Bahrain's Formula 1 for failure

Activist Ala’a al-Shehabi is the latest victim of Bahrain’s dictatorship arrested after a series of articles critical of the repressive regime. Al-Shehabi was arrested last week while taking journalists on a trip around the country during the Grand Prix weekend. She was possible arrested while travelling with the Channel 4 News crew led by Jonathan Miller which was filming illegally in hot spot areas before they were arrested and deported.  Al-Shehabi announced her own arrest on Twitter saying “Under arrest. Surrounded by.”  She was unable to complete the sentence because she was surrounded by 11 police vehicles.  There has been no word of any charges laid since the arrest.

Dr. Ala’a al-Shehabi is an economics lecturer, a founding member of Bahrain Watch and an outspoken democracy advocate. Her arrest came a week after she published a piece for Foreign Policy called Hunger, heroism and hope in Bahrain where she wrote about another prominent Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. Al-Khawaja was then into his 64^th day of a hunger strike. Al-Shehabi said if he died it could end the regime's efforts to rehabilitate itself. The regime was obviously paying attention. Not only did it arrest her, it also forcibly ended the hunger strike after 77 days by force feeding al-Khawaja who now plans to resume it.

His survival removed another potential embarrassing moment for Bahrain as it dealt with the fall-out from the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Leaving aside the disgrace of Bernie Ecclestone and the sport’s governing body heaped upon motor racing by agreeing for the event to go ahead (exposing once again the oft-repeated lie that sport and politics do not mix), the event did bring some good to Bahrain – it shone a light on the nation’s grievous problems. These problems have only got worse since the regime crushed the Shiite protests in March 2011 with Saudi help and US acquiescence.

A new briefing from the Project on Middle East Political Science called Breaking Bahrain surveys Bahrain’s political stalemate, how it got to this point, and what the future might hold. The briefing said the crackdown torpedoed a political compromise and had wider implications to the region blunting the momentum for change (a strong motivation for Saudi intervention). It also hardened sectarian attitudes between Sunnis and Shiites and exposes US hypocrisy at the same time as it intervened in Libya.

Bahrain’s own Independent Commission of Inquiry report found the Bahraini regime committed wide scale human rights violations during the crackdown. The report documented 35 deaths and found  13 of them were caused by security forces, five more dying of torture and eight more “not attributable to a perpetrator”.  Torture included extremely tight handcuffing, forced standing, severe beatings, electric shocks, burning with cigarettes, beating of the soles of the feet, verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, threats of rape and sexual abuse.

A year on, the Bahraini regime has refused to implement the recommendations of the report. They show no sign of admitting there is a problem and are unwilling to countenance any power sharing. When protests started again on 13 February to mark the one year anniversary, the response was swift and brutal. Police fired teargas and stun grenades at protesters who tried to occupy the old Pearl Square, the demolished rallying point of the 2011 protests.  The Government blamed outsiders for the riots. Field Marshall Shaikh Khalifa bin Ahmad Al Khalifa, the Bahrain Defence Forces commander in chief told local press a vast array of countries had “mobilised their media, embassies, agents and fifth columns in the Gulf” against Bahrain’s government.

The Grand Prix gave the regime only brief respite. Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa claimed cancelling the race would have empowered the extremists. But the security blanket Bahrain put on to ensure its “success” fooled no-one inside or outside the kingdom.  The protester Salah Abbas Habib was beaten to death by riot police on the eve of the race while there were more journalists in the country more interested in race issues rather than the race. Formula One is a loss leader for Bahrain costing $40 million to run but supposedly stimulating knock-on effect to other business.  But with the country on the front pages and first five minutes of international news, tourism remains on the nose and investment is seen as too risky. Bahrain’s problems will continue indefinitely in the absence of any serious attempts at political compromise.

