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Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait
Mary Ann Tétreault
2000
Chapter 6: The Election of 1992
The election of a new National Assembly was held a little more than a year and a half after Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi occupation. A flood of reporters came from all over the world to observe the last days of the campaign, the balloting, and the counting of the votes. The sheer mass of foreign observers lent credence to a conviction constantly repeated by Kuwaitis throughout the campaign and election: “the whole world is watching us.” Although most of these “democracy tourists” departed well before a new government was named and the new parliament convened, the impact of what their presence confirmed persisted. The audience observing the rituals of domestic politics in Kuwait included television viewers in Paris and readers of large-circulation newspapers and magazines in Europe, east Asia, and North America. Far more critical of these political performances than the foreign audiences, Kuwaitis also expected great results following the 1992 elections.
Launching and Covering the Campaign
The amir announced in June 1991 that parliamentary elections would take place in October 1992, though an election date was not set until more than a year later. Most Kuwaitis were confident that the election would be held by year’s end, but the lack of a definite date inhibited some potential candidates from formalizing their plans, particularly among those who had not run for office before. 1 Experienced politicians tested the political waters in the winter of 1991&-;92, going to diwaniyyas and meeting informally with potential constituents. 2 In the spring, aspiring candidates began to declare their intentions publicly. So-called “tribal primaries” were held in heavily bedouin districts. These clan meetings select one or two family members from among those who wish to run. Losers agree in advance not to contest the race, allowing the clan to concentrate its vote and improving the odds that a member of the group will win a seat. 3 By late August 1992, when the election date was officially proclaimed, early-identified candidates had been campaigning for several months. 4 Following the announcement, others rushed to join them, and the campaign soon dominated Kuwaiti public life.
The lack of a definite date for the election was not the only inhibiting factor in the campaign’s slow start. The persistence of press censorship and the law against public assembly, both imposed in the aftermath of the 1986 suspensions, impeded the identification and development of a set of national issues from among the evolving positions of various candidates and political groups. The suspension of the ban on public meetings in March cleared the way for public campaigning, until then mostly confined to the private space of diwaniyyas. Press censorship also was suspended in the spring of 1992. 5 However, most candidates continued to be circumspect in their public criticisms. A few told me that they wanted to avoid provoking the government into canceling the election. Others recalled how the regime’s critics had been arrested in the spring of 1990 during the lead-up to the election for the Majlis al-Watani. However, as the campaign season continued without arrests or other government disruptions, the participants became more open and more active in presenting themselves to the electorate.
Campaign headquarters were established by declared candidates and their supporters, generally in one or more tents erected on vacant land along the streets in or near their districts. Candidates used these large outdoor spaces to house a variety of campaign activities. Candidate `Abbas al-Khodary was an experienced campaigner, having been elected both to the 1985 parliament and to the Majlis al-Watani. His campaign in District 13, covering the heavily Shi`i suburb of Rumaithiya, boasted the largest tent in Kuwait. This green-and-white-striped extravaganza—`Abbas al-Khodary employed his name as a pun on “green” (`akhdar) in his campaign materials—had been ordered months in advance from tentmakers in Pakistan. In addition to the giant striped tent where carpets were laid and chairs set up for formal speeches, `Abbas’s staff presided over another tent housing kitchen facilities, large areas lined with comfortable seating for informal talks, and an “office” complete with extensive files of information about every voter in his district, cross-referenced by name, block, and family. That tent also was the home of the campaign’s computer, used to record data and run analyses and projections. 6
The candidates’ tent headquarters were the sites of scheduled meetings and other campaign events, some featuring guest speakers in addition to the candidate himself. Their kitchens supplied food, tea, and coffee to guests. On nights when no formal events were on the calendar of a particular campaign, staff members sat in these temporary diwaniyyas and chatted with anyone who might drop by. Usually the candidate himself stopped in late on such evenings, after having attended events elsewhere. So many tent headquarters were clustered along one boulevard in the suburb of Mishref that the area quickly reclaimed its old nickname, “Democracy Street,” first coined during the 1985 parliamentary election campaign. Reporters wanting to interview candidates and campaign officials could talk to several on the same evening on Democracy Street, perhaps one reason why candidates from this area were so often featured in stories appearing in the foreign press.
Campaign diwaniyyas are protected spaces for ideas and their public expression. The large numbers of people who come to formal meetings are more than just an audience. They also are witnesses. For example, I attended a diwaniyya on September 22 where candidate Ahmad al-Khatib, running in District 9, al-Rawdha, made his second major campaign speech. Following his formal presentation, Ahmad answered a number of questions, including several about incidents of harassment against him in which he referred explicitly to members of the family of the crown prince as having been involved. Ahmad al-Khatib, like other members of his political group, the Kuwait Democratic Forum (KDF), was a target of smear campaigns impugning his loyalty during the occupation. During the September 22 meeting, he challenged his attackers to prove their charges that he had been an Iraqi sympathizer and offered to make available to local television stations a video tape of the TV interview on which the allegations about him were based.
Thousands of persons attended the meeting, and Kuwaitis talked about it for days afterward. This ensured that many people who had not been present were aware of Ahmad’s response to the charges. Political scientist Shafeeq Ghabra believes that this event transformed Ahmad al-Khatib into a victim and earned him sympathy, support, and eventual election. 7 However, I believe that Ahmad’s discussion of specific occasions of harassment, along with his offer to provide the video tape, shifted the burden to his critics to prove the allegations—a put-up or shut-up gesture publicly made. The failure of government-controlled television stations to accept his offer and show the tape added to the candidate’s credibility and undermined government efforts to discredit him.
Public speech and assembly were not visibly impeded during the campaign, but, as the story just recounted shows, the government did limit some forms of campaign communication. There was virtually no campaign coverage by state-controlled electronic media. The most frequent answer to my questions about this was that there were too many candidates to cover even one major address by each, and that if all were not covered equally, critics would charge the government with favoritism. However, group events were not covered either, such as the two sets of debates, one sponsored by the Kuwait Graduates Society and the other by the political science department at Kuwait University. These debates were the first independently organized mass events featuring multiple candidates ever held during a Kuwaiti election campaign. They provided novel and fascinating opportunities to observe policy differences among candidates as well as to see how effectively each performed.
The print press did cover the independent debates, along with many of the events held at individual campaign diwaniyyas all over Kuwait. Still, the publication of newspaper stories was frequently delayed because of printing schedules. Occasionally the placement and content of stories were affected by events occurring during these delays. In my experience, qualities inherent in print-press reporting also make it difficult to associate a news story with an event that one has witnessed personally. Whether this is due to systemic influences, such as professional folkways or pressures from powerful elites, or to mundane decisions such as the number of column inches to be devoted to a particular event, few newspaper stories convey the flavor of personalities, the composition and comportment of audiences, and the peculiarities of the spaces in which they come together. This is why electronic coverage, which does highlight such qualities, is a useful supplement to the analytical coverage at which newspapers excel. A vivid example of information loss related to single-medium coverage is reflected in press reports about a meeting sponsored by another District 13 candidate, Saleh al-Yasin, at his campaign headquarters on Democracy Street.
This was the first time in a political campaign in Kuwait that women were the featured speakers. The announcement of the event drew a large crowd that gathered in the diwaniyya itself, along with scores of male-female couples who listened from their cars to the speeches, which were broadcast over loudspeakers. The diwaniyya space was divided by a physical barrier separating the audience area into men’s and women’s sections. The men’s side was much larger, open to the street, and had better physical facilities. Its active and noisy population included many little boys who often accompany their fathers on such excursions. The women packed into the smaller side were quieter and far less mobile than the men. Most sat in rows in as many folding chairs as could be squeezed in, and scores of latecomers stood against a wall. I saw only two little girls. The women’s section was separated from the street by walls, the speakers’ facilities, and a parking lot. The crowding and the walls hemmed the women in, making movement in this space difficult and disruptive. In consequence, the women were not only physically uncomfortable but also could not assemble and reassemble into various small groups as the men could do, to discuss and comment on what they were seeing and hearing. The women’s conversation was limited to persons seated or standing immediately by.
The speakers were both prominent women. Moudhi al-Hmoud is a former dean of the faculty of commerce at Kuwait University and an associate professor of business management; attorney Badria al-`Awadhi is Kuwait’s representative to the United Nations International Labor Organization and an official of the Regional Organization for the Protection of Marine Life. Both women spoke forcefully about issues affecting families, such as problems faced by working women and the plight of Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis. The groups on both sides of the gender barrier listened respectfully and, after the speeches were over, hands went up throughout the audience as the question-and-answer session began. Suddenly, during the second question, a firecracker was flung from a passing automobile. Its loud report startled the crowd and the woman who was speaking. Recovering herself, the questioner scorned what she interpreted as an attempt to frighten women from the gathering. Within moments, the meeting continued as though nothing untoward had happened. 8 Little of the texture of this event, and nothing about the firecracker, appeared in press accounts.
Issues
A former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the late Thomas P. O’Neill, was fond of saying that all politics is local. This is as true in Kuwait as it is in the United States. But the 1992 election in Kuwait also was run on a number of national issues. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the campaign was the high level of comprehensiveness and coherence evident in so many candidates’ analyses of the overall situation of the country. These are the main issues of the campaign as they were reflected in news reports, candidate debates, and the interviews I conducted with candidates, campaign staffs, and other observers.
The top campaign issue in 1992 was security. Even before the invasion, Kuwaitis felt a tremendous insecurity in all too many aspects of their lives. International concerns included fear of Iraqi border violations, economic and social pressures from Saudi Arabia, and continuing anxiety about militant Shi`i Islamism in Iran. During the 1992 campaign, the primary focus was on the Iraqi threat and charges of government incompetence leading up to “August second.” Opposition candidates talked frequently about the need to “open the files” on the period prior to the invasion to expose who was responsible for the government’s missteps and the military’s failure.
