KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT—Obaid Al-Wasmi manoeuvres his thin frame through the swarm of students, shaking extended hands as he makes his way into Kuwait University’s law school. Of hundreds of youths gathered here, some are supporters carrying white roses and others are just curious to see the man who challenged the Kuwaiti government.

Three days earlier, Al-Wasmi was released on bail after spending nearly two months in jail for criticizing the national assembly and accusing elected officials of corruption and undermining the constitution. As the 40-year-old law professor sat in his cell, he became a symbol of protest for hundreds of Kuwaitis, who held rallies in the capital, demanding the government be ousted.

But the protests fizzled and Kuwait’s streets are calm. Many credit the country’s emir, or leader, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, for taking steps to quell any unrest. He recently ordered that cases be dropped against three other outspoken critics of the government. Meanwhile, the interior minister, who oversees Kuwait’s police forces, resigned just days before a planned protest calling for him to be sacked.

And this month, in what’s described as a joint celebration of Kuwait’s 50th anniversary of independence and the 20th anniversary since the Iraqi occupation, the emir handed out $1,000 Kuwaiti dinars — more than $3,500 Canadian — and 14 months of free food rations to every Kuwaiti.

“They want to make Kuwaitis forget what they have the done, the problems,” says Muneera Al-Osimy, a 20-year-old university student.

“But some Kuwaitis, they don’t want the 1,000 KD. They think it’s the price of freedom, of honour, of dignity.”

Even without the money, however, few here think this small, oil-rich country would sprout a revolt like the ones that uprooted the governments in Egypt and Tunisia. All the protesters clarify that their anger is targeted at the ineffective prime minister and a corrupt government, not Sabah Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah. The royal leader’s smiling face is proudly displayed across the country on everything from pins sold at the local bazaar to the rear windows of luxury sports cars driven by Kuwaiti men.

Meanwhile, many nationals and foreign workers say Kuwaitis have little reason to complain. They are coddled by a generous welfare state that provides them with a free education, a guaranteed job and subsidized housing, electricity and food. Most Kuwaitis are too young to remember the days before oil money flooded the country’s coffers, and they can’t relate to the rampant unemployment and skyrocketing food prices that fuel the protesters’ ardour elsewhere in North Africa.

Those who can sympathize are the ones performing the menial jobs, mainly foreign labourers from other Arab countries or South Asia who spend their days cleaning, driving cabs and working in service industries. They make a fraction of what the Kuwaitis earn, and there have been repeated cases of abuse and unpaid wages.

But the foreigners, who account for fully 55 per cent of the country’s population of just 3 million, say they wouldn’t dare protest for fear they would lose their jobs and be jailed or deported.

“There’s no reason for anyone to do protests here,” says 19-year-old Bedour Al-Ruwaished. “If you’re Kuwaiti, you’d be giving up too much. If you’re not Kuwaiti, you’re giving up even more.”

“It is a democracy most of the time.”

The truth is even more complicated than that. In its geographical context, a region rife with autocratic governments and dictators, Kuwait’s constitutional emirate is a model democracy.

The National Assembly is a diverse legislative body, consisting of 50 elected officials who include pro-government nationalists as well as obstreperous opposition members, including Islamic traditionalists, secular reformists and tribal representatives.

Formal political parties are outlawed. Although strong parliamentary blocs have formed into a robust opposition, the government has impeded their progress and activities through harassment and arrest, according to a 2010 report by Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based organization that monitors human and civil rights across the globe.

The parliament has the power to grill appointed cabinet members and the prime minister, and can hold non-confidence votes an increasingly common recourse in recent years as opposition members, almost on cue, call for the resignation of cabinet ministers.

“Any given day there will be plenty of people accusing others of corruption,” says Edward “Skip” Gnehm, U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait in the early 1990s.

But the overriding power remains in the grip of the emir and the Al-Sabah bloodline, which has led Kuwait for more than 250 years. The emir appoints the prime minister, typically a relative who could soon occupy the pedestal of crown prince and heir apparent. He also chooses the cabinet ministers who control the state’s oil industry as well as its extensive welfare system.

Although the elected assembly can veto the emir’s selection for prime minister, they then have to choose from three alternatives put forward by the emir.

