January 16, 2006
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Stirrings in the Desert
In Tiny Arab State, Web Takes On Ruling Elite
James Hill for The New York Times
In Manama, the capital of Bahrain, from left to right, portraits of the
prime minister, king and crown prince, all members of the Khalifa
family. More Photos >
MANAMA, Bahrain
- Ali Abdulemam, this country's most notorious blogger, sat in the
boxlike reception room of his father's house in a cramped Shiite
village dotted with raw cinder-block houses, trying to log onto the
widely popular Web site that he founded.Skip to next paragraphSTIRRINGS IN THE DESERT
Minority RuleThis is the last article in a series examining the prospects for democracy in the Middle East.
James Hill for The New York Times
Ali Abdulemam, founder of the Web site BahrainOnline.org, in his father's home.
More Photos >
James Hill for The New York Times
Sheik Adel al-Mawada, second from left, an elected member of the lower house of Parliament, with colleagues in his home.
More Photos >
The New York Times
Bahrain's contrasts: Manama's luxury coexists with poverty and joblessness.
More Photos >The government on this
flyspeck of an island nation, home to an American Navy base, recently
renewed its effort to block dozens of opposition Web sites. So Mr.
Abdulemam, 28, a computer engineer, had to spend about 10 minutes
whipping through various computer servers around the world before
finally pulling up his Web site, BahrainOnline.org.It
was National Day, Dec. 16, and some five miles away, the beautifully
landscaped boulevards of Manama, the capital, were packed with revelers
enjoying bands and fireworks. Pictures of the ruling princes blanketed
the city, which was also awash in the national colors, red and white.
Red and white lights were even wrapped around the palm trees lining the
main thoroughfares.But most of the couple of hundred people
posting messages in the "National Forum" section of BahrainOnline
mocked the idea of celebrating the day in 1971 when a Sunni Muslim king
ascended the throne to rule over a Shiite Muslim majority."In
Bahrain, glorifying the king means glorifying the nation, and opposing
the king means betraying the homeland and working for foreign
countries," wrote one online participant, noting that the formula is
the mark of a dictatorship. "Should we be loyal to the king or to
Bahrain?"Bahrain, long a regional financial hub and a prime
example of the power of the Internet to foment discontent, bills itself
as a leader of political change in the Arab world. It is a claim echoed
in praise from the United States, which considers Bahrain crucial for
its many regional military ventures because the American Navy's Fifth
Fleet is based here.But in Bahrain, as across the Arab world,
those pushing for democratic change want to end minority rule by a
family, sect or a military clique.The royal family here
dominates, holding half the cabinet positions and the major posts in
the security services and the University of Bahrain.Sheik
Muhammad al-Khalifa, the prince who runs the Economic Development
Board, argues that Bahrain should not become a democracy in the Western
sense. "As traditional Arabs, I don't think democracy is part of our
nature," he said."I think all people want is accountability," he added, noting that some form of democracy was needed to achieve that.
So
political change in the Middle East rests partly on whether and how the
many minority governments will yield power and allow others to
participate. So far, the results are anemic.The al-Saud tribe
slapped its name on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where local elections
a year ago have not produced active municipal councils, and crucial
issues like how much oil wealth the ruling family absorbs are not
discussed.In Syria, the ruling Assad family and its
confederates from the Alawite minority sect are in crisis, accused of
assassinating Rafik Hariri, a former Sunni prime minister of Lebanon
and an important figure who might have been able to rally majority
support against the Alawites' monopoly on power.Of course,
Iraq remains the biggest experiment of all in changing the practice of
minority rule. The American occupation has yet to answer whether it is
possible to forge a democratic government in the Arab world, or if the
attempt will drown in a cauldron of sectarian bloodshed. But the
results are being closely watched, perhaps nowhere more than in
Bahrain, where up to 70 percent of its native population of 450,000 are
Shiites, similar to Iraq's Shiite-Sunni split. Shiites here also
increasingly look to moderate religious leaders in Iraq for guidance.Some
political change has occurred. Debate is growing through the Internet,
satellite television and other forces, and elections this year will
replace the Parliament and municipal councils first chosen in 2002
under a new Constitution. Members of the ruling Khalifa family describe
this as a vibrant process that will ultimately establish a local strain
of democracy. Yet some of its most senior members and their Sunni
allies hint that the process is threatened because Bahrain's Shiites
disloyally serve outside interests like the Shiites in Iran and Iraq.Members
of the opposition call this nonsense and accuse the ruling dynasty of
questioning their loyalty to avoid having to share power. They say King
Hamad and his Khalifa clan, descendants of Bedouins from the Arabian
mainland who conquered this island, taking it from its Persian masters
in the 18th century, will only make cosmetic changes, noting that
almost nothing has been done to alleviate the entrenched discrimination
faced by the poorest segments of the Shiite population."The
problem with the royal family is that when they give us any democracy
they think that it is a gift and we have to thank them for it," Mr.
