Dangerous change rattles
Bahrain By Derek Henry Flood
MANAMA - Arriving at Bahrain's small,
formerly passive, international airport, two
undesirable types of travelers are being singled
out: those appearing to be journalists and those
believed to be of Lebanese origin, irrespective of
current nationality. Asia Times Online was
detained for two-and-a-half hours after an
immigration officer took particular notice of a
bevy of Afghanistan visas.
The Kingdom of
Bahrain's new greeting procedures at its sole
airport give the Sunni-run state an air of being
bent on self-destruction, albeit perhaps
unwittingly. The harassment of international
journalists because of the "situation" is hardly a
well thought out bullet point in a comprehensive
public relations
campaign to tidy up the
kingdom's sullied image.
Following
bellicose statements by Hezbollah secretary
general Hassan Nasrallah in support of Bahrain's
majority Shi'ites against Sunni rulers, the
overnight intimidation of all manner of Lebanese
from wealthy Christians who've helped to build
Bahrain's economy from nearly scratch to
Lebanese-American and Lebanese-French tourists to
anyone who looks remotely Lebanese is a policy of
an inherently immature political system suddenly
unaware of the entire Persian Gulf region's
dependence on the business acumen of the Lebanese
diaspora.
Lebanese who fled their
country's 1975-1990 civil war helped greatly to
modernize the Persian Gulf's then nascent oil and
gas boom economies that created an environment
where everyone from Britons to Bangladeshis works
in the region today.
The infamous Pearl
Roundabout, often termed Pearl Square during the
uprising, is now a closed military zone fenced in
by barbed wire and acres of red and white traffic
barriers at the edge of Manama's Central Market
area.
Asia Times Online posed as a
customer with a small camera looking to buy raw
fish to get as close a look possible to the area
where Bahrain's pro-democracy movement rose and
fell.
Quietly approaching the ring of
defensive fencing surrounding a dead space, a
Nepali migrant worker described in halting English
witnessing the pathetic destruction of the Pearl
Monument on March 18. In a horrifying accident, a
Pakistani crane operator was crushed to death
after being ordered to destroy the monument.
The regime's raison d'etre for the
monument's removal was that it had been tainted by
the protester's presence. It was now a "bad
memory".
In an attempt to bring harmony to
the island's now completely polarized Sunni and
Shi'ite communities, the central bank "canceled"
the 500 fils coin (about US$1.3) that for years
proudly displayed this symbol of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) pre-oil boom past when
the region was a British protectorate known mostly
for harvesting pearls.
A cashier at
Carrefour, the French hypermarket ubiquitous in
the Gulf, said she was instructed to make the
pearl coins disappear by simply tossing them in
the rubbish bin after receiving them as payment
from customers, ensuring the erasure of the bad
memory plaguing the kingdom.
In another
poorly calculated move to stem the creation of
further bad memories, on April 2 the government
closed al-Wasat, the opposition newspaper,
claiming that its reporting was "fabricated,
inauthentic and misleading, directly targeting
Bahrain's stability and security", according the
state-run Gulf Daily News.
Following the
ban on al-Wasat, two of its resident reporters,
who according to the Associated Press were both
Iraqi nationals, were summarily deported. The
government repackaged the ban as a blip in the
paper's production as the opposition-minded editor
Mansour al-Jamri was forced out and Abidli
al-Abidli, a much more palatable figure, was
installed as the paper's new editor-in-chief.
A Shi'ite taxi driver, whom I'll call
Syed, stated that he initially supported the
protesters and their agenda of transforming
Bahrain into a constitutional monarchy but that
they lost his support when the unrest reached a
tipping point where his children could no longer
attend primary school.
"My priority is my
children, above all else" Syed recounted. "One
strike [protest], two strikes, okay. But not so
many strikes that my children cannot go to
school."