Bahrain government continues brutal crackdown

The main Shiite opposition party in Bahrain has said it will boycott the proposed “national dialogue” next month and will also sit out the planned September elections. Al Wefaq leader Shaikh Ali Salman said it was a protest against the government for not doing enough to address Shiite concerns. "There has to be real dialogue that results in political reforms,” Salman said. “We believe the dialogue was a step forward for the country but setting conditions before the process is not acceptable.” Salman told Chinese news agency Xinhua they would not take part in the 24 September elections because the “issues faced by people are more important and are still ignored”. He also said government needed to address the sacking of workers, arrest of doctors and nurses, as well as politicians and other citizens before entering any dialogue. (photo of Shaikh Ali Salman by Hasan Jamali)

The national dialogue forum Salman is referring to starts on Saturday. It is aiming to attract 300 participants bringing together the full spectrum of Bahrain's political, social, economic and rights groups. According to Dubai’s Gulf News (which is distributed in Bahrain), the participation rate of invitees is 94 percent. But Al Wefaq was the big undecided group and suspicious that the too wide variety of issues on the table would diminish the chances of agreeing on real democratisation. Despite being almost ha;f of parliament, it was invited to choose only five representatives to the 300-person conference.

Al Wefaq is Bahrain’s largest party winning 18 of the 40 seats in last year’s parliamentary election. However they are regularly outvoted by a bloc of Sunni parties and independents. In February, all 18 Al Wefaq MPs resigned after police killed seven people in the battle for Pearl Roundabout (now razed and known as Al Farooq junction). The Government crushed the rebellion in March with the aid of troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

On 1 June, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa announced the lifting of a "state of national safety" he had decreed and offered talks. Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Khalifa went to the Oval Office a week later to meet President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to seek support for the national dialogue. Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet so the US has been cautious about overtly attacking the regime despite condemning the security crackdown. The State Department formally welcomed the talks on 15 June. However Assistant Secretary Michael Posner told his Bahraini hosts meaningful dialogue could only take place “in a climate of respect for the freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.”

This was a veiled reference to the many trials and military court proceedings initiated by the government to deal with 500 people arrested since the February protest. On Monday Bahrain launched a mass trial of 28 doctors and nurses accused of joining the protests and spreading “false information” which means talking to foreign media. Another 20 doctors and nurses are accused of an "anti-state plot". On 22 June, a special security court in Bahrain sentenced eight activists and opposition leaders to life in prison on charges of “plotting to overthrow the government”.

Meanwhile a special military court called the Court of National Safety came into being on 12 June to hold the trials of politically motivated cases against opposition members of parliament and a prominent defence lawyer. According to Amnesty International, the courts were put in place to respond to the protests and are presided by one military and two civilian judges. The court sentenced a young activist to a year in prison for charges related to her public recital of a poem critical of Bahrain’s King.

Two Al Wefaq MPs are among those arrested and kept in secret solitary confinement. They have no access to legal representation or family present. Human Rights Watch has called on Bahrain to end the proceedings. “Most defendants hauled before Bahrain's special military court are facing blatantly political charges, and trials are unfair," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The Crown Prince may be sincere in his efforts to promote dialogue, but what good is that while back home the government is crushing peaceful dissent and locking up people who should be part of the dialogue."

Indicting Gaddafy: Lebanon raises the stakes on Musa Sadr disappearance

Lebanon has indicted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafy over the disappearance of a prominent Shia cleric 30 years ago. Sheik Musa Sadr disappeared in 1978 when he visited Libya though Tripoli claimed he left the country on a plane bound for Rome - a claim denied by Italy. Lebanon has charged Gaddafy and six other Libyan officials with conspiring to kidnap and false imprisonment which carry a maximum death penalty. However, Gaddafy and the others are highly unlikely to ever face trial in Lebanon.

The person assassinated, Imam Musa Sadr, was a major influence in Lebanon’s 1970s sectarian politics. He was born in Iran and got a law degree from Tehran University. His family was Lebanese and in 1960 he accepted an invitation to be the Shia religious leader in the Southern Lebanese city of Tyre. An intellectual, he spoke several languages and was equally conversant in Western thought as he was in Shia philosophy. Similar to South American liberation theologian priests, Sadr was a charismatic speaker and a tireless worker who gave his downtrodden community a voice and provided them with identity and power in Lebanese politics.

Growing tensions in the south near the Israeli border spurred a mass Shia exodus to the slums of southern Beirut. Sadr was religious head of the Shia community and he organised the fragmented slums of southern Lebanon and the western Beqaa Valley into a new political movement. Sadr called the movement Harakat al-Mahrumin (movement of the deprived) and it quickly became the voice of Lebanese Shia.

When Lebanon’s civil war began in 1975 the Harakat divided into political and military wings. The political party Amal (Hope) became an international organisation and the party of choice for diaspora Shia businessmen as far away as Freetown, Accra, Kinshasa and Detroit. These communities provided the financial muscle for the new party. Sadr used his Amal militia to run social services but his pleas for help in the Shia slums fell on deaf ears in Beirut.

