Kuwait's election and the freezing of Arab politics, , Rami G. Khouri

Opinion, July 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Kuwait's election and the freezing of Arab politics

Jordan Times, Wednesday, July 9, 2003

Rami G. Khouri

KUWAIT'S PARLIAMENTARY election results last weekend increase the confusion about precisely in which direction this region is moving. As in the Jordanian election two weeks earlier, the Kuwaitis voted in a parliament dominated by pro-regime centrist tribalists, with the Islamists emerging as the leading opposition group. “Liberals” and pan-Arab nationalists who had been a fixture in the legislature, such as Ahmed Rubei and Abdulla Naibari, lost their seats. One Kuwaiti human rights activist said that some independent MPs would tacitly align with the few remaining liberals, but without adopting the liberal mantel, because “liberalism has become like a disease”. So what's the deal here? It's hard to say. Kuwait's parliament represents just 15 per cent of all Kuwaitis, since the vote is given only to men aged 21 or over who do not serve in the military and police. Jordan's purposely distorted electoral districts disproportionately favour rural, pro-government, and tribal candidates, at the expense of urban, leftist, Islamist, and Palestinian-origin candidates. Egypt's parliamentary elections stopped having any meaning about sixty years ago, Yemen's and Tunisia's elections are similarly hollow jamborees of the ruling party's penchant for eternal self-perpetuation, and the rest of the region follows similar patterns.

So parliamentary election results are not a good gauge of true public opinion in the Arab world. But they do indicate that citizens and state in every Arab country still have not worked out political relationships that are mutually satisfactory and stable. Like two exhausted boxers flailing at each other at the end of a long and indecisive contest that has lasted about half a century, the Arab citizen and the modern Arab security state have not yet defined that space in which two critical things should happen: citizens can exercise their rights to speak, organise, and engage in political activity freely and fairly, and power in the hands of the ruling elite can be transferred peacefully from one group or party to another.

Consequently, democratic openings and parliamentary elections in Arab countries continue, predictably, to result in victories by three main groups: Islamists, incumbent regimes and parties, and centrist tribalists who are close to the regimes. The Kuwaiti elections reaffirm this acute polarisation of Arab public political space into these three extreme poles. Most other political groupings in between have been discredited, as we've seen in the Jordan and Kuwait elections. (We may be witnessing something similar happening in Iraq, as tribal and religious groups slowly dominate the little public political space that the American and British occupation forces make available for Iraqis to operate in. It is no accident, either, that in his final desperate years, Saddam Hussein attempted to shore up his regime's thin legitimacy by appealing to precisely these same three forces of the security state, tribalism, and Islamism.)

The situation is complicated by the odd spectacle of the United States — the occupying power in Iraq — speaking of promoting liberal democracy in the Middle East, which sends many native liberals and democrats to hide under their beds. Arabs who advocate democracy in their countries are now often in danger of being labelled as American stooges, and tend to speak less loudly, and less often.

To make the picture even more complex, many Arab young kings and emirs are stepping forward as champions of the causes of democracy, reform, and pluralism. Leaders in Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and UAE all speak similarly, to some extent, about the need to reform, open up, and change. Is this because they instinctively believe in democratic reforms, or because they feel the pressures for change from their own citizens?

Arab parliamentary election results are not very helpful in answering this question, for they reflect the polarisation of Arab political culture into the triumvirate of the incumbent regime, the tribal centre and opposition Islamists. This has been a recipe for freezing Arab public political space, and leaving it defined by predictable and largely hollow rhetoric. This rhetoric — whether the state's self-congratulatory acclaim, the tribalists' cultural triumphalism, or the Islamists' rote demands for change — has been reduced to a meaningless exercise of preaching to the converted. It is largely unconvincing to the Arab citizenry, and totally unconvincing to other, more powerful, countries that treat the Arabs with increasing disdain, colonial attitudes, and — now — military occupation.

Arab political parties and parliamentary elections, along with reform initiated by leaders from above, have limited impact on Arab political culture. Neither seems likely to significantly change real power flows according to the will of the citizenry. It's time to seek a more effective means of promoting real change in the exercise of political, economic, cultural, and police power in the modern Arab world.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).