Sultan Qaboos, quiet peacemaker who built Oman, dies at 79

Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, who over nearly five decades in power transformed his Persian Gulf kingdom from an isolated enclave into a developed nation known for brokering quiet talks between global foes, has died, the Omani government announced early Saturday. He was 79.

His death was announced by the official Oman News Agency. The announcement did not mention the cause, but Qaboos had been receiving treatment in Europe for cancer since at least 2014.

Qaboos’ decades as an absolute monarch who used oil wealth to pull his country from poverty made him a towering figure at home, with roads, a port, a university, a sports stadium and other facilities bearing his name. Internationally, as the longest-serving leader in the Arab world, he used Oman’s place in a turbulent region, next to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, to become a discreet but essential diplomatic player.

In a region rife with sectarianism, political divides and foreign interference, the soft-spoken, diminutive Qaboos championed a foreign policy of independence and nonalignment. He became a rare leader who maintained ties with a wide range of powers that hated one another, including Iran, Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

That gave Oman a role akin to a Middle Eastern Switzerland, where foes battling each other elsewhere could meet for quiet talks. In 2011, Qaboos intervened to free three American hikers who had been jailed in Iran on espionage charges, paying a ransom of $500,000 per person.

A few years later, he brought the two foes together again by hosting covert talks between Iran and the Obama administration that paved the way for an international agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.

Qaboos, unmarried for most of his life, had no children and did not publicly name or groom a successor. The matter is likely to be decided by Oman’s official succession process.

According to the country’s Basic Law, upon the sultan’s death a family council convenes to choose his successor. If it cannot agree within a few days, it opens an envelope containing the name of the sultan’s chosen successor, handwritten by the sultan before his death.

Many Omanis and foreign experts expect the new sultan to be one of three of his cousins. It remains unclear to what extent a new sultan would change Qaboos’ domestic and foreign policies.

Qaboos came to power at age 29 in 1970 in a bloodless coup aided by the British against his father, putting himself at the helm of a poor, isolated nation locked in a civil war with rebels in the south.

Tapping the kingdom’s newfound oil wealth, Qaboos subdued the rebels with a combination of military force and development projects while building roads, hospitals, schools and other modern infrastructure across the country to improve life for his people. The effort was so successful that in 2010, the United Nations ranked Oman first in the world in advancement up the Human Development Index over the previous 40 years, ahead of China.

That made Qaboos a titanic figure in his country of 4.6 million, located on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran. While sultan, he also held other offices at times, including prime minister, governor of the central bank and minister of finance, defence and foreign affairs.

The first day of his reign, July 23, is a holiday called Renaissance Day. His birthday, Nov 18, is Oman’s National Day.

Although economic stagnation fuelled by low oil prices marred his later years and his people’s political rights remained limited, Western diplomats marvelled at the consistency of his foreign policy. In 2007, he spelled it out in a public statement.

“We work for construction and development at home, and for friendship and peace, justice and harmony, coexistence and understanding, and positive constructive dialogue abroad,” he wrote. “That is how we began, that is how we are today, and that, with God’s permission, is how we shall continue to be.”

House Arrest to Absolute Power

Qaboos was born on Oct 18, 1940, the scion of the Al Said dynasty, which had ruled from the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula since 1744. During his youth, Oman was crushingly poor, with only a few paved roads, and insulated from the outside world by the strict rule of his father, Said bin Taimur. During his reign, Omanis could not buy cement or wear eyeglasses without the sultan’s permission.

Qaboos was sent to Britain for an elite education, studying at Bury Saint Edmunds in Suffolk and at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In 1965, his father summoned him home and put him under virtual house arrest for six years while maintaining Oman’s international isolation despite the kingdom’s newfound oil.

In 1970, with help from the British, Qaboos overthrew his father in a bloodless coup, emerging as sultan at age 29 and putting Oman on a new path to development and international relations. But first he tackled a leftist rebellion in the country’s south and began dealing with his people’s poverty.

To subdue the rebels, he solicited military aid from Iran, starting an enduring relationship with his neighbours across the Persian Gulf. To develop his country, he routed its oil wealth into infrastructure, building roads, schools, ports and hospitals that improved the standard of living.

And to end Oman’s isolation, he established diplomatic relations with its neighbours, joined the Arab League and the United Nations, and became a founding member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a grouping of Gulf Arab monarchies.

“The sultan’s biggest achievement was putting his country on a path to development,” said JE Peterson, a former historian of the Royal Armed Forces in Muscat and an expert on Persian Gulf affairs. “Sultan Qaboos set in progress a plan for development, created a government where none had existed before and created a foreign policy.”