Economic fears also absorbed Kuwaiti candidates and voters. Particular concerns included investment policy and imported labor, both of which were seen as threatening the long-term stability of the economy. The rapidly growing proportion of foreigners in the Kuwaiti population had reignited fears about cultural integrity, a prominent concern among many of the Kuwaitis I had talked to in 1990. The opposition was less united than government supporters with respect to these issues, perhaps because the economic interests of core members of the various opposition groups differed. However, virtually all among the opposition agreed that government corruption had degraded Kuwait’s overseas holdings—on this point, news of disasters connected to the Kuwait Investment Office’s Spanish holdings were uppermost in people’s minds. Along with suspicions that authorizations to import foreign labor were awarded as political favors rather than as the result of a rational policy, fears about Kuwait’s future economic security united candidates across the spectrum of opposition groups.
A number of candidates called for structural reform of the political system. Many suggested introducing additional institutional checks and balances by creating an independent judiciary and separating the position of crown prince from the prime ministership. There were many calls to reform the bureaucracy and to increase the accountability of ministries. Chief among the ministries criticized were Education and Oil. The large number of university faculty among the candidates may have had something to do with the prominence of education as a campaign issue, but another spur was the growing perception that many Kuwaiti graduates were poorly prepared for employment. With regard to oil, investment policy disagreements and charges of corruption dominated this discussion. Another prominent issue was the status of laws passed during the parliamentary suspension. Under article 71 of the constitution, amiri decrees promulgated when the parliament is not in session have the force of law. However, such laws must be referred to a sitting parliament within fifteen days after it reconvenes or, in the case of a new parliament, “at its first sitting,” in order for them to be confirmed. Without such legislative confirmation, interim laws presumably become invalid (see chapter 7). Decrees imposing censorship and forbidding public assembly were the most frequently discussed during the campaign as needing to be canceled by the new parliament.
Citizenship and human rights issues were far less prominent than the others mentioned here, with the exception of women’s political rights. The salience of women’s rights may have been related to the high degree of foreign interest in the campaign and was certainly connected to the increased pressure for political rights from Kuwaiti women’s groups. The visibility of women in the Resistance and among activist exiles strengthened the position of women’s rights advocates, whose public involvement in the campaign was extensive and widely covered in the press. The political rights of second-category Kuwaitis were of minor concern during the campaign but gained in prominence after the election. Second-category men were still denied the right to vote and run for office in 1992, although they were not barred from other citizenship benefits. The number of persons at issue was relatively small—“several thousands”—as opposed to the more than 100,000 adult women who would be eligible to vote and run for office should women’s rights be granted, or to the even larger number of bidun who would suddenly receive economic as well as political rights should their petitions for Kuwaiti nationality be granted. Thus, it is not surprising that the first citizenship issue decided by the 1992 parliament was to confer first-category status on sons born to naturalized Kuwaitis. 9 Problems such as mistreatment of domestic servants and the status of the bidun gained virtually all the attention they acquired on Kuwait’s postelection political agenda as the result of external pressures from domestic and international human rights groups and from the foreign press. Most Kuwaitis were not very interested in these issues in the fall of 1992.
Cutting across the divide between candidates running as part of the political opposition and those supporting the government were issues arising from the ideological division between Islamists and secularists. Prominent among these was the Sunni Islamist call to amend article 2 of Kuwait’s constitution to make Kuwaiti law conform to the Islamic Shari`a. This highly contentious and problematic issue joined tribal candidates from the outlying area with members of the Sunni opposition political blocs. I discuss it further below, along with the influence of sectarianism on the campaign and election.
Districts, Candidates, and “Parties”
| Table 6.1: Voters, Turnout, and Election Districts in Kuwait, 1992 | ||||
|
District Number and Name |
Registered Voters |
Voters Voting |
Turnout (in %) |
|
| 1. Sharq | 1,898 | 1,615 | 85.1 | |
| 2. al-Murqab | 1,728 | 1,445 | 83.6 | |
| 3. al-Qiblah | 1,666 | 1,346 | 80.8 | |
| 4. al-Da`iya | 2,927 | 2,506 | 85.6 | |
| 5. al-Qadisiya | 2,549 | 2,173 | 85.2 | |
| 6. al-Faiha’ | 2,630 | 2,221 | 84.4 | |
| 7. Kaifan | 2,120 | 1,774 | 83.7 | |
| 8. Hawali | 4,595 | 4,025 | 87.6 | |
| 9. al-Rawdha | 2,536 | 2,189 | 86.3 | |
| 10. al-`Adeliya | 3,729 | 3,235 | 86.8 | |
| 11. al-Khaldiya | 2,409 | 2,070 | 85.9 | |
| 12. al-Salmiya | 2,912 | 2,542 | 87.3 | |
| 13. al-Rumaithiya | 5,000 | 4,100 | 82.0 | |
| 14. Abraq Khaittan | 3,146 | 2,588 | 82.3 | |
| 15. al-Farwaniya | 4,277 | 3,451 | 80.7 | |
| 16. al-`Umariya | 4,962 | 4,283 | 86.3 | |
| 17. Julib Al-Shiyoukh | 3,389 | 2,876 | 84.9 | |
| 18. al-Sulaibikhat | 3,370 | 2,867 | 85.1 | |
| 19. al-Jahra’ al-Jadida | 2,643 | 2,188 | 82.8 | |
| 20. al-Jahra’ al-Qadimi | 4,313 | 3,557 | 82.5 | |
| 21. al-Ahmadi | 7,130 | 6,039 | 84.7 | |
| 22. al-Riqa | 3,301 | 2,682 | 81.2 | |
| 23. al-Subahiya | 4,148 | 3,403 | 82.0 | |
| 24. al-Fahaheel | 3,166 | 2,696 | 85.2 | |
| 25. Um al-Haiman | 896 | 552 | 61.6 | |
| total voters | 81,440 | 68,423 | 84.0 | |
| Sources: State of Kuwait, Ministry of Interior, Office of Elections, Registered voters by district, 1992. Typescript with ink corrections. (Received September 1992.) 1992 election results by candidate and district. Typescript. (Received September 1995.) Turnout calculated. | ||||
Kuwait is divided into twenty-five election districts, each of which sends two representatives to the National Assembly (see table 6.1). These districts were created prior to the February 1981 election, which marked the close of the period of parliamentary suspension initiated in 1976 by the then-amir, Sabah al-Salim. 10 The present amir, Jabir al-Ahmad, acceded to his position in 1977. He presided over the resumption of formal political life in 1981 as well as in 1992. Compared to `Abdullah al-Salim, the amir under whom the 1962 Kuwaiti constitution was written and ratified, Jabir al-Ahmad is far less tolerant of the constitution and the legislature for which it provides, although he is not so hard-line as his designated successor, Crown Prince Sa`d al-`Abdullah. As part of the political settlement leading up to the 1981 election, the amir tried to curb the powers of the parliament. In early 1980 he set up a commission to amend the constitution. The commission completed its work in four months. The amendments it proposed were supposed to be submitted to the new parliament, but they became the center of attention during the 1981 campaign and the resulting popular outcry forced the amir to rethink the wisdom of a frontal assault on the constitution. 11 His second strategy was two-pronged and more discreet. Large numbers of badu were given first-category citizenship which includes, for men, the right to vote and run for office. The new voters were geographically concentrated. This was a result of intentional and epiphenomenal settlement patterns that have produced significant, though far from universal, residential segregation in Kuwait, not only by tribe but also by sect, income group, age cohort, nationality, and marital status. 12 As you may recall, the badu, along with the Shi`a, were historic allies of the Sabah family. 13 Increasing the number of tribal voters was expected to marginalize the regime’s mostly hadhar critics and produce a less oppositional legislative body.
The political impact of tribal voters on the composition of the National Assembly was heightened by changes in election districts. In 1980, Law no. 99 was issued which set out new election districts. Under this law the old system of ten districts each electing five representatives was replaced by a new system of twenty-five districts each electing two. The largest single change from redistricting was the division of the old tenth district, Ahmadi, already heavily tribal, into five districts. This effectively doubled tribal representation from that area, raising it from five to ten members. The enlargement of the voter base by selective enfranchisement of tribal Kuwaitis, together with the strategy that guided drawing new district lines, reduced the proportion of hadhar in the 1981 parliament. Redistricting readjusted voting margins among other groups by shifting neighborhoods from one constituency to another. The biggest losers here were the Shi`a. However, the largest impact of redistricting was to shift representation from the hadhar population to the badu, most of whom live in the outlying areas.
Tribal gains at hadhar expense resulted not only from doubling representation from the Ahmadi area but also from reorganizing city districts such as old Shuwaikh and old Kaifan into smaller, more socially homogeneous districts, and enfranchising new clan groupings, adding substantial numbers of badu to voter rolls in urban districts. Together, these measures ensured the election of a parliament dominated by tribal representatives. At the same time, it also impeded the formation of cohesive tribal blocs by altering the distribution of voters from different tribes. Different clans and branch clans dominated new tribal districts, and some large tribes were distributed across several districts. 14 This forced the tribes to develop new strategies for maximizing clan power in the parliament, the most important of which was the tribal primary. Devised to counter the negative electoral impact of the redistricting on formerly dominant tribes, tribal primaries, first conducted by the `Ajman in 1975 in the old tenth district, 15 were adopted by other tribes in several different districts in 1985. Nicolas Gavrielides calls tribal primaries the functional equivalents of nominating procedures mediated by political parties, then as now illegal in Kuwait, and also sees them as normative trendsetters, introducing populist democratic principles into the electoral process. 16 Hadhar Kuwaitis are less impressed by the democracy of tribal primaries, which have proven to be most effective in ensuring the election of members of the largest tribes to parliament, where they have worked assiduously to promote clan interests. 17 As I discuss below, some “new men” 18 from the tribes also are unimpressed by tribal primaries, criticizing them precisely for their lack of democratic qualities.
