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$Title{Kuwait
Chapter 2B.   Politics and the Social Order}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Darrel R. Eglin;Donald M. Seekins}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{kuwait
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political
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$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 and political
currents.

     Perhaps because Kuwait is such a small nation, its political
concerns-particularly those involving matters of internal security-often
involved its neighbors (see Kuwait, ch.7). The dissolving of the National
Assembly in 1976, for example, supposedly was undertaken at the urging of the
conservative Saudi Arabian monarchy. It was also reported that Kuwait's rulers
consulted at length with those in Saudi Arabia and other peninsular states in
the wake of the December 1983 terrorist bombings in Kuwait. In a major sense
these two events in Kuwait were manifestations of events elsewhere: the
closing of the Assembly was linked to the civil war in Lebanon; the 1983
bombings, to the Iran-Iraq War.

     In these and other instances, loyalties among non-Kuwaiti residents that
varied from official Kuwaiti policies led to the government's viewing portions
of the community of alien residents as a political, and potentially a
security, threat. Thousands of non-Kuwaiti Arabs were reportedly deported
following the closing of the Assembly; further deportations were expected in
1984 after the trial of the 25-many of whom were non-Kuwaitis-accused of
participating in the December 1983 bombings.

     Although Kuwaiti officials feared that the militant Shia ideology
imported from revolutionary Iran would have a major impact on Kuwait's
sizable Shia population, this fear had not been borne out. Instead, another
type of Islamic extremism-Sunni fundamentalism-did make significant
inroads into Kuwait during the early 1980s. This regionwide movement continued
to grow in Kuwait after five fundamentalists were elected to the National
Assembly in 1981. In 1983 elections at the University of Kuwait, for example,
14 of the 20 student societies were won by slates that were designated
"Islamic." At the time officials did not view this growth with alarm; the
conservative nature of most of the Islamic movement did not fundamentally
threaten the status quo and served to counter popular leftist sympathies,
which historically had been viewed as a threat to the stability of the
monarchy.

     A large number of Islamic cultural organizations were to be found in
Kuwait; analysts divided the Sunni fundamentalist groups into four distinct
currents. The smallest, though it was growing in the early 1980s, was Sufism
(sometimes known as Islamic mysticism). Avoiding direct confrontation with
authorities, it was relatively inactive politically. Another relatively small
current was the so-called New Ikhwan Movement, whose largest group was the
Society for Islamic Guidance. It made a special appeal to the Kuwaiti
intelligentsia not only by opposing established Islam but also by criticizing
the more militant and dogmatic fundamentalist groups.

     The last two currents were far more influential. The Social Reform
Society was the major representative of the Al Aslah current. As the Kuwaiti
embodiment of Egypt's influential Al Ikhwan al Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood),
this current had been a part of Kuwaiti politics since the 1950s. Under the
leadership of Umar Bahair Amiri, it gradually evolved from a position of
opposition into an important component of the nation's Islamic establishment.
The Speaker of Kuwait's National Assembly, Yusif al Adasani, was an active
member of the Social Reform Society. If the Al Aslah was the least dogmatic
of the fundamentalist currents, the Salafiyyin (literally, Forerunnerists)
was the most dogmatic and extreme. Its profoundly reactionary goal was to
transform society into a mirror image of that during the time of the Prophet
Muhammad in the seventh century. The largest organization within the
Salafiyyin current was the Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage, led by
Khalid Sultan. The Salafiyyin was perhaps the fastest growing of all
fundamentalist currents, and it had a considerable impact on the debate in the
National Assembly during the early 1980s.

