By William Wallis, Financial Times – May 3 2006
A few blocks away from the new waterfront developments that Bahrain’s rulers hope will secure the kingdom’s future as a regional banking centre, there are signs of budding revolt.
Wearing balaclavas to mask their identity, young men with no stake in the capital Manama’s rising skyline, spend their evenings burning tyres, hurling stones and blocking traffic into the shabby, outlying villages where they live.
The demonstrations are regular and small – barely 50 Shia protesting against discrimination. But they have been preceded by much larger protests and are symptomatic of steadily rising tensions on an island squeezed between the competing influences of Iran and Saudi Arabia, with close ties to Iraq and income disparities that coincide with a deepening sectarian divide.
By William Wallis, Financial Times – May 3 2006A few blocks away from the new waterfront developments that Bahrain’s rulers hope will secure the kingdom’s future as a regional banking centre, there are signs of budding revolt.
Wearing balaclavas to mask their identity, young men with no stake in the capital Manama’s rising skyline, spend their evenings burning tyres, hurling stones and blocking traffic into the shabby, outlying villages where they live.
The demonstrations are regular and small – barely 50 Shia protesting against discrimination. But they have been preceded by much larger protests and are symptomatic of steadily rising tensions on an island squeezed between the competing influences of Iran and Saudi Arabia, with close ties to Iraq and income disparities that coincide with a deepening sectarian divide.
While the circumstances driving a wedge between Islam’s predominant sects are particular to Bahrain, the poorest of the Gulf’s oil producers and the only one with a Shia majority, some of the symptoms have blown in from elsewhere: Sunni extremist pamphlets distributed at a school suggesting the Shia are an aberration; newspapers and mosques that interpret events in Iraq from a sectarian perspective; and posters, in the same shabby Shia suburbs, of Iranian clerics calling on the faithful to “defend their beliefs with their blood”.
Bahrain had its “dawn of democracy” in 2001, several years before Washington looked hopefully for a thaw across the Arab world. But for the Shia who make up about two-thirds of the island’s 470,000 native population, it has proved false.
Rather than hastening change, the empowerment of Iraq’s Shia majority and muscular assertion of Iran’s influence in the region have made Bahrain’s ruling Sunni minority more cautious.
After inheriting power in 1999, King Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifa, Bahrain’s Sunni ruler, released political prisoners and welcomed back pro-democracy activists forced into exile when his father crushed a wave of unrest in the 1990s.
He then invited Bahrainis to vote on a new social contract. But the resulting constitution, with the absolute powers of the ruling al-Khalifa family unchecked by a new and toothless parliament, fell short of expectations the king himself had raised.
As parliamentary elections approach for the second time in four years, hopes for a political system that gives the Shia a fairer share of wealth, land and power have faded and for young Shia, the prospect of earning a decent wage remains bleak.
At current trends, 35 per cent of Bahrainis will be unemployed by 2013 and 70 per cent in jobs incommensurate with their expectations and skills, according to a report by the consultants McKinsey. “It is this and the gap between wages and the cost of living that gives rise to frustration for the layman, more than constitutional issues,” says Abd al-Aziz Abul, a Sunni opposition leader.
The government has started talking about unemployment as a priority, raising the minimum wage and allocating 30m dinars ($80m, €63m, £43m) towards training programmes. But more radical proposals face resistance from elites with a vested interest in cheap imported labour from Asia or income from selling visas, while the most glaring discrimination has been left intact.
According to the now banned Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, only 18 per cent of senior public sector and government positions are held by Shia. Shia are in effect barred from the security services, while the ranks of the police and army are filled by Sunni recruits from Yemen, Jordan, Syria and Pakistan. Shia and Sunni opposition leaders believe the practice of awarding these immigrants nationality as a means of altering Bahrain’s demographics continues.
They also complain that gerrymandering has made it impossible for the main Shia-backed el Wefaq National Islamic Society to win a majority in the elected lower house despite their numeric advantage. This was one of several reasons el Wefaq boycotted the last elections in 2002.
The most senior Shia cleric, Sheikh Issa Qassem, has urged his followers to use peaceful means of protest. But, allied to him, the youthful and moderate Islamist cleric, Sheikh Ali Salman, who has led el Wefaq into an alliance with other opposition including leftists and Sunni, says the lack of results is driving growing numbers of young Shia towards more radical agendas.
Borrowing a proverb from Yemen, he says the government has lifted the muzzle from Bahraini mouths but placed it instead on their own ears. “We are free to speak now but there is no real dialogue, no real change,” he says.
The likelihood that el Wefaq will nevertheless participate in elections this year – partly, some members say, to counter Sunni fundamentalists in parliament – has divided the opposition.
Harakat Haq, a new, mostly Shia, group, questions the legitimacy of the ruling Khalifa family. Some activists now openly espouse republican ideals.
For hardliners in the royal family, who have argued since the Iranian revolution that Bahrain’s Shia would take a mile if given an inch, this hardening of dissent validates a more ruthless approach to preserving the status quo.
For moderates – both Sunni and Shia – concerned with preserving the kingdom’s stability through gradual change, these are worrying signs that the opportunity for compromise is slipping away.