Finally, the 1981 redistricting increased the number and influence of parliamentarians who, in today’s terms, would be called Islamists. This happened in two ways. Representatives from the outlying areas, though seldom members of Islamist political groups, tend to agree with Islamists on social issues, guided by traditional values which, not entirely coincidentally, confer legitimacy on their own leadership. Another boost to Islamists comes from the effects of adjusting the urban districts, especially the change from electing five members from a large district to electing two from a smaller one. The result has been to improve the electoral chances of new men of all types, including Islamists, over members of the old elite. Members of Islamist political groups won election to the parliament for the first time in 1981. The consequences of these shifts for policy were evident immediately. For example, the 1981 parliament imposed a total ban on alcohol which, until the measure passed in 1983, had been legal for use by foreigners. Over the longer run, redistricting handed the future Islamist movement a structural advantage in mobilizing a parliamentary base. Although the intention behind redistricting was to hobble what at that time was a predominantly secularist political opposition, among the unforeseen outcomes was to privilege urban as well as tribal Islamists as a political force.
The 1992 election was run in the same districts as the elections in 1981 and 1985, and it brought out large numbers of candidates representing newly prominent social bases. Perhaps the least noted outside Kuwait was the change in the type of person running from tribal areas.
What we have seen this time is something we have never seen before, not only many candidates but many different kinds of people running. There is a difference between the inner and outer areas. In the inner city, the inhabitants are people who have been out of the nomad system for a long time. The outer areas are dominated by the tribal system until now. In the past, the quality people came from the inner areas. We see this time that high-quality people are also running from the outer areas—PhDs, lawyers, and teachers. They come from a very healthy background and cultural experience. 19
Sa`d Ben Tafla al-`Ajmi, a young professor at Kuwait University, ran as an independent in District 20, Old Jahra.’ Sa`d turned down the opportunity for endorsement by a tribal primary.
There are clan elections. We want somebody to run for the whole tribe. Anybody who is a member of the clan has the right to run. I refused that. I thought it was arbitrary—some sort of segregation. You should run as a Kuwaiti and not as a member of a clan. It is also discrimination. Those who do not have a big clan don’t have a chance. Each clan has its own branches, subclans. If yours is not so big, you don’t have a chance. Mine represents 70 percent of the tribe in the area and provided a good chance of my winning, but I refused [tribal endorsement] out of principle. 20
Sa`d al-`Ajmi was a prominent campaigner outside his district, appearing in both the Kuwait Graduates Society debate series where he talked about human rights, and in the Kuwait University debate series where he spoke on a number of issues including problems arising from the dominance of tribal and Islamist tendencies among Kuwaiti political groupings. 21 Although Sa`d lost the election in his district, his campaign won him recognition nationally as a rising political star, and he was subsequently invited to become a political consultant to the 1992 parliament. 22
The ranks of new men running in the urban areas also swelled in 1992. Occupation activists, both insiders and exiles, were well represented among this group. They ran even though few believed they could defeat better known or better bankrolled opponents. One of them put it this way, “I will probably not win. Here we have standard candidates from a long time. But you will see me again.” Activists ran to bring some sense of closure to their wartime experiences and to share what they had learned from these experiences with their fellow Kuwaitis. Two campaigned as independents in District 10, `Adaliya. One was an attorney and insider, Saleh al-Hashem; the other was a professor and exile, Saif `Abbas `Abdulla.
Saleh al-Hashem, like many insiders, was horrified at the postliberation exacerbation of social divisions among Kuwaitis, divisions that had virtually disappeared inside Kuwait during the occupation.
Before the invasion there was no equality among the Kuwaiti people regarding their loyalty to the country. They were not equal in front of the law. . . . But during the invasion we experienced equality and the true spirit of liberation. . . . After the liberation I was shocked at how Kuwaitis hated other Kuwaiti men. We don’t feel secure among ourselves so I try to do something about it. When I speak, I make it clear that this is not the time to divide the Kuwaitis. When Saddam Hussein came, he treated us equally. He did not kill Shi`a or Sunna: he killed Kuwaitis. 23
Like most hadhar candidates, Saleh was critical of the regime’s handling of foreign policy immediately prior to the invasion, and also of its management of the country’s finances. He advocated a reorganization of the government to increase transparency and political participation, and endorsed the Kuwait Democratic Forum’s suggestion that the office of prime minister be separated from the position of crown prince. The rationale for this change is that monopolization of both positions by the same person serves to keep the top political leadership in the hands of the ruling family. It also inhibits the behavior of the opposition, which sees the visage of a future amir in every face-off against the current leader of the government.
Saleh also advocated a greater degree of direct involvement by average citizens in political affairs. He had tough words for Kuwaiti women.
The main problem is that Kuwaiti women don’t believe in women’s rights. Older women are more stubborn about their rights than younger ones—they don’t want the responsibility. You cannot fight for someone else. If they believe in equality, they must start, but instead they ask the man to do it for them. I will take their case free of charge if a woman goes to the court for their rights. 24
This candidate’s emphasis on responsibility carried throughout his analysis of Kuwait’s situation. Saleh al-Hashem was consistent in advising the Kuwaiti people and their government to be more open, more direct, and more involved.
Saif `Abbas `Abdulla is a former diplomat and was chair of the department of political science at Kuwait University when he stepped down to campaign for the parliament in 1992. The Iraqi invasion occurred when he, his wife, and three of their children were in the United States. They rushed immediately to augment the staff at the Kuwait embassy in Washington, focusing their initial efforts on aiding stranded refugees. Shortly after, Saif was one of the group of Kuwaitis who set up Citizens for a Free Kuwait. He spent most of the occupation on radio, on television, and making speeches to live audiences all over the United States, pleading Kuwait’s case before the court of public opinion. After Saif returned to Kuwait following liberation, he began to consider running for parliament. He was slow to make up his mind because of his family and work responsibilities, his residence outside the district where the bulk of his family lives, and the fact that other family members also were likely to run. Their candidacies would not dilute his vote because they would be running in a different district. However, they would draw on the same family pool of human and financial resources. These and other concerns prevented Saif from declaring until September.
Saif’s positions reveal some of the complexity of political allegiances in Kuwait. Like Saleh al-Hashem, Saif advocates greater responsibility for citizens, but he sees the impact of this lack of responsibility on government policy differently from most other middle-class Kuwaitis. Perhaps because he is a Shi`a and because he spent so much of his life representing Kuwait abroad, Saif has more sympathy for the government’s point of view. He says that the political opposition is critical of the government not because the government is bad but because the critics are angry with themselves for being so dependent on it. This minority viewpoint is reflected in Saif’s analysis of the situation leading up to the Iraqi invasion, which he approached from a longer time perspective than most Kuwaitis ordinarily take, and in which he included the parliament as well as the government among the responsible agents.
How can the ones who are running now justify their silence [i.e., their lack of protest at giving aid to Iraq during the first Gulf War]? Will they appeal to Arab nationalism? To emotionalism? . . . Even if the government requested the aid, why didn’t the parliament object? 25
On other issues, Saif’s positions were similar to those of most other hadhar candidates. On education, for example, he was critical of Kuwait’s education policy, particularly as it affects the university.
There are no clear education plans. They change according to politics. . . . There are too many dropouts. Graduates do not work in the fields they were trained for. This is because of social pressure and politics. The degree is a license and not a background. 26
Saif’s campaign was most interesting for its procedural innovations. An expert in American politics, Saif tried to run an American-style campaign in Kuwait. At the outset, he invited all the other candidates running in his district to debate the issues at his headquarters. Several came privately to complain about the rules but only one—Saleh al-Hashem—showed up for the event itself. Willing debaters were not the norm in Kuwait in 1992. Few candidates running in any district were prepared to subject themselves to public questioning in an uncontrolled environment. The participants in the two independent debate series were nearly all new men with good educations and highly developed public-speaking skills. Many also were first-time candidates and probably saw the debates as opportunities to become more widely known. The highly educated and articulate Khaled Sultan, an experienced candidate, an Islamist, and a member of a prominent merchant family, decided at the last minute to cancel his appearance at one of the university debates because
it was not a balanced panel, directed toward our way. The members of the panel represented a specific ideology, more in the liberal and leftist type, and the issues that are likely to come up were directed toward a specific area. . . . Second, the mechanism of question-and-answer does not give the respondent the opportunity to respond to the question. 27
Saif’s proposed debate was even more alarming because it imposed a territorial disadvantage on his opponents along with the fear of uncontrolled questioning—a candidate would have to be very sure of himself to debate in an open forum on his opponent’s home turf.
Saif encountered other problems grafting American tactics onto a Kuwaiti campaign. Family involvement in his campaign extended beyond his brothers and nephews—standard practice—to include his wife and daughters—not standard practice at all. The daughters and their friends worked on Saif’s advertising and offered a steady stream of suggestions about campaign tactics. They wanted him to invite women to speak at his diwaniyya even before the Yasin diwaniyya with its two female speakers had been announced, and pressed him strongly to go on record immediately in support of women’s political rights. Saif’s brothers were uncomfortable with the girls’ involvement, especially the role of Lubna, Saif’s eldest daughter. Lubna’s energy, activism, and self-confidence horrified her uncles and challenged their authority. They applied strong pressure to get all the girls out of the campaign. Their position was reinforced by critical comments regarding the propriety of a feature story on the candidate and his family—with photographs—published in one of the Arabic dailies. This far-from-conventional incorporation of the private into the public sphere simultaneously obscured the candidate’s message about women’s rights and estranged him from more traditionally minded constituents, including some in his family. Family solidarity is important in Kuwaiti elections because family resources—everything from money to voting relatives—are the mainstay of most campaigns.
