al Khalifa’s brutal and misjudged response to Bahrain’s democracy movement has undermined its own existance

Bahrain: the crisis of monarchy
Christopher M Davidson, 25 July 2011

About the author – Christopher M Davidson is a fellow of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Durham University, and a former assistant professor of politics at Zayed University, Dubai. He is the author of The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival (Lynne Reiner, 2005), Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success (C Hurst, 2008) and The Persian Gulf and Pacific Asia: From Indifference to Independence (C Hurst, 2010)

The turmoil in the tiny Gulf island kingdom of Bahrain continues, even if it has tended to be overshadowed by events elsewhere in the Arab world such as the war in Libya and the intensifying unrest in Syria. Yet if the current developments there are barely reported in international media, they are nonetheless vital: for they both represent a key milestone in the country’s political history (even, it might be argued, its ongoing revolution), and have key ramifications for its closest neighbours and its most powerful international partners.

The Al-Khalifa ruling family is attempting to manage the crisis that erupted with the popular demonstrations for political reform in February 2011. The government convened a “national dialogue” about the unrest in early July. But it is fast running out of space for manoeuvre. Here the decision of Al-Wefaq, the largest Shi’a opposition party, to withdraw from the “dialogue” process is significant. Al-Wefaq was always a tolerated opposition movement and therefore very much part of the Al-Khalifa’s establishment. So at a time when the king and prime minister are trying to persuade their various allies that they are willing to discuss political reform and that they also still enjoy some basic level of legitimacy, the party’s stance is a major blow for the regime.

In reality, the Al-Khalifa now have no legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Bahraini population. Most of Bahrain’s people are still Shi’a, despite the government’s determined attempts over the past decade to manipulate the sectarian imbalance by trying to naturalise large numbers of invited Sunni immigrants. The understandable Shi’a resentment at such policies and the discrimination they represent have since February 2011 been expressed in protests, most of which have been put down with bloody force. …source