After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (40 page)

As with Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaiti government’s instinctive response to this mounting opposition was massively to increase public spending. An announcement was made that free food coupons would be issued to all Kuwait nationals for a period of 14 months, and that each citizen—including newborn babies—would receive a one-off payment of about $3500. As such those Kuwaiti families with several children received lump sums of $15,000 or more. Although carefully timed to coincide with the emirate’s celebration of fifty years of independence, the spending package—which was estimated to have cost over $4 billion
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—was widely viewed as a quick remedy to keep poorer Kuwaiti nationals off the streets. In parallel to the increased spending the government also began using defamation suits and other legal mechanisms to pursue the more vocal members of the opposition movements. In June 2011, for example, two Kuwaiti nationals were arrested and put on trial for using Twitter to ‘harm the state’s interests’ and allegedly insult the Kuwaiti ruling family along with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
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Similarly, a young female Kuwaiti national of half-British descent was believed to have been arrested for tweeting that ‘Sheikh Sabah should give us our money and don’t bother coming back’ in reference to the Kuwaiti ruler’s
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absence in London receiving health care. Most worryingly, a Kuwaiti journalist working for a daily newspaper was subjected to a gun attack in a northern suburb of Kuwait City. After confirming that there were bullet holes in his car the matter was reported to the Kuwait Journalists’ Association which stated that ‘we hope to have [some information] about the identity of the person who fired the bullet and the motives’ and that ‘we are not used to using firearms in Kuwait to express our views. We have always opted for dialogue to communicate, regardless of our differences’.
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As with its neighbours, the mixture of largesse and increased repression was not enough to curtail protests in Kuwait, and the latter part of 2011 saw major developments as opposition movements continued to gather strength. Despite the military intervention in Bahrain having taken place under the guise of the GCC, a large number of sympathetic Kuwaiti nationals were believed to have funded the Bahraini opposition, with some having even visited Bahrain to take part in the protests. Indeed, the Bahraini authorities stated that ‘we have full knowledge about their support [for the opposition], for them this was an ideological support, and there were figures who visited, including businessmen and those of influence’ and explained that this was ‘the reason behind our calls through official channels to prevent them from entering Bahrain and they are not welcomed and added to the blacklist’.
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More worryingly for the Kuwaiti ruling family, by summer 2011 further protests were held in an effort to force the prime minister’s resignation and investigate his alleged corruption. In June, for example, around 5,000 Kuwaiti nationals, including a delegation from the Kuwaiti Lawyers’ Society, rallied outside the parliamentary building under the banner of ‘For the sake of Kuwait’. Shouting ‘Leave, leave Nasser, we don’t want to see you tomorrow’ and ‘Leave, Kuwait deserves something better than you’, they demanded the removal of the prime minister, his deputy, and several of the ministers. Addressing the gathering, one activist accused some MPs of being ‘government mercenaries’ while a former MP claimed that the prime minister was trying to ‘empty the constitution of its contents’. Most damningly, other protestors claimed that the prime minister’s reign was ‘full of corruption and that citizens were being killed at police stations under interrogation’
and that parliament had been ‘abducted during his premierships… with honest MPs being prosecuted for saying the truth’.
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With the prime minister refusing to acknowledge the protestors’ demands, more extensive rallies were held in September 2011 following what was dubbed ‘People’s Day’ when banners were unfurled calling for an elected prime minister with no connection to the ruling family. Chanting ‘the people want to topple the prime minister’, and claiming that more than $350 million of public funds had been used to buy off MPs, protestors argued that Kuwait needed to be transferred urgently from being ‘a family state into a state of the people’. In particular they proposed that Kuwait became a constitutional monarchy, with the ruling family stepping out of government and only retaining the ceremonial posts of emir and crown prince.
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Most dramatically, in mid-November dozens of activists broke into the parliamentary building where they began singing the national anthem, while thousands reportedly marched on the prime minister’s house.
