Bahrain:Democracy by decree

'''PEOPLE’S POWER AND THE EMIR 'Bahrain: democracy by decree - Le Monde Diplomatique - May 2001

For nearly 30 years Bahrain has been fighting for a return to democracy and a parliamentary system. In the last few months, with a new ruler in place, there has been major progress marked by the release of political prisoners and return of exiles. This is having an impact on the region, particularly the other kingdoms which are thinking hard about their own futures.

''By David Hirst, May 2001

"Want democracy? Get a king", wrote the United States journal Middle East Quarterly (1), pithily identifying a remarkable feature of the contemporary Arab political scene. In a region notoriously resistant to the world-wide trend towards "people’s power", hereditary regimes, rather than republics, now lead the way, notably in that hitherto least likely of places, the Gulf. After constitutional advances in Oman, Qatar and even arch-conservative Saudi Arabia, Bahrain has now emerged as the boldest standard-bearer of reform.

On his father’s death in March 1999, Sheikh Hamad bin Issa Al Khalifa became the new emir, scion of a dynasty that has ruled the tiny island state since 1783. After an unpromising debut, he has now exceeded the best hopes for democratic advance of virtually his entire people. "This is more like a revolution," said one human rights activist: "overnight we have passed from an era of pessimism to optimism for the future." The climax came with the referendum in February which yielded a 98.4% vote in favour of a new National Charter. ’This was genuine," said an opposition lawyer, "not an Assad-, Saddam- or Mubarak-style fabrication."

On the one hand, unashamedly traditionalist, retrogressive even, the charter provides that the emir shall turn himself into a fully-fledged monarch. On the other, progressive, it calls for a bicameral parliamentary system reviving the old, elected National Assembly in association with a newly-created, appointed shura (Consultative Council). The referendum was accompanied by the release of all political prisoners, the right of return for political exiles, the abolition of draconian emergency laws, and a dramatic expansion of free speech. Sheikh Hamad and his Cambridge-educated son Salman achieved instant popularity, mobbed by enthusiastic crowds in former hotbeds of opposition where once only anti-riot police ventured.

To be sure, this was democracy by autocrat’s decree. But it was also, no less manifestly, a response to the popular will. "It is the fruit of determined struggle and great sacrifices", said Abd al-Nabi al-Akri upon his triumphant return from a 27-year exile. As well, one might add, as of a long tradition of popular activism peculiar to Bahrain. For various reasons Bahrainis were well ahead of other Gulf countries in the growth of a modern socio-political consciousness. Since the 1920s they repeatedly pressed the claims of popular sovereignty, constitutional order and representative government against a hereditary, patriarchal authority loathe to cede them. By last year the contest was becoming so politically, socially and economically damaging that it could not continue indefinitely without risk of undermining the Khalifa dynasty itself.

In 1973, after independence from Britain, the Khalifas had promulgated a constitution whose centrepiece was a National Assembly composed of 30 elected members and 14 ministers. But in 1975, incensed by its questioning of the ruling family’s designs on the country’s small oil revenues and public lands, and its fierce hostility to a State Security law authorising the detention of any citizen without trial for three years renewable, the then emir dissolved the new-born assembly. There followed 25 years of growing popular discontent at the ravages of unconstitutional rule.

Making common cause
One strand of the opposition was descended from the secular-modernist movement - generally pan-Arab nationalist and socialist in outlook - which in the 1960s and 1970s had led the struggle for representative government. Like the Khalifas themselves, its members were mainly orthodox Sunni Muslims who, though a minority of less than 40%, traditionally dominated the island’s politics. The other strand, more recent, was Shiite, led by a new brand of ulema who had been influenced by the religious-political activism of the Iranian revolution. The Shiites were largely rural, poorer and less educated than the Sunnis, and with fewer modern skills. They were also victims of officially inspired sectarian discrimination. Despite their often divergent agendas, the two movements intersected and gained strength from one another when it came to common demand for the restoration of parliamentary life. Ultimately it was the Shiite Islamists who, with their larger, more militant constituency, made the decisive contribution to the reformist campaign that Sunni secularists had pioneered.

The campaign took on a new momentum in the wake of the Gulf war (1991-92) and the blow it dealt to the prestige of the Gulf’s hereditary systems. The reformists resorted to the time-honoured, essentially deferential method of petitioning the emir. They collected an impressive 25,000 signatures on one such submission. But the emir spurned them and set up a powerless Consultative Council. Opposition then broadened into what became known as the intifada. Though it was unarmed and essentially non-violent in intent, the regime suppressed it with its time-honoured methods of brute force and omnipresent surveillance.

Up to 25,000 people, out of a total native population of 400,000, were estimated to have been imprisoned at one time or another. Some 30 protesters died in street clashes. Of a half dozen tortured to death, one, 16-year-old Said Iskafi, was taken from his home in the Shiite village of Sanabis and his corpse returned a few days later with a hole drilled in the thigh. Some 200 opposition leaders went into enforced exile.

The regime flagrantly intensified its sectarianism. Even though the petition movement was both Sunni and Shiite in inspiration, it concentrated its repression on the Shiites, stepping up discrimination and totally excluding them from the army, security forces and other "sensitive" institutions. Even Bahrain University systematically failed to appoint or promote any Shiites after 1995, despite their often superior qualifications.

