KUWAIT´S STRUGGLE TO CREATE A MODERN STATE / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Kuwait’s Struggle to Create a Modern State

The country’s reputation as a liberal Middle Eastern state obscures the underlying social tensions.

By: Hilal Khashan

With a free press, active parliament and dynamic political system, Kuwait is the most liberal member of the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

But its reputation as an open society masks the country’s abysmal human rights record and underlying social tensions. 

It’s a small, oil-rich country with a relatively prosperous population whose economic wealth far exceeds its level of social and political development. 

Its deficiencies in this regard are best seen in the treatment of nonnationals – including both foreign laborers and those considered stateless people who have roots in the country extending centuries.

Origins

Kuwait’s modern history began in 1716 when three tribes from north-central Arabia – al-Sabah, al-Khalifa and al-Jalahima, which together formed the al-Utub confederation – immigrated to Kadima on the northwestern coast of the Persian Gulf. 

In 1775, the Persian Zand dynasty seized Basra in southern Iraq, turning Kuwait’s port into a vital lifeline in the Persian Gulf’s northwest. But as the turmoil in Persia and Iraq persisted, wariness of foreigners grew and helped shape government decisions. 

Adverse local and regional conditions helped further divide Kuwaiti society along tribal, religious and sectarian lines.

Thus, throughout Kuwait’s history, citizenship has had little meaning other than entitlement to government welfare provisions. 

The country’s tribal structure is reflected in its political system. 

The parliament is a modern version of the "diwaniyas," or tribal meeting places, where each tribe assembles in a separate diwaniya to discuss political issues and choose its parliamentary representatives.

The tribal confederation and the business class agreed on an unwritten social contract based on Islam’s consultative system. 

The al-Sabah royals, whose reign the tribes and merchants endorsed in 1752, dismissed the consultative council in 1896. Kuwait’s first legislative council was formed in 1938 but quickly collapsed because of disputes between Arabs, Persians and commercial families. 

That same year, Kuwait’s hydrocarbon era began, refocusing its economy from commerce, pearl harvesting and fishing to oil production. 

Society discovered modern modes of interpersonal interaction, which paved the way, a year after independence in 1961, for a new social contract and an ostensibly democratic political system in which sovereignty emanated from the people.

From the onset of independence, Kuwait’s royals opposed empowering civil society because of their vested interest in preserving the state’s tribal nature and preventing the rise of strong parliamentary blocs. 

The ruling al-Sabah family considers the business elite a historical adversary and competitor, and it is determined to prevent them from regaining their political influence. 

In 2012, Kuwait’s emir changed the four-votes-per-person voting system to a one-person-one-vote system, which dealt a blow to the forces of change and precluded the opposition’s ability to form weighty parliamentary blocs.

For years, the state manipulated the tribes to strengthen its grip on power and weaken the parliament. 

The political movements that sprang up in the 1950s and 1960s – Arab nationalists, the Baath Party and Islamist political groups – failed to include broader segments of society and thus did not forge an integrated political community. 

The royals, meanwhile, failed to establish a state ideology to translate the constitution’s national principles. 

Instead, they chose to co-opt the tribes as a countervailing force to the merchants and ideological political parties. 

Despite the tribes’ increasing education levels, they remained economically disadvantaged and, more recently, began to turn on the ruling elite.

Discrimination

Kuwaiti society has a long history of discrimination against marginalized groups. It surged following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when the entire royal family fled to Saudi Arabia and left Kuwaitis to face the unknown. 

After liberation, demands surged for a population balance policy, primarily aimed at expelling the 450,000 Palestinian expatriates living in Kuwait due to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s public support for Iraq’s invasion. At that point, running a traffic light became a sufficient reason to deport a Palestinian. 

More than 360,000 Palestinians who played a crucial role in modernizing the country were deported to Jordan. 

