The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Political parties remained banned, but opposition activists were allowed to form political societies that effectively played the same role. In 2002 alone, sixty-five civil society organizations were set up, including eleven political groups and thirteen professional associations. By the end of 2003, more than 300 NGOs had been created, including independent human rights groups.39 Among the significant political groups established was Al Wefaq, or Harmony, which brought together a number of mainly Shi'ite Islamist opposition groups and figures under the leadership of the youthful cleric Sheikh Ali Salman, who like many of its members had been exiled during the 1990s. Another prominent group was Waad, or Promise, a secular leftist group that was led from 2005 by the Sunni opposition activist Ibrahim Sharif. These groups devised political programmes and began to hold meetings that openly discussed their vision for the future of Bahrain.

  King Hamad allowed the establishment of the country's first opposition newspaper, Al-Wasat, or the Centre, in 2002. Its editor-in-chief Mansoor al-Jamri was the formerly exiled son of the late Sheikh Abdul Amir al-Jamri, who had been the country's top Shi'ite cleric, an MP in the dissolved 1973 parliament and a leader of the 1990s uprising who had spent years in detention. Over the ensuing decade, Al-Wasat played an important role in opening up political debate, criticizing ministerial policies, breaking taboos and publishing investigative features almost unheard of in the hitherto staid and loyalist Bahraini press.

  The new reforms were not limited to politics either. Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who had been educated in Washington and at Britain's Cambridge University and was little older than thirty when his father became king, was put in charge of implementing the new reforms, which stretched to housing and urban development. The crown prince began a programme of economic reforms that sought to encourage foreign investment, to increase transparency and to break the stranglehold on the economy of old patronage networks run by his uncle, the prime minister.

  Hopes were high, so when the king finally promulgated a new constitution in 2002, as promised by the National Action Charter, many Bahrainis were disappointed by what appeared to be an effort to concentrate power in the ruler's hands behind a facade of elections to a disempowered parliament. While the charter had stipulated a bicameral system, many were dismayed to see that the appointed upper house would have the same legislative powers as the elected house and would be able to block its laws. Any laws would have to be passed by a majority in both houses and be approved by the king, who could also pass his own rulings by decree.40 The shape of the new constitution, and the way it was issued by unilateral decree and without further consultation, revived a deep-seated mistrust of the monarchy's intentions among politically active Bahrainis. Many opposition groups now felt that, despite the new assurances that they would be allowed broader political participation, power over the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and the resources of the country, would remain firmly in the hands of the Al Khalifa family.41

  Despite the disappointment over the new constitution, life in Bahrain improved for many. After boycotting the 2002 elections, Al Wefaq and its allies ran in both the 2006 and the 2010 elections. Al Wefaq won seventeen and eighteen seats respectively in the forty-seat chamber, cementing its place as the most popular opposition group and the single largest representative of Bahraini Shi'ites.

  Once inside parliament, Al Wefaq was involved in raising sensitive corruption cases and leading a groundbreaking parliamentary probe into land deals that appeared to blur the line between private- and public-sector property. The outspoken and combative attitude of Al Wefaq and other opposition groups broadened the scope of public discussion in Bahrain.42 Politics was back and the media became more outspoken, taking advantage of the new opening that now made Bahrain the most politically vibrant Gulf country after Kuwait.

  The economy was also booming. Riding a wave of oil price rises that had enriched the Gulf Arab region, Bahrain built hotels and luxury apartment blocks, reclaiming land to use for new developments. The crown prince was instrumental in bringing Formula One motor racing to the island and the inaugural Grand Prix was held in 2004, putting Bahrain on the map and attracting thousands of visitors with cash to splash each year.

  Yet eight years after elections were reintroduced, it felt to some that participation in the electoral process would not translate into influence on state policy. While almost half the elected parliament was Shi'ite, only a handful of Shi'ites had been appointed to the cabinet since the introduction of the 2002 constitution, reinforcing the impression of a systematic effort to keep them from high office and a growing sense that elections were just democratic window-dressing for what remained a near-absolute monarchy.