It all aggravated the Shiite sense of grievance and militancy. And that, in turn, made it easier for the regime to divert attention from what the intifada essentially was - a bi-communal campaign for representative government - and portray it instead as a specifically Shiite revolt, fundamentalist, Iranian-inspired, and a threat to the whole Sunni-dominated regional order and the outside powers which supported it.

The regime recruited foreign mercenaries. These might be Arab or non-Arab, from Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Syria or Pakistan, but they were always Sunni. The idea was to restore "demographic balance" at Shiite expense. As outsiders, they did not balk at brutalities against the local population or at ransacking and looting the homes they entered. One large group - rugged, often illiterate bedouins from Eastern Syria - acquired a particularly bad reputation and the locals, Sunnis as well as Shiites, ascribed all sorts of malpractices to them. These prejudices were exacerbated by the fact that the government went so far as to confer citizenship on them and their families just as it withdrew it from Bahrainis born and bred. It even gave them cheap, state-subsidised housing, ahead of Bahrainis for whom it was originally destined.

On top of this abuse by the Khalifas came corruption. Bahrain had once been one of the Gulf’s cleanest societies. The new emir’s grandfather use to forbid family members from engaging in business at all: he thought it sat ill with their status and tribal mores. "Now", said a businessman, "my foreign friends say we are on a par with Nigeria."

Lust for gain
With at least 3,000 members, the Khalifas far exceed the vast house of Saud as a proportion of the population. They all get a stipend from cradle to grave. But, through connections and cronyism, they also get the cream of business opportunities. The emir’s uncle, Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman, presides over the interlocking structure of public affairs and private gain. In power since 1961, he has packed the administration with his own protegés, including eight Khalifas in the cabinet and many more elsewhere. "He runs the government like his own business," says an opposition economist.

Land looms large in this lust for gain. Top family members compete with each other in grabbing vast tracts of vacant territory which, if a parliament had ever had its way, would have gone to the state. They have taken some of the tight little archipelago’s 33 islands entirely for themselves. They reclaim land from the sea and sell it to citizens who have to pay the reclamation costs to the state.

Then there are the notorious "free visas". Khalifas or their cronies "sponsor" the import of foreign workers. They extract from each an annual fee of up to $1,500 - a huge amount in relation to anticipated earnings. There are 200,000 foreign workers, half of them Indians, representing some 70% of the total labour force. They compete directly with locals who, unusually for oil-rich Gulf countries, deign to engage in manual labour. Unemployment is thus high, about 30% overall. It is at its worst among the Shiites, some of whose villages, said an economist, "compare to anything you find in Bangladesh".

Meanwhile, the middle class has been steadily contracting. It is heavily in debt, having to borrow for everything, from buying houses to educating its children. It has suffered from the general decline, the flight of foreign companies and investment capital which years of political turbulence have inflicted on Bahrain’s service-based economy.

Such then are the abuses that a resuscitated National Assembly will have to tackle. It is an open question what kind of body it will be, still in large measure the function of a hereditary autocrat’s individual will. Sheikh Hamad, all agree, has gone much further than expected. "He has shown courage," said al-Akri, "but he has yet to start on the real business of building a democratic state." He will certainly be torn, as he tries, between his old tribal and patriarchal instincts and his new-found democratic ones; between continued dependence on a loyalist apparatus and reaching out to society at large. The conflict has the makings of a showdown, not only within his own person, but more importantly between him - and his crown prince - on the one hand, and the so-called "old guard" on the other, led by the prime minister and fighting a surreptitious rearguard action against the reforms.

In its original draft, the National Charter had arrogated to itself a higher authority than the constitution, and conferred legislative powers on the newly created Consultative Council as well as on the elected Assembly. It was only in hectic pre-referendum negotiations, to secure the backing of the opposition, that the emir conceded the reverse - the supremacy of the constitution and the Assembly’s exclusive right to legislate. The opposition leaders saw it as a bad sign when it turned out, a few days later, that the newly formed Committee for Amending the Constitution was packed with the prime minister’s men. "Clearly," said one, "he’s trying to foist on us an Assembly with even less powers than that of 25 years ago. How can we have reforms without getting rid of those who were responsible for everything we must reform?"

Even if Hamad, in his new populist self, also sees the need for such a purge, he is evidently still very wary of carrying it through. Preserving the dignity and cohesion of the ruling family remains an overwhelming concern of this emir-who-would-be-king. So far he has confined himself to a subtle war of attrition, through such devices as ensuring that his crown prince attends cabinet meetings alongside the prime minister.

But even if he contemplates an ultimate showdown, he obviously considers that for the time being the balance of power is still insufficiently in his favour to risk it. It might produce a backlash, a virtual counter-coup, from the old guard, which still commands the institutional power base to mount one. For the old guard is afraid. "Once the human rights and corruption files are opened," said a human rights activist, "who knows where they might lead? We have our Milosovics or Pinochets here too, and some of us want retribution."

For the moment, however, it is the forces of moderation which prevail in opposition ranks. And they are likely to grow stronger the more they see evidence that their trust in the emir was justified, that he really will honour his part of the bargain. In the final analysis, says the opposition, he has no other choice. Of course it was he who offered the reforms but it was the people’s intifada that forced the offer on him. If out of disappointment, the people ever have to renew the revolt, said an opposition journalist, "they won’t just be wanting a parliament and constitution but the removal of the Khalifas as well."

(1) Piscataway, New Jersey, no 4, December 2000.