The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0037/00378.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 27KB | 433 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00378}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Kuwait
Chapter 2B.   Politics and the Social Order}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Darrel R. Eglin;Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{kuwait
kuwait's
states
political
kuwaiti
united
foreign
relations
iraq
social
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1984}
$Log{See Modernistic Mosque*0037802.scf
}
Title:       Kuwait
Book:        Persian Gulf States, An Area Study: Kuwait
Author:      Darrel R. Eglin;Donald M. Seekins
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1984

Chapter 2B.   Politics and the Social Order

     Despite its small population, Kuwait had become a country of considerable
social complexity by 1984, and different communities derived various levels of
status depending on their religious and ethnic identities and on the date of
their or their ancestors' immigration into Kuwait. Such social stratification
and cleavages were common throughout the oil-rich monarchies of the Arabian
Peninsula, but the communities had little, if any, political impact in other
nations, where politics was closed to all but the royal families and a number
of small, nonroyal elites. In Kuwait, however, the relatively democratic and
open nature of the political system, manifested especially in the National
Assembly, lent a significance to nonelite groups that was of considerable
interest to political observers. Although organized forms of political
participation common to democratic nations, such as political parties and
labor unions, were not a political factor in Kuwait, other forms of popular
political expression, reflecting social cleavages within Kuwait as well as
those in the Middle East region as a whole, were evident.

     The overriding social cleavage is between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, the
majority of the latter having arrived after World War II to take advantage of
the opportunities that accompanied the oil boom. In the late 1950s and early
1960s, when it first became apparent that the foreign population was becoming
a significant and semipermanent presence in Kuwait, the government undertook
legal measures to discriminate against the newer arrivals. In addition to
being denied voting privileges and other political rights, those defined as
non-Kuwaitis were restricted in their ownership of business and property and,
although able to benefit from free education and health care, were denied
other aspects of the government's welfare provisions, such as housing
subsidies and pensions.

[See Modernistic Mosque: Modernistic Mosque in capital city]

      The discriminatory laws were of little concern to the vast majority of
non-Kuwaitis whose access to part of Kuwait's generous welfare benefits and
to local job opportunities offered them a privileged position compared with
conditions in their native countries or elsewhere in the Middle East. However,
among a small elite of the non-Kuwaitis, consisting largely of educated and
politically aware Palestinians who were residents of several generations and
held high positions in government or elsewhere, the legal discrimination was
a cause of growing resentment and alienation. Although long aware of this
problem built into the social and political systems, the government had done
little by 1984 to alleviate this ever growing, long-term problem.

     Journalism was the chosen profession of a number of the 300,000 to
350,000 Palestinians estimated to live in Kuwait in the mid-1980s. Until the
promulgation of the stringent Press and Publications Law in August 1976, the
press-which included five Arabic and two English-language dailies and some
20 other periodicals of less frequency-was known as freewheeling and open
to the expression of a wide variety of political opinion. Although the 1976
law did not institute prior censorship, it did set down a number of pretexts
under which the government could close a paper and administer other
punishments for offending editors and publishers. The liberal use of the law
between 1976 and 1984 had the effect of instituting self-censorship, and the
press lost part of its previous vitality as a result. Radio and television
were run by the Ministry of Information.

     Among Kuwaiti citizens, women were the objects of legal discrimination
in that they remained disfranchised in 1984. The Women's Cultural and Social
Society-one of the more active of several dozen such popular organizations
that occasionally assumed a politically active stance akin to lobbying-had
long been headed by Lulwa Qattami and had been in the forefront of attempts
to gain women the right to vote. After unsuccessful efforts in 1981 and 1982
to pass a bill in the National Assembly calling for the enfranchisement of
women, Qattami and her organization shifted their efforts to the courts, where
they hoped that the discriminatory electoral law would be ruled
unconstitutional in light of Article 29, which states that all Kuwaitis are
"equal...in public rights and duties before the law without distinction as
to sex...." Although the amir and the heir apparent supported women's right
to vote, the effort confronted strong public opposition that was spearheaded
by the growing Sunni fundamentalist groups.

     Male Kuwaitis, then, were a privileged minority. Social
stratification-based on the time when an individual's ancestors arrived in
Kuwait and on religion and ethnicity-did exist within this elite minority
but under normal circumstances was not a cause of politically charged
disputes because Kuwait's oil-based economy provided adequately for all.
At the top of the pyramid was the Al Sabah, which, along with six other
families whose ancestors were the original eighteenth-century settlers, held
vast wealth. Unlike some other Arabian royal families, however, the Al Sabah
did not habitually display their wealth and therefore rarely aroused the envy
of the citizenry. At the bottom were the Shia whose ancestors had arrived
before 1920 from Iran, Iraq, and eastern Arabia. After the 1979 revolution in
Iran, the Kuwaiti Shia community became the object of considerable propaganda
from across the Gulf, but five years later it had shown few signs of political
disaffection-a phenomenon that some observers attributed to Kuwait's political
system that, although Sunni-led, provided a comfortable existence to Shia
citizens. Others pointed out that the major Shia cultural organizations
received money from the Kuwaiti government.

     This general state of social tranquillity was severely disrupted, if
only temporarily, during the early 1980s by the mid-1982 crash of Kuwait's
unofficial stock market, the Souk el Manakh (see Finance, this ch.).
Individuals-particularly those near the bottom of the social pyramid-had
invested heavily in the Souk in anticipation of quick profits, and when it
crashed, the mountain of checks totaled an estimated US$94 billion. Soon
afterward the government announced that it would supply funds to compensate
poor individuals for part of their losses. After the initial bitterness
toward the government for having allowed the Souk to crash, tensions lingered
for many months over how the government's promised compensation would be
distributed. Poorer groups especially feared that the crash and the
compensation scheme would result in the redistribution of wealth to the very
rich. Two years after the crash a number of related problems still had not
been solved, although observers noted that thus far the compensation process
had been largely satisfactory to small investors and that the potentially
explosive tensions evident in 1982 had dissipated to a large extent.

     Political phenomena elsewhere in the Middle East were also reflected in
the Kuwaiti panorama. This fact could be attributed in part to the large
number of Middle Eastern immigrants who, in the relatively open Kuwait
political climate, could express their concerns with respect to events in
their home countries. Other phenomena, such as Islamic fundamentalism and
Arab nationalism, were national expressions of regionwide social