In countries where political parties take responsibility for nominating candidates and providing campaign resources, they also mobilize voters from different social groups into voting coalitions. Government intervention in the electoral process in Kuwait is designed to thwart nonfamily coalition-building, not simply by making parties formally illegal but also by direct interference. One way is to provide under-the-table financial assistance to selected campaigns. Many of the Kuwaitis I interviewed in 1992 and 1996 thought the government was funneling money to particular candidates. The logic behind such a tactic is to add to the number running, thereby diluting the votes of antigovernment candidates, and also to introduce distractions that take attention away from issues. People making such charges pointed to the modest means of some candidates as compared to highly visible evidence—like lavish refreshments for audiences at speeches, or the proliferation of expensive, professionally produced campaign materials—that their campaigns were spending a lot more money than could be accounted for by family resources alone.
Some well-heeled campaigns countered charges of covert financing by openly soliciting resources from their potential voter base. This was the tack taken by `Abbas al-Khodary, whose campaign staff stressed that the candidate’s friends were donating time, materials, and services to `Abbas’s campaign. The campaign manager called attention to these donations as evidence of the candidate’s effectiveness as a district representative. Friends contributed to `Abbas because “we like him.” But demonstrating obligations to friends may pose problems too, because it is likely that at least some friends give assistance with the expectation of favors in return.
Favors for favors, measured in votes as well as in direct campaign contributions, are the province of the “service candidate” who acts both as ombudsman and benefactor to individual constituents in his district. The government is a silent partner in this patron-client system, helping to entrench service candidates by channeling favors through parliamentarians who prove themselves to be the kind of men the government prefers. Constituents who approach service candidates find it easier to obtain scarce and selective benefits ranging from permits to import labor to authorizations to seek medical care abroad—for which travel as well as medical expenses are paid—than if they were to apply through regular bureaucratic channels. `Abbas al-Khodary was well known as a service candidate—the Alphonse D`Amato of Kuwait—and details about favors he had done for his constituents were included in the impressive computerized voter files at his headquarters.
Many party functions are carried out by the most highly developed of the “political groups,” Kuwait’s substitute for political parties. The names of these groups sometimes change from election to election, usually after particular organizations are banned by the government and members reorganize under a new banner. The 1992 election revealed institutionalization of the dominant political trends embodied in what Shafeeq Ghabra refers to as “public political blocs.” Six of these quasi-parties operated in Kuwait in 1992. 28
Despite the number and variety of political groups, most candidates in Kuwait run as independents. This choice reinforces the factionalization of Kuwaiti politics and the persistence of family and quasi-family alliances and allegiances that retard the development of representative political institutions.
Tribal identification as a primary source of factionalism is actively promoted by the government. For example, the government follows a procedure in listing candidates that emphasizes clan affiliation. Many Kuwaitis, especially those from prominent families, are already known by a family marker in addition to their personal names and the names of their fathers. For others, official documents such as candidate lists included tribal markers in the names of Kuwaitis who did not customarily use them. For example, Saif `Abbas `Abdulla acquired a “last name,” Dehrab, in addition to the three names—his own (Saif), his father’s (`Abbas), and his grandfather’s (`Abdulla)—by which he had identified himself since he was a young man. The inclusion of tribal identities is a strategy for managing reflexivity because it keeps “traditional” tribal designations socially prominent despite the efforts of new men to overcome tribalism in their bid for larger, more socially comprehensive constituencies. 29
Political parties and political groups emphasize issues and ideologies over family and tribal identities and even over candidates’ personalities. The functional correspondence between Kuwaiti political groups and political parties is clear with respect to a number of activities. For example, the KDF worked out a platform long before the 1992 campaign began—some of the KDF planks, most notably the demand to separate the positions of crown prince and prime minister, were developed during the occupation. The KDF also ran a candidate slate—eight persons, the largest of any of the political groups. Candidates were recruited to run in urban districts where the KDF anticipated a voter base sympathetic to its positions. However, only two KDF candidates were victorious, `Abdullah Nibari, in District 2, and Ahmad al-Khatib in District 9. Both were strongly identified with the KDF in 1992. `Abdullah Nibari was the KDF’s secretary general then as he had been in the group’s earlier incarnations, and both men had been elected to previous parliaments.
How the KDF fared is indicative of some of the contrary pulls that make party-formation difficult in Kuwait irrespective of government actions. For example, entrepreneurs who see themselves as stronger than a political group are seldom willing to lend their luster to others by running under the group’s designation. The KDF was particularly vulnerable to a drop-off in support from voters and candidates in 1992 because of smear campaigns, such as the one targeting Ahmad al-Khatib, and because of widespread (and long-standing) perceptions that the group as a whole was doctrinaire and inflexible. Ahmad al-Khatib was able to turn the tables on his attackers and win in his district, but the KDF as a whole could not shake its rumor-driven reputation as a group of people whose loyalty to Kuwait was questionable and who, in any event, were out-of-step with the mass of the population.
This vulnerability played out in an interesting way in District 8, Hawali. The KDF named Ahmad al-Rub`i to run under its banner in District 8, but he held them off for some time and chose finally to run as an independent. Scrambling at the last minute to find a substitute, the KDF chose a first-time candidate, Ahmad Dayin, an insider during the occupation who had participated in the Resistance. 30 His campaign was based entirely on the KDF platform, which featured a list of proposals for government reform and a promise to investigate the events leading up to the Iraqi invasion. In line with the KDF platform, which advocated full political rights for women, Ahmad Dayin named a woman, Iman al-Bidah, to run his campaign, and also tried to run a gender-integrated campaign headquarters.
I started out wanting a mixed diwaniyya, but the men complained and I had to have a second tent. We did this because we go according to the social norms. . . . Even though some liberated women come, housewives, we go by the social norms and keep them in a separate place. The women who come to the headquarters watch events through closed-circuit TV. They [also attend mixed] meetings in private houses. On nights when there is an announced meeting, about sixty or seventy women come. 31
Ahmad Dayin was not expected to win, but he did attract a respectable number of votes, some likely to have come from Kuwaitis committed to the KDF and its platform.
Meanwhile, the charismatic and politically experienced Ahmad al-Rub`i ran an aggressive campaign as an independent, tied to no platform or political group though he endorsed most of the KDF’s positions. Having broken with the KDF, Ahmad al-Rub`i was able to maneuver freely to mobilize a diverse and impressive base of support for himself. 32 Another charismatic independent in District 8 was a newcomer, Husain `Ali al-Qallaf, a young Shi`i mullah with a large and passionate following. 33 On election day, Husain came in third. The story of his electoral fate features a complicated interaction between two patterns of group identification in Kuwait: sectarianism and diwaniyya voting.
“Diwaniyya” is a term used to describe a room in a house, a campaign tent headquarters, and the meetings that go on in both as well as in places such as the Fatima Mosque in `Abdullah al-Salim neighborhood where one of the Monday special diwaniyyas was held during the pro-democracy campaign (see chapter 4). But when a person talks about “his” diwaniyya, he usually means the regular weekly meetings that he hosts in his own house or attends regularly at the home of a relation, a friend, or a patron. These meetings center around a core group whose association extends back for years and sometimes for generations. A diwaniyya like this resembles a family, an intimate group conscious of its shared interests and common history.
In District 8 a few diwaniyyas were said to have voted strategically to defeat Husain al-Qallaf. Several persons I discussed this with stressed that diwaniyya voting is not unusual in Kuwait. It is a strategy that works like a tribal primary or a family council where participants agree ahead of time on one or two candidates as a way to concentrate their votes and improve the likelihood that their choices will win. 34 Shortly before the 1992 election, the members of a diwaniyya in Mishref are said to have decided that each would cast only one vote for Ahmad al-Rub`i and not choose a second candidate. Ahmad had spent a lot of time talking with them and was seen as deserving their support. Casting one vote would increase the likelihood that Ahmad would win a seat by avoiding adding to the totals of rival candidates. Most of the diwaniyya members were indifferent about the other candidates anyway, and the single-vote tactic reflected their actual preferences as well as constituting an electoral strategy.
According to what I have been able to piece together from several informants, the ICM mounted a sophisticated campaign to undermine the strength of Husain `Ali al-Qallaf. They feared Husain’s chances would be boosted by the “one-eyed votes” of those whose only candidate was Ahmad al-Rub`i, and concentrated their efforts on diwaniyyas whose members were known to have decided to cast only one vote for Ahmad. In one of them, an ICM member objected to the single-vote strategy, saying that unless the group voted as a bloc for a second Sunni candidate, “the mullah” would win. This comment played off sectarian rivalry, what another informant called a “scare campaign” against Husain and still another interpreted as a reaction to a Sunni belief that Shi`i voters would pick Husain because they “choose as a religious matter.” After some persuading, the diwaniyya members agreed and pledged to vote for the same two candidates, Ahmad al-Rub`i and ICM candidate Isma`il al-Shati. 35 Other Sunni diwaniyyas were said to have made a similar decision. A fourth informant told me that on the night before the election, “People stayed until three in the morning; in certain cases even until light,” trying to convince small groups of voters to support Isma`il al-Shati. The spread of this kind of behavior from diwaniyya to diwaniyya also is not unusual. It is an example of how the bandwagon phenomenon, also visible in other electoral settings, works in practice. In Kuwait, a carefully timed and targeted effort like this one can change the outcome of an election because of the small number of voters in each district and the large number of candidates running—winning margins often are very small (see appendix 6.1).
