Page 83 - The Arabian Gulf States_Neat

INTRODUCTION 21
representing the Kuwaiti branch of the Arab Nationalist Movement
won, to the surprise of many optimistic observers, only four of the
scats of the new National Assembly. This was a great setback to this
group of Kuwaiti intellectuals, headed by their leader, Dr Ahmad
al-Khatib, who himself was defeated by his less popular opponent.
These election results, which were, obviously, unfavourable to the
Kuwaiti educated and progressive class, prompted ‘a group of 38
candidates, including six successful ones, backed up by five of Kuwait's
seven newspapers and a number of other organisations’, to accuse the
government of flagrant interference in the elections. In protest against
these alleged irregularities, the six successful candidates, who would
have represented the only opposition group in the new parliament,
submitted their resignations. The Government, on the other hand,
denied allegations of interference in the elections. At the same time,
it took ‘disciplinary measures’ against a number of newspapers which
criticised the Government for its. improper conduct in the election.
The Government, however, promised to submit all the election com­
plaints for review by the special electoral committee, but it refused the
demands for declaring the elections null and void.1
The present row for political power in Kuwait underlies the great
strains through which the new democratic experiment is passing in
this small, but fabulously rich, country, where the temporary inter­
marriage of 1963, between the traditional ruling family and their sup­
porters from the aristocratic merchant and bedouin families and the
new Kuwaiti educated middle class, has already collapsed. The
absence of a badly needed ‘intelligent opposition’ in the present
Kuwaiti parliament is, of course, much regretted by many admirers
of Kuwait’s democratic system. The Al-Sabah rulers, who are credited
by the Economist with having ‘marvellously handled the problems of
their co-existence with democracy’, are, nevertheless, criticised for
having ‘shown themselves followers rather than leaders, too ready to
shelter behind an assembly which some suspect was created for this
very purpose’.2
The Judicial System: since 1960, a codified system of law, based
largely upon the Egyptian judicial system, has been established. The
organisation of the judicial system was initiated Some years before
independence when a judicial committee was appointed, under the
chairmanship of a well-known Egyptian jurist, Dr fAbd al-Razzaq
al-Sanhuri, for the purpose of promulgating modern civil and criminal
laws.3
1 See EuropaPublications,op. cit.,p. 380; N1EES, No. 12,20 January and No. 14,
^February 1967; The Economist, 21 January 1967, p. 217; The Times, 3 February

2 The Economist, 21 January 1967, p. 217.
3 From I960, Shari'ah courts were successfully replaced by modern civil courts.
The modern laws promulgated at that period included the following: The Law for