All along, Qaboos maintained Oman’s independence and ability to build ties with a range of global and regional powers.

Bucking the Arab consensus, he supported talks between Egypt and Israel that led to a peace treaty in 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab state.

After the Islamic Revolution in Iran that same year, he tasked the Omani ambassador to Tehran with getting to know the country’s new rulers. That led to a sit-down with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who received assurances that Oman would maintain relations with the Islamic Republic, regardless of the sultanate’s alliances with Western powers.

Qaboos opened lines with China and the Soviet Union, and in 1994 Oman welcomed Yitzhak Rabin, making it the first Persian Gulf state to receive an Israeli prime minister. Two years later, it received another one, Shimon Peres.

“Sultan Qaboos has kept these ties to almost everyone open, and that is no mean feat in this region,” said Calvin Allen, a retired history professor at Shenandoah University in Virginia who has written extensively about Oman.

Oman’s broad network of international relationships often made Qaboos a useful friend for the United States.

In 2013, he hosted American and Iranian representatives at his private villas on the Omani coast for talks that paved the way for official negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program. Those talks resulted in a landmark agreement between Iran, the United States and other international powers in 2015, although President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement three years later.

Qaboos’ independence often rankled his more powerful neighbours in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who hoped — in vain — that Oman would fall in line with their regional policies.

In 2011, when Saudi Arabia sent tanks to put down an Arab Spring uprising by the Shiite majority in the island kingdom of Bahrain against its Sunni rulers, Oman declined to participate. It stayed out of the Saudi-led military intervention against the Houthi rebels in Yemen in 2015, but later hosted the warring parties for peace talks.

And in 2016, it remained on the sidelines when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab nations imposed a blockade on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and interfering in their domestic affairs.

Qaboos’ engagements often went further afield, and far outside those of other Arab leaders. After suicide bombers blew themselves up outside courthouses in the Damascus, the capital of Syria, Damascus, in 2017, Qaboos sent a condolence message to President Bashar Assad, whom the West and parts of the Arab world consider a war criminal.

And in 2018, Qaboos welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu on the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to a Gulf Arab state in more than two decades. Omani state television aired footage of Qaboos, dressed in a white robe, a traditional Omani head wrap and white sandals, receiving Netanyahu and his wife, Sara.

The report did not say what the men discussed.

Economic Boom, Then Stagnation

In Oman, Qaboos was beloved for his focus on economic development during the early decades of is rule — while foreigners noted that he oversaw an absolute, if not particularly brutal, police state.

On paper, he broadened the opportunities for citizens to participate in government. He issued Oman’s first constitution in 1996, which institutionalised a consultative assembly and granted universal suffrage to all citizens over 21. But he remained the sovereign centre of the state. Political parties and unauthorised public gatherings were banned and critical news outlets shut down.

For many decades, he took an annual “meet the people tour” of his country. A visiting American military commander who met him in 2008 noted that Qaboos seemed to be “in good health and cheerful.” But the sultan said running the country kept him from his favourite activities, such as reading books. A music lover, he was said to play the lute and the pipe organ and to compose his own music. He founded a royal symphony orchestra.

In 2011, as the Arab Spring uprisings swept across the Middle East, thousands of Omanis joined in, taking to the streets to rally against the lack of jobs — but not against the sultan or Oman’s system of rule.

Security forces killed two protesters, and Qaboos quelled the demonstrations with promises to create jobs and boost salaries and pensions. Government spending skyrocketed in the next few years, leaving Oman vulnerable when the global oil price crashed in 2014. It has run budget deficits every year since, creating economic pressures that the new sultan will have to address.

As Qaboos aged and his public appearances grew scarce, speculation among Omanis and foreign experts mounted about his health. In November 2014, on his 74th birthday, he appeared on television to tell his people of an unnamed illness that would “require us to proceed with the medical program in the forthcoming period.”

Afterward, he took frequent trips to Europe for treatment.

Unlike his royal counterparts elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, Qaboos was married only once, to a first cousin, Nawwal bint Tariq Al Said, in 1976. The marriage lasted only three years and produced no children. He remained unmarried for the rest of his life and never publicly named an heir to the throne.

Speculation on who could succeed him has centered around three of his cousins. One favoured by many Omanis and foreign experts is Asad bin Tariq Al Said, who was also educated in Britain and whom Qaboos appointed deputy prime minister in 2017.

But during Qaboos’ life, Omanis avoided public discussion of who might succeed him. In 2007, an American diplomat noted that Omanis often stopped attempts to broach the subject with the invocation, “May he live forever.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service