Stories of Democracy: Chapter 8

Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait

Mary Ann Tétreault

2000

Chapter 8: Getting By with a Little Help from Our Friends

Analyses of political and economic hurdles blocking the pathways of “late developers” such as Kuwait are staples of the political economy literature, though some analysts are less pessimistic than others, stressing the “advantages of backwardness” and the opportunity for late developers to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. ₁ On balance, however, especially during periods characterized by widespread financial insecurity and commodity price collapse, pessimism dominates. A few writers have stopped believing that economic development in late-developing countries is even possible. ₂ A related literature on “dependent development” concentrates on the situation of states that depend on a single exported commodity for the bulk of their national incomes. ₃ The rentier state is a privileged member of this group but, like the others, is subject to economic forces over which it has little or no effective control. I discussed some of the theoretical literature on this topic in chapter 3; similar concerns also are reflected in empirical and policy studies of oil exporting states. ₄

The politics of late development could very well be called “dependent politics.” Examined in the context of imperialism and the Cold War in Africa, ₅ Asia, ₆ and the Middle East, ₇ this literature shows in detail how external intervention has selected in favor of authoritarians among contenders for power in late-developing countries. Charles Tilly’s lament about the difficulties of political development in the modern age finds plenty of support in these studies.

States that have come into being recently through decolonization or through reallocations of territory by dominant states have acquired their military organization from outside, without the same internal forging of mutual constraints between rulers and ruled [as occurred in early developers]. To the extent that outside states continue to supply military goods and expertise in return for commodities, military alliance or both, the new states harbor powerful, unconstrained organizations that easily overshadow all other organizations within their territories. ₈

The message of the literature on dependent politics stresses the damage done by external actors and an external environment that distorts the evolution of domestic political structures just as incorporation into global capitalism distorts the economies of late developers. However, the message of this chapter comes from a different perspective.

As a political economist and something of a structuralist, I must confess that I tend to be pessimistic about prospects for development. Even so, as someone who also believes in human agency and ingenuity, I am drawn to examine cases through lenses that focus on more than simply systemic qualities defining imperialism, globalization, and other totalizing orders so often cast as Satanic mills grinding helpless human beings into atoms. Throughout this volume, I have tried to show how individuals exercise agency—power: autonomous capacity to transform if not always to control. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “What is at issue is the capability even of the most dependent, weak and the most oppressed to have the ability to carve out spheres of autonomy of their own.” ₉ In Kuwait, where people are blessed with social, economic, and personal resources not only in their individual capacities but also in their collective capacities as families, neighborhoods and congregations, and professional and business groupings, we have seen that the ability of citizens to carve out spheres of autonomy is extensive. The interplay between pacts and populism which, in the Kuwaiti case, is mass politics of a particularly resourceful kind, reflects the unusually rich resources available to Kuwaiti elites and Kuwaiti “masses.”

In this chapter I revisit the interdependence between pacts and populism in an enlarged context that includes international, transnational, and global actors and networks. The city-state today is, like its ancient and medieval predecessors, a nexus of the larger world. It is a port of trade, a locus of diversity, and a center of culture. City-state politics is an arena in which ideas of civic culture and civil society find a variety of concrete expressions, and what some see as new forms of social organization stimulated by globalization are developing most rapidly. Roger Keil argues that such communities are “world cities,” places where pasts and futures are articulated in a lively and contested present far more complicated—and interesting—than the nation-states he sees them as replacing. ₁₀ Kuwait is such a world city, one whose “local” politics is connected to persons, movements, and institutions worldwide. Such connections support political development by providing protected spaces for resistance and by offering alternative sources of power and authority for nonviolent social change.

New Social Movements and Old Institutions

Social movement theory seeks to explain why and how people mobilize against institutional forces that oppress them and the conditions under which their movements succeed or fail. ₁₁ Social movements themselves incorporate participation by mass publics in activities intended to expand their rights. These include collective bargaining by labor and the extension of civil identity and protection to formerly subject groups such as women and ethnic minorities. So-called new social movements are defined as those featuring highly participatory leadership and action styles, and participants who are younger, more middle class, and more likely to be female than old-style, centralized, and hierarchical movements. Another quality of new social movements is their fluidity. Activists come together over specific issues and for limited purposes, disperse, and then reform as a somewhat different cast of characters depending on events and how they intersect individual and collective interests. ₁₂

New social movements are fluid horizontal mobilizations that combine the efforts of issue activists with those of persons in sympathetic government agencies and established voluntary associations, both of which tend to be structured and hierarchical. In Kuwait voluntary associations are formally regulated by the state. Consequently, new social movements are doubly important as one of the few indicators of institutionally unmediated popular will, including the will of citizens with formal government responsibilities. New social movements everywhere are boosted by the ability of members and leaders to communicate directly by telephone, fax, and the Internet. This contributes to their growing capacity to mobilize on short notice and to initiate and maintain international linkages to sister movements and other supporters based abroad. The fluidity of these movements and their international connections contribute to their civic efficacy by allowing activists to elude surveillance controls and providing them with protected spaces constructed from publicity and protest. ₁₃ In this regard, international linkages become “transmission belts” for external pressure on domestic regimes with respect to movement issues and activist protection.

In addition to assistance from international and transnational groups, external support for activists and institutions also is available from the judicial bodies of international organizations and foreign countries. Illustrated recently in the effort by Spain to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for trial on alleged human rights violations, international treaties increasingly are being used by activists in and out of government to bring criminals to courts abroad when the courts in their home countries refuse or are blocked from hearing cases against them. Even before this trend in human rights protection became a general matter of public knowledge, citizens and organizations long had sought civil redress in foreign courts for a wide variety of reasons.

Foreign parties suing for redress in the courts of other countries is a HUGE area of the law—it happens all the time. There are, [in the United States] for example, whole courses in law school devoted to various aspects of this—courses like conflict of laws, private international law, public international law, transnational litigation, international human rights law, international business transactions, international trade, international finance, international banking and development finance, plus [the status and role of] foreign parties in . . . areas of the law like corporations [and] tax. ₁₄

The availability of legal redress overseas is a crucial support for social activists in countries whose courts enjoy no or only limited independence. Here I look at two sets of issues variously involving Kuwaiti government organizations, voluntary associations, and new social movements. These are the protection of public funds and human rights. In both areas, extra-national assistance was crucial to making significant progress on national movement goals.

Public Funds

The limited constitutional leverage afforded the parliament includes its institutional responsibility for oversight of public finances, and this is a role that Kuwaiti parliaments have struggled very hard to fulfill in the face of government evasion and secrecy. ₁₅ Contemporary assertions of parliamentary oversight rights were stimulated by discoveries of embezzlement of public funds, such as in the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company (KOTC) case discussed in the previous chapter and below, and in consequence of a long parliamentary investigation chaired by Ahmad Baqr (IPA) into the events leading up to the Iraqi invasion. This inquiry by the 1992 parliament disclosed financial irregularities in how defense contracts were awarded and managed, along with political and military failures by leaders in charge of managing the crisis which ended in the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The 1992 parliament had little time to act on all the committee’s recommendations, but legislation was passed tightening auditing requirements and establishing a new standing committee, the Protection of Public Funds Committee (PPFC), to monitor expenditures by ministries, including Defense. The PPFC also was charged with supervising state investments, including oil industry investments and the portfolio investments in Kuwait’s Reserve Fund for Future Generations (RFFG) which, by law, receives 10 percent of annual government revenue.

The PPFC provided the platform on which members of the 1996 parliament mounted a vigorous campaign to halt what they termed the theft of public funds. A major role in this campaign was played by the Audit Bureau, a government agency established in Law no. 30 of 1964. The Audit Bureau works for the parliament, which appoints its chair, but until recently this agency was not noted for its energy. After the 1992 election, the Audit Bureau came under scrutiny from parliament and was urged by the speaker to be more aggressive in monitoring appropriations and expenditures. In December 1994 the Audit Bureau chief announced his resignation in a letter to the crown prince in which he complained about the speaker’s “attempts to interfere in the bureau’s internal affairs followed by continuous pressures to quit.” ₁₆

Early in the 1995 fiscal year, the Audit Bureau reported large budget overruns for fiscal 1994. The government said it would close the budget gap by the year 2000, though no one expected that this could be done without a serious overhaul of fiscal policy. ₁₇ Meanwhile, the alliance between the Audit Bureau and the parliament was strengthened by popular approval of the bureau’s exposure of unlawful financial dealings by the government. Shortly after the 1996 parliament convened, the Audit Bureau reported that the government had made unauthorized withdrawals from the RFFG, and the PPFC’s chair, `Adnan `Abd al-Samad, made an immediate request that this action be halted. When the request was made at the end of January 1997, the sum of unauthorized withdrawals already had reached KD 0.24 billion. ₁₈

Under the legislation setting up the RFFG, no withdrawals are permitted. Despite that, many in and outside Kuwait believe that the government has routinely moved investments among reserve accounts, including the RFFG, and that it has used the RFFG as a screen for other investments. ₁₉ During the occupation, this blue-chip fund, which at that time was estimated as amounting to more than $100 billion, was stripped of more than two-thirds of its assets and reduced to a reported $30&-;35 billion. ₂₀ Some of this money was used to sustain Kuwaitis during the occupation; a much larger sum, approximately $26 billion, went to pay Kuwait’s share of the formal and informal costs of military operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. ₂₁ However, that leaves quite a large amount unaccounted for. One rationale for establishing stricter oversight procedures and calling for investigations of particular instances where abuses were suspected was to find out what had happened to the rest.