Foreign Relations

     For a nation of its small size, Kuwait had an active and diversified
foreign policy; in the early 1980s it maintained formal diplomatic relations
with over 90 nations. Kuwait prided itself in having an independent and
pragmatic foreign policy stance that "opened its windows to the world" of
both conservative and radical Arab nations and of both capitalist and
communist superpowers. This stance on the nonaligned middle ground was less a
matter of ideological conviction, however, than a product of Kuwait's small
size, its geographic location, its military vulnerability, and the composition
of its population. Since first assuming responsibility for its foreign policy
from the British in 1961, the ruling Al Sabah has viewed a centrist
position-from which it can appear as all things to all nations-as a key to
its survival. The maintenance of national security was, indeed, Kuwait's most
vital foreign policy concern. Other major concerns included the maintenance of
amiable commercial relations with its oil customers and those nations in
which its surplus oil revenues were deposited and the pursuit of Arab
solidarity in the conflict with Israel, with particular attention paid to the
Palestinian problem. A key tool in the quest for these goals was the
prodigious use of its oil wealth to win foreign allies, conciliate enemies,
and spread goodwill in the name of Kuwait.

     Major foreign policy decisions were made by Amir Jabir and Prime Minister
Saad in consultation with their senior advisers. Minister of Foreign Affairs
Sabah, who by 1984 had held that post for well over a decade, was the most
publicly visible of these secondary decisionmakers and was viewed as the
architect of the government's nonaligned posture. The ministers of defense and
of oil also played important advisory roles in their respective areas of
concern. Foreign policy debates in the National Assembly added a measure of
Kuwaiti public opinion to the decisionmaking equation. In the early 1980s, for
example, this factor made it more difficult for the government to continue its
subventions to Syria while the latter was warring on Palestinians in Lebanon.
During that time the Assembly also raised objections to supporting the Iraqi
war effort while longtime border differences between Iraq and Kuwait remained
unresolved.

     Kuwait's security concerns centered on its relations with its three large
neighbors-Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia-and its efforts to avoid "being
caught in the cross fire" among these frequently antagonistic regional powers.
In 1984 these relations continued to be dominated by the fierce Iran-Iraq War
being waged less than 100 kilometers from Kuwait's northern border (see The
Impact of the Iran-Iraq War, ch. 7). Kuwait's initial stance in this conflict
had been one of neutrality, but in 1981, fearing an Iranian victory, it began
to support Iraq through loans that totaled US$6 billion over a two-year period
and by allowing Iraqi-bound trade to enter Kuwait ports and traverse its
northern border. In October 1981 Iranian jets attacked Kuwait's oil facilities
at Umm al Aysh as a warning against this support of Iraq, and most Kuwaitis
interpreted the December 1983 terrorist bombings in Kuwait City as another
warning to be cautious in supporting Iraq.

     Kuwait's support for Iraq was hardly steadfast; in fact, it feared a
victory by either antagonist, for both were viewed as potential enemies.
Revolutionary Iran, on the one hand, threatened all the Sunni monarchies
of the Arabian Peninsula by its revolutionary propaganda aimed at foreign Shia
Muslims, who in Kuwait made up over 20 percent of the population. A resurgent
Iraq, on the other hand, would be in a strengthened position to press its
historical territorial claim to Kuwait.

     Tensions caused by its 1961 claim to the entire territory of Kuwait were
greatly eased in 1963, when a new Iraqi regime granted formal recognition of
Kuwait's independence. This action did not involve an acceptance of Kuwait's
borders, however, and in 1973 Iraq briefly occupied a Kuwaiti border post in
order to press its claim. In May 1975 Iraq, in effect, altered its claim by
proposing that Kuwait cede its sovereignty over Al Warbah Island and lease
half of Bubiyan Island to Iraq for 99 years. This proposal, designed to
protect the approach to Iraq's second largest port at Umm Qasr, was
categorically rejected by Kuwait, which argued that it would lose considerable
offshore drilling rights under such an arrangement. Iraq again pressed this
claim after the outbreak of war with Iran in September 1980 and the resultant
closure of its primary port at Basrah. Kuwait again rejected the Iraqi claim
and responded by building a causeway from its mainland to the police post on
Bubiyan in order to secure its position on the island.