“Kuwait is not an electoral democracy,” the Freedom House report said. “The ruling family largely sets the policy agenda and dominates political life.

To question or challenge the emir is not just taboo; it’s outlawed by the constitution. Abdulrahman, a Kuwaiti student at the Gulf University for Science and Technology who insisted only his first name be used, remembers helping his younger brother study for a seventh grade history test, only to notice that details about infighting within the royal family had been removed from when he had taken the course only a few years earlier.

“They deleted anything that might have tarnished the Al-Sabah (family),” says Abdulrahman.

In Kuwait, slandering the emir is “more serious than criticizing Allah,” observes Thaqal Al-Amji, an international law professor at Kuwait University, and could land the offender five years in jail.

But the protesters’ complaints aren’t targeted at the emir. Like all Kuwaitis, Al-Mutairi says, he loves and respects their leader. Even Al-Wasmi, whose demands are more radical than those of many of his supporters and involve stripping power from the emir and letting voters elect their prime minister, has no desire to remove the monarchy.

“We want to change the way the government is administrated,” he says.

Kuwaiti dissidents don’t want a revolution. They just want to fix the problems they say plague their government, chief among those being corruption. Kuwait was ranked 54 out of 178 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index. The same organization’s 2009 corruption barometer found that 28 per cent of Kuwaitis surveyed believed civil servants were “very corrupt” — an unsettling figure considering 90 per cent of Kuwaitis work in the public sector.

“Some companies are getting contracts from the government year after year,” says Al-Mutairi. “Most of those companies are connected to people inside the parliament.” Despite being 31 years old, the wiry mechanical engineer considers himself part of a growing contingent of Kuwaiti youth who “feel betrayed” by the government.

They became active dissenters shortly after Dec. 8, when Kuwaiti special forces clad in blue-and-white camouflage stormed a private gathering where Al-Wasmi was delivering a speech. They dragged the professor outside and clubbed him with bright yellow batons, witnesses said. He was arrested for criticizing the government three days later.

A youth protest bloc dubbed the Fifth Wall launched a Twitter account, demanding the unelected cabinet resign. The activists tweeted criticisms against the “government and its undemocratic practices,” including an apparent coverup of a police killing. In January, 16 officers were charged for torturing a man to death. The interior minister initially told parliament the man had died after complaining of chest pains and resisting arrest, but the medical report showed he had bruises and injuries all over his body. The government then postponed parliamentary sessions, delaying an inquiry into the killing.

The numbers of readers swelled to thousands as the Twitter account, and ones like it, became a news source for some young Kuwaitis.

“They give me the truth,” says student Muneera Al-Osiny. “They give me the real things going on.” Al-Osimy adds that local independent media outlets often censor themselves to avoid breaking Kuwait’s extensive publication laws, which generally ban any material that can be seen as spreading dissent among the public.

“In the last five years, freedom of speech has gone down,” says law professor Al-Amji. “We criticized the prime minister, the ministers before. No one went to jail for that. The prime minister now, he’s intolerant of such criticism.”

The protest group Fifth Wall stressed it wasn’t connected to the protests in Egypt or Tunisia. But with the world’s focus on the Arab world, it appears they were emboldened by them. They called for massive protest on Dec. 8 outside Kuwait’s National Assembly, breaking a new government law that banned public rallies.

Three days before the protest, the emir accepted the interior minister’s resignation. The bottom fell out of the protest. While the Twitter account announced it was postponing the rally until March, about 20 protesters still arrived outside Kuwait’s National Assembly. Within minutes, security shooed them away from the building.

The Fifth Wall’s Twitter account has been silent since Feb. 8, as have any whispers of future anti-government protests.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

But tonight, as Al Jazeera streams live footage of thousands of Egyptians crammed into Tahrir Square, at this point still waiting for Hosni Mubarak to resign, the conversation focuses on one thing: protest.

The anti-government protesters are a small minority in Kuwait, the men say. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other Kuwaitis who don’t share their beliefs, contends 27-year-old Ahmaid Al-Fraih, who admits he agrees with some of the activists’ convictions.