The Audit Bureau confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions when it sent a formal letter to National Assembly speaker Ahmad al-Sa`doun stating that the government had withdrawn more than $80 billion from the RFFG since the invasion. An emergency amiri decree made on August 3, 1990, had authorized withdrawals to deal with the crisis, but this decree was canceled a week after liberation. The subsequent unauthorized withdrawals were made despite two formal warnings from the Audit Bureau, the first issued in November 1995 and the second a year later. When the government failed to halt its illegal withdrawals and return the money it had taken without authorization, the Audit Bureau wrote to the speaker. The finance minister responded by submitting a request to the parliament for retroactive legalization of the unauthorized withdrawals. ₂₂

Even before the uproar over unauthorized withdrawals from the reserve fund, the PPFC had notified the government that the entire cabinet might be questioned in parliament because ministers had failed to respond to the committee’s many requests for information on spending as well as on the government’s failure to collect fees such as rents for industrial and recreational property. Meanwhile, at a December 1996 press conference, the managing director of KOTC, `Abdullah al-Roumi, charged that he had been threatened, offered a bribe, and then falsely implicated in a drug charge because he had refused to halt his investigation of the KOTC embezzlement (see below). Shortly afterward, oil minister `Eisa al-Mazidi referred `Abdullah al-Roumi and several other KOTC board members to the public prosecutor for having accepted “illegal bonuses” for the overtime they had put in on the KOTC investigation. The allegation later was found to be without foundation, but when parliamentarians asked questions about `Abdullah al-Roumi’s charges they were criticized for bringing these issues before the public instead of allowing them to be handled behind closed doors. ₂₃

This new conflict between the government and parliament provoked the by-then usual intimations that parliament might be dissolved. This time, Kuwaiti activists mobilized to head off the suspensions they feared might be imposed to cover up the misuse of public funds. They formed a citizens’ watchdog group whose members pledged to raise public awareness of how the government was spending public money by writing articles about the use of public funds and publicizing Audit Bureau reports. Over two hundred persons attended the group’s first meeting in early March 1997, including prominent pro-democracy activists and several present and former members of parliament. A board of eleven members was elected at this meeting and, despite warnings about the dangers of operating without state sanction, the group, chaired by Mohsen al-Mutairy, decided to begin work without waiting for a government license. ₂₄

Within a month, cabinet ministers were pledging government support for any parliamentary proposal to strengthen procedures to stop the misuse of public funds. The PPFC produced a wide-ranging report at the end of April that called for the government’s secret service organization to investigate charges of embezzlement and other irregularities in the use of public funds, including any such crimes committed abroad. ₂₅ In early May, Ahmad al-Sa`doun, whose entitlement to the speakership in the 1996 parliament had been affirmed by the Constitutional Court just a short time before, ₂₆ attacked the Kuwait Investment Authority’s (KIA) privatization program, charging that the government was “privatizing without controls or regulation, and is simply selling its assets to a select number of Kuwait’s elite.” ₂₇ The already dangerously overheated political pot was stoked further by charges that four members of the public prosecutor’s office had accepted money from KOTC to conduct their investigations of the embezzlement charges. ₂₈

The pot exploded on June 6 in an assassination attempt against `Abdullah Nibari which wounded him seriously and also injured his wife. The speaker blamed the thieves of public funds for the tragedy. “The shooting at Nibari was not directed against his person, but because he was one of those who defended public funds and stood against those playing in the future of the country.” ₂₉ The conviction that there was some connection between the funds scandals and the assassination attempt was strengthened by the discovery that the person who had organized and led the assault had been cited by a parliamentary committee as having “allegedly benefited from illegal profits through dubious catering contracts with the Ministry of Defence.” ₃₀ A prominent feature of contemporary news coverage of the event was the fact that this man also was a relation of the finance minister, Nasir al-Roudhan. `Abdullah Nibari, who had been publishing articles and making speeches about the misuse of public monies since November 1993, himself believed that the assassination attempt had been motivated by his investigations of persons involved in the theft of public funds. ₃₁

Shock at the assassination attempt on `Abdullah Nibari, along with concerns that the violence would continue, ₃₂ increased popular support for the opposition. Meetings were held by various groups, and opposition newspapers called for a thorough investigation. Some critics intimated that the rulers were involved in the shooting and the opposition immediately was taken to task for its “language,” a euphemism that refers to public mention of possibly shady behavior by Kuwait’s rulers. ₃₃ However, as is often the case in Kuwaiti politics, opposition ascendency was short-lived, confounded by the sheer magnitude of suspected wrongdoing, a strategic error in choosing the primary target to investigate, and disagreement among opposition Islamists. ₃₄

The opposition decided to question only one minister “to preserve the unity of the National Assembly.” ₃₅ The man they chose to interpellate was the finance minister, Nasir al-Roudhan, but the list of issues to be covered did not include anything about the assassination attempt on `Abdullah Nibari. The minister already had been called by the public prosecutor to testify about his knowledge of the shooting. However, the topics for questions did include the minister’s alleged failure to implement laws and procedures regarding accountability for public money, and his conduct as the ex officio head of several government corporations. ₃₆ That opposition Islamists might be weak allies in this confrontation became evident when ICM deputies complained that they had not been consulted in advance about the issues appearing on the list. When July 15, the day of the “grilling,” finally arrived, the minister was well prepared. He denied every allegation made by the three signers of the request for the session, Sami al-Munayes (KDF), Mishairy al-`Osaimi (I), and Ahmad al-Mulaifi (I). ₃₇ And although he did admit that some irregularities had occurred, the minister was far from contrite. He attacked the questioners for their immoderate language and accused them of using the interpellation as a ploy to bring down the government. By the end of the thirteen-hour session, the minister and his supporters clearly had emerged as the victors. The three challengers proved unable even to come up with the ten signatures necessary to offer a motion of no-confidence. ₃₈

Although the minister’s performance allowed him to escape with his position secured and his reputation enhanced, the opposition did not give up on the issues. Members continued to insist on a more rigorous implementation of the laws governing the spending of public money. In one of the last parliamentary sessions before the 1997 summer recess, a majority of twenty-three out of the thirty-four members present approved a request that the government not sign any new exploration or production agreements with foreign oil companies before consulting the National Assembly. An additional request, approved by only eighteen members, requires prior notification before any contracts for new projects for KPC are signed and also that a separate central committee for tenders at KPC be established to handle all contracts. After this measure passed, the finance minister claimed it was unconstitutional. The members then passed unanimously a third recommendation asking that KPC coordinate all its investment activities with KIA.

These initiatives to tighten parliamentary control over state finances complemented a new “transparency law” governing public-sector contracts issued by the 1992 parliament in August 1996. All government agencies, the Kuwait Municipality, public organizations and institutions, and companies owned one half or more by the state or any “juridical personality” must report to the Audit Bureau the names of anyone receiving special fees or commissions in connection with government contracts, along with those who authorize such payments. The law covers all goods and services, including arms purchases. Following any agreement to pay and any transfer of payment, the recipient and the payer are required to provide to the Audit Bureau a detailed written description of the nature of the commission—whether it is cash, goods, or services—its value, where it was or will be paid, and the names of the parties involved. Failure to report a commission is punishable by a fine of twice its value, and submitting a false statement about a commission incurs a risk of up to three years of imprisonment. ₃₉ The law is an attempt to control corruption by making agency personnel as well as third parties culpable for failing to report commissions.

The manipulation of commissions to embezzle funds was exposed in the KOTC investigations, which began in a very small way following the resignation of the company’s managing director, `Abd al-Fattah al-Badr, in February 1992. His successor, `Abdullah al-Roumi, was formerly the assistant managing director for marketing at KPC and a nonexecutive director of KOTC. `Abdullah was alerted to possible irregularities in the company’s finances when Nader Sultan, then deputy chairman of KPC, mentioned in passing that a KOTC subsidiary had paid a higher-than-market price for a charter some time in 1988 and that his attempts to investigate why this had happened had been stifled. Shortly afterward, a Kuwaiti bank official called `Abdullah al-Roumi to inquire why KOTC suddenly had stopped purchasing large quantities of traveler’s checks. ₄₀ These and perhaps other anomalies stimulated `Abdullah al-Roumi’s initial investigation of KOTC. As he went on, he encountered strenuous efforts to close off the investigation, such as the bribery attempts referred to above in the discussion of events leading up to the attempted assassination of `Abdullah Nibari.