     The stalemate in the Iran-Iraq War during the early 1980s, then,
temporarily served Kuwaiti interests by distracting two potential adversaries.
Kuwait feared the escalation of the war, however, particularly if it were to
involve the intervention of the United States and/or the Soviet Union, and
therefore called publicly for negotiations that would lead to an end to
hostilities. Thus, in 1984 Kuwait called on Iran to respond to Iraq's request
for a mediated solution to the conflict. Although in May of that year there
was no prospect of this call's being heeded, Kuwait attempted to maintain a
modicum of leverage by continuing its low-profile aid to Iraq while trying to
keep its trade lines open to Iran.

     The Iran-Iraq War also had the effect of strengthening Kuwait's ties
with Saudi Arabia and the smaller monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. The
founding of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in May 1981 was a direct
response to the outbreak of war in the Gulf (see Appendix C). Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman saw the GCC as a
forum for coordination of policies in the fields of investments, development,
trade, and finance, but it was in the area of defense that the major
cooperative efforts of the GCC were directed. Most of Kuwait's aid to Iraq,
for example, along with that of other member states, was channeled through the
mechanism of the GCC.

     Although Saudi Arabia played the predominant role, Kuwait's
countervailing influence-as the most politically liberal of the GCC states
and the only one with diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and its
allies-was felt in the defense area.  Kuwait was often critical of Saudi
Arabia for its close ties to the United States and of Oman for having granted
military base facilities to the United States within the framework of the
Rapid Deployment Force (by 1984 the United States Central Command). Analysts
described these as disagreements among friends, however. The relationships
among the GCC states, based on common cultures and histories, similar if not
identical political systems, and a common perception of the threat posed by
the Iran-Iraq War and especially by an Iranian victory, remained extremely
close.

     The Arab-Israeli conflict was another focus of Kuwaiti attention.
Although Kuwait had participated only marginally in the several wars, its
absorption of a large number of Palestinian refugees and its financial aid to
the combatant countries-particularly Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, as well as to
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)-made it an important factor.
Kuwait was one of the largest financial backers of the moderate Al Fatah wing
of the PLO, and Kuwaiti leaders often voiced the PLO goal of establishing a
Palestinian homeland in the territories occupied by Israel since the June 1967
War. Al Fatah was allowed a substantial presence in Kuwait on the condition
that it not involve itself in local politics. Kuwait's support for the PLO
overrode its support for the front line Arab states in the cases of Jordan in
1970 and Syria in 1983. On these occasions when Arab governments waged war
with Al Fatah, Kuwait temporarily curtailed its subventions to the governments
in solidarity with the Palestinians. Kuwait joined other Arab nations in
severing diplomatic relations with Egypt following its 1979 peace treaty with
Israel. Commercial relations never ceased, however, and in 1984 there were
good prospects for a thaw in political relations as well.

     Kuwait's foreign aid program was concentrated in, but by no means limited
to, the Arab Middle East. In 1974 the charter of its major foreign aid agency,
the KFAED, was amended to allow funds to be distributed to non-Arab developing
nations of Africa and Asia. During the late 1970s slightly less than half of
over US$1 billion committed annually in foreign aid went to non-Arab states,
such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, Mali, and
Ghana. The Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, to
which Libya and Saudi Arabia also made major contributions, was another major
vehicle for Kuwaiti foreign aid. Numerous observers have noted that although
such Kuwaiti concerns as its antipathy toward Israel and toward the system of
apartheid in South Africa are well-known to aid recipients, Kuwait's program
was one of the most professionally run and least politically motivated
programs of foreign aid in the world.

     Kuwait's commercial relations were focused in East Asia, Western Europe,
and the United States. Japan was by far the largest customer for its oil
exports during the early 1980s, followed by Taiwan, South Korea, the
Netherlands, Singapore, and Britain, in that order. Although the United States
was insignificant as a consumer of Kuwaiti oil, it was second only to Japan as
a source of imports (United States exports to Kuwait in 1981 and 1982 exceeded
US$900 million). The United States, along with Britain and France, were the
major suppliers of military equipment to Kuwait; the Soviet Union and West
Germany were minor suppliers. Finally, in the commercial field an estimated
two-thirds of Kuwait's US$80 billion or more surplus from oil revenues (the
profits from which had become a major source of government revenues by the
early 1980s) was invested overseas. The bulk of these investments was believed
to be in Britain and the United States (see Foreign Trade and Balance of
Payments, this ch.).