  The monarchy's domination of government also raised the ire of prominent Sunni families, who felt they too were being locked out of politics. Of twenty-five ministerial portfolios, twelve were held by members of the Al Khalifa family in 2010. These predictably included all the important ministries such as interior, defence, foreign affairs, finance and justice. The prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, was the king's uncle and had been premier since before independence in 1971. A conservative with close ties to Saudi Arabia and a vast web of businesses that the opposition believed posed serious conflicts of interest, Khalifa saw the new reforms as a threat.43

  The king and the crown prince faced pressure from opposition groups and the Shi'ite community to speed up their political reforms, but at the same time were encountering strong resistance from Khalifa and other conservatives inside the royal family. Bahrain's new ruler was also facing resistance from Saudi Arabia, which was concerned that Bahrain's reforms were moving too fast and could awaken political ambitions among nationals across the Gulf region, where they lived largely under absolute and hereditary rulers.44

  The limits of Bahrain's independence, and of the king's ability to pursue such dramatic policy shifts without the blessing of Saudi Arabia, came into stark relief when it signed a free trade agreement with the United States in 2004 without the consent of its neighbour. Bahrain, part of the Gulf Cooperation Council, already enjoyed free trade with the six members of that economic and political bloc. Outraged by this display of independence, Saudi Arabia cut the 50,000 barrels-per-day donation of additional oil it granted to Bahrain from the shared Abu Safa field.45

  Bahrain's experiment with political reform was also taking place in a tense regional atmosphere that complicated what may otherwise have been seen as largely domestic policies. Sectarian tension had already increased across the Middle East in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, which toppled a Sunni ruler and ushered in a new era in which the Shi'ite community, the largest in that country's religious and ethnic mosaic, would dominate government. From the point of view of Saudi Arabia and the region's other Sunni rulers, the biggest winner from the 2003 invasion was Iran, which enjoyed booming trade, good relations with the Baghdad government, and influence among Shi'ite Islamist groups and militias that it had supported during decades in exile. In 2004, Jordan's King Abdullah spoke with concern about the rise of what he described as a ‘Shi'ite crescent’ stretching from Iran through Iraq all the way to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. Al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists reacted to this Shi'ite resurgence with violence, recruiting suicide bombers from around the Arab world. Huge car bombs began to go off in Iraq's Shi'ite neighbourhoods and outside Shi'ite mosques on festival days, while Shi'ite militias ran amok as sectarian violence reached new highs.

  It was not just Iraq that became a proxy battleground in the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but Lebanon too. A standoff between Saudi-backed Sunnis and Iranian-backed Shi'ites pushed that country from one political crisis to the next in the late 2000s. Tiny Bahrain could not escape this new regional context that increasingly tinged the political struggle in that country with sectarian overtones. For Saudi Arabia, political reform in Bahrain posed a threat. Successful reforms could raise expectations among Saudi Arabia's own Shi'ite M
uslims, who were clustered in the Eastern Province, home to most of the country's oil facilities, and were linked to their co-religionists in Bahrain by the King Fahd Causeway.

  By the mid-2000s, in a regional atmosphere of growing sectarian tension, and faced with serious opposition to reform from inside the royal camp, trust was beginning to erode. The ‘Bandargate’ scandal that erupted in 2006 appeared to confirm the worst fears of Bahrain's Shi'ites. Salah Bandar, a British-Sudanese government adviser, blew the whistle on a secret five-year plan by a senior royal to exacerbate sectarian tensions and minimize the representation of Shi'ite groups who had decided to run in the 2006 elections.46 The report was never substantiated and opposition groups went on to perform respectably in the polls, but it is widely seen by Shi'ites as proof that behind the facade of reform, there was a conspiracy to keep their community down.