The investigations of KOTC’s finances soon produced criminal indictments of three Kuwaitis: former oil minister Shaikh `Ali al-Khalifa, former managing director of KOTC `Abd al-Fattah al-Badr, and former deputy managing director of KOTC, Hasan Qabazard, along with two foreigners. The inclusion of `Ali al-Khalifa as a defendant in the criminal case triggered the series of clashes between the parliament and the amir described in the preceding chapter. As I recounted there, repeated challenges by `Ali al-Khalifa and his representatives of the legitimacy of trying him in any court other than the one provided for in the amiri decree passed during the second constitutional suspension succeeded in gradually whittling down the number and severity of the charges against him.

Although I believe that a strong effort was made to intimidate the judges in the Kuwaiti criminal court case, I must agree with Nathan Brown that the systemic problems of all Kuwaiti courts and judges are more serious than individual instances of intimidation whether or not they succeed. Kuwaiti courts lack the institutional independence that could provide them even the limited protected space that the constitution offers to the National Assembly and its members.

The minister of justice is involved in the appointment of almost all senior judicial officials. . . . The Supreme Judicial Council is devoid of budgetary independence, and all the administrative support for the courts is part of the Ministry of Justice. . . . [A] proposed law [to give the judiciary greater independence may have been] one of the causes of the government’s decison to dissolve the parliament indefinitely [in 1986]. . . . [A] new law was introduced by several members of [the 1992] parliament. . . . When a complex dispute between the parliament and the government erupted over the legal status of legislation enacted in the absence of parliament . . . however, the proposed law became a victim of an agreement between parliamentary leaders and the government. ₄₁

The lack of judicial independence is clearly shown in the KOTC case. Even though the criminal court found the nonministerial defendents guilty in June 1996, after `Ali al-Khalifa had been separated from the case the Court of Cassation threw out the conviction the following year on the grounds that the verdict had not been dated. ₄₂ Both the long prison sentences imposed and the requirement for restitution of the stolen funds were thereby overturned.

However, KOTC was not solely dependent on Kuwaiti courts for redress. The company brought a civil suit against `Abd al-Fattah al-Badr, Hasan Qabazard, and Timothy St. John Stafford, former fleet operations manager for KOTC, in the Queen’s Bench Commercial Court in London. Six weeks of court argument began in February 1998. It laid out four schemes by which the defendants and others, including `Ali al-Khalifa, had embezzled millions of dollars from KOTC beginning in 1985, the year before the second parliamentary suspension. After eight months of deliberation, the judge in the case handed down his draft judgment on November 16, finding the three defendants guilty and asking for complete restitution, including interest, of the money they had stolen. ₄₃

The decision itself was only part of the victory achieved by Kuwaiti activists. Even more important was the detailed reconstruction of the crimes from testimony and documents, and the evaluations of the credibility of the various witnesses by the judge, reconstructions and evaluations which, when suggested by Kuwaitis, had been dismissed as immoderate language and baseless charges. Report of the draft judgment touched off a firestorm of popular protest in Kuwait. Prominent opposition members of parliament, including `Abdullah Nibari (KDF) and Mubarak al-Duwailah (ICM), ₄₄ and other respected critics of the regime’s financial policies, spoke at public gatherings about the necessity to reclaim Kuwaiti agency in the KOTC case. According to Ghanim al-Najjar, “a vigorous campaign led by al-Qabas newspaper, and [featuring] scores of public rallies organized by MPs demanding that `Ali al-Khalifa be charged” forced the government to resubmit the case to the public prosecutor. But the critics did not have the field to themselves. Head-to-head with al-Qabas, the newspaper owned by traditionals in Chamber of Commerce, was al-Watan, the daily owned by a consortium headed by `Ali al-Khalifa. Perhaps desirous of demonstrating his own extra-national bona fides, `Ali al-Khalifa, “as owner of al-Watan, announced in a huge celebration his partnership with Newsweek as the sole publisher of [the magazine’s] Arabic edition.” ₄₅

Resistance by the government and members of the ruling family to submit to demands for financial accountability has been constant and multifocal. Another recent example is the regime’s attempt to take over the PPFC. When the third session of the 1996 parliament began in October 1998, parliamentary committee members were reelected. Prominent Islamist critics of the government’s fiscal policies were defeated in bids for seats on powerful committees. Examples include Mubarak al-Duwailah, a fierce opponent of arms purchases who was kept off the Legal and Legislative Affairs committee, and even more telling, Ahmad Baqr, the parliament’s greatest proponent of cooperative health insurance that would require employers to pay a share of employees’ premiums, who lost his bid for a seat on the Health and Labor committee. Secularist critics, most notably `Abdullah Nibari, who was kept off Finance and Economy, also were defeated for key committee posts. ₄₆ Charges that the government had interfered in the committee elections were made by several Islamist members. ₄₇

The appearance of interference in elections for the PPFC was even clearer. The PPFC is selected from two other standing committees—Finance, and Legal and Legislative. The members chosen from the latter committee were three “service MPs,” `Abbas al-Khodary, Khalaf al-`Enizi, and Mubarak al-Khrainej. The Finance Committee members included veteran watchdog `Adnan `Abd al-Samad, `Abd al-Wahhab al-Haroun, a secularist independent, `Abdullah al-Hajri, ICM member and tribal representative, and `Ali al-Khalaf al-Sa`id, a service MP whose previous experience in elected office had been as a member of the Majlis al-Watani. `Ali al-Khalaf had been imported from Old Jahra’ to run in Khaldiya in 1996, where his defeat of the popular Mohammad al-Marshad took many by surprise. `Ali al-Khalaf’s election to the PPFC enraged `Adnan `Abd al-Samad, who resigned from the committee, vowing to take his crusade to protect public funds to the floor of the National Assembly. ₄₈

The conflict over public funds in Kuwait is far from resolved. Indeed, the May 1999 dismissal of the 1996 parliament can be read as part of the regime’s counterattack against parliamentary watchdogs of the public purse. It is true, of course, that the 1996 parliament was marred by behavior every bit as self-centered and disruptive as any that tarnished the reputation of the 1992 body. However, it also is true that the suspension of a parliament removes both the government’s most visible critics and the institutional procedures impeding its freedom to make economic policy as it wishes. The subsequent preoccupation of parliamentarians, citizens, and media with the impending election reduces attention paid to what the government is doing about important issues at the same time that the absence of the parliament allows the amir to govern by decree.

The 1999 parliamentary suspension also opened an opportunity for the government to incorporate extranational friends of its own in the struggle to dominate economic policy-making. If successful, this could spill over into the conflict over the balance of power between the legislature and the executive. An article 71 already weakened by the amir’s actions during the 1992 parliament (discussed in the previous chapter) would be gutted further if external pressures could be mobilized successfully against parliamentary cancellation of amiri decrees issued in its absence.

Key oil policy and restructuring decisions lie at the heart of this conflict. During the past several years, and along with most of the rest of OPEC, Kuwait has edged toward inviting international oil companies (IOCs) back in as partners in the upstream ₄₉ phases of its hydrocarbon industry. Reprivatization would go a long way toward negating the nationalizations of the early 1970s, which allowed OPEC members to set their own crude prices and production levels and also to keep the entire margin between costs and prices for themselves rather than having to share it with foreign corporate owners. Production control per se was an important goal of oil exporters in the 1960s and 1970s. When Kuwaitis were debating whether to nationalize completely or reclaim their hydrocarbon resources through a phased-in participation plan, oil-field management was one of the deciding factors in their decision to nationalize. ₅₀ Oil production at rates higher than necessary to meet current income needs were criticized by the parliament as damaging to ultimate recovery levels and, in response, production was cut by a third between 1972 and 1974. ₅₁ Also at that time most Kuwaiti gas was being flared. Repeated company rejection of proposals for higher levels of gas utilization in secondary recovery and as an industrial raw material had been a point of contention between the government and its concessionaires for some years. Nationalization gave Kuwait both full control of oil production and resources for investments, enabling it to exploit its natural gas as it chose. ₅₂

The owner of a substantial proportion of the world’s hydrocarbon resources, Kuwait after nationalization opted for multinational vertical integration of its corporate holdings. This strategy opened a space within which Kuwait could seek to maximize jointly its national autonomy and security, and its hydrocarbon revenues. ₅₃ However, the government and the parliament had very different views of how oil policy should be made and also what its methods and goals should be. To the government, oil revenues are the backbone of the state economy and the foundation of citizen support for the regime. To the parliament as well, hydrocarbon revenues are the state’s income mainstay, but parliament sees oil and gas as the patrimony of the Kuwaiti people, and members are equally concerned about policies that appear inconsistent with this image. These perspectives clash with regard to oil revenue stability which, however you look at it, is an elusive goal. Although the government can control its own oil production, it cannot control production from other sources and thereby regulate oil prices. As a result, major oil producers like Kuwait have to balance their needs for income and even for control over their key domestic industry to meet equally pressing needs to avoid extreme price fluctuations either up or down. A price collapse brings immediate budget deficits, but sustained high prices are problematic too because they cause consumers to shift to alternative fuels and reduce income over the long term.

