by Emile Nakhleh
Bahrain’s national election planned for this Saturday portends no change in the al-Khalifa regime’s anti-Shi’a stance and is yet another futile exercise in sham democracy. Even the mainstream al-Wefaq Shi’a opposition party has decided to boycott the election because of perceived bias in the recently gerrymandered electoral districts.
Most observers view the election as another public relations ploy by the minority Sunni regime to convince the outside world, especially Western countries, that all is well in the tiny kingdom. The regime is betting, perhaps correctly, that the West would not criticize its game of superficial electoral politics because of Bahrain’s participation in the US-led anti-ISIS coalition and Saudi Arabia’s influence in the process.
The regime’s sectarian repression of the Shi’a majority is deeply grounded in the same radical Sunni ideology espoused by Islamic State (ISIS or IS). In fact, extremist Sunni rhetoric has been tolerated in Bahrain in the name of fighting the Shi’a opposition and Iran.
IS enjoys significant backing in Bahrain among some pro-regime Sunni factions. Such ideological support, which is widely spread out among certain Sunni groups in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, is a key driver of IS in Iraq and Syria. This also explains why many IS jihadists come from the family-ruled Gulf states.
Promoting extremist Sunni ideology at home while ostensibly fighting IS in the Levant is a cynical ploy by the Khalifas’ to justify their continued suppression of Shi’a rights and policy of turning a blind eye to the poor living conditions in Shi’a villages and towns. Sitra, a tiny Shi’a island just south of the capital city of Manama, is indeed a world apart from the glitzy Khalifa strongholds in other parts of the island country.
Stoking sectarianism might be a winning strategy in the short term; it is certainly a losing proposition in the long run. It’s equally foolish for the Bahraini regime to believe that Western support, which is currently driven by the war against IS, would be sufficient to save them from the wrath of their people should a radical Shi’a uprising erupt.
Wefaq and the Election
The regime, and US policymakers for that matter, should take Wefaq’s boycott of the election very seriously. As a mainstream opposition political party, Wefaq has been willing to cooperate with the Sunni regime under the umbrella of the Khalifas as long as genuine reform is implemented.
For the party, meaningful reform includes free elections; reinstating the 1973 constitution; government accountability (particularly at the level of the prime minister); ending economic, political, and employment discrimination, especially in security and defense; and halting illegal arrests, trials, and convictions.
In fact, Wefaq supported the reform initiative of then-Emir Hamad in 2001-02 and endorsed the so-called National Charter believing that Hamad was committed to genuine reform. Several opposition figures came back from exile to cooperate with the new initiative.
Unfortunately, however, the only “reform” that resulted from Hamad’s initiative was changing the name of the country to the “Kingdom of Bahrain” and replacing his title of “Emir” with “King.” The reform initiative stalled because of opposition from Prime Minister Khalifa and the “Khawalids” in the office of the emir in Gulf countries, and defense, and judicial branches of government.
Overturning the Bahraini regime’s unconstitutional step of stripping Shi’a citizens of their citizenship has become a key reform demand for Wefaq. Despite the constitutional prohibition, a total of 40 Bahrainis have been stripped of their citizenship in the past two years—31 in November 2012 and nine in August 2014.
Article 17 of the Bahraini constitution states that a Bahraini citizen “cannot be stripped of his nationality except in case of treason. It is prohibited to banish a citizen from Bahrain or prevent him from returning to it.” Article 18 states, “People are equal in human dignity, and citizens are equal before the law in public rights and duties.”
Wefaq is the largest, most prominent and pragmatic opposition political party in the country. Its 18 members resigned from parliament three years ago to protest the draconian measures the ruling family has adopted against the opposition, particularly the Shi’a community.
Wefaq believes the regime will use the skewed election results to justify its massive human rights violations and continued campaign of harassment, arrests, and illegal detentions. Wefaq and other opposition groups—including Wa’d, al-Tajjamu,’ and al-Ikha’—decided to boycott the election, refusing to take part in what some of them call a pseudo-democratic political charade.
Jamil Kathim, who heads Wefaq’s Shura Council, said the election “does not represent the popular will and will not provide security for the country.” Matar Ibrahim Matar, a former Wefaq Member of Parliament who is currently living in Washington, DC, called on the government to postpone the election “until a national path forward has been agreed on.”
The opposition groups also urged King Hamad to “seek a national consensus to resolve the serious national issues that have bedeviled the nation since 2011 before holding elections.”
