Gulf women make slow progress towards winning political rights

DUBAI - Women in the Gulf Arab states have made headway towards gaining political rights, albeit at a slow pace. With the United States increasingly clamouring for democracy in the Middle East, calls for women’s enfranchisement are reverberating across the Gulf states now more than ever.

Even in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, women, who are still banned from driving, are demanding a change to the status quo.

Though Saudi women have been deprived of taking part in landmark municipal elections, rare statements are being made by the kingdom’s officials that women could cast their ballots next time round.

Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE, meanwhile, have all overtaken Kuwait in partially empowering their women, even though the tiny emirate was the first Gulf Arab state to adopt parliamentary democracy in 1962.

Women occupy senior posts in Kuwait’s public and private sectors but are still battling for their right to vote amid discrimination from hardcore Islamists who say that they have no political rights under Islamic sharia law.

The hardliners are now on the offensive to counter a government-led drive to grant women their rights, which they narrowly lost out on in 1999, when parliament voted down a bill proposed by the emir.

A new bill, approved by the cabinet last May, calls for amending the election law and could be debated by parliament this month.

“The government is absolutely determined this time. It is exerting efforts, making contacts and throwing its full weight behind the bill,” said Sami al-Nesf, media advisor to the Kuwaiti premier.

But prominent Kuwaiti activist Lulwa al-Mulla said women’s enfranchisement in her country is less to do with the seriousness of the government than with the wind of change sweeping across other Gulf states.

“We are behind (other Gulf states). We were in the lead and now we are at the end of the line, and this is shameful,” Mulla, secretary general of the Women’s Socio-Cultural Society, told AFP.

“It’s time Kuwaiti women had their rights, there’s no excuse otherwise,” she said, pointing out that Kuwait’s constitution stipulates that all citizens are equal.

But Mulla said she was not optimistic women would win the vote this time round, as hardliners, a number of them lawmakers, are rallying anew against women “under the veil of Islam and Sharia ... merely for electoral interests.”

In Oman, where there are three female cabinet ministers, Lujaina Mohsin Darwish, one of two women in Oman’s elected Shura (Consultative) Council, argued: “There’s no differentiation between men and women.”

“Omani men don’t look at women as competitors but as complementing them,” she told AFP.

“I see Omani women in all places, at all levels,” said Samia al-Wuhaibi, a veiled 25-year-old Omani who cleans rooms in a Muscat hotel.

“There’s no discrimination,” insisted Wuhaibi, whose one sister is a policewoman and another a computer technician.

In the UAE, Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, a US-educated businesswoman in her forties, was named economy and planning minister in November, marking the highest-ranking post ever held by a woman in the Gulf region.

In Qatar and Bahrain too conditions for women at the helm have improved, with Doha naming several females to key posts in recent years.

A woman was named Qatari education minister in May 2003, becoming the first in the Gulf to be given a seat in government. That was four years after Qatari women voted for the first time in municipal polls and ran for office, though none won a seat.

Bahraini women voted in a referendum on a national charter in 2001, and ran for office in municipal and legislative elections the following year, but none were elected.

AFP