Kuwait is a pivotal actor in oil market management because of the relative size of its production and reserves. As a result, its actions matter to the market as a whole and it approaches oil policy from a long-term and highly strategic perspective. This viewpoint rarely is shared by domestic interests represented in the parliament and, since the early 1970s, the government has tended to avoid making major oil policy decisions when the parliament is in session. As I noted in a previous chapter, corporate reorganization under KPC was initiated in 1980, during the first parliamentary suspension. During the second parliamentary suspension, KPC conducted all its business out of the sight of Kuwaiti citizens and, by the end of the decade, was routinely producing oil over Kuwait’s OPEC quota.

Prior to the 1999 dismissal of parliament, government oil-policy makers had published a detailed plan for upstream privatization, a policy that had attracted sharp parliamentary criticism since its first inception. Government interest in altering the ownership basis of Kuwaiti hydrocarbons was first expressed early in the 1990s, when upstream privatization was framed as part of a national defense policy—Kuwait would seek foreign participation in its northern oil fields on the theory that foreign oil company personnel and equipment might serve as potential hostages against another Iraqi invasion. Kuwaiti oil industry managers also cited capital shortages and a desire for access to frontier technologies as reasons to reprivatize, rationales which had shaped their decision to invite Union Carbide to become a partner in the new facility constructed by KPC’s Petrochemical Industries Company subsidiary. However, I believe these latter reasons are not so crucial for Kuwait as for some other producing countries, such as the successor states of the former Soviet Union. In fact, it is those successor states and their desperate bids for hydrocarbon investment on almost any terms that have frightened the established producers, Kuwait among them, into considering the surrender of some of the fruits of nationalization by inviting the IOCs back in on a limited basis. They hope privatization will preempt production capacity expansion in the successor states and thereby forestall the deleterious impact of a flood of oil from new and uncontrollable sources on an already weak market.

In the early 1990s, there was little interest from IOCs in investing in projects in northern Kuwait. Kuwait did sign controversial contracts with BP and with Chevron for consultation services with respect to oil field development. However, the privatization scheme seemed to have been abandoned, despite World Bank encouragement of privatization throughout the Kuwaiti economy, including in its hydrocarbon industry. ₅₄ In 1997, however, Kuwait’s Supreme Petroleum Council, the country’s chief oil-policy decision-making body, reiterated the state’s interest in privatization and once again targeted the “northern fields” as the first to be offered for participation deals. ₅₅ Again, some in parliament objected, saying this would violate Kuwait’s constitution which forbids foreign ownership of Kuwaiti resources. Despite these concerns, the government announced a privatization plan that included procedures for selecting partners and a timetable for the new policy’s implementation. ₅₆ When the plan was released in April 1999, it was widely assumed that privatization would not go forward before the parliament had agreed it was constitutional and had approved the terms under which IOCs would be invited to participate in upstream projects. ₅₇

Meanwhile, the government continued to press the parliament to agree to its positions not only on oil privatization but also on a series of measures to restructure Kuwait’s domestic economy. Many restructuring proposals, such as those which advocated cutting subsidies for utilities; limiting the number of children entitled to a family allowance; increasing taxes on housing, airport departures, and large appliance purchases; and introducing worker contributions to social security, ₅₈ all were resisted because they would impose disproportionately higher living costs on low-income groups. Even a fairly modest proposal to increase retail fuel prices was attacked without mercy for weeks in the parliament. Some years earlier, KPC managers told me that resistance even to marginal adjustments in domestic gasoline prices was at the root of the company’s decision to introduce lead-free gasoline in Europe but not in Kuwait because KPC would not be permitted to recoup the higher cost of production in the domestic market.

Budget manipulation has been a favorite government technique for mobilizing parliamentary support for restructuring. Kuwait’s budgets (like the budgets of other states) are political documents as much as economic blueprints. For one thing, they do not reflect all the government’s income and expenditures: in Kuwait, dividends and capital gains from investments held in state reserve accounts such as the RFFG, along with profits from KPC activities other than the sale of crude oil (examples would be oil refining and product sales), are not counted as income in the state’s budget; on the other side of the ledger, defense expenditures are all off-budget. Another distortion whose result is to make the budget a less-than-transparent mechanism for assessing the fiscal health of the state is the practice of the government to forecast crude oil prices and thereby estimates of its anticipated income at a level well below what outside experts and perhaps even finance ministry officials themselves believe will be the case. In January 1999, for example, the finance minister announced that his next budget would be based on an oil price assumption of US $8/bbl., two dollars under the previous year’s price. ₅₉

The government’s deficit projections based on these exclusions and assumptions were challenged by independent estimates from sources such as Moody’s. ₆₀ They also were challenged by members of the National Assembly who objected not only to the estimation methods but also to questionable expenditures arising from government corruption and what they charged was fiscal irresponsibility in off-budget purchases of foreign-made weapons systems. ₆₁ Consequently, prior to the suspension of the parliament in May 1999, domestic economic restructuring, weapons system purchases, and upstream privatization all were on the table, and each had garnered significant opposition among secularist and Islamist members.

What Aristotle would term the “efficient cause” of the dismissal of parliament was the parliamentary interrogation of the minister of justice, `Awqaf, and Islamic affairs, Ahmad al-Kulaib, for having distributed defective copies of the Qur’an. Although no one seems to have believed that his error was intentional, many were convinced that the minister would fail to win a vote of confidence in the parliament. ₆₂ But there are reasons to doubt that the efficient cause was the actual reason—in Aristotelian language, the “final cause”—for the amir’s action. As I discuss in the next section of this chapter, only the year before two other ministers faced parliamentary questioning. Because both were ruling family members, these cases were more directly challenging to the regime than the interpellation of Ahmad al-Kulaib. In spite of this, both conflicts were resolved short of a dissolution.

An even more telltale sign that the government might have collaborated in the events leading up to the 1999 dismissal of parliament is the identity of the man leading the charge against Ahmad al-Kulaib. This was `Abbas al-Khodary, a Shi`a who is neither a member of the Islamist opposition nor someone normally associated with Islamist positions. Indeed, `Abbas as a service MP maintains close relations with the government to ensure continuation of the stream of favors he can dispense to his constituents in return for their support at the polls. As I noted earlier in this chapter, `Abbas probably owes his membership on the PPFC to his political reliability, and his prominence in the attack on Ahmad al-Kulaib supports suspicions that this was a government-approved production rather than a genuine reflection of offended religious sensibilities. However, that a religious issue triggered the dismissal of parliament also had its uses because it focused negative popular attention on Islamist deputies. Opposition Islamists such as Mubarak al-Duwailah, the most visible critic of the government’s weapons purchases, and issue Islamists such as Nasr al-Sana`, were high on the list of members said to have been targeted by the regime for defeat in the July 1999 elections. ₆₃

Threats to investigate allegations of corrupt business deals by ruling family members and conflicts over oil and finance policies—the same issues that triggered the two earlier parliamentary dissolutions ₆₄ —are the most likely final causes of the dismissal of the 1996 parliament. Immediately following the amir’s announcement, members of the opposition suggested that the planned questioning of finance minister and ruling family member `Ali al-Salim al-Sabah for irregularities associated with the privatization of the Kuwait Investment Company was the actual reason for the suspension of the parliament. ₆₅ Other fortuitious events created opportunities that could be opened by a parliamentary suspension at this particular time. One indication was a signal of the government’s intention to ignore the 1997 measures discussed earlier in this chapter which demanded closer coordination between itself and the parliament on oil and investment issues. In a statement the day after the amir’s decree dismissing the parliament, oil minister Sa`ud Nasir al-Sabah said publicly that upstream privatization did not require the passage of a new law, ₆₆ although he also said that “the government would not try to finalise the [oil privatization] plan with oil majors in parliament’s absence. . . . `We will discuss this matter with the brothers in the new parliament and see what will be decided upon in this project.’ ” ₆₇ Shortly afterward, the amir issued a decree granting permission for foreign ownership of up to 100 percent of Kuwaiti firms, ₆₈ a significant reversal of a series of policies going back to 1960 which had protected domestic, primarily merchant-class, interests from foreign competition in Kuwait itself. ₆₉ This direct attack on the merchants’ heretofore protected domestic economic stronghold marks a departure from the ensemble of pacts between these two political forces that Jill Crystal identified as integral to the social contract between rulers and merchants in Kuwait. ₇₀ Not coincidentally, it also signaled the rulers’ intentions of providing a hospitable climate for foreign investment.