The mainstream opposition includes several leading figures with whom the regime could work with if it’s seriously interested in becoming more inclusive. These include Ali Salman, Secretary General of Al-Wifaq, Jamil Kathim, Abd al-Jalil al-Khalil, Ali al-Marzook, Matar Ibrahim Matar, Jasim Hussain, Mansoor al-Jamri, Nabil Rajab, Lamis Dhaif, Maryam al-Khawaja, Ali al-Ikri, and several others.
The regime, in defiance, has gone all out to publicize the elections based on Crown Prince Salman’s so-called “Common Ground” framework. In addition to “Electoral Districts,” the other four parts of the framework include “Legislative Authority,” “Cabinet Formation,” “Judicial Reform,” and “Security.”
Is There a Way Forward?
The regime is pressing ahead with the election while ignoring the pragmatic demands of the opposition. Human rights Watch and Human Rights First have frequently identified the egregious human rights violations committed by the regime against innocent civilians and political activists.
But Bahrain has waged a fierce public relations campaign to dissuade Western governments from raising the human rights issue in the country. The Khalifa regime has used an army of “access” academics, former diplomats, retired senior military officers, corporate executive think-tankers, and pliant media influential figures to act as informal advisers to “lobby” policymakers in Western capitals on behalf of the Bahraini regime.
What we are seeing now is a minority Sunni regime refusing to share the political process with the country’s Shi’a majority on the basis of fairness, equity, and justice. If the United States believes continued tensions in Bahrain and in the wider Gulf are harmful to its strategic regional interests, it cannot remain oblivious to these violations and to the possibility of radicalization in Bahrain.
Due to the Khalifas’ refusal to seriously act on the concerns of the country’s Shi’a majority, the elections on Saturday will not move the reconciliation process forward. Washington may be hoping to stabilize its relations with Iran through an agreement on the nuclear issue and to understand the regional factors that led to the rise of IS to speed up its defeat, but the growing chance of vicious sectarianism in Bahrain could undermine its search for regional stability.
]]>by Jim Lobe
I was pretty surprised Monday when, in the front-page New York Times article about the implementation agreement reached Sunday between the P5+1 and Iran in Geneva, I read the following in the fourth paragraph:
“It [the agreement] comes as Tehran has sought to expand its influence in the [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I was pretty surprised Monday when, in the front-page New York Times article about the implementation agreement reached Sunday between the P5+1 and Iran in Geneva, I read the following in the fourth paragraph:
“It [the agreement] comes as Tehran has sought to expand its influence in the Middle East by providing weapons and sometimes members of its own paramilitary Quds Force, in what Western nations view as destabilizing activities in countries including Syria Bahrain and Yemen, according to interviews with intelligence, military, diplomatic and government officials.”
“Wait a minute,” I said to myself, “I know something about Iran’s activities in Syria, but Yemen and especially Bahrain, to which I’ve devoted substantial attention, I hadn’t heard so much about.
On the latter, the story picked up toward the end with the following assertions:
In Bahrain, where Iran has ties to several Shiite groups, including some that have carried out small-scale attacks on the police, security officials last week seized a ship headed for the country with 50 Iranian-made hand grenades and nearly 300 commercial detonators marked “made in Syria.”
The two Bahrainis captured told interrogators that they had been trained in Iran and were directed by Bahraini opposition figures based there.
The country’s public security chief, Tareq al-Hassan, said that information provided by the suspects had also led to the seizure of plastic explosives, detonators, bombs, automatic rifles and ammunition in a warehouse.
Now, the only place I’ve seen this story seriously promoted is on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations and, to be more precise, Elliott Abrams’ “Pressure Points” blog. In a Jan. 3 post entitled “Iran Continues Subversion Despite the Nuclear Negotiations,” Abrams suggested that the Obama administration had not publicized this incident so as not to jeopardize the nuclear negotiations in Geneva. He dutifully cited the “Bahraini authorities” about the discovery of various kinds of weapons — some Iranian-made, others Syrian-made — “in a warehouse and onboard a boat intercepted as it was heading to the country.”
“Is this just propaganda from the Government of Bahrain?” Abrams asked rhetorically. “No; I’ve checked with US authorities and these reports are accurate.”
Now, if you do a Google search, you’ll find that even the Bahraini authorities have not accused Iran of direct involvement in this case. Nor have other Gulf states, including the ruling al-Khalifa family’s chief protector, Saudi Arabia, made such an accusation. And what’s really remarkable is that Abrams in the past has rightly and repeatedly criticized Bahrain’s government for using trumped-up charges to arrest (in some cases torture), try, and imprison leaders of the majority Shia community there for political reasons. So why is Abrams so certain that a) the Bahraini authorities are telling the truth about this incident and not just trying to bolster their constant charges of Iranian subversion; and b) the import of weapons into Bahrain is being organized by Iran, as opposed to, for example, Shia militias in Iraq whose ties to the Bahraini Shia community have historically been much closer? Because he “checked with US authorities?” That seems a tad vague under the circumstances.