We toured by row after row of
nearly empty hotels whose occupancy by Saudi and
Kuwaiti weekend alcohol and sex tourists is a
staple of Bahrain's now fragile economy.
"Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we have too many
people [men] from Saudi and Kuwait who come here
to enjoy themselves. Now as you can see, there are
none."
The 25-kilometer long King Fahd
Causeway that connects the Bahraini archipelago to
the Arabian Peninsula mainland has acted as a
release valve for the dry, ultra-conservative
kingdoms to Bahrain's north and west.
The
only visitors from Saudi Arabia who have come
recently are the 2,000 or so soldiers who have
come to restore "stability" to Bahrain under the
guise of the GCC's Joint Peninsula Shield Force
(JPSF).
The JPSF troops pitched camp
behind Manama's hulking, virtually customer-less
City Center Mall They man a checkpoint with heavy
armor. Attempting to walk from the fish market to
the mall, Asia Times Online was stopped a second
time in under two hours.
A pair of Saudi
soldiers in a Humvee along the shore worriedly
insisted that this correspondent had breached
their perimeter and should go no further until
their captain was summoned. Feigning no knowledge
of Arabic and hedging that these JPSF troops would
not fire on a foreign reporter in broad daylight,
it was time to simply walk away shouting things
like "tourist, hotel, airport" and pointing to a
wristwatch.
After exiting the country,
Asia Times Online spoke with Nabeel Rajab, the
outspoken director of Bahrain's Center for Human
Rights. Rajab candidly outlined the outbreak of
gross human rights violations directed against the
island state's Shi'ite majority population in
recent weeks.
"It is intimidation ...
every Shi'ite [Muslim] is a target," Rajab said of
the overall climate of fear gripping the kingdom.
Rajab described in detail a campaign of a fear
being waged not only in villages in the shadow of
the once glittering capital but now in downtown
Manama itself.
He said the appearance of
graffiti supporting King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa,
desecration of traditional food offerings left
outside husseiniyas (Shi'ite religious
halls), and a plethora of humiliating checkpoints
where being caught with any imagery related to the
uprising or bans on photography can lead to a
severe beating coupled with interrogation.
During a recent visit to a local hospital,
Rajab noticed posters of King Hamad and other
leading members of the al-Khalifa dynasty that
low-level hospital workers of suspect allegiance
were apparently urged to kiss in a display of
coerced allegiance. Inside the hospital, there
were posts for members of Bahrain's security
apparatus, intelligence service, and regular army
to question arriving patients who they believe of
suspect affiliation.
Many in the security
forces are immigrant ex-soldiers recruited from
friendly Sunni states like Jordan, Yemen and
Pakistan. According to a Western diplomat who
spoke to Asia Times Online, the active placement
of foreign Sunni soldiers in Bahrain's military
was an effort to firmly consolidate the kingdom's
place as a Sunni power, however minor.
Rajab describes these foreign recruits
filling out the ranks of his country's special
forces as "mercenaries". The presence of Sunni
shock troops has increased hostility immensely and
fuels Shi'ite resentment about a purposefully
changing sectarian demographic. Rajab, who was
detained on March 20 in a night raid that
terrified his family, depicts what amounts to a
policy of collective punishment being deployed
against the monarchy's now possibly irreconcilable
subjects along with an economic implosion that is
shaking the nation to its core. It is a bleak
picture of mostly unseen repression that quickly
dropped off the international media's radar.
"They [the regime] try to humiliate the
enemy," he said. Asked about the strange
disappearance of the Pearl Monument-bearing 500
fils coin normally given as change in transactions
with the Bahraini dinar, Rajab responded: "Seeing
the 500 fils coin is dangerous. People are now
afraid to carry it."
Hundreds of workers
are now being sacked from their jobs for having
any affiliation with the uprising that began
formally on February 14. The al-Khalifa monarchy
has effectively marketed the notion of Iran as the
Shi'ite specter across the Persian Gulf and Rajab
stated that the American media's silent treatment
of the Bahrain crisis and its accompanying human
rights deficit was "hypocritical" in light of its
coverage of the simultaneous tumult in Libya,
Yemen and now Syria.