Some Kuwaitis were encouraged by the decision of the amir to call for new elections at the same time that he dismissed the 1996 parliament, believing that his action indicates the growing responsiveness of the regime to the demands of democratic governance. ₇₁ Others are less optimistic that the decision to follow constitutional procedures this time signals a real sea change in the attitudes of Kuwaiti rulers. ₇₂ All would do well to recall the words of economist Walter J. Levy who, more than twenty years ago, cautioned policymakers in oil-exporting countries not to ignore the long-term interests of their countries in their euphoria at the rivers of revenues flowing to them from the oil revolution. ₇₃ Despite its many failures, Kuwait did better than most in this regard, particularly during the period when rulers and parliaments kept one another in check. ₇₄ If these checks and balances can be strengthened, many of what now appear to be intractable economic and social problems could find constructive amelioration and resolution.

Human Rights

While many would argue that economic entitlements to national resources are human rights, ₇₅ in Kuwait as elsewhere human rights are more conventionally seen as civic, civil, and property rights. With respect to these issues, Kuwait’s human rights record was harshly criticized following liberation, when news of mistreatment of household servants and abuse of prisoners subject to State Security Court procedures were brought to the attention of the world community by international human rights groups. ₇₆ The first domestic human rights group organized following liberation was the Kuwaiti Association to Defend War Victims, established in March 1991. Chaired by Ghanim al-Najjar, the group applied twice for a license but was denied both times.

We concentrated on human rights work during the dangerous and chaotic period after liberation. We cleaned prisons because there was no staff to do that. We appointed lawyers for the prisoners and, with the [cooperation] of prison authorities, we were able to arrange visits for prisoners’ families. . . . We had a membership of more than 900 Kuwaitis, all insiders. ₇₇

Following the 1992 election, on November 17, the association, along with another group working on prisoner-of-war issues, organized a large demonstration in front of the parliament building. The demonstration drew the members outside to listen, and its size and intensity convinced the government that it needed to exercise greater control over human rights groups operating in Kuwait. The government tried to persuade the activists to form a united organization under its aegis, a strategy similar to what had been used in the co-optation of Citizens for a Free Kuwait during the occupation. In the case of the human rights groups, however, activists felt that the government’s terms were “too political to accept,” and they continued to work on their own. The government then asked the parliament to pass a law banning unlicensed groups. The measure passed by one vote and the decree to dissolve all unlicensed voluntary organizations was published in the summer of 1993. ₇₈

The Kuwaiti human rights community is large and varied, and carries on extensive relations with similar groups abroad. For example, the Kuwait Society for Human Rights (KSHR), organized in 1993 under the leadership of former parliamentarian Jasim al-Qatami, is affiliated with the Cairo-based Arab Organization for Human Rights. KSHR also was denied a license to operate legally. Most Kuwaiti human rights groups are unlicensed, a few by choice. The Pro-Democracy Committee did not seek a license because it wanted to avoid government interference in its activities. The League of Families of Prisoners of War did not register because members saw the group as temporary. However, the unlicensed status of virtually all the rest of the voluntary associations Kuwaitis have established to work on human rights, including an Islamist group that concentrates on POW issues, is not a result of design but rather of government denial of their legal status to operate. These groups irritated the government, not only because they were more effective than state organizations charged with overseeing efforts to deal with the same problems—for example, the Kuwaiti Association to Defend War Victims and the League of Families of POWs actually carried out the investigations that resulted in detailed information about Kuwaiti POWS, including biographical information and testimony from Iraqi prisoners who had been released as to the last date each one had been seen alive—but also because they were so effective in building international channels of communication and playing a role independent of the government in international arenas. ₇₉

When the cabinet published the order to dissolve all unlicensed voluntary organizations, only human rights groups were mentioned by name although the ban was to apply to societies of every type. ₈₀ The government justified the ban as nothing more than an attempt to enforce a 1985 moratorium on new voluntary associations. That moratorium had been augmented by a 1988 amendment to the then twenty-six-year-old basic law governing voluntary associations which gave the cabinet complete authority over licensing. ₈₁ Here it should be noted both that the moratorium was, in practice, selective—it was not applied to groups such as the Islamist women’s organization headed by the wife of the crown prince, for example, which received a license in 1991—and that the amendment to the 1962 law on associations was one of the more than five hundred pieces of legislation passed during the 1986/1992 parliamentary suspension. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the amir has fought the right of the National Assembly to overturn any of these nonparliamentary decrees. Thus, the showdown over human rights activism was and continues to be embedded in the larger struggle of the regime to limit the power of parliament and the civil rights of Kuwaiti citizens.

In spite of the risks of operating without a license, the banned human rights groups have remained active, supporting their work through donations and member dues. Meanwhile, the parliament created a new standing committee on human rights. This initiative is another illustration of the interdependence between populism and pacts in Kuwait. The parliamentary human rights committee, like the PPFC during its heyday, provides a protected space within which the concerns of citizen activists can be articulated and pursued. It also moves issues identified by the popular groups into the National Assembly for consideration, and serves as an official channel through which international pressure can be applied to support both the local activists and their human rights initiatives. ₈₂

Following the establishment of the parliamentary committee, Kuwait’s human rights community succeeded in promoting a rapid expansion of formal human rights protections. A major step forward was taken in a July 1995 decision by the government to abolish the much-hated State Security Court. Citizen pressure also stimulated a modest reorganization of priorities in government ministries such as Interior and Labor. The consequence was to strengthen regulation and supervision of visa authorizations, foreign labor recruitment practices, and conditions of employment for domestic workers. In addition, the staff of the Dasma police station, the main center for dealing with complaints about employer abuses, was upgraded. ₈₃ Other concerns include protecting the due process rights of foreigners. For example, the KSHR adopted the cause of a foreign teacher who was shot by a disgruntled Kuwaiti student. ₈₄

Citizens also organize spontaneously to halt particular instances of abusive behavior. A “milestone” case occurred in 1995. A shopowner in `Abdullah al-Salim neighborhood fired a non-Muslim worker because the shopowner thought his employee’s religion was “putting customers off.” Within twenty-four hours, as the result of a stream of faxes and letters of condemnation, the shopowner was given a notice of eviction by the cooperative society for violating his employee’s human rights. `Ali al-Baghli, then the chair of the parliamentary human rights committee, said of this episode, “When it happened . . . many aware citizens sprang up at this irresponsible act and they redressed the situation. This is the kind of support we also hope to get, the kind of strong popular support.” ₈₅

The parliamentary committee allows the National Assembly to initiate action on human rights issues via normal parliamentary procedures. Following the abolition of the State Security Court, the parliament ratified three pending human rights conventions, although it has yet to rescind reservations that were attached to its February 1994 ratification of the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women. ₈₆ A related popular initiative is a campaign to incorporate human rights issues and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in school curricula. ₈₇ The pattern of human rights activities in Kuwait reveals an informal division of labor between the voluntary associations and the parliamentary committee. Responding to a charge that his group concerned itself only with the rights of expatriates, Jasim al-Qatami replied that the KSHR was ready to respond to any charge of human rights violations in Kuwait, but that Kuwaiti nationals have multiple venues for such complaints, including the courts and the parliamentary committee. “Our society mostly receives complaints relating to human rights from expatriates who face more violations than citizens.” ₈₈ The society’s efforts on behalf of the teacher mentioned earlier, and on behalf of Kuwaiti prisoners of war, Jordanian prisoners in Kuwait, and the group’s participation in international conferences such as the 1995 Beijing meeting on women’s human rights, a 1996 human rights conference in Lebanon, and the 1997 National Organization for Human Rights Workshop in Mexico, are other indications of its role as an integral element in the vigorous and highly developed new social movement to promote human rights in Kuwait.

Citizen activists and parliamentary bodies have made progress in extending human rights protections, but Kuwait has much more to do in this regard. The U.S. State Department’s report on human rights in Kuwait in 1997 notes that, despite improvement in the country’s overall human rights record, many serious problems remain.

Citizens cannot change their head of state. The Government bans formal political parties. . . . The government restricts freedom of assembly and association, and places some limits on freedom of religion. Journalists practice self-censorship, and the Government uses informal censorship. The Government prevents the return to Kuwait of stateless persons who have strong ties to the country. Deportation orders may be issued by administrative order, and hundreds of people are being held in detention facilities pending deportation. Many have been held for up to 6 years. Discrimination and violence against women are problems. Domestic servants are not protected by labor law, and unskilled foreign workers suffer from a lack of a minumim wage in the private sector, and from failures to enforce labor law. ₈₉

Many of the problems recounted in the State Department’s list are intertwined together, but perhaps the predominant cause of human rights abuses in Kuwait is the problem at the top of the list, the lack of government accountability. A brief review of one recent example shows this well.

The spring of 1998 can only be described as politically turbulent. It included a forced cabinet reshuffle in April to avoid a vote of no-confidence against the information minister, Shaikh Sa`ud al-Nasir al-Sabah, for failing to halt the sale at a book fair of literature to which parliamentary Islamists took objection. ₉₀ However, calls for interpellations of ministers did not halt with the formation of a new government. Other ministers complained of “threats” that they would be hauled up for a grilling by service MPs out to gain stature among their constituents, and by Islamists who wanted to put pressure on the education minister to speed up gender segregation. ₉₁ These attacks on ministers came on top of continuing pressure from parliamentarians and citizens about the misuse of public funds. Harsh parliamentary criticism of government initiatives ranging from revenue-raising measures such as the proposal for a 50 percent increase in motor gasoline prices to revenue-depleting measures such as contracts to purchase British missiles and American howitzers, were among many that drew the ministers’ ire. ₉₂ The resulting government disarray provoked feelings of schadenfreude in some columnists writing for the independent Kuwaiti press, who saw it as poetic justice.

In al-Qabbas, Saud al-Samaka . . . says that the government is largely to blame for parliament’s failure to act on various pressing national issues that have been put to it. Its legislative sessions and meetings of its various committees are often without a quorum because of the absence of “service MPs”—the term used to refer to apolitical legislators who used their posts primarily to secure government patronage—who stay away because they are busy soliciting official favors for their constituents. And those MPs, who constitute a large proportion of the total, were helped to win their mandates by the government itself, which provided them with the “facilities” needed to defeat their rivals at the ballot box. ₉₃

However, rather than accepting some of the responsibility, the government chose to castigate parliament as an institution for the problems it was encountering. With great publicity, the crown prince sent invitations to a reported 1,200 public figures to attend a gigantic banquet on June 1. He invited “hundreds of ministry undersecretaries, assistant undersecretaries, heads of government and other official bodies, businessmen, academics and journalists,” along with the members of the Majlis al-Watani whose ostentatious inclusion made some parliamentarians nervous. “These are not representatives of the people, and no one should assume that together they make up an enlarged parliament for the Kuwaiti people.” ₉₄ The dinner was expected to produce a definitive public statement about the government’s current difficulties but, in the end, the crown prince offered little more than platitudes about Kuwait’s “family spirit” and the need to adopt measures to make Kuwait a leading commercial center in the region. ₉₅

On the day of the crown prince’s dinner, Husain `Ali al-Qallaf produced its most significant event. He submitted a request to question interior minister Shaikh Mohammad al-Khaled al-Sabah “over increased violence, rampant human rights abuse, and a pervasive drugs problem.” Citing an “unprecedented deterioration in security performance,” Husain denounced rising rates of violent crime; routine escapes from Kuwaiti prisons by prisoners convicted of violent crimes; a rapidly growing drug problem exacerbated by the apparent ease with which police officers and other highly connected traffickers had been able to use their connections to escape arrest and prosecution; and human rights abuses of persons arrested and in detention, including two Kuwaiti Shi`a whom the ministry allowed to be extradited to Saudi Arabia for questioning with regard to the bombing of a U.S. military installation there. ₉₆ The two detainees had been held for a year and a half but eventually were sent home without being charged. They reported that during their incarceration they had been tortured, and so contacted Husain, a member of the parliamentary human rights committee, to ask him to seek restitution. Husain’s motion to question the minister touched so many nerves that he was able to demand to cross-examine Shaikh Mohammad about his overall performance rather than having to specify particular grievances to which he might have been limited during the interpellation.

The crown prince responded the next day by saying that it was not in Husain’s interests to make such accusations and that he hoped that the request would be withdrawn. ₉₇ Shortly afterward, the cabinet proclaimed its full confidence in the minister and made pointed reference in its announcement to how highly he was valued by the amir. ₉₈ But Husain failed to withdraw his interpellation request, prompting the crown prince to send a request of his own, to the amir, to dissolve the parliament. The regime was praised for the impending dissolution by its supporters in the Kuwaiti press including al-Watan (owned by Shaikh `Ali al-Khalifa—see above), and al-Siyassa (its English-language version is published as the Arab Times), whose editor, Ahmed al-Jarallah, has been a vociferous opponent of parliamentary independence virtually since the reinstatement of the National Assembly in October 1992. ₉₉ The crown prince’s request initiated a series of negotiations with parliamentary leaders in which the threat of dissolution was used to wring concessions out of the parliament. ₁₀₀

Following these negotiations and the settlement which allowed the parliament to continue, the negotiators from the parliament were criticized for having caved in to pressures from the government. ₁₀₁ However, as I discussed above, there was mounting evidence that the theft of public funds had reached crisis proportions despite massive efforts by parliament and citizen watchdogs to halt it. ₁₀₂ This may have contributed to the parliamentary negotiators’ decision to go along with “the deal” pushed by the government. The closure of parliament in 1998 not only would have cut off all official sources of information about government fiscal policies but also all legislative avenues for limiting both new taxes and new spending.

The deal also involved substantial losses in parliamentary power. It entailed the staging of a vote on a proposal to conduct the grilling of the interior minister in camera. Its adoption prompted Husain `Ali al-Qallaf to walk out and then to withdraw his request. ₁₀₃ Other elements in this “gentlemen’s agreement” included pledges by members to moderate their criticism of ministers, reduce the number of critical responses to ministerial statements “with or without good cause,” and minimize their use of parliamentary devices such as points of order to influence the course of debate. ₁₀₄ Al-Qabbas was particularly concerned that the deal would make any future attempt to interpellate a minister impossible. ₁₀₅ These fears were justified. As I have noted, both previous dissolutions were preceded either by parliamentary requests to interpellate ministers who were members of the ruling family or by severe disagreements between the government and the parliament on financial issues and oil policy. The 1999 dissolution also preceded a request to interpellate a ruling family member at a time when the government and the parliament were at odds over economic restructuring and a significant shift in oil policy. Even though the third dismissal of a sitting parliament followed constitutionally mandated procedures, the strong family resemblance among the various political circumstances surrounding all three dissolutions suggests caution in equating this one instance of constitutionality with a new commitment to democratic life.

How Long?

The constitutionality of the procedures governing the 1999 parliamentary dissolution might well be another example of Kuwaitis getting by with the help of their friends. The restless international spotlight has shifted to many other trouble-spots since invasion, war, liberation, and the restoration of normal political life drew the eyes of the world to Kuwait. But the events of the early 1990s, along with the normal processes associated with modernity, have enlarged the boundaries of the Kuwaiti political arena. Democracy constituencies in states that Kuwait depends on for its strategic security are among the external actors for whom Kuwait is a sector of the world stage on which they operate. Expatriates, international oil companies, British courts, transnational human rights organizations, and many other individual and corporate bodies are active participants in Kuwaiti life and link that life to other people and issues in other places. ₁₀₆ For most of these external actors, constitutionality—clear rules and governments that abide by them—are bottom-line requirements.

The world city is embedded in an international public life; meanwhile, the city-state is the product of a domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family. The 1992 parliament was widely regarded as overly contentious. Whether the government interfered as extensively in the 1996 election as so many Kuwaitis insisted to me that it had, the outcome of the vote brought defeat to key opposition critics. These results were touted as a popular reaction against the opposition, an electorate opting for cooperation over contention. But the 1996 parliament was even more contentious than its predecessor, and even less inclined to follow the government’s lead on critical issues. What the 1996 election demonstrates to me is the aptness of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” The same advice holds true for the 1999 election.

Since 1980 the rulers of Kuwait have manipulated constituencies and elections to change the character of the parliament. Their aim was to get rid of the merchant traditionals who felt themselves entitled to a strong voice in public affairs, and to replace them with “new men” and tribal representatives who, because they would owe their social prominence and their private benefits to the regime, would know their places and act accordingly. To do this, they promoted what Shafeeq Ghabra calls the “desertization” of Kuwait, the incorporation of massive numbers of tribesmen, along with traditional tribal values, into the politics and society of the country. ₁₀₇ They shaped election districts to improve the chances of religiously oriented candidates whom they saw, I believe mistakenly, as additional sources of “traditional” support for the regime. The amir’s 1999 bid to enfranchise women reflected the regime’s expectation that including women as voters would shift election results in its favor. However, woman suffrage, when it comes, may lead to as many unforeseen and unwanted results as has the naturalization of badu.

Kuwaiti rulers have long interfered in elections, both to defeat their opponents and to help their friends. The parliaments that resulted should have been far less critical of the rulers’ autocratic ways than pre-1981 Kuwaiti parliaments had been. However, I argue in the last chapter that this calculation was incorrect. The desertization strategy was costly financially and in terms of social cohesion. It also didn’t work. Most new men saw their preferments as entitlements and quite a few came to parliament with their own agendas. Many willing to go along with the government in exchange for personal perks and constituent benefits proved to be unreliable allies and expensive to boot. Enfranchised women may be similarly uppity and resistant to control.

Meanwhile, the myriad outcomes of modernity continue to fragment Kuwaiti society and support autonomy and agency among members of every social group, including the ruling family itself. In the last chapter, I look at some of the hopeful outcomes of modernity, particularly those centered on Kuwaitis engaged in improving old institutions, creating new ones, and staking out innovative positions on the issues of the day. It is difficult to imagine that current political antagonists could put their bitter memories of the past twenty years far enough behind them to move on. However, they are not the only ones involved in shaping the future of Kuwaiti politics.