But now this same story has been picked up by the Times whose reporters, Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt, assert without any qualification or attribution that Bahraini “security officials” did indeed seize a ship” laden with various kinds of arms and that two of the captured Bahrainis “told interrogators that they had been trained in Iran and were directed by Bahraini opposition figures based there.”
How do the two reporters know that these accounts are true? In this case, they don’t even cite the “US authorities” that Abrams allegedly check with. (This is the same Michael Gordon who sometimes co-authored pieces with Judith Miller in the run-up to the Iraq War, including the notorious Sep 8, 2002 article, “The U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” in which they claimed that “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb,” among them, the infamous “specially designed aluminum tubes.”) They report it as fact.
In any event, I decided I would ask our contributor, Emile Nakhleh, a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer and serious expert on Bahrain (and author of Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society, a classic study of the country first published in 1976 and re-printed in 2011) what he made of the Times‘ account and its assertions about Iran’s actions in the countries identified by Gordon and Schmitt as Iranian targets. This was his emailed reply:
I was a bit surprised to see the New York Times lump together Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain so cavalierly as objects of Iranian military adventurism. The veteran reporters Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt should have known that Iran’s relations with these three countries are very different and driven by the particular conditions in each country.
On Yemen, former Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh for years had accused Iran of stoking and supporting the Huthi rebellion in the north in order to get American and Saudi support in his fight against the Huthis. The Saudis went in, but the Americans had no convincing evidence of Iran’s unproven involvement with the Huthis.
Washington’s involvement in Yemen in recent years, even before Saleh was removed from power, was driven by al-Qa’ida’s presence in some parts of the country and not by claims about Iran’s unproven seeming support of the Huthis.
On Syria, Iran’s military support of Assad and physical presence in Syria are well known. The Iranians want Assad to stay in power because of the strategic triangular relationship that has existed between Iran, the Assad regime, and Hizballah for decades. Syria has been Iran’s linchpin in the Arab world.
The veracity of the NYT report on Bahrain is questionable. The two reporters should know better and should have been more nuanced. Perhaps their report was a nod to some hardliners in Washington who oppose any deal with Iran on the nuclear program. I am afraid the Gordon/Schmitt report might give the impression the NYT is falling in the same neocon-Israeli trap about Iran.
One should not discount the possibility that some Bahraini Shia radicals, who have given up on the possibility of dialogue with the regime, as I said in my recent op-ed on Bahrain, have had contacts with some elements of the Revolutionary Guard or the Quds Force in Iran for the purpose of committing violent acts in Bahrain. Iran’s main Shia connection in Bahrain, however, has been the al-Wefaq party.
This group supported the King’s reform program back in 2001-02, and many of its leaders, some of whom lived in Iran, returned from exile and expressed readiness to work with the regime to bring about genuine reform in Bahrain. They remain committed to meaningful dialogue with the regime and to a peaceful solution of the political crisis in the country.
There is no evidence to indicate that either Iran or al-Wefaq have made a shift away from dialogue with the regime to violent plotting against the ruling family.
It is disingenuous for the Times to lump the three countries together as if Iran’s support for Assad should be synonymous with military plotting against Al Khalifa. In fact, the Bahraini foreign minister several months ago criticized President Obama for clumping together Bahrain, Syria, and Iraq as countries where sectarianism is becoming vicious and bloody.
The weapons were seized on a boat, not a “ship” as the Times has claimed. They could have come from a location on the Iranian coast or from any other place in the northern Persian Gulf or the Shatt al-Arab estuary. We should be very careful lest we are duped by information or intelligence, which the Bahraini security services might have obtained through “interrogations” of the people arrested on the boat. It’s disappointing the Times did not take a more strategic look at Iranian-Bahraini relations and published, as fact, a claim about Iranian weapons heading toward Bahrain.
Photo: Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmad Al Khalifa meets with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Sept. 30, 2013 in New York.
]]>A few days ago, Bahraini officials announced they “foiled an attempt to smuggle explosives and arms, some made in Iran and Syria, into the country by boat.” Around the same time, the government also contended it had defused a car bomb and seized weapons in different locations in the country.
[...]]]>A few days ago, Bahraini officials announced they “foiled an attempt to smuggle explosives and arms, some made in Iran and Syria, into the country by boat.” Around the same time, the government also contended it had defused a car bomb and seized weapons in different locations in the country.
The Al Khalifa regime maintains it is fighting terrorism, which it unabashedly equates with pro-reform activists. The regime accuses Iran of plotting and driving acts of “terrorism” on the island. Regardless of Iran’s perceived involvement in the smuggling of weapons, it is important to put this latest episode in context.
