Riots in Bahrain, US Silent on heavy handed crackdown – 12 June, 1995

(The Wall Street Journal, Monday June 12, 1995, p A1)

MANAMA, Bahrain — On Friday, armored vehicles rolled through the streets of this offshore-banking capital, as thousands of troops staged a show of force to keep angry Bahrainis at bay.

The crowds were gathered for Ashura, an occasion when Shiite Muslims flagellate themselves in public to mourn the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson. The day passed peacefully. But the transformation of downtown Manama into an armed camp was a grim reminder that this tiny island has recently been the site of the worst civil unrest to hit any of the Gulf Arab monarchies in years

In the past six months, Shiite youths have been rampaging through their villages, setting electricity substations on fire and igniting canisters of cooking gas in giant fireballs. On Saturday night, three cars were burned near Bahrain’s big U.S. military base, headquarters of U.S. naval operations in the Persian Gulf. The ruling family has responded by unleashing their foreign mercenaries, who have pulled young people off streets at random, beaten and jailed them.

For U.S. policy makers worried about security in the Persian Gulf, the strife in Bahrain could be a harbinger of turmoil to come. The island is connected to much larger and richer Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd causeway, and perhaps more. The same conditions that have spawned instability here — economic decline, uneven distribution of wealth, a hated monarchy — are also serious problems in Saudi Arabia, which has a large, disadvantaged Shiite population in its oil-rich Eastern Province.

The Bahraini riots show no sign yet of jumping to the Saudi mainland, but the unrest raises touchy questions about U.S. strategy in the region. At a time of expanding democracy in the world, is it prudent, Gulf experts ask, for the U.S. to maintain its unwavering support for the unpopular oil monarchies?

There are two worlds in Bahrain. One is home to the gated compounds of diplomats and Western bankers, who help make Bahrain, in terms of assets, one of the biggest banking centers in the world. Here are the beach resorts of wealthy Arabs, who come to drink alcohol, visit their money and be waited on by about 250,000 foreign workers.

But the other world, where a large share of the 350,000 native Bahrainis live, is a parched island of mud huts and poverty.

This year’s rioters have been mostly unemployed youth from Bahrain’s Shiite majority, who are demanding jobs and the restoration of Bahrain’s Parliament. The ruling family, the al-Khalifas, who follow the rival Sunni sect of Islam, aren’t budging.

Since December, their security forces, composed of British and Pakistani mercenaries, have killed about a dozen unarmed Shiite youths, detained thousands of islanders without charges and besieged the Shiite villages with light tanks. The Saudi government has sent helicopters and cash to Bahrain, which has only small oil reserves of its own.

Recently, as residents of the fishing village of Diraz protested during the mourning for a 17-year-old boy killed by government troops, soldiers blew off the head of an 18-year-old. ‘Dogs in the United States have more human rights than we do,’ says one young man in the village.

Last month, the 31-year-old daughter of Sheik Abdel-Amir al-Jamri, a leading Shiite preacher and member of the deposed Parliament, disappeared, only to turn up several weeks later. She had gone to visit her ailing father in prison, Amnesty International reported, and was abducted and beaten there by women officers.

In London, meanwhile, Bahraini and Saudi dissidents recently held their first joint public meeting — hosted by the House of Commons — to express their complaints. Last summer, about 25,000 Bahrainis — both Shiites and Sunnis — signed a petition calling for the restoration of Parliament and other rights. Bahrain’s emir, Sheik Isa Bin Salman al-Khalifa, refused to accept it.

The emir once gave democracy a chance. In 1973, he issued a constitution authorizing an elected legislature. But he abolished it two years later, when the body refused to approve some draconian security laws.

Today, the main grievance of Bahrainis echoes a rising complaint heard in other Gulf states: the gut feeling that local rulers have conspired with outsiders — whether American oil companies, arms makers and the Pentagon, or offshore bankers and Asian labor suppliers — to divvy up the spoils of oil for themselves.

This suspicion is particularly prevalent in Bahrain. It is fueled by the fact that the entire southern part of the island, home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is off-limits to Bahrainis. For the past two decades, the emir and his brother, the prime minister, have ruled by decree, with a cabinet of hand-picked ministers. As the Khalifa family has grown, so have their assets — a source of bitter resentment.

The rulers developed many of the major hotels and office buildings, including the H-shaped Hessa complex, named for the emir’s wife. The family also has taken large tracts of beachfront property for their own use, blocking age-old routes to the shore for many inland villages.

‘You can’t get permission for any project now without giving a percentage to the Khalifas,’ contends Abdul Latif al-Mahmoud, a popular Sunni cleric whose passport and university post were revoked in 1991 after he spoke out in favor of democracy. ‘This is why all Sunnis and Shiites are angry. But what can we do?’

In an interview, Tariq Almoayed, Bahrain’s minister of information, says discontent on the island is isolated to ‘a small number of people’ who have ‘received instructions from outside.’ The unrest, he claims, ‘does not make sense to Bahrainis.’

