Abd al-Rahman Al-Nu’aimi: Forty Years of Bahraini Opposition

Abd al-Rahman Al-Nu’aimi: Forty Years of Bahraini Opposition
Claire Beaugrand, 20 September 2011 – Open Democracy

Reflecting upon Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aimi’s lifelong activism adds important context to Bahrain’s current crisis and generates feelings of nostalgia for a united political opposition, says Claire Beaugrand

Far removed from the political turmoil that has recently swept through his home-country of Bahrain, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aimi passed away on 1 September 2011, after four years in a deep coma. His death, triggering reactions of sympathy from across the political spectrum in Bahrain, comes at a crucial time when both government and opposition search for a modus operandi in order to salvage what is left of Bahraini politics. Reflecting upon his lifelong activism as a window to modern Bahraini politics puts the current crisis into its historical context.

Throughout his life, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aimi played an important role in shaping the modern political consciousness of Bahrain. His dedication to political struggle and steady commitment to leftwing values contributed to make the conception of politics in Bahrain gradually evolve from a sheer elite consensus towards a more agonistic understanding, where politics is about expressing conflicting interests, yet in a peaceful way. Embodying the opposition since the early days of his involvement in a student organisation in 1961, al-Nu’aimi tirelessly imposed new terms on the political debate,

Al-Nu’aimi was born in 1944, on al-Muharraq island, to a notable family with close links to the traditional ruling circles. Increasingly politically active in the 1960s, he broke away from that background by joining the Arab Nationalist Movement. In 1966 he graduated from the American University of Beirut with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and found himself amongst the educated elite – of the sort that continues to be represented in Kuwait by Ahmad al-Khatib – that was advocating new forms of political legitimacy, on the basis of nationalist and leftist ideologies.

In the context of a politically charged Gulf with the independence and creation of new states in both Yemen and the Lower Gulf#, al-Nu’aimi’s political activism was defined via his enrolment in the nebulous Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf that aimed to fight British imperialism and overthrow its local ‘stooges’. This organisation oscillated between different levels and areas of action. It originally united regional forces to support the Dhofar rebellion in the Western part of Oman (hence the renaming Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf); yet, as the Dhofar rebellion was being crushed, it was disbanded and divided between the Bahraini and Omani branches in 1974. Al-Nu’aimi became the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. By this time, though, he was already in exile.

Exile

Following a crackdown on worker’s movements at the power station where he was an engineer in 1968, Al-Nu’aimi had left Bahrain to live in exile. He was not the only one to leave: between March 1965, the date of a major uprising in Bahrain, and the dissolution of the first Bahraini Parliament in 1975, the great majority of the members of the clandestine leftwing opposition in Bahrain whether it was the Popular Front or its Marxist-tinged counterpart, the National Liberation Front of Bahrain, left the island. They either feared further repression or were refused re-entry into the state following the state authorities’ suspicions of their political leanings and activities. After travelling via Qatar or pre-Saddam Iraq and, for some, after a revolutionary experience in Dhofar or Aden, all eventually settled in Beirut and Damascus. The policy of Ba’thist Syria was to grant residency to any Arab especially nationalists and Gulf dissidents. Al-Nu’aimi, known as ‘sa’id saif’, the luck-bringing sword, was no exception. He remained in Damascus for 33 years.

It was from abroad that he witnessed the rise of Shiite Islamist forces in Bahrain throughout the 1980s and watched during the 1990s the ‘Intifada’ mark the brutal entry into Bahraini politics of the masses from the peripheral Shiite ‘villages’.

Despite of the discredited reputation that affected the Arab nationalist leftists – as much as it did the Marxists – al-Nu’aimi kept alive a secularist form of political opposition. He, at the same time, liaised with a new generation of Shiite activists in exile, including Mansur al-Jamri and Saeed al-Shehabi from the London-based Harakat Ahrar al-Bahrain al-Islamiyya (Islamic Bahrain Freedom Movement). The period of exile allowed oppositional activists to build bridges between their diverse movements: both islamists and leftists worked to raise awareness and gain international support. The Popular Front, led by Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aimi and Abd al-Nabi al-Akry, both based in Damascus, began to embed its claims in the then universalising language of human rights. This forced it to adopt representative democracy as an ideal and to discard revolutionary goals and violent means to achieve their aims. …more