05/12/2016
18283 times read
05/12/2016
18283 times read
![Ahmed Al-Jarallah – Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times](https://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ahmed-Al-Jarallah-200.jpg)
EVERY citizen has right to express his/her opinion on national issues and Ahmad Al-Saadoun, who recently expressed his views explicitly on the Al-Jazeera Channel is not the exception.
However, he erred during the interview when he said democracy is the security of Kuwait because of which the country was protected in the past.
I believe the Kuwaiti democracy which Abu Abdul-Aziz talked about is quite different from the one we knew and established scientifically.
There is no doubt he was one of the major players who promoted the wrong concept of a relationship between the government and people. Whoever has followed him will understand that he was talking about messy issues which prevailed over the past forty years until they snowballed into severe internal crises.
This has nothing to do with democracy which we see in the United Kingdom, the United States, France and other countries where respect for the rule of law determines the relationship among various segments of the society.
It is not the parliamentary dictatorship that has been practiced by some individuals to eliminate others and trample upon the institutions. They do not restrict the activities to blackmail and exchange interests among members of both the executive and the legislature as it is done here.
Al-Saadoun is a major player who has supported the selfish attitudes to such an extent that violating the Constitution is regarded as a general attitude in democracy.
This attitude has dragged the country into a complicated crisis in the past. It led to the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1985 and Al-Saadoun and his like were fully responsible for that historical incident.
This is especially when they went to the extremes and violated the Constitution. The so-called ‘Monday Diwaniyas’ was a political coup. The situation sent wrong signals to the one who was then secluded in Iraq, who mistook it for a popular outcry and invaded Kuwait.
Ahmad Al-Saadoun must have certainly realized the price paid because of his wrong signals he sent to Baghdad during that period. He surely remembers how the Iraqis interpreted the visit of the Kuwaiti delegation which he headed to Baghdad a few days prior the invasion.
Saddam Hussein looked at the visit as a plea and took the opportunity to foment crisis, so in other words the type of democracy Al-Saadoun was talking about made invasion easy.
Nobody in Kuwait disproves the fact that genuine patriotism rescued Kuwait and the liberation from the occupation made easy rather than what Abu Abdul-Aziz said.
Hence, the best thing for the agitators of democracy is to correct past mistakes rather than returning to old ways. They should not indulge in extreme political adolescence by putting at risk the fate of the country in the process of actualizing selfish interests, as was the situation when Al-Saadoun was Speaker of the Parliament.
This political adolescence manifested in the rejection of the one-man one-vote system that accomplishes fair representation of the citizens, while curtailing the spread of tribalism and sectarianism.
The system also contains suspicious surrogates who are under obligation to execute external agenda. The outcome of the recent elections has strengthened national immunity derived from that law.
In the past, large sections of the society were deprived of parliamentary representation, because the election mechanism was massively faulty and we have seen the price paid by Kuwait in that regard, especially in the area of development and economy.
It nearly put at risk the national security too while we continued to float the negative experiences of the eighties, but the invader this time around was the Mullah regime and no Kuwaiti or a GCC citizen need to dig for facts to know about that regime.
The kind of anti-democracy ‘rhetoric’ promoted by Al-Saadoun almost disintegrated Bahrain and offered it to the regime in Tehran on a silver platter to make the invasion of Manama smooth.
We all saw what happened at what used to be known as the Lulwa (Pearl) Roundabout in Manama — the erection of the four gallows and hoisting of the flags, amid whimsical Iranian slogans and speeches, seeking assistance from the Revolutionary Guard.
To add insult to injury, the Iranian warships were on standby to invade by the time it dawned on Tehran agents to repent in Manama.
Again, a quick glance at modern history will help Ahmad Al-Saadoun, see what the ‘anti-democracy’ has done to the Egypt of King Farouq, Tunisia during the era of Al-Bay, Iraq of King Faisal, Libya of Al-Sanousi and Syria.
He should also understand that whoever created chaos shouted in the name of democracy to rescue his own victims thus playing the role of a hangman and victim simultaneously.
This surely cannot be hidden from Kuwaitis who are more enlightened beyond the imagination of Al-Saadoun and his like who are promoting chaos under the pretext of democracy.
By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times