Observers of the 1992 election disagree about the impact of sectarianism on the results. Shi`i winners and their supporters insist that sectarianism was a minimal factor in their own elections. However, several persons I talked to who had information about ballot counting in districts with prominent Shi`i candidates reported that votes for Shi`a were more likely to be paired with votes for other Shi`a than with votes for Sunni candidates. Kuwaiti attorney and author Mohammad al-Jasim obtained a vote tally matrix from District 4, al-Da`iya, showing that only thirty-five of the votes for Shi`i candidate `Ali al-Baghli, who came in first with 919 votes, were paired with votes for non-Shi`i candidates—not even 4 percent. 36 The diwaniyya voting described above indicates that sectarianism remains an important mobilizing force for Sunni Kuwaitis also. An openly sectarian campaign was run by Sunni candidates in District 4 in 1996, and included a “Sunni primary,” conducted in a number of Sunni diwaniyyas shortly before the election. I discuss this further in subsequent chapters.
The salience of sectarianism as an electoral issue is connected to the policy positions of explicitly Islamist candidates. As in other countries where Islamists run for electoral office, a standard “plank” in most Islamist platforms is a promise to make the country’s laws conform to Islamic law, the Shari`a. In virtually all cases of Islamist propagandizing for Shari`a, the assumption is that there is one Islamic law that simply can be slotted into place. In reality, however, there are multiple interpretations, beginning with the primary division of Islam into Sunni and Shi`i variants. Within Sunni Islam, there are four major schools of doctrinal interpretation—the Maliki school is the one followed by most Sunni Kuwaitis. Other sources of doctrinal divergence are fatwas, which are formal opinions issued by individual religious authorities; interpretations of laws made by Islamic councils and courts; and the interpretation that each individual finds in the Qur’an. The assertion that there is one right way to interpret Islamic law—a fundamentalist assumption—is contradicted by an even more fundamental tradition in Islam, which is that the individual bears personal responsibility for her or himself before God.
Some Islamists talk as though Islamic law is uniform and self-evidently so to any diligent reader of the Qur’an, but this is not reflected in actual practice. In most Muslim countries, personal status laws regulating such things as divorce, child custody, and inheritance are adjudicated in sectarian courts, according to communally based interpretations of the Qur’an, rather than in secular courts applying a single legal standard. 37 Kuwait provides for religious adjudication, but state courts go beyond the already-liberal Maliki standards in areas such as child custody, where they have introduced the “best interests of the child” concept into Kuwaiti family law. This provides a morally defensible legal alternative that is especially attractive to Shi`i mothers seeking custody of their children. 38
In Kuwait the sectarian distribution in the population is approximately 30 percent Shi`a and 70 percent Sunni Muslims. As I noted earlier, since the 1981 redistricting, the Sunni majority among elected officials is larger than it was before. Sunni Islamist candidates in 1992 routinely included a call to amend article 2 of the Kuwaiti constitution. This article already states that Shari`a is a major source of Kuwaiti law, but Sunni Islamists wish to change it to say that Shari`a is the only source of Kuwaiti law. Shi`i candidates, conscious of their status as members of a minority group and the likelihood that any interpretation of Shari`a chosen to guide Kuwaiti law would discriminate against their tradition, did not support amending article 2.
Kuwaiti standards for political correctness in 1992 required candidates to avoid sectarian issues in public forums. On the few occasions where sectarianism was part of a debate, the wisdom of this convention was more than apparent. During the first Kuwait University debate, for example, a comment from `Abd al-Latif Du`aij, a columnist on the panel posing questions to the candidates, brought up potential problems with other parts of the constitution should article 2 be amended as Sunni Islamists were advocating. The columnist offered his opinion that an amended article 2 would be incompatible with the article giving the Sabah family the right to rule in Kuwait (because they are not descended from the prophet Muhammad) and also would violate several constitutionally protected civil liberties. In response, ICM candidate Isma`il al-Shati said that the perspective of the questioner reflected a minority (i.e., Shi`i) viewpoint within Islam and that such an amendment would not interfere with the article making the Sabah the ruling family—the Sunni position. Another respondent, Yacoub Hayati, openly accused `Abd al-Latif Du`aij of trying to embarrass Sunni candidates. Yacoub, a Sunni, was running as an independent in Sharq, a district with a large Shi`i population. Disparaging remarks about Shi`a were made by several others, and the discussion got nastier as more people joined in, both from the panel and from the floor. The argument grew so heated that university officials discussed canceling the remaining debates to prevent similar confrontations in the future. 39
Sectarian concerns underlie other differences on issues between Sunni and Shi`i Islamists in addition to the conflict over whether to amend article 2. Perhaps the most significant of these is women’s rights, an issue usually regarded as dividing Islamists from secularists. In Kuwait, where Shi`a are too few to aspire to dominance but too many to be marginalized—even in the parliament—women’s rights cut across the Islamist-secularist division during the 1992 campaign. This twist reveals not only sectarian differences in interpreting the boundaries of separate spheres for men and women as mandated by the Qur’an but also hints that the Shi`a could have been positioning themselves to seek and be allies of secular liberals on issues where their interests coincided, including on some issues involving women’s status.
The manipulation of women’s rights as a marker of political rather than religious principles in the 1992 campaign was not always easy for candidates to orchestrate successfully, whether they ran under a religious designation or not. Consider, for example, the desire of KDF secularist Ahmad Dayin to preside over a gender-integrated diwaniyya and how he was thwarted by the refusal of the presumably secularist men attending his events to tolerate the presence of women in the same tent. Similarly, Husain `Ali al-Qallaf, the young Shi`i mullah, along with his campaign staff, were uncomfortable with the reality of women attending the candidate’s rallies, but their principles demanded that they provide facilities for any who might actually present themselves. Shi`a such as Nasir Sarkhou, an IPA candidate running in District 13, Rumaithiya, along with members of his campaign staff, took pains to distinguish their positions supporting women’s rights as distinct from the positions on women’s rights taken by Sunni Islamist candidates. In Nasir’s case, this position included a formal recognition of women’s equality to men, and their right under Islam to occupy public space, vote and run for office, and hold leadership positions in the government other than those putting them in charge of a religious or judicial body. 40 In contrast, Salaf candidates such as Khaled Sultan (District 3), ICM candidates such as Mohammad al-Basiri (District 20), and Sunni Islamist independents such as Khaled al-`Adwa (District 21), made a point of their opposition to women’s participation in politics other than voting—about which they were not very enthusiastic either. The Sunni Islamists I encountered were especially adamant against women’s attendance at public meetings and any changes in the law that would give women the right to hold public office. 41
The Sunni Islamist political groups may have noted the positioning of Shi`i rivals as potential coalition partners with secularists and wanted to proclaim the similar availability of their candidates on issues other than women’s rights or amending the constitution. They also may have wanted to increase their visibility in the campaign and their clout after the election. For whatever reasons, shortly before election day, both the ICM and the IPA gave public endorsements to lists of candidates who were not running under their designations. (See appendix 6.1.) These endorsements, like the two independent debate series and female speakers at diwaniyyas, constituted another 1992 campaign innovation. I interviewed several candidates who were endorsed by one or both groups; all denied having solicited the endorsements though none repudiated them. One noted that because he had not sought the endorsement he was not obligated to do anything in return for it, while the fact of the endorsement might shift a few votes his way and help him win. However, such an eventuality would cut both ways, as the endorsing political group could increase its status and assert an obligation by claiming that its endorsement had provided the margin of victory.
The strategic conception of the endorsements as enhancing the authority of the Sunni Islamist groups in the new parliament may be inferred from the fact that the endorsements were concentrated among apparent front-runners. For example, in only three districts (2, 14, and 24) did anyone receive an endorsement who finished in less than fourth place. 42 Interestingly, there were cross-endorsements—IPA endorsements of ICM candidates and vice versa—and double endorsements—both Sunni Islamist political groups endorsing the same outside candidate. Thus, the two Sunni groups behaved less as rivals than as partners, though this was not universally true. The ICM refused to endorse Khaled Sultan or Fahad al-Khanah (who ran as an IPA candidate in District 6), and the Salaf were said to have refused to endorse Ikhwan candidates elsewhere. Among the nine cases where both the ICM and the IPA sponsored or endorsed the same candidate, seven won.
While much was made of the endorsements during the last few days of the campaign, their importance faded quickly after the election. Even so, the endorsements marked an organized effort to counter political fragmentation. As such, along with the preparation of coherent platforms and compatible candidate slates, they demonstrate the growing political sophistication of Kuwaiti political groups and their ability to compensate for some of the effects of the regime’s divide-and-rule approach to Kuwaiti electoral politics.
The Election
Prior to election day, Kuwaitis as well as foreigners expressed many doubts about the likely honesty of the electoral procedure itself. As a result, I devoted some time to learning about the standard Kuwaiti techniques for cheating in elections as well as about measures election officials were taking to foil them. On election day I traveled to six polling stations and observed for more than an hour at each one. While I noted substantial divergences from the recommended procedures at two polling stations, my overall impression is that, on the whole, the election procedures in five of those districts were carried out conscientiously, in large part because most officials, including judges and poll watchers representing candidates, conducted themselves in a highly professional way. Most manipulations of Kuwaiti elections occur prior to the polling rather than on election day itself, though vote-buying continues to be a problem.