     Relations with the United States were broadly based and generally good
despite some tensions over the United States role in the Middle East. During
the early 1980s the quasi-official Kuwaiti media often criticized the United
States military presence in and around the Gulf, expressing fears that it
would accomplish little, other than to increase regional tensions and
encourage the Soviets to increase its regional profile. Close United States
relations with Israel were also criticized, particularly because they were
felt to dampen prospects for what Kuwait termed "a just solution" to the
Palestinian problem. The status of Jerusalem entered the equation of the
United States-Kuwaiti relations in August 1983, when the United States nominee
as ambassador to Kuwait was rejected on the grounds that he had served
previously as the American consul general in Jerusalem. This incident caused
increased strain in United States-Kuwaiti relations.

     Kuwait argued with its fellow Arabian monarchies in the GCC that their
refusal to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union left them at
the mercy of United States policies in the region. Kuwait's Soviet ties, which
date back to 1963, were better explained, however, as an effort to neutralize
its domestic leftist political opposition and to gain the trust of Iraq and
other regional nations that had Soviet links rather than as an effort to gain
leverage over the United States. The 1975 visit to the Soviet Union by
Minister of Foreign Affairs Sabah and the subsequent conclusion of a Soviet
agreement to sell a variety of missiles to Kuwait marked a significant
departure from previous ties, which had been limited to economic, technical,
and cultural cooperation. No Soviet advisers accompanied the US$400 million
deal, however, and no further arms purchases were recorded until 1981. On
August 15, 1984, Kuwait and the Soviet Union signed an arms agreement that
provided for Kuwait's purchase of various air defense weapons and for Soviet
personnel to train Kuwaitis in their use (see Kuwait, ch. 7). In September
1981 Amir Jabir made an unprecedented trip to Eastern Europe that included
stops in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Erich Honecker of the
German Democratic Republic (East Germany) visited Kuwait in 1982.

     Kuwait was also active in more than 20 multilateral organizations,
including the United Nations (UN), the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC), the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, the
League of Arab States (Arab League), the Nonaligned Movement, and the
Organization of the Islamic Conference. It was accepted as the
one-hundred-and-eleventh member of the UN in 1963 and in 1978-79 served on its
Security Council. In 1960 it had been a founding member of OPEC along with
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela.

                                  * * *

     Kuwait: Urban and Medical Ecology, by G.E. Ffrench and A.G. Hill,
presents a wealth of information on a variety of subjects. Harry Winstone and
Zahra Freeth's Kuwait: Prospect and Reality offers a more general but still
useful survey. A brief treatment of Kuwaiti education can be found in A.L.
Tibawi's Islamic Education.

     A useful but dated survey of the Kuwait economy was prepared by
economists of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in The
Economic Development of Kuwait. David Sapsted's Modern Kuwait presents a broad
picture of the economy up to 1980. The article "Kuwait Adopts Measures to
Adjust to the Impact of Reduced Oil Revenues," in the IMF Survey, August 8,
1983, contains a brief summary of economic developments. Between 1973 and 1984
the Financial Times of London published annual reviews of Kuwaiti
developments. The Kuwait government publishes many statistical series; the
Annual Statistical Abstract contains a broad range of data, though not as
up-to-date as one would like. Many current statistics are carried in the
International Monetary Fund's monthly International Financial Statistics.

     Hassan A. Al-Ebraheem's Kuwait: A Political Study is an excellent
introduction to the political system of Kuwait. Kuwaiti attempts to develop
democratic institutions within a constitutional framework are analyzed in
various works by Abdo I. Baaklini, such as "The Legislature in the Kuwaiti
Political System." Kuwait's role in regional and international relations is
covered in depth in Soliman Demir's The Kuwait Fund and the Political Economy
of Arab Regional Development and David E. Long's The Persian Gulf: An
Introduction to Its People, Politics, and Economics. (For further information
and complete citations, see Bibliography.)