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With a government spokesmen having describing the protestors as ‘traitors who aim at toppling the regime’
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and with the ruler having publicly stated that he would not dismiss the prime minister or dissolve the parliament, it appeared that the emirate had reached an impasse. Indeed, amid a crackdown on those who took part in the marches and the arrests of dozens of activists, the ruler told the opposition that ‘you held demonstrations and insulted people, using expressions that are alien to the Kuwaiti society’ and stated that ‘what happened was a crime against Kuwait and the law will be fully applied against those who stormed the parliament. We will not forgive’.
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Yet by the end of November and just days after the ruler’s condemnation the prime minister finally resigned, following the largest protests ever seen in a Gulf monarchy—since dubbed the ‘Kuwaiti Spring’. Claiming that he wanted ‘to comply with the national interest’ and was responding to ‘the danger the situation had reached’,
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the prime minister had clearly become an unacceptable liability for the ruling family and the wider power elite in Kuwait. Given the public humiliation incurred by the ruler in having so speedily to make a u-turn, the episode has greatly tarnished the legitimacy of the ruling family. Moreover, even though the new prime minister
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is also a member of the ruling family and is similarly unelected, having been the former minister for defence, a fresh parliamentary election held in February 2012 saw opposition blocs making significant gains and winning the majority of seats.
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This led to renewed
investigations of corruption and further calls for an elected prime minister and a constitutional monarchy. An attempt was also made to block the government’s proposed $111 billion four year spending plan, on the grounds that it was ‘unrealistic’.
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United Arab Emirates: opposition emerges

As another small, wealthy state the UAE has yet to face street protests, however its seven ruling families are now finally being challenged directly by citizens, some of whom are publicly calling for regime change. This is because the UAE currently suffers from some of the heaviest restrictions on free speech and the media in the region, and there has been mounting frustration among the more educated sections of the population, especially with regards to corruption, lack of transparency, human rights abuses, and some of the government’s more questionable policies. Moreover, as discussed, there is a widening wealth gap in the UAE and not all of its national population are being provided with adequate economic opportunities. This is leading to many of its less educated citizens—especially in the northern emirates—also beginning to voice their discontent. Thus, even though the UAE embarked on a massive Saudi-style spending splurge in the wake of the Arab Spring in order to appease the national population, this has not always been enough, with 2011 and 2012 witnessing the unprecedented detaining of dozens political prisoners along with a marked tightening of civil society.

The roots of the UAE’s most serious Arab Spring challenges and the current opposition movement date back to summer 2009 when a number of activists, including university students and bloggers, launched a discussion website entitled
www.uaehewar.net
. Soon visited by thousands of UAE-based internet users, and featuring hundreds of posts—almost all in Arabic, and almost all by bona fide UAE nationals—the site quickly gained a reputation as being the best place to put forward grievances, challenge the authorities, and discuss the country’s future. Within weeks, very lively debates were taking place on many issues including the growing personal wealth of the ruling families and the sustainability of some of the UAE’s overseas investments and prestige projects. By January 2010 the website’s most controversial debate was gathering pace, with thousands of users reading posts about the acquittal of an Abu Dhabi ruling family member who had been accused of torture and sodomy.
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Most of
the posts stated the concerns of UAE nationals over the application of the rule of law to the ruling families and the broader impact of the verdict on the UAE’s international reputation. Within days UAE-based visitors to the site were no longer able to gain access it, being greeted with a peculiar ‘server problem’ message appearing when they tried. Moreover, one of the state-backed telecommunications companies
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asked website owners to identify themselves to help solve ‘technical issues’.

Unable to block the website outside the UAE,
www.uaehewar.net
survived well into 2011, with mirror sites being used to allow UAE-based users to keep accessing its contents. Discussions included the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, the lack of a proper UAE parliament, and the shortcomings of the UAE’s rulers. The website’s most accessed thread was entitled ‘The Paradoxes of Muhammad bin Zayed’s Policies’, referring to the Abu Dhabi crown prince.