In 2013, the Ministry of Health introduced a new checkup protocol at public hospitals that segregated Kuwaitis from expatriates and gave them preferential treatment, even though the vast majority of the medical staff is foreign.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, racism has again seen a resurgence, this time targeting Asian laborers, many of whom lost their jobs because they were seen as linked to the virus. 

Some politicians have also accused expatriates of spreading COVID-19 and overburdening the health care system. 

Indeed, many Kuwaitis, irrespective of their social standing, have negative attitudes toward expatriates, most notably laborers from Southeast Asia and Egypt. Roughly 825,000 Indians, 518,000 Egyptians and 186,000 Filipinos live in Kuwait. 

Employee abuse has particularly been an issue for the Filipino community. In 2018, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte condemned the ill-treatment of Filipino workers in Kuwait. 

He banned Filipinos from seeking employment in Kuwait amid confirmed reports of widespread human rights violations by employers, including murder, rape and subhuman working conditions. 

Between 2016 and 2018, more than 200 Filipino workers in Kuwait died on the job, 22 by suicide. A Kuwaiti lawmaker demanded halting all foreign aid to the Philippines in response to Duterte’s criticism. 

A few months later, the ban was lifted, likely a result of the fact that remittances from Filipino workers in Kuwait are a valuable source of income for the Philippines.

There are several other anecdotal examples of the prejudice toward foreign workers. A Kuwaiti actress who disparaged Arab communities living in the country called for Egyptians to be thrown in the desert. 

An Emirati poet attempted to defend her by saying she meant Bengalis, not fellow Arabs. In another incident, a Kuwaiti food handler beat a hungry Indian laborer queuing for food during Ramadan because he was Hindu. 

Kuwaitis have mostly ignored the criticism over foreign worker abuse. They often argue that they are entitled to do what they want in their own country. 

The official response is usually that these are isolated events that do not represent Kuwaiti values. (Ironically, Kuwaiti ruler Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, who passed away last September, was known as “the emir of humanity,” despite the country’s appalling human rights record.)

Undocumented Residents

The poor treatment of nonnationals extends not just to temporary foreign workers but also to those who have deep, ancestral links to the country. 

Less than 30 percent of Kuwait’s 4.5 million residents are citizens; the rest are either expatriates residing in the country or "bidoon," meaning stateless people. 

When Kuwait won its independence from Britain in 1961, the local population totaled 310,000 people. One-third of them received citizenship as descendants of the al-Utub confederation state founders, and another one-third was also granted citizenship. 

The rest were labeled bidoon, despite the fact that their ancestors had lived in the country for centuries. 

According to official statistics, the native population has grown sixfold since independence, but the number of bidoon has remained stable at roughly 110,000 people.

The bidoon are Bedouins who, for the most part, came from southern Iraq in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their Shiite background is the primary reason they have been denied Kuwaiti citizenship. 

For many of them, their naturalization applications were either discarded or rejected by the Interior Ministry when Kuwait gained independence. Until the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, they received generous state benefits, but since then, they have been treated as illegals and deprived of fundamental human rights such as public education and hospital access. 

Many live in abject poverty and are seen by the public as traitors, despite the fact that many bidoon fought and died for Kuwait when the Iraqi army occupied the country in 1990. The bidoon issue is essentially a human rights matter, but the government has treated it as a political matter, one that threatens to disrupt Kuwait’s fragile social balance.

With the population balancing policy, Kuwait missed an opportunity to learn the lessons of its past. Instead of building an indigenous labor force, Kuwait has replaced Palestinians mostly with Egyptians and contracted hundreds of thousands of Asian laborers. 

The country is facing severe challenges that require substantial reforms, both political and economic. Oil, Kuwait’s sole source of revenue, is losing its luster as prices fall. The Gulf region is as unstable as ever, and expatriates are leaving Kuwait in increasing numbers. 

The pressure will continue to mount on the royal family to transition to genuine constitutionalism and on Kuwaitis to become economically productive. 

Only these substantive changes will help Kuwait transform into a modern state.