In giving credence to
the Bahraini (and Saudi) regime's insistence that
Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Islamic Republic of Iran is
persistently interfering and stoking sectarian
strife in Bahrain, Rajab said it was a way for the
outside world to "justify their silence" on
Bahrain's brutal crackdown. The GCC's Iran
hysteria fits into a both Saudi and Israeli
pre-fabricated narrative featuring Iran as a
deviant bogey man constantly keeping the security
balance of their respective regions on a knife's
edge.
The myth of the Iranian pariah
imperiling all manner of interests in the Persian
Gulf's littoral states has helped the United
States, France and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization gain GCC acquiescence in the Libyan
war, another new Arab awakening-turned-conflict
with no apparent end in sight.
A Western
diplomat stationed in Manama stated that the
majority of Bahrain's Shi'ites populace holds a
fervent distaste for Iran and that this sentiment
is well known throughout much of the diplomatic
corps there.
Officialdom in Washington and
other Western capitals appear to be behind the
curve if that is indeed the case. Any sense of
guilt in the West can be washed away by giving
credibility to the Iran claims promoted by Manama,
Riyadh and unscrupulous public relations firms in
Washington which create kneejerk double-take among
lawmakers about an actual degree of Iranian
involvement in Bahrain's troubles. Skepticism has
given way to the status quo when it comes to
Bahrain.
Bahrain's place in the Persian
Gulf as a financial hub is currently being
decimated and rapid capital flight may make the
kingdom an economic as well as military dependency
of Saudi Arabia. According to Rajab, the Bahraini
economy "will be frozen" so long as a "state of
war" exists with Saudi and United Arab Emirates
(UAE) occupation forces (who do not appear to be
wearing any insignias denoting them as Saudi)
trampling over Manama's urban core.
Many
Asian migrant workers and Western expatriates have
fled and may return to Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha
if at all. Bahrain has already facilitated a
somewhat orderly exodus of a percentage of its
traditionally indentured South Asian and Filipino
workforce in order to quickly cut costs in its
nearly vacant hotels, restaurants, and now stalled
vanity construction projects.
Though local
customers, having been prisoners in their own
homes for weeks on end, may indeed be trickling
back into gaudy malls guarded by tanks, it will
take much more substantial revenue to save the
local economy from regime-guided self-destruction.
The Saudis have promised to provide the island
with a rather substantial financial assistance
package though Bahrain may become dominated by a
suzerain in the process.
The question for
Bahrainis of any stripe, along with foreign
investors and migrant workers depending on the
Bahraini economy to send remittances home, is
precisely when the Saudi military, along with the
UAE police force, plan their exit. No one seems to
know precisely if or when.
Those who stand
to gain from the momentary perception of
"stability" say they welcome the Saudi forces. The
indigenous Shi'ites on the other hand, view the
armed interlopers as a sort of Shi'ite containment
mechanism designed to stem the transformation of
Bahrain into an inclusive, representative society
that would not neatly fit into Saudi foreign
policy.
In Rajab's words, "It does not
look like the Saudis are going to leave soon."
Though the streets of Bahrain's capital remain
free of protests and visible violence, the core
issues of majority rights, democratization, and
for some, toppling the monarchy itself, will
remain bottled up to burst into rage another day.
So as King Hamad, his uncle Prime Minister
Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifah and company try to
erase the Shi'ite uprising with its calls for
democratic reformation in Bahrain from memory, the
kingdom's Sunnis look to the monarchy to ensure
their place in Bahrain's traumatized society while
former Shi'ite protesters along with ordinary
villagers wait in fear of the next punitive night
raid.
Derek Henry Flood is a
freelance journalist specializing in the Middle
East and South and Central Asia.
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