“A lot of people here have the same beliefs as the Fifth Wall,” Al-Fraih says in Arabic. “But they’re talking about the issues in diwaniyah.”

Al-Mansour’s diwaniyah is more relaxed than the weekly forum his father holds, a formal affair the likes of which members of parliament occasionally attend to get a gauge of the public’s stance on certain issues. The room is bare except for a low, wrap-around couch, a TV rigged with a satellite channels and a video game console, and a soiled carpet. Apart from the traditional Kuwaiti tea and Arabic coffee, the men dine on chips, chocolate and pop.

But what goes on inside Al-Mansour’s room is no less important than such gatherings involving older men. In fact, in a country where the median age is 28, Al-Mansour and his friends, all young professionals in their mid-20s, represent average Kuwaitis. So, it’s telling that even dissident-friendly Al-Fraih says he wouldn’t join a protest outside the parliament. He doubts many people would.

“My opinion would reach anyone in Kuwait if I speak at this diwaniyah or another, because Kuwait is small,” he insists.

After an hour, Al-Mansour drives his Land Rover a few minutes away to a second diwaniyah. As the rest of the men sit, slurping tea kept warm by hot coals, Al-Mansour takes a straw poll: do you support the government or protesters?

The men side six to one with the government. To several of them, a Kuwaiti protester is nothing more than a troublemaker.

“Kuwaiti people have everything: I have a good salary, I have food, I have a home,” Al-Mansour says. Things might not be perfect with the government, he continues, but there’s no need to storm the parliament. “You don’t need to be loud to be heard.”

Nationals are guaranteed government jobs with attractive salaries and benefit packages (while 10 per cent of Kuwaitis do work in the private sector, they receive monthly subsidies if their salaries are below those earned by government employees). They also receive a free education, government-paid dowries, subsidized mortgages and the occasional cheque doled out by the emir.

“Kuwaitis are pampered,” says one professor. Like several foreign scholars working in Kuwait, he spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing he could be fired for saying anything ill of the country. “The simplest way to put it is this: life is very good in Kuwait if you are Kuwaiti.”

That “if” represents only about 45 per cent of the population. The majority living here are foreigners. Many of them earn as little as 35 KD a month, the equivalent of $124, and live in crowded tenements, sometimes sleeping 14 men per room.

There are also the bidoon, some 100,000 stateless residents who have no citizen rights and “often live in wretched conditions,” the Freedom House report said.

It’s these people who could likely sympathize with the struggle and anger of the protesters in Egypt and Tunisia, says Julius Rivera, an articulate, 30-year-old Filipino who works at a call centre for a Kuwaiti phone company. When the emir gave out the 1,000 KD grant to all nationals, stores across the country raised their prices, he notes. The price for a half-litre of milk jumped by 25 per cent.

“The emir gave the money and the foreigners suffered,” he says flatly. “But they won’t protest.”

It’s not that foreign workers haven’t lashed out before. In 2005, 800 Bangladeshi expats raided their embassy in Kuwait after their ambassador failed to help them recoup five months of unpaid wages. Three years later, nearly 300 cleaners staged a sit-in at the country’s Ministry of Education, to again protest months of not being paid their paltry 25 KD ($88) salary. The gathering prompted a Kuwaiti politician to demand all Bangladeshis be expelled from the country, saying the workers’ “immoral” actions had “exceeded the limit and threatens dire consequences for the country.”

Rivera and his friend, R.V. Umali, question whether foreigners want to risk getting kicked out over better pay or working conditions.

Kuwait is a safer place to live than the Philippines, Umali says. He considers himself lucky to have a job. If they protested, both men feel they would likely be jailed or deported — and would no longer be able to send money home to their children.

“That’s a big hassle for the people waiting for money every month,” Umali says. “They need you. So you deal with it, you know?”

“He has told us his opinion and opened our minds,” says law student Ibraheem Khraibet. Then the “but:” “I think he expressed his opinion the wrong way just a little bit. He was too honest.”

He adds: “Kuwaiti people like the government, I think.”

There’s applause after Al-Wasmi’s speech, part earnest, part obligatory. As the reception wraps up, the students disperse, some still chatting and texting away, content with their Kuwait as is.

Read more about: