Saudis hold their last all-male election

Saudi cit­i­zens sit as they wait to cast their votes at polling sta­tion dur­ing the munic­i­pal elec­tions in Riyadh, Saudi Ara­bia, Thurs­day. King Abdul­lah of Saudi Ara­bia granted women on Sept. 25, 2011, the right to vote and run in munic­i­pal elec­tions from 2015 onwards, a his­toric first for the ultra-conservative coun­try where women are sub­jected to many restric­tions. (ASSOCIATED PRESS | HASSAN AMMAR)

ABDULLAH AL-SHIHRI

Asso­ci­ated Press

RIYADH, Saudi Ara­bia — Saudi Ara­bia held its sec­ond nation­wide vote ever on Thurs­day, a male-only elec­tion for pow­er­less munic­i­pal coun­cils. The bal­lot­ing comes just days after the king decreed that women will be able to par­tic­i­pate for the first time in the next local elec­tions in 2015, a mea­sure likely aimed at head­ing off Arab Spring-style dis­sent in the kingdom.

The elec­tion and Sunday’s decree to give women the vote are two exam­ples of the baby steps King Abdul­lah has been tak­ing to reform and mod­ern­ize his oil-rich nation since he ascended the throne in 2005. Though small, they are sig­nif­i­cant by the stan­dards of his ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive coun­try — home to Islam’s holi­est shrines and vastly influ­enced by the cler­i­cal establishment.

Still the reforms sig­nal the rul­ing fam­ily is not ready for deep change, even as pop­u­lar upris­ings are trans­form­ing the face of an Arab world long accus­tomed to absolute mon­archs — like the Saudi king — dic­ta­tors and fraud­u­lently elected leaders.

“They are glacial changes,” Salman Shaikh, direc­tor of the Brook­ings Cen­ter in Doha, Qatar, said of the recent decree on women. “But King Abdul­lah is the only man who can push change. Unfor­tu­nately, it has been too slow.”

The Saudi king­dom is nowhere close to any of its Arab neigh­bors, not even those in the con­ser­v­a­tive Gulf region, when it comes to basic rights, free­doms and gen­der equal­ity. The king rules with absolute power and shows zero tol­er­ance for polit­i­cal dissent.

The rul­ing Al-Saud fam­ily has a near monop­oly on top gov­ern­ment posts and does not answer to any­one out­side the fam­ily. Women are barred from dri­ving and they can­not be mem­bers of the Cab­i­net. They can­not travel either, be admit­ted to hos­pi­tal or take a job with­out per­mis­sion from a male guardian.

On Thurs­day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wel­comed the king’s announce­ment giv­ing women the right to vote. U.N. spokesman Mar­tin Nesirky said in a state­ment that Ban “believes that these rep­re­sent an impor­tant step in the real­iza­tion by women in Saudi Ara­bia of their fun­da­men­tal civil and polit­i­cal rights.”

If giv­ing women the right to vote was hailed as a coura­geous step by the king, some saw it as almost purely symbolic.

“It was a bold and unex­pected move,” said blog­ger Eman al-Nafjan. “It is a start, but what we really need are reforms that improve women’s lot in their every­day life.”

Offi­cial turnout fig­ures were not avail­able for Thursday’s vote. But Saudi media and activists said it was a small slice of the 1.2 mil­lion reg­is­tered vot­ers, a pos­si­ble reflec­tion of the insignif­i­cance Saudis attach to the tooth­less local coun­cils that oper­ate in the shadow of provin­cial gov­ern­ments led by pow­er­ful mem­bers of the rul­ing Al-Saud family.

Some 5,000 peo­ple ran for the more than 1,000 seats on 285 coun­cils across the king­dom. The vot­ers elected half the mem­bers of the coun­cils, the other half will be appointed by the government.

The local coun­cil vote was ini­tially sched­uled for 2009 but was post­poned. The first one was in 2005.

Abdul­lah, 88 and known to have health prob­lems, is hailed among many Saudis as a reformer because of sev­eral bold moves he has taken since com­ing to power. He set up the Shura, or con­sul­ta­tive, coun­cil in 1993 and even though it is an advi­sory body, it allowed some pop­u­lar voice in gov­ern­ment. All 150 mem­bers of the all-male cham­ber are appointed by the king, but women will be appointed to sit on the coun­cil when it starts a new term in 2013.

The jus­tice min­is­ter said in com­ments pub­lished Thurs­day that future female coun­cil mem­bers would not share the same cham­ber with male peers, sug­gest­ing that closed cir­cuits could be used to allow them to par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions. The arrange­ment would con­form with the country’s rigid seg­re­ga­tion of the sexes.

King Abdullah’s reform-minded poli­cies are best evi­denced in the edu­ca­tion sec­tor. He estab­lished the kingdom’s only uni­ver­sity where men and women attend classes together — and in the econ­omy, which he has sig­nif­i­cantly liberalized.

Saudi Arabia’s 18 mil­lion cit­i­zens are mostly con­ser­v­a­tive and, like their king, don’t want to see Western-style reforms change the tra­di­tions and cus­toms of a soci­ety heav­ily inspired by the teach­ings of Islam.

More­over, the Al-Saud fam­ily has had an endur­ing under­stand­ing with the pow­er­ful clergy that dates back to the early years of the last cen­tury, under which the cler­ics’ views are heard on what does and does not con­form with Islam.

What the Saudi cler­i­cal estab­lish­ment has to say is not only heard in the king­dom, but res­onates across the pre­dom­i­nantly Sunni Mus­lim Gulf region, where most fol­low the aus­tere Wah­habi doc­trine born in Saudi Arabia.

“What King Abdul­lah did for the women was prac­ti­cally throw­ing into the bin what his reli­gious estab­lish­ment had to say for years about women’s place in soci­ety,” said Sami Alfaraj, chair­man of the Kuwait Cen­ter for Strate­gic Stud­ies. “I sus­pect that more restric­tions on women will be lifted, but the con­ser­v­a­tive nature of Saudi Ara­bia would not allow women to exer­cise all the rights they may win.”

It is against this back­drop that King Abdul­lah must tread care­fully as he pur­sues even slow and grad­ual reforms: a pow­er­ful clergy, a con­ser­v­a­tive seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, the high expec­ta­tions of the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion that is under 25 and guard­ing against a pos­si­ble spillover from the Arab Spring revolts that could pro­vide his sub­jects with mod­els to follow.

The Saudi monarch has given con­tra­dic­tory sig­nals on how he views the Arab Spring, dis­patch­ing mil­i­tary forces to neigh­bor­ing Bahrain to prop up the rul­ing fam­ily there against a cam­paign for equal rights launched by the tiny nation’s Shi­ite major­ity. Last month, how­ever, he with­drew his ambas­sador from Dam­as­cus in protest against Syr­ian Pres­i­dent Bashar Assad’s crack­down on anti-government protesters.

Posted by AP News on Sep 29 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.