Abdulemam said. "The time when they were the lords and we were the
slaves is gone. The new generation is well educated. They won't live
like our fathers did in the past, when they said O.K. to whatever the
royal family did."A 'Golden Time' Cut Short
Bahrain's first Parliament, elected in 1973, proved too boisterous
for King Hamad's father, who dissolved it after 18 months. Opposition
demands to restore it increased through the 1990's, marked by bombings
and other sporadic violence. The authoritarian government subjected the
mostly Shiite opposition political activists to arrest, torture and
forced exile.When King Hamad, now 55, inherited power in 1999, he promised a democracy that he described as "areeqa" or "well rooted."
He
announced changes that included amnesty for exiles and the disbanding
of the dreaded State Security Courts. Bahrainis enthusiastically
approved the new plan in a public referendum.It was then that
Mr. Abdulemam established his groundbreaking Web site, determined to
give Bahrainis a place to share ideas and develop plans to deepen
political change. "It seemed like a golden time, when the country was
moving from one period in its history to another," he said. "Everybody
needed a place to talk so I provided it."But King Hamad soon hit the brakes. In 2002 he announced a new Constitution, formulated without public consultation.
The
cabinet, led by his uncle, a hard-liner opposing democratic change,
would report to him, not the Parliament. Instead of a single 40-member
Parliament, he added an appointed upper house. Amending the
Constitution now required a two-thirds majority of both houses, giving
the monarch full control. Parliament now could only propose laws, not
write them. An audit bureau that had previously reported to Parliament
was replaced with one that would not subject the spending of the royal
court or the 2,500 royal family members to any public scrutiny."I
had been full of hope that a new era was coming to Bahrain," Mr.
Abdulemam said. "But what happened next threw us all in the dirt. When
the king brought in the new Constitution, everyone was crushed."Politics in the Internet Age
In the old days, with its monopoly over television and radio and the
ability to shut down newspapers, the Khalifa dynasty would have had
less trouble controlling the debate. Now, with the Internet and
satellite television outside its reach, the government resorts to
tactics like tossing Mr. Abdulemam and two of his fellow Web masters
into jail for a couple of weeks, as it did last year.At the
time, the opposition orchestrated repeated demonstrations and
international intervention to help win his release, but legal charges
of insulting the king, incitement and disseminating false news remain
pending and can be dredged up at any time.One reason the
Internet is so popular - scores of villages have their own Web sites
and chat rooms - is that far more can be said about the ruling family
online than through any other means."Freedom of expression is
something you have to take, not something that will be granted to you,"
Mr. Abdulemam said, but he doubts that free speech alone will
accomplish much. "Their policy basically comes down to, 'Say what you
want and we will do what we want.' "BahrainOnline is the go-to
political site, with princes, Parliament members, opposition leaders
and others with an interest in politics saying they consult it daily to
find out what the opposition is thinking.The easiest way to
ensure a large turnout for any demonstration, the leader of the main
Shiite opposition group said, is to post the announcement for it on
BahrainOnline."If something happens anywhere in Bahrain, usually
within five minutes maximum something about it is happening on my
site," Mr. Abdulemam said.Still, the site's Web masters are
often criticized for creating a "tabloid" that spreads rumors and
demeans those considered enemies. Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights
advocate who criticized the Shiite clergy for opposing a proposed law
that would give more defined divorce rights to women, said her face was
pasted onto a naked body.Mr. Abdulemam said his site was
blamed for trash posted on any site in Bahrain, and his Web masters,
monitoring as many as 1,000 posts a day, remove anything that promotes
violence. He laughs when he recalls his arrest and how little his
interrogators knew about how the Internet works, blaming him for the
content of every posting.Mansour Jamri, editor of a daily
newspaper, Wasat, and the son of a famous Shiite opposition cleric,
notes that many of those writing on the Web sites are very young."If
you don't shout with them you are a corrupt person, you are basically a
dog used by the government," said Mr. Jamri, who has been portrayed as
just that.Part of the issue is that the press remains hobbled.
When Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, a prominent human rights advocate, was
arrested in late 2004 after giving a speech attacking the prime
minister over corruption, no newspaper printed what he had said. For
that people had to turn to BahrainOnline."This pocket of anarchy is a byproduct of half-hearted democracy," Mr. Jamri said.
Simmering Frustrations
In 2002, BahrainOnline led a fight to boycott the elections. As a
result, Shiites mostly stayed away from the polls, and the vote
exacerbated the sense among Shiites that the Khalifas and their Sunni
allies were not interested in treating them as equals.Election
districts were gerrymandered so that sparsely populated Sunni districts
in the south got almost as many members as the heavily Shiite villages
in the north. Opposition groups amassed evidence that the government
gave passports to various Sunni Muslim groups, including members of a
tribe in Saudi Arabia that had once lived on Bahrain, to alter voting
demographics.Ultimately, Sunnis captured 27 of the 40 seats in
the election. As in many parts of the Muslim world, fundamentalists
were the best organized, and a group of Sunni fundamentalists became
the largest bloc in Parliament. They muted any opposition to the
government out of concern that it might help spread the influence of
Shiite Islam.The new Parliament spent half its time bickering
over religious practice. It won a fight to allow fully veiled women to
drive. It proposed a ban on scantily clad window mannequins. It tried
to separate the sexes in all classrooms. Last year, alcohol sales were
banned during a Muslim holiday - a time when tens of thousands of
visitors arrive from Saudi Arabia to drink.What Parliament did
not do was really confront the government over a chronic housing
shortage and unemployment, particularly among Shiites. The gap between
the largely Sunni haves and the Shiite have-nots grows ever more
apparent and feeds simmering frustration.Mr. Abdulemam, for
example, earns a decent salary as a computer engineer at an
American-owned company. With a wife who is expecting their first child
any day, he can not afford $130,000 for a plot of land and does not
ever expect to be able to.He is the youngest of 10 siblings, 4
of whom still live with their children in his father's house. Some 15
people live there, with each nuclear family allotted a room. "I know we
deserve better," he said.Exact numbers are hard to pin down in
Bahrain, but about 27,000 applications are pending for subsidized
government housing, senior officials concede. Unemployment stands
officially at 15 percent but runs as high as 28 percent among Shiite
young adults ages 20 to 24, diplomats and Bahraini economists said.Opposition
members accuse the royal family of monopolizing all available land, and
say an expatriate community of 250,000 - from Asia and other Arab
countries - blocks Shiites from most decent jobs. Shiites avoid some
tough jobs like construction and are generally barred from joining the
security services. Royal family members concede that more needs to be
done to improve housing but deny hoarding land. A job training program
is to begin this month.Last spring, the committee in the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights that monitors racial discrimination
rebuked Bahrain. The report said that although Bahrain paid lip service
in its laws to barring discrimination, actual practice lagged.When
Mr. Abdulemam was arrested in February 2005, he found that his
interrogator was an Egyptian, one of hundreds of Sunni Muslims from the
Arab world and Pakistan recruited into the security services, given
houses and usually citizenship."He was asking me whether I was
loyal to this country," Mr. Abdulemam said sourly. "How can an Egyptian
ask me about my loyalty? There are many ways to love your country, and
what I do is one of them."The poverty suffered by many Shiites
seems particularly galling to them given the real estate boom. The
capital's skyline is dominated by gargantuan luxury office blocs under
construction, which Bahrainis contend are all owned by the royal
family. The capital is also plastered with ads for housing developments
like Riffa Heights, an upscale community with sea views and a golf
course in a plush neighborhood already dominated by royal palaces where
Shiites cannot buy land.Senior officials call it all essential
development to attract investment to Bahrain, long the Persian Gulf's
financial hub but one competing increasingly with far richer emirates
like Dubai and Qatar.The young, American-educated crown prince
