After the Sheikhs
Page 30
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.126 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.127 With a government spokesmen having describing the protestors as ‘traitors who aim at toppling the regime’128 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’.129
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’,130 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 minister131 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.132 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’.133
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.134 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 companies135 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.136 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.137 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’.138
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’.139 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 chan
ge 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’.140
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’,141 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.142 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.143
As a further response to the petition the authorities also moved to weaken the civil society organisations involved by dismissing their elected board members and replacing them with government-appointed individuals. A group of loyalist lawyers then began preparing a counter petition and a ‘statement of allegiance’ to demonstrate the profession’s supposed commitment to the regime, with their spokesperson stating that ‘we, the lawyers, call upon all citizens to deny activists’ allegations denouncing our government. We ourselves are united in refuting these false claims, and remain fully loyal to His Highness President Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan… and all other crown princes and rulers’. Moreover, their statement also claimed that ‘…activists who try to incite others against the government are therefore creating unnecessary civil unrest and attempting to destabilise the country’.144 Although the lawyers were careful not to refer specifically to the political prisoners, stating that ‘this is not directed at the detained people, as the independent judiciary in the UAE classifies everyone innocent until proven guilty’ there was nonetheless little doubt that the government attempted to manipulate the trial of the UAE Five. In particular, loyalist rallies outside the court buildings were staged while relatives of the accused were harassed upon entering and leaving the buildings. Most interestingly, the authorities also attempted to influence public opinion by encouraging a number of tribal leaders to denounce the men and even file law suits on behalf of tribes that felt the activism had ‘offended the state and nation’. The state-backed media, however, provided details of only one such tribal meeting and resulting denouncement145—an Abu Dhabi-based tribe which includes one of the ruler’s key advisors among its senior members and which for historic reasons has been extremely loyal to the ruling family.146 Interestingly, a senior member of Al-Shehhi’s tribe—the Shihuh—was reluctant to condemn him, being quoted as saying ‘we still do not know the nature of the accusations directed against Ahmad Al-Shehhi as of yet, nor if he has been officially charged… thus, how are we expected to denounce him before any official accusation takes place?’147
With the UAE Five in prison and with www.uaehewar.net eventually going offline after the website’s owners were unable to renew its subscription from their prison cells, the government shifted its focus to top-down reforms and distributing largesse to the national population. In addition to an expansion of the electorate for the September 2011 Federal National Council elections, massive salary increases were also announced for public sector employees, in some cases of up to 100 per cent, while welfare benefits were increased by up to 20 per cent and a $2.7 billion package to assist poorer nationals with outstanding loans was set up. Interviewed by a state-backed newspaper, ministerial employees benefiting from the salary increases stated ‘this is not the first time the President has surprised us with his generosity… it is not about the financial benefit, but about how the people of the country are taken care of’ and ‘it was a big surprise that makes everyone happy, it is like a prize for all’. Similarly, other interviewees stated they planned to use the increases to buy new cars, indulge their wives and children, and upgrade rooms in their houses.148 A seemingly minor perk, highly symbolic free parking permits for UAE nationals in Dubai, was also announced.149
In parallel to this spending programme, it was exposed in May 2011 that the UAE had been hiring a private army of foreign soldiers. Much like the focus on mercenaries in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it seemed that the UAE authorities were similarly unwilling to take any chances on uncontrollable street protests in the wake of the Arab Spring. Revealed by the New York Times in an extensive report, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi had been employing the founder of Blackwater, a private military company, to create a secret 800-strong force made up of Columbian and South African fighters. At a cost of over $500 million, a base had been constructed in Abu Dhabi’s interior and the men brought into the UAE posing as construction workers. According to documents associated with the project, the force’s raison d’être was to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks, and—crucially—‘put down internal revolts’. Further to this latter objective, the report also stated that the Blackwater founder was under strict instructions to hire no Muslim mercenaries as ‘Muslim soldiers… could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims’, while another document associated with the project described ‘crowdcontrol operations where the crowd is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons such as clubs and stones’.150
Within days of a November 2011 report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which concluded that the imprisonment of the UAE Five was arbitrary and that the UAE government should release the men and pay them reparations,151 they were freed in time for the UAE’s national day celebrations on 2 December. Although the men were convicted of ‘publicly insulting the UAE’s leaders’, sentenced to three years imprisonment, and then pardoned within 24 hours—seemingly in an effort to portray Abu Dhabi’s ruler as being magnanimous—their names were not cleared of the supposed crime. Nonetheless, soon after their release UAE Five immediately resumed their online activities, appearing stronger than before. They renewed most of their demands and were quickly followed by thousands of UAE nationals on various social media platforms. By the end of the year the opposition seemed to have broadened, with the government facing further criticism for stripping seven Islamist critics, including a judge, of their citizenship. Referred to as the ‘UAE Seven’, they claimed they were ‘unjustly targeted for their political views’ after having earlier signed a petition on behalf of an indigenous Islamist organisation entitled the Reform and Social Guidance Association152 which was calling for an end to ‘all oppressive measures against advocates of reform in the country’.153
Over the course of 2012 the situation has greatly deteriorated. In March a young UAE national154 was arrested for tweeting about the Arab Spring. He was accused of ‘damaging national security and social peace’ and handed over to a state security court,155 before being re-arrested at a mosque in April. In May a prominent stateless person156—one of the original UAE Five and well known for running a website detailing the plight of the UAE’s bidoon—was arrested, stripped of his re
sidency papers, and deported to Thailand—a country he had never visited before.157 By the end of July dozens more activists had been arrested, bringing the total number of political prisoners to fifty-four. These included academics, human rights activists, Islamists, and even a ruling family member.158 The former of director of Abu Dhabi’s educational zone159 and former president of the Jurists’ Association160 were arrested along with a number of lawyers,161 some of whom were detained when they tried to represent arrested activists.162 In some cases the sons of these have men were imprisoned163 and lawyers from Kuwait and Qatar trying to travel to the UAE to defend the detainees were denied entry. Interestingly, the fifty-four prisoners represent all seven emirates, almost all had active Twitter accounts prior to their arrests, and they represent more or less the full spectrum of opposition in the country. Most are being held without charge and several have reported incidents of torture, with some having been beaten or followed by plain clothes security prior to their detainments. One prisoner, originally detained for being a member of a terrorist organisation, was then accused of Muslim Brotherhood membership, before finally being officially accused of embezzlement at his workplace.164