Bahrain remains mired in a political stalemate with little serious progress toward reconciliation and reform, but few signs of a return to the acute instability of 2011. The National Dialogue established in 2011 has stalled, society remains polarized, and some prominent members of the Shia political opposition have turned to boycotting the political process. The Bahraini leadership enjoys full backing from Saudi Arabia, which views the island kingdom as a vital bulwark against Iran, and continues to host the U.S. Navy, which has meant Washington’s criticism of the government’s crackdown and human rights abuses has been muted.
But opposition protests and the police crackdown continue with little end in sight.
Four experts on Bahrain weigh in on the country’s situation and the role outside powers can play in encouraging compromise and reform. Each offers a different perspective on why reconciliation has been elusive and whether it will remain so.
Please join the discussion by sharing your own views in the comments section.
The Problem is Political Will
Jane Kinninmont
Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House.
Bahrain has fallen off the international news agenda in recent months, eclipsed by violent conflict in Syria, Egypt, and Libya. But its slow political deterioration deserves the attention of Western policymakers for two reasons. First, the country is closely allied with the U.S. and U.K. Inevitably—and regardless of whether it is fair—these larger outside powers will be blamed by a large section of both domestic and regional public opinion for the ongoing failures to resolve the political crisis. Second, this is not another intractable Middle Eastern political conundrum; the contours of a possible power-sharing compromise are not hard to imagine. The mainstream opposition party is calling for a constitutional monarchy, and reformers in government say they want the same thing. There are many options for addressing the opposition’s decades-old calls for greater representation and less discrimination without playing a zero-sum game between Sunni and Shia communities. Fears—stoked by Iraq—among many Sunni Bahrainis that elections would lead to a “tyranny of the majority” dominated by Shia clerics could be allayed by bringing in proper checks and balances on executive power. Instead, fears are deliberately fanned by state propaganda. It is not the impossibility of a solution that explains the failure to resolve the political crisis; it is the lack of political will.
Earlier this year there seemed some cause for cautious optimism about a possible political solution, compared with the stagnation that for two years had characterized the formal political process (though not the busy sphere of grassroots activism). A formal political dialogue was initiated in February, including the country’s main licensed opposition group, al-Wefaq. It was slow, halting, government-controlled, and included only a limited range of players that the government found acceptable; talks were preoccupied with methodology, with little progress on substantial issues. But the existence of such a process was at least an acknowledgement that the country needs a political solution, not simply a security-based approach to managing dissent. The appointment of the crown prince to the role of deputy prime minister—giving him a formal executive role—also appeared to empower a younger-generation royal leader willing to engage with the domestic drivers of unrest. Also encouraging were reports from diplomats that Saudi Arabia and the UAE wanted a political solution. Although Saudi Arabia may place a ceiling on the level of political change, the question of what exactly it can live with in Bahrain has never been fully explored, and its role is sometimes exaggerated by Bahraini conservatives looking to justify their own behavior.
But just a few months on, the momentum has stalled. The dialogue took a lengthy summer holiday. During the same period, the conservative security-minded faction of the government took center stage, thanks in part to three car bombs that so far haven’t killed people, but have alarmed many. The parliament, boycotted by the opposition, said the authorities should have even stronger powers to combat terrorism—which Bahrain defines with convenient breadth. As opposition groups called for protests on the country’s independence day, August 14, hundreds of people were locked up on terrorism-related charges. These included one of al-Wefaq’s leading figures, Khalil al-Marzooq, a former MP. Prior to the 2011 crisis, al-Wefaq was the largest single group in parliament, with 17 out of 40 elected MPs. Today, four of them are exiled and two of those have been made stateless. Al-Wefaq is now boycotting the dialogue as well as the parliament. While the formal political processes stagnate, political disputes continue to play out on the streets instead.
A Local Solution for a Local Conflict
Frederic Wehrey
Frederic Wehrey, senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings.
Too often, Bahrain’s ongoing impasse is viewed through the prism of a region-wide sectarian conflict or the county is seen as a pawn in a geo-political contest between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such a narrative has obviously been the most useful for the Bahraini government and its Saudi patrons: by framing unrest as Iranian-inspired, it absolves them from tackling the true economic and political drivers of dissent.
For many Bahraini officials the ongoing protests in Manama’s Shi'a suburbs have long been seen as a sort of retaliation by Iran for Gulf Arab support for the anti-Assad uprising. “You pinch me here, I’ll pinch you there,” a senior official in the Bahraini Foreign Ministry told me in 2012. Hardliners in the regime have echoed this: the commander of Bahrain Defense Forces (BDF), Field Marshal Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa has repeatedly argued that the anti-Assad forces represent the only true, homegrown popular uprising in the Arab world; other revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, and especially Bahrain have been the products of foreign incitement.
Other Bahraini Sunni actors, with apparently tacit government approval, have taken further steps to “regionalize” and “sectarianize” the island’s crisis. Prominent Salafi MPs from the al-Asala society visited the Free Syrian Army to deliver humanitarian aid to hospitals and shelters. Shi'a commentators found the visit especially ironic because the government in usual circumstances heavily scrutinizes and regulates the transfer of Shi'a charitable donations (khums) outside Bahrain. In early and mid-2013, there was additional evidence that al-Asala’s support to Syrian jihadists had grown more formal and robust, with reports that five Bahraini Salafis had been killed fighting alongside Syrian jihadists from Jabhat al-Nusra. Although the Foreign Ministry distanced itself from these activities and urged Bahrainis to avoid traveling to conflict zones, pro-government commentators lambasted the Shi'as’ criticism of their visit as yet another sign of their perfidy, “sectarian bigotry,” and support for the Assad regime.