Endnotes

Note 1: Among the most highly nuanced analyses of the political, economic, social, and spiritual difficulties of late development is Eric R. Wolf’s excellent Europe and the People Without History. Alexander Gerschenkron is most often associated with the view that there can be economic advantages to late development—see Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. My favorite analyst of the opportunities available to the oil producers among late-developing countries is Edith Penrose, The Large International Firm in Developing Countries: The International Petroleum Industry. Back.

Note 2: See, for example, Gilbert Rist, The History of Development from Western Origins to Global Faith. Back.

Note 3: Raymond D. Duvall and John R. Freeman, “The State and Dependent Capitalism,” International Studies Quarterly 25 (1981): 99–118; Timothy W. Luke, “Dependent Development and the Arab OPEC States,” Journal of Politics 45.4 (1983): 979–1003, and “Dependent Development and the OPEC States: State Formation in Saudi Arabia and Iran Under the International Energy Regime,” Studies in Comparative International Development 20 (1985): 31–54. A more recent study of dependent development comparing dependency on oil revenues to dependency on labor exports in the same region is Chaudhry’s The Price of Wealth. Back.

Note 4: For examples, see Walter J. Levy, “The Years That the Locust Hath Eaten: Oil Policy and OPEC Development Prospects,” Foreign Affairs 57 (Winter 1978–79): 999–1015; Jahangir Amuzegar, “Oil Wealth: A Very Mixed Blessing,” Foreign Affairs 60 (Spring 1982): 814–35; Hunter, “The Gulf Economic Crisis,” 593–613; Paul W. H. Aarts, Gep Eisenloeffel, and A. J. Termeulen, “Oil, Money, and Participation: Kuwait’s Sonderweg as a Rentier State,” Orient 32 (June 1991): 205–16. Back.

Note 5: For example, see Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. Back.

Note 6: Here the literature on the American war in Vietnam is a particularly rich source of information and analysis—see, for example, Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience, and Truong Nhu Tang (with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai), A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. Back.

Note 7: For example, Mark J. Gasiorowski, U. S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran. Back.

Note 8: Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” 186. Back.

Note 9: Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism 2:11. Back.

Note 10: See Roger Keil, “Globalization Makes States: Perspectives of Local Governance in the Age of the World City,” Review of International Political Economy 5 (Winter 1998): 616–46. Back.

Note 11: This literature is analyzed in Tamar Hermann, “From Unidimensionality to Multidimensionality: Some Observations on the Dynamics of Social Movements,” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 15 (1993): 181–202. Back.

Note 12: See the chapters by Jirina ^vSiklová, “Women and the Charta 77 Movement in Czechoslovakia”; Cheryl Logan Sparks, “How Grandmother Won the War: Strategic and Organizational Lessons of the Struggle for Suffrage”; and Haya al-Mughni, “Women’s Movements and the Autonomy of Civil Society in Kuwait”—all in Teske and Tétreault, eds., Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power, vol. 1. The heterogeneity of new social movements is well shown in such studies of peace and human rights movements as David S. Meyer, A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics, and Caroline Blackwood, On the Perimeter (New York: Penguin, 1985). Back.

Note 13: This quality is emphasized by ^vSiklová with regard to the protection offered by international human rights organizations to activists. See “Women and the Charta 77 Movement.” Back.

Note 14: Robin L. Teske, personal communication. Teske is an attorney who teaches international law at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Back.

Note 15: Every suspension of the parliament (1976, 1985, 1999) occurred after the National Assembly had initiated investigations into government finances. Back.

Note 16: United Press International (UPI), December 27, 1994 (from the archives of Gulf2000). Back.

Note 17: Reuters, September 1, 1995 (from the archives of Gulf2000). Back.

Note 18: Arab Times, February 2, 1997, 6. Back.

Note 19: See, for example, the analysis of the British Petroleum Company stock purchase in “KIO, BP and the $5bn Shell Game,” Financial Times, September 24, 1993, 9; also Paul W. H. Aarts, Gep Eisenloeffel, and A. J. Termeulen, “The KPC Connection of `Kuwait Inc.’ ” (Amsterdam: CEPS, University of Amsterdam, 1989); and Middle East Consultants, “The Background to Recent Changes in the KIO,” January 18, 1990 (typescript). Many Kuwaitis I have interviewed—most notably, `Abdullah Nibari and Jasim al-Sa`doun—make similar charges. Back.

Note 20: In a May 4, 1998, report in al-Watan (newspaper), government reserves were given as KD 12,009 million (U.S.$39.8 billion) in the RFFG and KD 5,780 million (U.S.$18.9 billion) in the General Reserve Fund. This was the first time that figures on Kuwaiti government reserves had been released to the public. In the Middle East Economic Survey (hereafter, MEES) report of the release (MEES Archives for 41.19 [May 11, 1998]), it was noted that most estimates of Kuwaiti reserves are lower than the nearly $60 billion revealed by al-Watan. In my many interviews with bankers and others in Kuwait since 1990, all report that the only liquid reserves held by the state are in the RFFG. If this is so, the report and the estimate, though nominally divergent, are functionally nearly identical. Back.

Note 21: Tétreault, “Kuwait: The Morning After,” 9. Back.

Note 22: Arab Times, February 1, 1997, 1, 8. Back.

Note 23: Arab Times, January 2–3, 1997, 1, 8, and January 22, 1997, 1, 6. Back.

Note 24: Arab Times, March 10, 1997, 1, and March 11, 1997, 1. The eleven board members as reported in the Arab Times are Imad al-Saif, Ahmad Lari, Ahmad al-Serraf, Kawthar Jawwan, Imran Mohammad, Khalifa al-Khorafy, `Ali al-Baghli, `Abdullah al-Roumi, Fatima Abdali, `Abdullah al-Dughayshim, and Mohsen al-Mutairy. Ghanim al-Najjar, who attended that meeting, reports that the group applied for a license as a public benefit society, but that the license was denied (personal communication). Back.

Note 25: Arab Times, April 28, 1997, 1. Back.

Note 26: The speakership of the 1996 parliament was decided by a one-vote margin due to a single abstention. The loser of what otherwise would have been a tied race, Jasim al-Khorafy, asked for a ruling on the grounds that Ahmad al-Sa`doun did not receive an absolute majority of the entire body. The Constitutional Court ruled that Ahmad al-Sa`doun’s election was valid. Back.

Note 27: Arab Times, May 4, 1997, 1. Back.

Note 28: An independent investigation later determined that the charges had been false, and the four prosecutors were exonerated. Arab Times, June 21, 1997, 1, and June 24, 1997, 1. Back.

Note 29: Arab Times, June 7, 1997, 8. Back.

Note 30: “Attempted Murder Convictions Upheld for 4 Men Who Shot at Deputy,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, March 23, 1999, from the Gulf2000 Archives. Back.

Note 31: Arab Times, June 18, 1997, 1. The assassin also was connected to Shaikh `Ali Khalifa, and it was reported in the press that he had taken an envelope to `Ali Khalifa at al-Watan immediately after the assassination attempt. When questioned, `Ali Khalifa was reported to have said that the envelope had contained stock certificates. (Personal communication from Ghanim al-Najjar.) Back.

Note 32: The day after the assassination attempt against `Abdullah Nibari, Mohammad Jasim al-Saqr, editor of al-Qabas, the newspaper owned by merchant traditionals, reported receiving a telephone death threat saying that he would be the next target. Back.

Note 33: Mideast Mirror, June 10, 1997, 11. Back.

Note 34: Government action also dissipated the momentum favoring populist critics. The suspects were caught and arrested within forty-eight hours of the crime. Back.

Note 35: Quoted in Arab Times, June 29, 1997, 1. Back.

Note 36: Arab Times, July 2, 1997, 1. Back.

Note 37: It should be noted that Ahmad al-Mulaifi, though not a member of an Islamist political group, often supported Islamist positions on issues. Back.

Note 38: Arab Times, July 16, 1997, 1, 8. Back.

Note 39: “Kuwaiti Government Issues Transparency Law on Public Sector Contracts,” MEES 39.51 (September 16, 1996), from the MEES Archives. Back.

Note 40: Details on the case come from the draft judgment handed down on November 16, 1998, in the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Commercial Court, by the Honorable Mr. Justice Moore-Bick between Kuwait Oil Tanker Company S. A. K. and Sitka Shipping Incorporated, Plaintiffs; Abdul Fattah Sulaiman Khaled Al Bader, Hassan Ali Hassan Qabazard, and Timothy St. John Stafford, Defendents; and H. Clarkson & Company Limited, Hugh O’Neill McCoy, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and Sheikh Ali Khalifa Al Sabah, Third Parties. Back.

Note 41: Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World, 158–59. Back.

Note 42: Arab Times, November 23, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 43: Arab Times, December 3–4, 1998, 4. The article notes that the court “froze worldwide assets held by the trio up to [$130 million, the] value [of the judgment].” Back.

Note 44: Arab Times, December 3, 1998, 2, and December 7, 1988, 3. Back.