There is no indication that voters were prevented from casting their ballots. In fact, the voter registration system in Kuwait is permissive rather than restrictive, and there are many formal and informal arrangements available to help the infirm as well as those who are incapacitated in other ways, to vote. Although qualified citizens have only a brief period in which to register—for the 1992 election, twenty days in February—this is not a time when many Kuwaitis are out of the country. 43 If a voter moves to another district after registration is closed, he can vote in his old district, where he is officially registered. 44 Registration is closed early in the cycle so the names of all the voters can be published—and potentially challenged. According to `Ali Murad, the Interior Ministry employee in charge of electoral procedures, one person challenged seven hundred registrants in 1992. After investigation, one hundred were eliminated from the list. One went to court asking to be reinstated, but “the judge decided they should drop him.” 45
The electoral process in Kuwait can be corrupted by registering the unqualified and loading candidate slates in key districts, matters already touched on. One also can “buy” votes and tamper directly with ballots. When I described diwaniyya voting earlier in this chapter, you might have wondered why diwaniyya members would keep their word and vote as they had promised—and how anyone could tell whether they had or not. The same thought crossed my mind with respect to vote-buying. Prior to the adoption of the “Australian” or secret ballot in the United States, parties could assure that “their” voters were voting as they should simply by watching them. A voter entered the public polling place and requested a “ticket” for a particular party. He then dropped this ticket into a visible receptacle, also a public act. Anyone buying a vote could see exactly what he was paying for. But when the secret ballot came in, all voters received identical ballots listing every candidate, ballots they were to mark privately. They could vote for candidates from different parties in the same election—this is where the term split ticket comes from—and they could vote for candidates other than the ones they might have been paid to vote for without anyone being the wiser. The level of “party voting” dropped sharply after the Australian ballot was adopted, and soon even the “honesty” of bribed voters was called into question as results verged from vote-buyers’ expectations. 46
Kuwait also has a secret ballot, so I was at first mystified at how vote-buying could be accomplished with any confidence. One of the first people I asked said that buyers simply marched their voters to the mosque and had them swear before God that they would vote as they had promised. I had some doubts about the reliability of this method and, inquiring further, learned of others. The oldest depends on the number of illiterate voters or voters who can pass themselves off as illiterate. This practice is dying out, especially in the city, along with the Kuwaitis who grew up before education became free and widespread. A voter who cannot read is permitted to vote aloud, before a judge and anyone else who might be present, including representatives of the candidates who are there to observe the judge’s conduct as he questions voters and marks their ballots. A voter may be challenged by an observer who knows he really isn’t illiterate, and the judge can decide to disqualify him. A judge also can disqualify a voter without an external challenge if he thinks the voter is pretending to be illiterate or is purposely revealing his vote to observers.
The standard method for vote-buying before 1992 was the ballot switch. A vote-buyer sends in his first voter, who pretends to vote by dropping a blank paper provided by the vote-buyer into the ballot box. The “voter” takes the real ballot he received from the judge to the vote-buyer to get his money. The next voter goes in with this ballot already marked. He gets his money when he comes back with a second blank ballot, having “voted” with the premarked ballot. This process continues until all the paid voters cast ballots. The success of this method depends on being able to switch ballots without being seen, easy to do in a standard voting booth.
To combat the ballot-switch scam, `Ali Murad and his staff prepared a new voting space, a lectern with a four-inch rim around three sides. The idea is to place the lectern in the open in such a way that the judge can watch the voter’s back and see whether his hands go into his pockets, while casual observers from the sides and front cannot see how he marks his ballot. The effect of this simple but ingenious innovation was remarkable. In the first days after the 1992 election, grumbling that voters had not voted for candidates they had been paid to vote for was heard in several diwaniyyas and not a few government offices.
My experience watching voting in the six districts I had chosen to observe confirms the success of properly applied procedures in limiting obvious fraud. For example, the judge supervising illiterates voting in Ahmadi revealed both firmness and compassion in dealing with the elderly men he was assisting, one quite befuddled by his prior instructions from a family member. The official poll watchers, one from the ministry and the others representatives of the candidates, unfailingly supported the judge, who was remarkably patient, gentle, and, like so many Kuwaiti judges, very young. Not all the judges whom I observed in their various capacities as election monitors and referees were equally conscientious. Procedures at District 14, Abraq Khaittan, were slipshod at best, and I was not surprised to learn a few days later that the election in that district was being contested on the grounds that disqualified persons had been permitted to vote. In these six districts as a whole, however, most of the judges were reasonably good about following procedures.
The security of the ballot boxes was ensured by the number and interests of the persons observing them at all times, but depended most heavily on the probity of the judges. Ballot boxes were always in the sight and custody of the judges. When a polling place was closed, the chief judge in the district locked the ballot box and sealed it with red sealing wax. Then he dropped the voter tally and the unused ballots, along with the list of voters registered in that precinct, the pens used by the judges during the polling, and the remaining sealing wax sticks, into the box. This was all done before witnesses. The ballot boxes have windows so their contents are visible from outside and observers can see what is and is not inside each box at any time.
In 1992 all the ballots from each district were counted in the first precinct of that district. Boxes from the other precincts were carried by each presiding judge as he was escorted to a waiting police car. Judge and box together were driven to the first precinct where the judge continued to carry the box as he was escorted into the polling place. All the boxes and all the judges were present when the votes were counted. The boxes were not opened until every box was in and certified by the chief judge of the first precinct. The count itself was done by all the judges together, working before a large crowd consisting of candidates and their staffs, friends, voters, reporters, television crews, the odd professor studying the election, and security personnel with machine guns to keep them all in order.
The boxes were unlocked, one at a time. All the ballots were removed, counted by the judges, and the sum compared to the official total that had been compiled during the balloting by each presiding judge. Then each ballot was read and tallied. A judge unfolded it and read the marked names. He held the ballot up so everyone could see that it had been correctly read and properly marked—a ballot with more than two candidates marked was disqualified, as was any ballot with a write-in vote. 47 In consequence, the several voters who wrote in “George Bush” sacrificed their second vote as well as the write-in. The judges and the people sitting close to the front of the room also could check the special watermark on the ballot, a device to detect ballot substitution in order to prevent variations on the vote-and-switch scam. The ballot was passed down the row of judges, one of whom compiled the official vote total. Running tallies were kept by candidate representatives also, most of whom marked them in a matrix so as to record vote pairs. This keeps a record of the ballots, not merely a tally of the vote, preserving more information about voting choice. (Examples collected in 1996 can be found in appendix 6.2.) A big tally was recorded on poster board with Magic Markers by members of the Interior Ministry staff. Every now and again the judge in charge halted the count to read from the official tally to be sure that everyone had recorded the same figures.
With the very first box of votes counted in Hawali, it was apparent that strategic voting had been widespread. About 10 percent of the ballots in that box had only one candidate marked. People who watched the count in other districts reported that some had produced even higher proportions of single-vote ballots. In District 7, for example, observers I questioned estimated that single-vote ballots made up more than a quarter of the total cast. Such large numbers of single-vote ballots in a precinct or district is more likely to reflect diwaniyya voting than strategic choices made by individuals. If the former, their concentrated support strengthens the clout of the diwaniyya if its candidate wins.
What goes on in diwaniyyas is not considered to be privileged information, and diwaniyya members are quick to use stories about what people said and did there for a whole range of purposes. In her book on the Palestinian village of Ein Houd, anthropologist Susan Slyomovics recounts reports from her informants that Iraqi security forces searching Kuwaiti diwaniyyas during the occupation had found listening devices they said were planted by the Kuwaiti government. 48 The idea that the government might be listening to diwaniyya conversations does not perturb Kuwaitis. Diwaniyya members are aware that whatever they say is likely to find its way into the rumor mill and into the ears of the rulers. This is one of the principal ways that the rulers can estimate the tolerance of the population to whatever they might be doing. Consequently, in most people’s minds, a diwaniyya is a sounding board and what someone says there is supposed to be overheard, especially if the news that gets around could benefit diwaniyya members. When diwaniyya members concentrate their vote for a winner, they are sure to be among the first to inform him of that fact.
While the count was still in progress in Hawali, I went to the first precinct in Kaifan to see the end of the count in a very close election there. When I arrived, the last box was about to be opened. The intensity of the crowd watching the neck-and-neck race for second place between `Abd al-`Aziz al-`Adsani, the brother of a member of the 1985 parliament, and ICM-endorsed `Adil Khaled al-Subieh made the judge reading the ballots increasingly nervous. After it became clear that `Abd al-`Aziz would win, the judge ejected the noisiest observers and had the security forces lock the doors. The counting and tallying were completed before the remaining witnesses.
The procedure I have described is cumbersome and takes a long time. Some districts were not fully counted until daybreak. However, close scrutiny by observers of deliberate behavior by judges gives confidence in the reported results. In 1996 the ballot-counting procedure was changed so that individual tallies were made in each precinct in order to have the results available as quickly as possible. The shortage of competent judges to conduct the counting was more than evident where I witnessed it, in the first precinct of District 13. The chief judge finally had to give up on one colleague who could neither read accurately nor record the marks on the tally board properly when others called out the names of the candidates marked on the ballots. It took hours to count the vote in this single precinct because of the problems caused by that one individual. Meanwhile, results from other precincts and districts arriving over cell phones and television feeds were constant sources of distraction to and disruption of an already chaotic process. Later, when one of the losers in District 4 insisted that the judges had mixed up the tallies from the different precincts and added votes belonging to him to someone else’s, the charge did not seem far-fetched given what I had seen in District 13. Most of the election results were available before 11:00 p.m. on election evening, the goal of the change in procedures, yet much of what was gained in speed was lost in dignity and to some degree in confidence in the reported results, even though all the ballots were preserved and recounts were run where requested. There were four legal challenges by losers in 1996 as opposed to only two in 1992.