As proof, he says, ‘there has not been a single hour of work lost in the government or private sectors; not a single person has been injured — Bahraini or non-Bahraini — who is not related to the rioters or the police. The world knows Bahrain is safe and secure.’

The man in charge of Bahrain’s security, a Briton named Ian Henderson, lives in the shadows: seldom seen, rarely photographed, widely feared. Last of a breed of British colonials who once ran the Gulf, Mr. Henderson, 67, is chief of internal security for the Khalifa regime. Before assuming the post in the mid-1960s, he earned a police medal for helping quell the Mau Mau rebellion in the jungles of colonial Kenya.

Bahrainis blame Mr. Henderson for devising the regime’s brutal response to the recent unrest. Dissidents also accuse him of persecuting democratic activists over the past 20 years and authoring Bahrain’s ‘Precautionary Law,’ which permits detention of political prisoners for three years without trial. Some Bahrainis who claim to have been tortured in Mr. Henderson’s jails say their Arab interrogators worked from questions written out in English.

Yet, others who knew him in prison say he is almost charming. ‘He tells you, `I’m only a policeman carrying out orders,” says Hassan Radi, a lawyer whom Mr. Henderson jailed in the 1970s for participating in pro-democracy activities.

Mr. Henderson declined to be interviewed. His secretary says, ‘Mr. Henderson doesn’t meet journalists.’

Nothing conjures up colonialism, however, like Sheik’s Beach, the emir’s partly public garden on the Gulf. At the entrance, Pakistani guards check cars for contraband. No cameras, no Arabs, no South Asians, a guard says: ‘White people and Japanese only.’

What about the Indian ambassador? someone asks.

‘Indian people — ambassador, minister — not allowed,’ the guard says. ‘Arab people, not allowed. Emir’s orders.’

Inside, dozens of white families lounge under soaring palm trees by the sea. An oil engineer from Texas tosses a football with his son. Sodas are free, and sometimes, Sheik Isa shows up with gold chains and other gifts for his guests. Once, when executives of Banque Indosuez of France were entertaining a potential new hire from London at the beach, the emir asked them where they were planning to dine that night, and sent a bottle of champagne.

Westerners, including the 3,000 or so Americans in Bahrain, have been unscathed by the riots so far. Unlike South Asian laborers, who tend to live near the poor Shiite villages and have become targets of attacks for allegedly taking locals’ jobs, other foreigners have remained outside the fray. Westerners’ main complaint is the dearth of official information about the unrest, which they know is out there from hearing explosions and helicopter noises in the night.

Bahrain’s media is barred from covering the conflicts, and Mr. Almoayed, the information minister, has ordered all Bahrainis not to speak to foreign journalists. According to Western bankers, investment activity has dropped, but Westerners aren’t fleeing.

Asian expatriates have fared much worse. Business in the Manama bazaar, dominated by Indians and Pakistanis, has fallen 80% in recent months, traders say. Some Asians, afraid for their lives, have left.

‘It has never been this bad; Bahrain was so peaceful,’ says one electronics merchant, whose family moved here from India in 1920. ‘I don’t know what to do. This island is my home.’

Opting for the iron hand, the Khalifas have refused dialogue. Instead, the regime has introduced cosmetic reforms, such as giving more publicity to Bahrain’s ‘consultive’ council, a group that is supposed to advise the government on matters concerning citizens, but is largely powerless.

The government is also renewing promises to replace low-wage Asian laborers with Bahrainis. But limiting foreign workers is proving difficult. Under Bahraini law, employers can only import laborers on specific contracts for limited jobs. But many companies simply bypass the law, by purchasing ‘free’ visas directly from members of the ruling family or their associates. Today’s going rate: $1,350 a head.

The quest for democracy in Bahrain has united the Muslim sects. This spring, prominent Sunnis and Shiites requested a joint meeting with the emir to discuss the unrest, but were rebuffed. Instead, rulers met separately with elders from each sect. The groups were given very different messages, according to participants in the meetings: Sunnis were reassured the Shiites were under control. Shiites were ordered, in unusually tough terms by the emir, to stop the violence at once, as a condition to discussing any concerns.

‘The regime has always pitted Sunnis and Shiites against each other,’ says Sheik Mahmoud, the Sunni cleric. ‘But it’s not working this time. The problem is between the people, who want democracy, and the government, which doesn’t.’

The U.S., which uses Bahrain’s strategic location to police the Persian Gulf, seems to have sided with the government. In March, as the riots were raging, Defense Secretary William Perry visited Bahrain’s rulers and made no public mention of the unrest, which locals interpreted as clear support for the regime. Earlier, when U.S. Ambassador David Ransom met a group of Bahrainis at the embassy, he told them the U.S. couldn’t interfere in Bahrain’s affairs,say people who attended the meeting. An embassy spokesman declines to comment.

In the villages, the outrage shows no sign of easing. In one home in the village of Diraz, four brothers — ages 13 to 21 — were recently taken by troops from their beds in the middle of the night; they were held for a month before being returned to their family. Says the youngest son: ‘We will fight until we get our rights.’