Note 45: Both quotes in this paragraph are taken from a personal communication from Ghanim al-Najjar. Back.

Note 46: The list of committee members, including those who lost bids for committee slots, can be found in Arab Times, October 28, 1998, 4. Ahmad Baqr’s health insurance proposal is outlined in ibid., June 30, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 47: See, for example, Arab Times, November 1, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 48: Arab Times, November 23, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 49: Upstream and downstream are terms that envision the oil industry as a continuous process with production as its pivot. “Upstream” includes production, along with exploration and development—installation of production capacity. “Downstream” from production are transportation, processing, and marketing. A vertically integrated firm owns interests in all phases of the industry. A multinational firm’s holdings are located in more than one country. Back.

Note 50: Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, 90. Back.

Note 51: Ragaei El Mallakh and Jacob K. Atta, The Absorptive Capacity of Kuwait: Domestic and International Prospects, 14, 20–22. The role of parliament in this policy is emphasized in J. E. Peterson, The Arab Gulf States: Steps Toward Political Participation (New York: Praeger, 1988), 40. Back.

Note 52: Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, 90. `Abdulla Nibari, then a member of parliament, was the leader of the pro-nationalization forces. Back.

Note 53: Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and “Political Consequences of Restructuring Economic Regimes.” Back.

Note 54: World Bank, “Kuwait: A Privatization Strategy,” Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, October 1993), 31–38. The World Bank did not recommend strategies for upstream privatization, although it offered suggestions for improving efficiency at KOC, KPC’s production subsidiary. The report concentrated on downstream privatization, reflecting the Bank’s disapproval of Kuwait’s multinational vertical integration strategy. Back.

Note 55: Arab Times, August 25, 1997, 4. Back.

Note 56: MEES 42.16, April 19, 1999, A1–A3; D1–D4. Back.

Note 57: Ibid., A2. Back.

Note 58: Ibid. Back.

Note 59: MEES 42.4, January 25, 1999, from the MEES Archives. Back.

Note 60: Ibid. Back.

Note 61: Ibid. Back.

Note 62: Ashraf Fouad, “Kuwait Goverment Backs Minister Before House Grilling,” May 2, 1999, Gulf2000 Archives; “Kuwait MPs Set to Seek Minister’s Resignation,” Reuters, May 4, 1999, Gulf2000 Archives. Back.

Note 63: Ashraf Fouad, “Kuwait Election Could Bring Back Key Government Critics,” Reuters, May 5, 1999, Gulf2000 Archives. Back.

Note 64: I have not focused on the 1976 dissolution in this volume. Discussions of the financial and oil policy conflicts of that era, along with the regime’s discomfort at parliamentary criticisms of ruling family business interests and the family’s objection to the public airing of these issues, can be found in Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 91–92, and Peterson, The Arab Gulf States, 39–41. Back.

Note 65: MEES 42.19, May 10, 1999, A3, B1; also “Kuwaiti MPs Accuse Cabinet of Orchestrating New Polls to Save Minister,” AFP, May 5, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive. The sale of KIC shares had been annulled two months earlier on the grounds that the initial public offering (IPO) price was too low. Allegations that IPO prices were unnecessarily discounted were made in parliament regarding previous KIA privatizations, and underlay criticisms on this issue from the speaker that were noted in the text of this chapter. Setting IPO prices at very low levels is a common technique for directing quick capital gains to insiders—see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954); also Leon Levy and Jeff Madrick, “Hedge Fund Mysteries,” New York Review of Books 45.20 (December 17, 1998): 73–77. Back.

Note 66: MEES 42.19, May 10, 1999, A2. Back.

Note 67: Ashraf Fouad, “Kuwait Politicians Mull Stance for July Elections,” Reuters, May 6, 1999, Gulf2000 Archives. Back.

Note 68: MEES, May 31, 1999, B1. Back.

Note 69: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 90. Back.

Note 70: Ibid., 75–79, 89–92. Back.

Note 71: See the comments by political scientists Shafeeq Ghabra and Ghanim al-Najjar on Gulf2000. Back.

Note 72: See, for example, comments by political scientist `Abdullah Alshayeji on Gulf2000; and an interview with Shamlan al-`Eisa reported in “Most Kuwaiti MPs to Retain Seats, Crisis to Continue, Analysts Say,” AFP, May 6, 1999, Gulf2000 Archives. Back.

Note 73: Levy, “The Years That the Locust Hath Eaten,” 287–305. Back.

Note 74: See, for example, Stauffer, “Oil Revenues: Income or Capital?” Back.

Note 75: For example, see Gould, Rethinking Democracy, and Shue, Basic Rights. Back.

Note 76: See, for examples, Raymond Bonner, “A Woman’s Place,” The New Yorker, 16 November 1992; “Alarming Death Sentences in Kuwait Spark World-wide Repercussions,” Arabia Monitor 2.7 (July 1993): 1. I also discussed these issues in a number of interviews in 1992 and 1996 with Kuwaiti human rights activists, among them Shamlan al-`Eisa, Kholoud al-Feeli, Ghanim al-Najjar, and Jasim al-Qatami. Back.

Note 77: Ghanim al-Najjar, personal communication. Back.

Note 78: Ibid. Back.

Note 79: Neil Hicks and Ghanim al-Najjar, “The Utility of Tradition,” 205. Back.

Note 80: “Kuwait Closes All Human Rights Organizations,” Middle East Watch 5.6 (September 1993), 1–2. Back.

Note 81: Ibid. Back.

Note 82: A similar symbiosis between human rights groups and the parliament characterizes the link between Kuwaiti NGOs dealing with prisoner-of-war issues and their parliamentary counterpart, the Committee of the Detained and Welfare for Martyr’s Families. See Hicks and al-Najjar, “The Utility of Tradition,” 205. Back.

Note 83: Kuwait University political scientist Shamlan al-`Eisa notes that the effectiveness of the human rights organization lies in its ability to work discreetly, through informal networks, and thereby to capitalize on the desire of the government to improve Kuwait’s reputation on human rights without embarrassing the country or the regime. Back.

Note 84: Arab Times, April 27, 1997, 2. Back.

Note 85: All the quotes in this paragraph are taken from the Arab Times, December 31, 1995, 1. Back.

Note 86: Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “Rhetorical Strategies and Official Policies on Women’s Rights: The Merits and Drawbacks of the New World Hypocrisy,” in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World, 115. The Kuwaiti reservations were noteworthy among reservations made by other Muslim states for their political rather than religious rationales. Back.

Note 87: Arab Times, December 31, 1995, 1; also, interviews with Shamlan al-`Eisa, fall 1996. Back.

Note 88: Quoted in Arab Times, January 25, 1998, 3. Back.

Note 89: U.S. Department of State, “Kuwait Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997,” report released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, January 30, 1998 (from Gulf2000). The report included the phrase, “women do not have the right to vote or seek election to the National Assembly,” a situation the government indicated it wished to see altered with the amir’s May 1999 decree conferring full political rights on female Kuwaiti citizens. Back.

Note 90: Reuters, March 16 and March 23, 1998 (from Gulf2000). Back.

Note 91: Mideast Mirror, May 27, 1998, 16–17, and June 10, 1998, 15–20. Back.

Note 92: For example, Mubarak al-Duwailah led the National Assembly in referring an attempt, in his words, to “buy scrap” from the United States to supply the Kuwaiti armed forces (regarding a proposal to buy howitzers and military vehicles) to the Protection Public Funds Committee. See Arab Times, June 3, 1998, 1, 4. Back.

Note 93: Mideast Mirror, June 10, 1998, 19. Back.

Note 94: Quoted in Mideast Mirror, May 27, 1998, 17 (preceding quote also taken from this source). Back.

Note 95: Arab Times, June 2, 1998, 1, 4. Back.

Note 96: Ibid.; also, Mideast Mirror, June 15, 1998, 18. Back.

Note 97: Arab Times, June 3, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 98: Arab Times, June 8, 1998, 1, 4. Back.

Note 99: On June 13 he praised the impending dissolution as “the right step” for bringing Kuwait “back to balance.” Arab Times, June 13, 1998, 1. Back.

Note 100: Arab Times, June 10, 1998, 1, 4. Back.

Note 101: Mideast Mirror, June 16, 1998, 16–17. Back.

Note 102: See, for example, Arab Times, June 8, 1998, 1, 4. Back.

Note 103: Arab Times, June 17, 1998, 1. Husain told a press conference that he had been forced to choose between two unattractive options, “either to kill one of the most important tools in the National Assembly or to kill the grilling itself. I choose the latter because I don’t want to establish a bad precedent that the government may use in the future.” Back.

Note 104: Mideast Mirror, June 16, 1998, 14–15 (quotes from 15). Back.

Note 105: Mideast Mirror, June 18, 1998, 15. Back.

Note 106: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Out of Body Experiences: Migrating Firms and Altered States,” Review of International Political Economy 6.1 (Spring 1999): 55–78. Back.

Note 107: Ghabra, “Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-economic Change,” 358–72. Back.