Western officials and commentators have also slipped into a geo-strategic and sectarian narrative, which assigns agency to chess-moves by Iran and Saudi Arabia, while obscuring the accountability of local actors. President Obama’s General Assembly reference to “sectarian tensions” on the island is only the most visible example; others have referenced Iran’s ability to “stir the pot” in Bahrain, should the regional balance-of-power tip in its disfavor. But despite such accusations, there is little evidence that Iran provides material or lethal support to the Bahraini opposition—or seeks to do so in a manner that approximates its clandestine strategy in Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria. As for sectarianism, it is best thought of as the symptom of the island’s impasse and a byproduct of regime policies, rather than being the underlying driver: the real culprits are its democracy deficit, corruption, and uneven distribution of economic capital. Finally, there is no doubt that that Riyadh wields power over the island’s politics and reform progress. But too often, this influence is used to avoid assigning culpability to the poor governance and repressive tactics of the Al Khalifa.
To move forward on tangible reforms, it is crucial for all sides to delink Bahrain’s political ills from the analytical framework of Iranian-Saudi rivalry, the Syria war, or broader Sunni-Shi'a tensions. Doing so may also equip the U.S. to better assess the balance sheet of liabilities incurred by continuing to base U.S. assets and people on the increasingly unstable island.
Denial Not a Good Plan
Richard LeBaron
Richard LeBaron, senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, Atlantic Council.
The political impasse in Bahrain has certain similarities to the recent bewildering lack of constructive politics in Washington—clinging to hard-line positions, the inability to find areas of compromise, and deliberate exaggeration in the media. And some figures in both countries do not seem much interested in finding ways to move forward.
The Bahraini leadership took umbrage when President Obama, in his September 24 speech at the UN General Assembly, lumped Bahrain with Syria and Iraq as places where sectarian problems need addressing. Obviously the levels of violence in Syria and Iraq are quite distinct from the situation in Bahrain, but the country has a serious denial problem when the Interior Minister reacts by proclaiming that Bahrain "never witnessed at any time sectarian tensions" and the Foreign Minister reverts to branding any and all protesters as terrorists involved in a concerted effort to target security personnel and expatriates.
September 24 wasn't the first time President Obama talked about Bahrain at the UN. In his September 21, 2011 address, for example, he said, "we will continue to call on the Government and the main opposition bloc—the Wefaq—to pursue a meaningful dialogue that brings peaceful change that is responsive to the people. And we believe that the patriotism that binds Bahrainis together must be more powerful that the sectarian forces that would tear them apart."
The Bahraini leadership would prefer that the U.S. stay focused on hard power strategic interests in the Gulf and further temper its occasional criticism of human rights violations and the frozen national dialogue. That's unlikely to happen. Human rights will seldom be at the top of the U.S. agenda, but they will always be on it. And in the case of Bahrain, U.S. policy is driven not only by a commitment to promoting wider political participation, but also by the need to protect a valuable security partnership. Stationing U.S. military personnel in unstable countries is less than ideal from a purely security perspective. And alarm bells go off when a minister says expatriates are being targeted by terrorists.
Bahrainis themselves need to decide what kind of future they want. But it seems clear that U.S.-Bahrain relations will be best served by a credible, inclusive political process that helps preserve stability over the long term.
It’s Now or Never
Matar Ebrahim Matar
Matar Ebrahim Matar, Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and former Member of the Bahraini Parliament.
Contrary to optimistic expectations, since the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, was promoted to the position of deputy prime minister, Bahrain has entered a new phase of oppression and civil unrest, characterized by mass arrests, harsh prison sentences, revoking of citizenship, the revival of torture and excessive force, and attacking activists under false charges of terrorism (including the arrest of Khalil al-Marzooq, a member of the al-Wefaq opposition party).
The growing manifestations of the rentier economy are harming the productivity and performance of the public sector and the entire Bahraini state. Two years after declaring plans to start gas exploration, no achievement has been announced. All these crimes against the human rights and growing sectarianism are just symptom for the kleptocratic nature of the Bahraini regime. Between 1962 and 1970, only two thirds of the total amount of oil revenue was listed in the state’s financial reports. In 2010, about half a billion dollars was missing from the initial state budget. And the corruption continues in wider scale through moving the ownership of lands in Bahrain to the members of the ruling families and their allies, with the estimated cost equivalent to about five times the Bahraini government’s annual revenues from oil and taxes. All these factors will accelerate the risk of economic collapse earlier than the IMF’s expectation that debt growth will be unsustainable by 2018.
Still, Bahrain’s struggles will be easier to overcome than the challenges facing other countries in the region. Instead of standing by the repressive regime as an old friend and major ally, the United States should co-sponsor a plan with other regional players to see Bahrain through a process of gradual reform with a clear road map. That’s why the approach in the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain is to encourage the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at Bahrain as a country with high potential to be a success story of peaceful transition to justice and political participation. Bahrainis refused to wait neither on regional changes nor for al-Wefaq to start the uprising, and after entering the third year of the uprising, the people of Bahrain are consistently still able to gather in tens of thousands. Rather than thinking that it was too early for them to call for a constitutional monarchy, a large portion of Bahrainis believe that after ten years of participation in a fake process they were late to call for it.
As citizens of a small island state with a long history of multiculturalism, Bahrainis have one of the oldest demands for greater political representation in the region. A major motivator for Bahrainis throughout the uprising has been their deep belief that Bahrain is the most prepared country in the Gulf for such a transition.
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