The Results
The 1992 election produced a parliament in which more than half of those elected had run on platforms opposing the government. Even proven vote-getters like `Abbas al-Khodary, whose entire raison d’être seemed to be wasta (“connections,” patronage), were edged out by opponents promising reform. The exact number of opposition members elected differed slightly depending on who was counting, particularly with respect to the many newly elected independents whose political antecedents were not fully known. Shafeeq Ghabra put the number of opposition members at thirty-five, and he called these results a victory for the middle class: “Twenty-three seats went to formal opposition groups. . . . The remaining twelve went to eight independent candidates affiliated with the opposition . . . tribal candidates with opposition sympathies took four seats.” 49 More than half of the elected members of the 1992 parliament, twenty-seven, were newcomers, and most of them, nineteen, came from tribal districts (see table 6.2 and appendix 6.1).
| Table 6.2: Experienced Members in Kuwaiti Parliaments | ||
| Year | Oldtimers | Incumbents |
| 1967 | 19 (38%) | 19 (38%) |
| 1971 | 27 (54%) | 22 (44%) |
| 1975 | 27 (54%) | 25 (50%) |
| 1981 | 18 (36%) | 11 (22%) |
| 1985 | 23 (46%) | 22 (44%) |
| 1992* | 23 (46%) | 19 (38%) |
| 1996 | 32 (64%) | 25 (50%) |
|
Notes: “Oldtimers” = members who served in one or more previous parliaments. Sources: Arab Times, October 9, 1996, 6–7; voter tallies for 1981, 1985, and 1992 from the Kuwait elections office (photocopy); Nicolas Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy: The Anatomy of Parliamentary Elections in Kuwait,” in Linda Layne, ed., Elections in the Middle East: Implications of Recent Trends, 187–213 (Boulder: Westview, 1987). |
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The 1990 election of the Majlis al-Watani had produced an even larger proportion of newcomers among the winners because so many veterans had refused to run. However, the 1992 election reflected a different hierarchy of values and produced legislators from different segments of the middle class than had been elected in 1990. Candidates and political groups worked hard in 1992 to nationalize the campaign. They developed platforms, built coalitions, and emphasized issues rather than identities. This was most marked in the newspaper coverage of the campaign and was reflected also in the decision to organize the two debate series. Yet the great diversity in individuals’ backgrounds and interests make the Kuwaiti middle class, like its counterparts elsewhere, difficult to designate as “the” winner of an election, as well as a difficult base on which to organize a coherent and politically effective opposition to an entrenched regime.
Shafeeq Ghabra’s identification of the “middle class” as the winner of the 1992 election encourages us to think about what that term means in Kuwait. I believe that in Kuwait, as elsewhere, “middle class” often is a synonym for “modern” as this concept was developed in chapter 2. Modern persons are individualistic: inner-directed, competitive, and oriented toward personal achievement. 50 The tendency to read “middle class” as an economic designation defining particular relations of production is why I prefer the term “new men”—and, where appropriate, “new women” or “new persons”—which conveys the sense of modernity I intend without requiring resolution of definitional conflicts and categorical exclusions associated with the term “class.” 51 The new man in Kuwait sees himself as constructing personal and professional identities from his own efforts rather than receiving them as a consequence of family membership. In this sense, a merchant or a tribe member also may be a new man (another reason why “middle class” is such a confusing designation), although others may have difficulty seeing such persons as individuals independent of their family backgrounds.
The conceptual incompatibility of the two halves of new-men-as-middle-class is one reason why strong class interests such as those pulling Kuwaiti merchants together to fight time and again against the power of the Sabah are difficult to find among members of this group. In Marxian terms, it is the merchant class and not the middle class that is the analogue to the bourgeoisie. Unlike the merchant class, Kuwait’s middle class is an economic group defined by income level. It is highly varied even though its members share a number of vulnerabilities, the chief of which is their dependence on salaries, nearly all coming from the government. 52 The economically marginal are especially conscious of the generous perquisites of their offices and work hard to hold onto them. Even so, as many observers have pointed out, 53 such persons do not constitute a “working class” in the Marxian sense, a class position that, in Kuwait, is occupied by foreign, mostly south- and east-Asian contract workers. Other members of the middle class, such as professionals and technocrats, are economically better off in the present and more confident in the future than low-skilled and unskilled Kuwaiti workers. Although they too are nearly all dependents of the state in terms of the source of their income, they are more visible socially and politically. Many are willing to take risks and exercise autonomy, and they see themselves as active contributors to present and future Kuwaiti life.
Increasingly, merchant interests also work against the coherence of the opposition, not only because the opposition includes larger numbers of new men but also because the merchant class itself is becoming modern. Merchant exclusivity and the strongly strategic orientation of the old merchant families placed class and family interests above those of the individual. Such merchants today find it difficult to understand, much less applaud or even tolerate, the individualistic strategies and goals of ambitious new men. This was evident in ambivalent responses by merchants well before the 1992 election to the electoral and popular successes of Ahmad al-Rub`i. Yet the merchant class too is internally divided. Sociologist Khaldoun al-Naqeeb calls opposition merchants “traditionals.” Traditionals coordinate their strategies in the Chamber of Commerce, an institution they continue to dominate though no longer monopolize. 54 In contrast, the merchant allies of the Al Sabah, like the rulers themselves, are primary beneficiaries of state resources. Merchant allies front for ruling family investments and are rewarded handsomely with lucrative contracts and agencies. Some, such as members of the Behbehani, were small merchants before the 1970s but grew very large as the result of their connections to the government. Others, such as members of the Marzouk, were already rich and powerful but increased their wealth and reach through similar favors. An example is the awarding of the postwar oil field reconstruction contract to Bechtel as the sole contractor rather than to all five of the firms chosen by the KPC group. Faisal al-Marzouk was the agent for Bechtel. 55
Growing divergence within the merchant class complicates the contending myths describing the merchants, the ruling family, and their respective positions in the state as both elites compete for allies from the middle class. Interclass conflicts tend to paper over divisions within classes, but they add to the power of the ruling family by deepening the gulf between classes. For example, financially pressed members of the middle class, even those who are critical of the government, more often speak of themselves as disadvantaged competitors in an economy dominated by greedy merchants than as potential allies of merchants who suffer economic retaliation for their prominence in the political opposition.
Class, status, and ideological differences among members of the 1992 parliament were aggravated by the proportion of newcomers among them. Part of what enables legislatures to conduct their business is the socialization of members to respect and follow the institution’s norms and folkways. During their socialization, newcomers are supposed to observe and learn—be seen and not heard—and take their cues from the oldtimers. As table 6.2 shows, in the 1992 parliament newcomers outnumbered oldtimers. Most newcomers were elected as independents and came from the outlying area. Many saw themselves not merely as new men but as self-made men. They had run populist campaigns, sometimes as tribal candidates, and were closely tied to their electoral constituencies. Like the large “class” of Republican first-termers who came to Washington after the 1994 U.S. congressional elections, many among Kuwait’s new parliamentarians in 1992 came to change the system, not accede to its demands.
Members of the ruling family to whom I spoke were openly disappointed (perhaps disgusted is a better word) at the results of the election, but they were far from daunted. Pressed by a chorus of demands from the new parliament, along with citizens’ expectations, the rulers realized that the new cabinet would have to include more than the one or two tokens from among the elected parliamentarians that had been a characteristic of Kuwaiti cabinets since the 1981 election. But their analysis of the likely weaknesses of the new parliament was acute, and in their choice of cabinet members, as in their governing strategy, they manipulated these weaknesses with great skill to undermine the effectiveness of the opposition in its attempts to reduce the hold of the ruling family on national power.
Endnotes
Note 1: Interviews in Kuwait, September-October 1992. According to Khaldoun al-Naqib and `Abd al-Wahhab al-Zufayri, 60 percent of the candidates for parliament in 1992 had not run for office before. Cited in Shafeeq Ghabra, “Kuwait: Elections and Issues of Democratization in a Middle Eastern State,” Digest of Middle Eastern Studies 2 (Winter 1993): 7. Back.
Note 2: Interviews with Kuwaitis and political officers of Western embassies who attended some of these meetings, September-October 1992 in Kuwait. Back.
Note 3: Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” 166–70. Back.
Note 4: Shafeeq Ghabra, “Democratization in a Middle Eastern State: Kuwait, 1993,” Middle East Policy 3 (1994): 105. Back.
Note 5: Ghabra, “Democratization in a Middle Eastern State,” 109. The article implies that these laws were rescinded. However, in a postelection interview, Hamad al-Jou`an, the first winner in District 2, al-Murqab, emphasized that the laws permitting the government to ban public meetings and censor the press were not rescinded but merely not enforced. They remained on the books throughout the campaign, and their continuing status has been a subject of contestation in the 1992 parliament—in fact, arrests under the censorship law were resumed only a week after the election. See Arab Times, October 13, 1992, 3, and chapter 7, this volume. Back.
Note 6: Interview with Dr. Mohammad al-Muhanna, one of seven Khodary campaign managers, at campaign headquarters, October 2, 1992, and a volunteer working with the computerized files. The information tracked the number of times a voter had approached the candidate (and vice versa), and whether he had asked for and/or received any assistance through `Abbas al-Khodary’s good offices. Back.
Note 7: Ghabra, “Democratization in a Middle Eastern State,” 108. Back.
Note 8: This meeting was held on September 28, 1992. It is discussed further in Tétreault, “Civil Society in Kuwait,” 286. Back.
