Kuwait as a sectarian model is the single positive case John Kiriakou will name when asked whether any Middle Eastern country has managed a transition toward democracy. He offers it with a qualification attached — “it’s not a perfect model” — as a country that has at least begun a transition into a uniquely Middle Eastern form of semi-democracy.[1]
How the franchise was won
Kiriakou dates the process to street protest. Kuwaitis marched in the 1980s and into the 1990s; there were riots, the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, and a dozen or two dozen people would be arrested and released a few weeks or months later.[1]
What he treats as decisive is that it did not stop. The marches continued after the Iraqi invasion and occupation and after the re-establishment of the monarchy, until the royal family finally agreed that there had to be democratic elections.[2]
He does not present the result as clean. The elections were stacked, in that the constitution was rewritten so that tribal families received an inordinately large number of parliamentary seats. His argument is about what happened afterwards: over the years even those tribal families turned in favour of democracy, so that while there is still a monarchy it is much more of a constitutional monarchy than it was twenty or thirty years ago.[2][3]
The episode he volunteers against himself
Having been offered agreement, Kiriakou interrupts to add the part that cuts against his own case — “may I add something to that too?”[4]
Kuwait, he says, had a tough time with elements of its Shia community in the early 1980s. There was a Hezbollah presence in the country, and the Kuwaiti royal family reacted with a very heavy hand: they went in and literally flattened with bulldozers an entire Shia neighbourhood where the cell had established itself. They killed people. They arrested a lot of people.[4]
The turn he records is what came next — that they then immediately began trying to rebuild sectarian relations in the country, a reversal he attributes in part to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.[5]
Where it left the country
Kiriakou puts the country at 40 or 45 per cent Shia under a Sunni royal family, with Shia heavily represented in the assembly, Shia cabinet ministers, and prominent Shia business families among the country’s merchant houses. People, he says, seem to get along well in Kuwait.[5][6]
Asked what is being done differently at the base, he gives the whole answer in a sentence: “they’ve given Shia Muslims exactly the same rights that Sunnis have. Plain and simple.”[6]