syria. He was also Impressed by the thoughts of Syrian Arab nationalist thinker Qustantin Zuraiq, the four friends who founded the Arab Nationalists Movement in 1951, which became the basis for most Arab nationalist parties in the region. The movement initially called for Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine.
He came back to Kuwait in 1954 and did his practice in the American Hospital, and he started his own private practice, which he continued well into the 1990s when he finally retired. However, he was more curious about politics and befriended the term Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem.
They shared the same and stable way of thinking that led to the Emir establishing a constitutional council, the Founding Assembly, to draft a modern constitution that established in 1963 the Arab Gulf’s first democratically- elected parliament.
Al-Khatib was also the deputy chairman of the assembly. He was elected to the first parliament along with several members of the nationalist movement. After that session, he became the opposition block, along with several more parliaments until he quit the parliamentary life in 1996.
However, police also arrested him several times, mostly when he protested the dissolution of the parliamentary by the late Emir Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmed in 1976 and 1986. In May 1990, three months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, security forces stormed his house and arrested him along with 20 other former MPs as they met to discuss ways to restore the elected parliament.
Since his retirement from politics in the mid-1990s, he has been warning of the corruption of politics in Kuwait as well as in the Arab world. His last initiative was a few years ago, calling for a national congress in Kuwait to renew commitment to the 1962 constitution following a number of political crises that gripped the country, leading to the frequent resignation of the cabinet.