Note 9: Arab Times, February 7, 1994, 1. The amendment to the citizenship law reads, “Offspring of a naturalized Kuwaiti are treated as first-class citizens if their father was a Kuwaiti at the time of their birth.” The issue of the numbers of persons involved was regarded as primary in the minds of the government by Kuwaiti political scientists. Speaking at a press conference held during the 1996 campaign, Ghanim al-Najjar used the enfranchisement of the sons of naturalized Kuwaitis to illustrate his point that enfranchisement of women might be implemented gradually, in steps, in order for the government to ensure that the results would not destabilize the regime—see chapter 9. (Press conference at Kuwait University, October 5, 1996.) Back.
Note 10: Shafeeq Ghabra notes that this suspension occurred shortly before the parliament took a vote on a measure the amir had refused to sign the previous year. Under the constitution, the parliament has two ways to pass a law over such an amiri “pocket veto.” One is to pass it immediately with a two-thirds majority vote. The other is to pass it by a simple majority a year later. See “Democratization in a Middle Eastern State,” 103. Back.
Note 11: Ibid., 104. See also Kamal Osman Salih, “Kuwait’s Parliamentary Elections, 1963–1985” (unpublished paper). Back.
Note 12: Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” 160; Mary Ann Tétreault and Haya al-Mughni, “Modernization and Its Discontents,” 412–13; Ghabra, “Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change,” 363–66; Salih, “Kuwait’s Parliamentary Elections.” Back.
Note 13: Badu are Sabah supporters because of their long collaboration during the heyday of the caravan trade, and because individual ruling family members, including many amirs, maintained personal relationships with tribal leaders, often through marriage with a woman from one of the major tribes. Shi`a supported the amir during the 1938–39 parliamentary crisis, both because of Sunni prejudice and because the self-anointed Sunni electorate and parliament had excluded them from participation in the two legislative councils elected during that era. Badu forces were used against parliamentarians and their supporters during the 1938–39 crisis. Back.
Note 14: Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” esp. appendix B. Kamal Osman Salih is most concerned by the absolute increase in the number of tribal representatives, whom he calls “traditional political forces”—see “Kuwait’s Parliamentary Elections.” Shafeeq Ghabra identifies the combination of bedouin enfranchisement and electoral redistricting as the beginning of the “desertization” of Kuwaiti politics (see “Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change,” 366–67). Back.
Note 15: Kamal Osman Salih, “Kuwait’s Parliamentary Elections.” Back.
Note 16: Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” 166–70. Back.
Note 17: Following the 1992 election, parliament’s Legal and Legislative Affairs committee approved a bill to ban tribal primaries. The bill was then sent to the Interior and Defense Affairs committee, which refused even to discuss it—all five of its members had been elected after first having won tribal primaries. Arab Times, October 7, 1996, 1. Back.
Note 18: The term “new men” is one of several used for members of economic classes and social groups formed as a result of modernization that are not found in traditional social formations. For examples of this usage, see Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Back.
Note 19: Interview with Khaled Buhamrah, then deputy managing director of the Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC), a subsidiary of KPC, at his office at Mina’ al-Ahmadi, September 27, 1992. Back.
Note 20: Interview at the Shuwaikh campus of Kuwait University, October 10, 1992. Back.
Note 21: The Graduates Society’s debate was held on September 26. The Kuwait University debate was held on September 27. Back.
Note 22: Interview, March 1994, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 23: Interview, September 29, 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 25: Interview with Saif `Abbas `Abdulla, September 19, 1992, in Kuwait. A similar point about the widespread support among Kuwaitis of aid for Iraq during the first Gulf War can be found in Rajab, Invasion Kuwait, 12. Back.
Note 26: Interview with Saif `Abbas `Abdulla, September 19, 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 27: Interview with Khaled Sultan, September 30, 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 28: Information about the political groups comes from Ghabra, “Democratization in a Middle Eastern State,” 9–10; the Arab Times, various issues, including the candidate listing by district and affiliation published on October 6, 1992, 3; and interviews with candidates and campaign staffs. Back.
Note 29: Political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott sees the creation of surnames as a way for states to keep closer tabs on citizens. “In almost every case . . . the invention of permanent, inherited patronyms . . . . was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens.” Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 64–73 (quote from 65). While I have no doubt that this is so, the inclusion of designated surnames in Kuwaiti electoral rolls strikes me as having a broader purpose. Back.
Note 30: Information about the candidate came from an interview with him on October 1, 1992, and interviews with other KDF members in September and October 1992. I was unable to get Ahmad al-Rub`i to answer questions about his decision to run as an independent, but many other Kuwaitis in and out of the KDF were more than willing to speculate about his reasons as well as to offer comments on his character and prospects. Back.
Note 31: Interview with Ahmad Dayin at his campaign diwaniyya, October 1, 1992. Back.
Note 32: I infer the diversity of Ahmad al-Rub`i’s support from the ballots cast in the election. Ballots for Ahmad al-Rub`i, who was a very strong first-place winner (see appendix 6.1), included votes for virtually every other candidate running in District 8, religious and secular, Sunni and Shi`i. Back.
Note 33: Husain al-Qallaf also maintained a separate tent for women, but the women’s tent was dark and deserted every time I passed his headquarters, even during events when the main tent was full of men. That, and the upheaval that resulted when, together with my Dutch colleague, Paul Aarts, and two young Kuwaitis, a man and a woman, I went there to interview him, convinced me that women rarely if ever attended events at Husain’s headquarters. The small second tent was more symbolic than functional, a point to which I shall return later in the chapter. Back.
Note 34: Gavrielides sees tribal primaries and diwaniyya voting as similar and often jointly employed strategies for maximizing the chances that a group can elect one of themselves. He notes that single-vote ballots were employed by the supporters of the secularists (whom he refers to as the “Liberal/Left”) in 1985, districts where secularists were too few to field two candidates and expect to win. See Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” 167. Back.
Note 35: Two of the people I discussed this with said that at least one diwaniyya had preferred Ahmad Dayin but were persuaded to choose Isma`il al-Shati for strategic reasons—so that the anti-Qallaf vote would not be scattered. Back.
Note 36: Interview with Mohammad al-Jasim, October 20, 1992. Two vote tally matrices from the 1996 election are reproduced in appendix 6.2. Back.
Note 37: The differences between various understandings of Islam and their impact on family and personal status laws, the issue area featuring the greatest religious influence, are explored in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World, and in John L. Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law. Back.
Note 38: Interview with attorney Badria al-`Awadhi, October 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 39: This debate was held on September 22 at the `Adeliya campus. Information on the university’s qualms at continuing the debates came from the university debate organizer, `Abdullah al-Shayeji, then acting chair of the political science department. Back.
Note 40: Interview with Nasir Sarkhou, October 2, 1992. However, candidate Sarkhou did eschew shaking my hand, the mark of a very religious man who does not touch women who are not related to him. Back.
Note 41: Interviews, Khaled Sultan, September 30, 1992; Khaled al-`Adwa, October 18, 1992; attendance at a diwaniyya on September 29, 1992, where candidate Mohammad al-Basiri and two of his supporters spoke—but only after I, the only woman present in a gathering of more than one thousand persons, had left the diwaniyya space and took refuge behind a row of cars in the parking lot where I could listen to what was going on while the others could pretend I was not there. Back.
Note 42: In District 24, ICM endorsee Sa`d Mohammad al-`Ajmy, finished fifth, only thirty-six votes behind the fourth vote-getter. Back.
Note 43: Information on voting procedures, the irregularities that have been common in Kuwait in the past, along with the measures adopted in 1992 to keep them at a minimum, was obtained in interviews with `Ali Murad from Kuwait’s Ministry of the Interior on September 21 and October 10, 1992. `Ali Murad heads a staff of twenty-one persons charged with administering election procedures. Back.
Note 44: Voting outside one’s district of residence became a major issue in 1996, as I shall discuss in the last chapter. Back.
Note 45: Interview with `Ali Murad. There were charges made after the election that severe irregularities had occurred in the polling in District 14, Abraq Khaittan, and District 16, al-`Umariya. These elections were rerun in February under closer scrutiny. The primary focal point of the charges was that disqualified persons had voted—specifically, police and military personnel. (Interview with Mohammad al-Jasim, attorney for the challenger in District 16, October 20, 1992; Arab Times, February 16, 1993, 1.) Back.
Note 46: Many of these issues are discussed in Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 7–28. Back.
Note 47: Observers I talked to at the vote-counting in District 7, Kaifan, said that many ballots cast in 1990 for the Majlis al-Watani were technically invalid because of write-ins. The government was not concerned about the number of invalid ballots but very concerned about turnout. It was supposed to have set a target of 50 percent and, had fewer voters shown up, the election would have been canceled. One reporter put it this way: “Coming at all, even to vote for Donald Duck, was enough.” Back.
Note 48: Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, 162. Back.
Note 49: Ghabra, “Kuwait: Elections and Issues,” 15. Back.
Note 50: Tétreault, “Individualism, Secularism, and Fundamentalism”; also Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, esp. ch. 2. Back.
Note 51: See, for example, Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State, ch. 5. Ayubi opts for the term “intermediate classes” to describe the heterogeneity of this segment and its economic location between social groups of premodern origin such as merchants and landlords on the one hand, and badu and peasants on the other. Back.
Note 52: Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State, 170–82. Back.
Note 53: For example, ibid.; also Longva, Walls Built on Sand. Back.
Note 54: Interview with Khaldoun al-Naqeeb, October 14, 1992. See also F. Gregory Gause III, Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States, 93–94. Back.
Note 55: See Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, 140–41. Shortly before the 1992 parliamentary elections, a number of other ruling family–allied merchants had run against the traditionals for places on the Chamber of Commerce’s governing board. Faisal al-Marzouk was the only challenger who won a seat in the chamber election—see Gause, Oil Monarchies, 93–94. Back.
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