Page 170 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 167

consequence the newly educated generation of Kuwaitis, by and large,
emerged from their schools in the early 1960s with a much greater appetite for
politics than for learning.
Aware of this circumstance, and warned by the disturbances created in
Bahrain by youthful agitators in the late 1950s and in Kuwait itself during the
Suez crisis of 1956, the Al Sabah took steps to ward off future trouble.
Nationalist sentiment was appeased by the termination of the treaty relation­

ship with Britain in 1961 (as being ‘inconsistent’, so the exchange of diplomatic
notes had it, ‘with the sovereignty and independence of Kuwait’), and a
constitution was drawn up and promulgated at the end of 1962 to serve as a
harmless outlet for the expression of political fancies. It provided for the
establishment of a national assembly of about fifty members and a council of
ministers to conduct the business of government. The first elections were held
in January 1963, the franchise being limited, then as since, to adult, male,
native-born Kuwaitis, a limitation which scarcely made the assembly a rep­

resentative body. Nor, since the council of ministers was appointed by the
ruler, could it be said to possess any independent authority. The constitution,
in fact, was no more than a device to enfranchise the Bedouin (who were by
this time mostly settled in or around Kuwait town), to make them into a
political prop for the regime, especially against the Uitlanders, and to serve as
an emblem of Kuwait’s modernity in an age infatuated with the trappings of
‘democracy’.
It has been successful in this last respect, at least so far as impressionable
outsiders are concerned. The authors of a book published in England some half

a dozen years ago to celebrate the history of the Al Sabah, and the fair deeds
they have wrought, so lost themselves in contemplation of the beauties of the
constitution as to declare that it ‘set out principles of action and behaviour such
as many a country has taken several hundred years to evolve; and not always
with so much conviction’. ‘Personal liberty, the freedom of the press’, they go
on to declare,

are guaranteed, and the care and protection of the young and old are the subject of
specific requirements.... Discrimination on grounds of race, social origin, language or
religion invites severe penalties. Freedom to form or join trade unions and other
associations, and to contract out of them, is another constitutional guarantee, as is the
right to assemble without notification or approval. ... These freedoms and limitations
on the executive power are watched over by an independent judiciary. . .. Few nations
can in the nature of things have jumped the wide gulf which separates hereditary tribal
rule from universal suffrage with as much alacrity. It was an act of voluntary and
*
enthusiastic faith on the part of successive rulers.
There is, to put it mildly, cause to doubt whether all the fashionable, contem­
porary rights and freedoms enumerated here are anything more than an

H. V. F. Winstone and Zahra Freeth, Kuwait: Prospect and Reality, London, 1972, pp. 212-13.