The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Arab Nation and the Islamic Nation have lost one of their finest men with the death of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Crown Prince and Minister of Defense and Aviation, and Inspector General. And I lost a dear friend and a strong supporter who always backed me in calamities since I knew him as a young man in Beirut, a city that he would visit in the summer with then-Prince Fahd bin Abdul Aziz (who became king after that), Rest in Peace, and Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, may God grant him the long life. The day was gone when the bad news came, and I was so dismayed that I hoped the news was a lie. But life and death are in the hands of God, and death is a reality, and so I pray for God to grant patience and give consolation for Prince Khalid bin Sultan and his family. The memories about the Prince, the honest friend, are many, but above all, there are two things, namely, his patriotism and his friendship. I visited him near Geneva after he underwent surgery for his knee. I sat at the edge of his bed and we had a conversation about the nation's concerns, especially those in the aftermath of the Baghdad summit in May, 1990. He was concerned by what seemed to him arrogance on the part of Saddam Hussein, and his ambitions or greed. Prince Sultan was convalescing in Tangier when Saddam invaded Kuwait. I called him there and he reminded me during the phone conversation of what he had said about Saddam Hussein, and then resolved to return to Riyadh even before he recovered. I visited him a few days after that in his office in Riyadh (I believe the building was the old headquarters of the Saudi Prime Ministry). He was still dragging his leg in pain, and I pleaded with him not to stand and walk with me, but he smiled and said that this was the least of his concerns at the time. We were still in September. He told me that Kuwait will be liberated and that it shall return. He was certain of that, and when I tried to discuss with him the reasons why he was thus confident, he said that what mattered was that liberation would take place with the least possible damage for Kuwait, the Gulf, Iraq itself and the nation. Would I be revealing a secret if I said that Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz had played a major role in restoring relations between Yasser Arafat on one hand, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf nations, after the liberation of Kuwait? Abu Ammar had taken a bad position on Kuwait, the country that had welcomed him, and the country from which he had launched his revolution. His position angered many within the PLO and outside it, and God have mercy on the soul of our brother Khaled Hassan, who would visit me in my office in London back in those days to complain to me and to the colleagues at Al-Hayat about the mistakes of Abu Ammar against Kuwait. It is Prince Sultan who restored the relationship between Abu Ammar and Saudi Arabia. When I thanked him for this, he said that the issue was more important than Yasser Arafat and his mistakes. Prince Sultan then advocated the Cause when he represented his country at the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations in New York. His speech is there and the honorable stance of his country is on the record. On the personal level, Prince Sultan was that permanently smiling friend who never turned down a request by me - and all my requests were to obtain political information and news that I could disclose, in part, in this column. During the preparation for the liberation of Kuwait, his responsibilities and preoccupations became many. Once, he found that I had failed to get an appointment with him in his office and was disappointed, so he arranged for me to visit him in a farm near Riyadh on the weekend. He gave me information, but King Fahd had given important statements on the issues we discussed, and so he suggested that I postpone publishing what I heard from him out of respect for the king, his eldest brother, and out of respect for seniority, as this was the way the members of the royal family deal with one another. The relationship with Prince Sultan strengthened significantly after Prince Khalid bin Sultan, his eldest son, republished Al-Hayat in 1988, and became its publisher and sole owner. Al-Hayat then maintained the same pan-Arab patriotic line, without partisanship or fanaticism, and remained a paper for all Arabs and Muslims, as it was in the days of its founder and editor Kamel Mroueh, Rest in Peace, who introduced me to the Saudi princes visiting [Lebanon], when I was a university student working on Sundays in the Daily Star to make some pocket money. Because of the fact that my studies in Western schools differed from Prince Sultan's traditional Arab and Islamic learning, it was often that he would tell me poems, proverbs or stories that I had never heard before. If I heard something new, I would thus note it down. In truth, I keep all those clippings, and perhaps I will one day publish them in an article in reminiscence of other memories with the late dear friend and patriot. Rest in Peace, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. His death is a loss for the whole nation, especially his family, and for me along with them. [email protected]