even used a huge tract to build a $150 million Formula 1 racing
circuit. Talal al-Zain, the investment banker who is the raceway's
chairman, lauded it as a means of putting Bahrain on the international
map. The track seems to baffle Bahrainis. For special races on National
Day only about 500 people, most of them foreigners, sat in stands built
for 30,000. One Web site mocks the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad
al-Khalifa, as "Salman Schumacher," a reference to Michael Schumacher, a top racer.Formally,
the Bush administration has declared that it supports democratic change
across the region, that the United States will no longer laud despots
just because they back American policy. "Hopeful reform is already
taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain," President
Bush said in his 2005 State of the Union address.Practically,
though, the United States has not pushed for sweeping change out of
concern for what might happen if states fell into the hands of
Islamists.The Khalifas court the Bush administration
particularly well. The foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed
al-Khalifa, noted that a proposed port might provide the deep-water
docking space needed for the aircraft carriers that now have to anchor
offshore. Such cooperation has earned Bahrain a free-trade deal and
praise from Mr. Bush.A Shiite-Sunni Divide
During a protest march on National Day, some of the participants
chanted "Death to Khalifa!" referring to Sheik Khalifa bin Salman
al-Khalifa, 69, who has remained prime minister since independence in
1971. They yelled it in Arabic and Persian, the language of Shiite
Iran.With Iraq holding so much of the people's attention here,
much the way Iran did after its revolution, the question is whether
developments in Iraq will lead Bahrain to more sectarianism or more
democracy. Signs of both exist. Some postings on BahrainOnline include
portraits of prominent Iranian ayatollahs past and present,
particularly Khomeini and Ali Khamenei.
Members of the ruling family generally use such displays to buttress
the accusation that the basic goal of the Shiites is to establish an
Iranian-style theocracy in Bahrain.But Shiites here respond
that the ayatollahs are strictly spiritual guides and that native
Shiites have lived in Bahrain longer than the ruling family and have no
intention of living under the thrall of yet another foreign power. To
counter the accusation that their loyalties lie outside Bahrain, the
Shiite activists stopped hoisting such pictures at rallies."The
new Iraq is the model," said Sheik Ali Salman, the 40-year-old Shiite
cleric elected to lead Al Wifaq Islamic Society, the main Shiite
opposition group, and a man who once organized rallies denouncing the
American invasion of Iraq. The expectation that Shiites will dominate
the Iraqi government has given Shiites across the region new
confidence.Speaking fluent English learned during five years
of exile in Britain, the cleric ticks off all the steps Iraqis have
taken toward choosing their own leaders in the same period that King
Hamad has been busy consolidating power while warning against moving
too quickly to carry out change.Most Shiites follow one
senior cleric on matters of religious practice in their daily lives.
Mr. Abdulemam said he used to look to Khomeini in Iran, but recently
switched to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the moderate and powerful
Shiite cleric in Iraq.Sunnis in Bahrain are at times incensed
when Shiites fax Ayatollah Sistani questions, like asking him whether
they must obey traffic laws, because King Hamad is not, in their view,
a legitimate Islamic ruler. (He faxed back to say yes, they do.)Where
many Shiites here used to watch Al Manar, the satellite channel
broadcast from Beirut by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah, they have
switched to the Iraqi-run Euphrates channel. When a bombing kills
Shiites in Iraq, some in Bahrain wear black.Shiites and Sunnis
silently assess all events in Iraq, which are both feeding democratic
yearnings and deepening the divisions between them."If a Sunni
area is bombed, the Sunnis wish it was a Shiite area; they don't say
it, but they feel it," said Sheik Khalid al-Khalifa, a prince and an
academic who serves on the Shura Council, the appointed upper house of
Parliament. "It's the same for the Shiites. It's all reflected here."http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/international/middleeast/15bahrain.html?pagewanted=all
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