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Emboldened by Mubarak’s fall and the Bahrain demonstrations, in March 2011 the website’s founders along with many other activists began circulating petitions which were eventually forwarded to the ruler of Abu Dhabi.
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One of these, signed by 130 intellectuals, demanded a fully elected parliament and universal suffrage, and asked that the UAE worked towards becoming a constitutional monarchy that was committed to human rights and other basic principles. One signatory, Nasser bin Ghayth—a prominent UAE academic and an adjunct lecturer at the Sorbonne’s Abu Dhabi campus—had also blogged about the Gulf monarchies’ stance on the Arab Spring, and the strategy of distributing wealth in order to achieve political acquiescence. He stated that ‘they [the Gulf monarchies] have announced benefits and handouts assuming their citizens are not like other Arabs or other human beings, who see freedom as a need no less significant than other physical needs’, before moving on to explain ‘…they use the carrot, offering abundance. But this only delays change and reform, which will still come sooner or later…. No amount of security—or rather intimidation by security forces—or wealth, handouts, or foreign support is capable of ensuring the stability of an unjust ruler’.
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Signing the petitions as institutional actors, four of the UAE’s civil society organisations—the associations for jurists, teachers, national heritage professionals, and university faculty—added their weight to the demands and soon after published their own joint statement. In this they argued that ‘civil society in the UAE considers that the time has come to ensure the right of political participation of every citizen, with direct
elections for a council with full federal oversight and legislative powers’ and lamented ‘the lack of involvement of citizens to choose their representatives, decades after the establishment of the state’.
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In parallel to these developments, there were also examples in early 2011 of growing informal opposition activity, with an extensive Reuters report revealing that students planned to upload videos onto YouTube and Facebook regarding the need for political reform, and to meet in secret to discuss democracy and how the country’s oil wealth should be spent. Referring to the economic benefits received courtesy of her nationality, but explaining how this was no longer sufficient, one student interviewee stated ‘I’m well off. I don’t need a revolution because I’m hungry. I want my freedoms, my dignity’. Having provided the journalist with an alias, she explained this was because of her ‘fear of pursuit by security forces’. Meanwhile, other students complained of their rulers, stating that ‘times have changed, they need to change their mentality… they act like we’re kids. We’re conscious, educated people’, while others focused on economic mismanagement, arguing that ‘young people can’t get jobs. We have bad hospitals … and this is a wealthy country’. Some also referred to the inevitability of the Arab Spring impacting on the UAE, explaining that ‘… it’s like wave. If the whole world is changing and this wave is coming and taking everyone with it, well, it’s somehow going to cross this place as well’.
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The authorities’ reaction to the petition and the civil society organisations’ demands took many UAE nationals by surprise, as most had not expected a heavy-handed response. In early April 2011 five men—later referred to collectively as the ‘UAE Five’—were taken from their homes, seemingly as a random sample from among the signatories. Bin Ghayth was one of these, along with Ahmed Mansour Al-Shehhi, a founder of
www.uaehewar.net
. The latter claimed he had been offered a well-paid position in Pakistan by his state-backed employer only a week before. Having refused to leave the UAE, stating that ‘…if they think I’m going to back off, they’re mistaken. As long as I have the ability, I will continue my efforts’,
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Al-Shehhi was then reportedly arrested by ten officers—only two of whom were in uniform—and his passport and computer seized. In his final tweets that evening he had predicted his arrest, suspecting the police would plant something in his car, and then detailed their attempts to call him down to the street from his apartment.
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Held in custody without explanation, the authorities appeared unsure how to
explain the UAE Five’s disappearance to the broader population. Early indications were that they would be charged with some sort of illegal possession, with reports circulating in the state-backed media that bottles of whiskey had been discovered in Al-Shehhi’s apartment.
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