Slowly but surely he began to undermine the pan-Arab unity of Sunni hegemony. Sadr was the figurehead of a growing Shia awakening. In the 1970s Amal camps trained Shia activists from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. As the civil war raged, Sadr’s Shia-centric actions and Persian accent brought about great distrust in the Lebanese Sunni community. Many accused him of treason and saw him as a threat to the Palestinian establishment and by extension to the larger Arab world.

His assassination was well-planned and well-known in advance. Before he left for Libya in 1978, the feared head of Syrian security Rifaat al-Assad (younger brother of then President Hafiz al-Assad and uncle of current leader Bashar al-Assad) summoned the Shah’s ambassador to Damascus to warn him of Libya’s plan. Sadr still held an Iranian passport and Assad did not want to damage relations with Tehran. But Sadr and two assistants left as planned to visit Gaddafy and none of them were never heard from again.

To his supporters Sadr became known as the “vanished Imam”. Despite his disappearance Amal remained a major force in Lebanese politics. He welcomed the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon as a liberation and flexed his power in the refugee camps after Israel expelled the PLO. They remained the leading Shia group until they were overshadowed by Hezbollah backed by the new theocratic Iranian government. Hezbollah won respect in Sunni communities after it took on the IDF and forced it to retreat from southern Lebanon.

The issue of Sadr’s disappearance dragged on to become the subject of a major dispute between Libya and Lebanon. Gaddafy refused to attend an 2002 Arab summit in Beirut after Shia groups threatened him. Libya closed its Beirut embassy claiming it was insulted by Lebanese pressure to reveal Sadr’s fate. In 2004, Sadr’s son filed a suit against Gaddafy and 17 members of his government. Lebanon claimed to have new information about the disappearance and the country’s chief prosecutor said former Libyan Prime Minister Abdel Salam Jalloud and a former Libyan ambassador to Lebanon should also be summoned.

But the Libyan leader never responded to the summons. Gaddafy has not been back to Lebanon since Sadr disappeared. The arrest warrant against him allows magistrates to take such measures against suspects who fail to respond to an official summons. Lebanon knows its current arrest warrant is highly symbolic, but is unwilling to let the matter lie. Their Shia have emerged as a major political force and remain determined to get to the bottom of the fate of their “vanished imam”.

Iraqi end games: Shia Government says US troops out by 2011

Though it is hazardous exercise setting a military withdrawal timetable three months before a US presidential election, Iraq says it has signed a deal that could see all US troops out of the country by 2011. As well as the doubts on the US side, Chief negotiator Mohammed al-Haj Hammoud and Iraq’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs also has to sell the so-called “27 point deal” to his own parliament but it may be the best chance to lock the US into a timetable for withdrawal. Hammoud said Baghdad and Washington had agreed to "withdraw the US troops from Iraq by end of 2011." The US is refusing to confirm the deal is finalised, but it is there for negotiation even if no-one is mentioning the agenda of where Iraq’s oil goes.

But if the US troops leave, the contest will go on in Baghdad and Basra as the consequences of the genie Saddam’s removal from power continue to be felt. The clash of whether Sunnis or Shias inherit his kingdom is a battle the US can no longer manage. During his long regime Saddam was a political opportunist who was quick to bend in what favourable wind was blowing. But he was also a Sunni and when US tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003, the long Sunni reign in Mesopotamia was over. According to Vali Nasr’s theory in “The Shia Revival”, Iraq is now the vanguard of a new Shia power, subtly different from the more theocratical version next door in Iran.

Hussein was deeply hostile of Iraqi Shias whom he believed were in secret allegiance with their co-religionists in Iran. Shia were also a majority in his own country. But they were concentrated in the south around Basra. Hussein’s clan was from the Sunni north where power was concentrated. When the British left the “mandate” of Iraq they handed over power to the Sunni. Senior diplomat Gertrude Bell, the “uncrowned queen of Iraq” and “daughter of the desert”, harboured suspicions of the prickly Shia mullahs and ayatollahs whom she believed were behind the revolt against the British at the end of World War I. The Shia uluma reciprocated and watched in bitterness as Bell handed power to the Sunnis.