First, although Iran might benefit from continued instability in Bahrain, since Bahrain became independent in 1971 Iran has not engaged in any activity to remove the Sunni Al Khalifa from power. In 1970-71, the Shah of Iran accepted the United Nations’ special plebiscite in Bahrain, which resulted in granting the country independence. Successive Iranian governments under the Ayatollahs since the fall of the Shah have not questioned Bahrain’s independence.
Furthermore, over the years most Bahraini Shia looked for Iraqi and other Arab, not Iranian, grand Ayatollahs as sources of emulation or marja’ taqlid. The Shia al-Wefaq political party, which some elements within the Al Khalifa ruling family have accused of being a conduit for Iran, has consistently supported genuine reform through peaceful means.
Al-Wefaq leaders, some of whom have studied and lived in Iran in recent decades, have supported the government’s call for dialogue with the opposition and have endorsed the government’s call for dialogue with the opposition and the Crown Prince’s initiative for reform and dialogue. The Al Khalifa’s response to al-Wefaq’s peaceful position has been to arrest its two most prominent leaders, Sheikh Ali Salman and Khalil al-Marzooq.
Second, regardless of the public relations campaign the Bahraini regime is waging against Iran, it continues its arrests and sham trials and convictions of Bahraini citizens. This includes doctors and health providers, young and old peaceful protesters, and more recently athletes. Their only “sin” is that they are members of the Shia majority in a country ruled by a Sunni minority regime.
In a recent article, James Dorsey of Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies detailed the large number of Shia athletes, players and champions — soccer, handball, tennis, jiu-jitsu, gymnastics, beach volleyball, and car racing — who have been arrested and given lengthy jail sentences. Many of these players, who hail from Diraz and other neighboring Shia villages, were hastily tried and convicted for expressing pro-reform views.
Third, in a recent interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas, Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, who headed the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), expressed his disappointment at the government’s failure to implement some of the key recommendations in the report. As a reminder, King Hamad had created BICI and formally and publicly received and accepted its final report.
No one within the regime has been held accountable for the unlawful acts and crimes detailed in the BICI report. According to Bassiouni, the government’s inaction on the recommendation has raised serious doubts within “civil society institutions and human rights organizations” about the regime’s commitment to genuine reform.
Fourth, the Bahraini regime, like its Saudi counterpart, is stoking a deadly sectarian war in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region. The ruling family is very concerned that should Iran conclude a deal with the international community on its nuclear program, Al Khalifa would become marginalized as a Gulf player.
The regime is particularly worried that as a small island country with minuscule oil production, Bahrain might become a marginal player in regional and international politics. It behooves the Al Khalifa regime to know that if it fails to work with its people to bring stability to the country, it will lose its standing in Washington and other Western capitals.
As the Bahraini majority loses confidence in the regime, it would not be unthinkable for Saudi Arabia and other regional and international powers, including the United States, to consider Al Khalifa a liability. The key mission of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet is not to protect the repressive Al Khalifa regime. It serves regional stability, strategic waterways, and other global US interests. Its commitment to Al Khalifa or to the Bahrain port is neither central nor irrevocable.
As the Bahraini regime continues its campaign against Iran, it should remember that by refusing to engage the largely peaceful opposition for meaningful reform, it has created an environment for Sunni extremism and anti-Shia radicalism. The recent history of intolerant religious proselytization instructs us that such an environment invariably leads to terrorism. This is a domestic phenomenon regardless of whether the intercepted arms came from Iran or not. One also should recognize that growing frustration among dissidents will drive some of the youth to become more radicalized and turn to violence.
If regimes are willing to tear their countries apart in order to stay in power as the Al Khalifa ruling family seems to be doing, domestic terrorism is an assured outcome. Today, we see this phenomenon in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. The Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) did not emerge in a vacuum. Radical, intolerant, Sunni jihadism, which Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have been pushing in Syria, and before that in Iraq, is the kernel from which terrorism sprouts. Eventually it will come home to roost.
As I wrote previously, the Al Khalifa regime’s survival remains possible only if the ruling family stops playing its repressive apartheid game and engage its people with an eye toward power sharing and genuine reform.
King Hamad still has an opportunity to implement the BICI recommendations comprehensively and transparently. He could assemble a group of distinguished Bahrainis, Sunni and Shia, and task them with writing a new constitution that would include a nationally elected parliament with full legislative powers and checks and balances over the executive branch. This should be done soon because the King and the ruling family are running out of time.
Photo: Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmad Al Khalifa meets with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Sept. 30, 2013 in New York.
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