  Increasingly, Bahraini Shi'ites complained that non-Bahraini Sunnis were being encouraged to immigrate for work and apply for citizenship in a systematic effort to remake the country's religious, national and social fabric. State officials say that foreigners are naturalized in accordance with the law, which requires that Arabs live in Bahrain for fifteen years, and non-Arabs for twenty-five years. However, the law makes allowances for Arabs who have offered unspecified ‘great services’, and it gives the king the right to grant citizenship to whomsoever he pleases. In 2008, the government announced that it had naturalized just 7,012 people in the previous five years, including nearly 3,600 Asians and over 3,300 Arabs.47 It did not give their religions, but their nationalities suggest they are likely to have been Sunni. In 2001, the government naturalized 8,000 Saudi members of the Dawasir tribe, who continued to hold Saudi passports and live across the bridge, while also giving citizenship to about 1,000 stateless Shi'ites.48

  Activists complained that the real numbers were far larger and accused the monarchy of diluting any opening-up of the political arena with 'political naturalization’ of Sunnis. By 2007, estimates cited in a subsequently leaked US embassy cable suggested that almost 40,000 people had received Bahraini passports, with controversy surrounding some 5,000 applications apparently rushed through ahead of the 2006 elections.49 By 2009, the issue had become such a point of antagonism that MPs from the main Shi'ite opposition group, Al Wefaq, wore ‘No to political naturalization’ buttons on their clothing and held regular demonstrations against the practice.50

  Whatever the sectarian balance in Bahrain, Shi'ites complained that their numbers were not reflected accurately at the ballot box because of gerrymandering. They said electoral constituencies were drawn up to give a disproportionate number of seats in parliament to sparsely-populated areas that were mainly Sunni, compared to densely-populated regions that were Shi'ite-dominated, effectively meaning that a Shi'ite vote was not worth as much as a Sunni vote. As Bahrainis have tended to broadly vote along sectarian lines since the country's first election in 1973,51 the effect was to give Sunni candidates a slight majority in the elected house, even though Shi'ites are widely believed to at least equal and most probably outnumber them.52

  Some Shi'ite activists also claimed that efforts were afoot to segregate Bahrain by refusing to sell land in some Sunni-majority areas to Shi'ites. In 2007, a Shi'ite cleric complained to the US embassy that Shi'ites had been banned from buying land in the old town of Muharraq, a mostly Sunni island where he lived.53 Others complain that they have not been able to buy land in the Rifaa area, home to a royal palace and to large numbers of Sunnis, since the mid-1990s. For Shi'ites living in nearby Sitra, being kept out of affluent and well-maintained Rifaa appeared to represent a deliberate obstacle to class mobility.54

  Even assuming there was no systematic effort to grow the Sunni community, the rapid pace of population growth and the pattern of property development and land use pushed prices beyond the reach of lower-income citizens. The country's population doubled in the decade before 2011 and the number of Bahrainis, though increasingly overtaken by foreign workers, rose by 28 per cent, creating more competition for state benefits such as subsidised housing.55, 56

  Dissatisfaction with access to adequate housing was repeatedly raised as a major concern by protesters in 2011, and a Gallup poll in late 2010 found that 41 per cent of Bahrainis and Arab expatriates had had problems paying for adequate shelter at least once in the previous twelve months, a sharp increase from a year earlier and higher than the seventeen other Arab countries surveyed.57

  The issue of housing had become such a political hot potato that, in the midst of the crisis in February 2011, the newly appointed housing minister, a Shi'ite who had been moved from the labour portfolio in a cabinet reshuffle aimed at appeasing demonstrators, said that more than 46,000 families were on the waiting list for subsidised property.58 It was not clear what proportion of them were Sunni or Shi'ite, but a drive around Bahrain revealed major disparities in the quality of housing enjoyed by the two groups.