The subsequent Sunni 80 year reign was only briefly punctuated by the 1958 coup in which Colonel Qasim overthrew and murdered Iraq’s last king Faisal II. Qasim was nominally Sunni but his mother was Shia and he had close ties to Iraq’s Communist Party which was also Shia. But Qasim lasted only five years before he was himself was deposed. The subsequent rise of Arab nationalism and Ba’thism kept the Shia further out of the picture.

When Saddam came to power, he ruthlessly suppressed any hint of Shia revolt against his regime. According to Vali Nasr, he systematically neglected the cities of the south and starved them of services. He caused the environmental catastrophe of the draining of riparian wetlands so they could no longer shelter anti-Saddam rebels. One million poverty-stricken Shia were forced to seek homes in the slums that surround Baghdad and Basra. As well, Saddam banned public Shia festivals such as Ashoura and murdered popular religious leaders. He also discouraged pilgrimages to shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest places of Shia orthodoxy.

Despite a litany of oppression, the Shia remained generally mute and mostly loyal. It was not until George Bush Snr’s false call to rebellion in 1991, that they lashed out. A riot in Basra rapidly spread north to Karbala and Najaf boosted by Bush 41's call for Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. But when a horrified Saudi Arabia saw the extent of the Shia uprising, they influenced the US to stay out of the resulting conflict. US forces in the Euphrates Valley merely watched on as Saddam crushed the revolt with the tanks of his praetorian division he had kept out of the war – the dreaded Republican Guard.

And while the Americans fiddled, Shia towns burned and the shrines at Karbala and Najaf were shelled. No one lifted a finger to help as tens of thousands of Shias died. One Iraqi general told the New Yorker he had captured many people whom he divided into three groups; those whom he knew were involved in the rebellion, those he wasn’t sure about, and those he knew had no involvement. He telephone High Command to ask what to do with them. “They said we should kill them all,” said the general, “and that’s what we did.”

Many mass graves would not be found until after the fall of Saddam. And it wasn’t until 30 January 2005 when Iraqis went to the polls that Sunni dominance would finally end. The hugely influential Ayatollah Sistani brokered a truce between Shia factions to present a united face. Only after Shia majority rule had been won, argued Sistani, could the Shia quibble about who precisely rules and under what system. The Shia House took 48 percent of the vote and almost half the seats in the new parliament. They did better again in the December elections that year and won 46 percent of all the seats, more than the Sunni and Kurdish blocks put together.

But the Shia alliance is an artificial one and remains fraught with hazard. There are three big power blocks. Firstly there is Sistani himself allied with the other grand ayatollahs of Najaf. Unlike their Iranian counterparts they have not been inclined to turn Iraq into an Islamic Republic. But they remain hugely influential. The second power block is the slum rebellion in Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr is the scion of a prominent Shia family who inherited a huge flock of urban poor from his cleric father who was murdered by Saddam. He is now trying to turn his Mahdi Army into a political machine.

The third element in Iraqi Shia politics is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC). SIIC and its military wing, the Badr Brigade, straddle the boundary between Sistani and Sadr. Founded as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) by the Hakim Brothers, their father was a Najaf Ayatollah. The Hakims fled to Qom in Iran in the 1980s and their Badr Brigade fought in the war against Saddam. When Sunni extremists killed one brother in 2003, the other, Abdul-Aziz Hakim became SIIC’s leader.

The current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is from none of these three factions. He represents the nonclerical Islamic Da’wa Party but as the name would suggest it too has Islamists roots, dating back to a Saddam-era party dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq. Dawa and Maliki now depend on a coalition of Sadr and SIIC to rule. Sadr will not be happy with the timescale of the US withdrawal nor the vague conditions of “security” that might delay it. SIIC will proceed cautiously but Hakim is proving to be a surprisingly gifted operator and far from being an Iranian stooge.

Hakim’s political front the “United Arab Alliance” is the largest single party in parliament. In 2006 he met George W Bush at the Oval Office where he claimed the Iraqi situation has been “subjected to a great deal of defamation”. Hakim said US, Iraqi, and regional interests were are all linked. But he made it clear Iraq was going to go its own way. “We believe that the Iraqi issue should be solved by the Iraqis with the help of friends everywhere,” he told Bush 43. “But we reject any attempts to have a regional or international role in solving the Iraqi issue.” With an 2011 agenda now in place, McCain or Obama will have to take this man on his own merits.