  Jaafar's home was a case in point. ‘I live with my brother and our wives on the second floor. On the ground floor, my three brothers have a room next to my mother's room … If my six sisters had not gotten married and moved out, I don't know where we'd all sleep,’ he said.59

  Jaafar's sister, who was visiting with her children, agreed: ‘I've been married eleven years and I'm living with my in-laws. We have had four children since then and the naturalized just get a key on arrival.‘60

  Shi'ites also complained increasingly of discrimination in security-related and senior diplomatic jobs, with the most common grievance related to the Bahrain Defence Force, the National Guard and various branches of the police, whose ranks they believe the ruling family had bolstered with Sunni Muslims imported from Jordan, Syria, Yemen or Pakistan. Bahraini Shi'ites widely see these forces as little more than mercenaries hired to protect the royal family, having less compunction about firing at protesters than a Shi'ite soldier might, and believe they are fast-tracked into acquiring Bahraini citizenship. In the midst of the 2011 uprising, a trust with close links to the Pakistani army had taken out advertisements in Pakistani newspapers to recruit former soldiers for Bahrain's National Guard.61 Bahraini officials do not declare the number of non-Bahrainis or naturalized Bahrainis working for the security forces, but it is not uncommon to come across police who do not speak Arabic or who speak non-Gulf dialects of the language, adding anecdotal evidence that the practice is widespread.

  By the time the Arab Spring brought people onto the streets in Tunis and Cairo, Bahrain's fragile political experiment was already threatening to unravel. Both the regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia and influential figures inside the royal family opposed change. It is difficult to gauge the true extent of King Hamad's personal commitment to reforms, but it was clear on the eve of the Arab Spring that opposition to greater liberalization had rendered him unable to fully satisfy all the hopes he had awakened on inheriting the throne. For the Shi'ites, reforms had been bestowed as royal privileges, not as formal rights, and democracy had not been enshrined in the constitution. In the years leading up to the 2011 uprising, Bahrain saw repeated outbreaks of rioting that saw young Shi'ite protesters burn tyres in the streets. The number of activists and bloggers in jail or exile was mounting again.

  With political freedoms once more being curtailed, Al Wefaq's position as representative of the Shi'ite community was being undermined. Increasing numbers of Shi'ites saw their participation in elections as part of a meaningless charade. Once in the assembly, they could raise issues of importance to the opposition, but they could not change the law. More and more Shi'ites were being drawn to more radical groups, such as Al-Haq, or The Right, which had rejected the elections and were calling for more fundamental changes.

  Al Wefaq was campaigning for a full constitutional monarchy, but even this demand was too much for the royal family, which knew it would bring in a parliament dominated by Shi'ite opposition groups that could destabilize its rule and further bolster the regional influence of Iran.

  The sensitivit
ies inflamed by Iraq were further exacerbated by the speed with which the Tunisian and Egyptian leaders had apparently been abandoned by the United States. From the point of view of both Bahrain's rulers and their Saudi patrons, Washington's willingness to abandon Mubarak, a veteran ally, after just a few weeks of protest, suggested that the Al Saud family, who had provided a stable supply of oil to the world market and had operated beneath the US security umbrella in the Gulf since the Second World War, might not be able to rely on its old ally for support in the face of any serious domestic crisis.62 For Bahrain's rulers, the political ties cemented by their decision to host the US Fifth Fleet, and the Gulf monarchies’ status as a regional network of US allies and a bulwark against Iran, no longer seemed a watertight guarantee of US support. Even before the Arab Spring had brought a single person onto the streets of Manama, it was clear to the Gulf's Sunni rulers that a repeat of Tunisia or Cairo could not be allowed on their doorstep.

  The Pearl Revolt

  In the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's departure in Egypt, revolutionary groups sprang up around the Arab world. In Libya, many coalesced around the 17 February protests in Benghazi. In Morocco, it was the 20 February youth movement. Bahrain's youths chose 14 February, a date which held the significance of being a full decade since the National Action Charter was approved. Calling for peaceful protests, the 14 February youth movement demanded a rewrite of the constitution that had proved such a disappointment nine years earlier, and an investigation into claims of high-level corruption and political naturalization, and allegations that activists who had been rounded up in recent years had been tortured in jail. Ignoring the demands, the king sought to sap the momentum of protesters by ordering that each family receive $1,000 to celebrate the anniversary of the charter. His gesture misread both the depth of frustration in Bahrain and the spirit of revolution that had by now infected the entire region and spread beyond it.