05-05-2012, 02:21 PM
SAUDI INVASION OF BAHRAIN : THE ALLIANCE AGAINST REVOLUTIONS
Prof. Madawi Al-Rasheed & Dr. Kristian Ulrichsen
Open Discussions – Gulf Cultural Club
20th March, 2012
http://www.gcclub.org/index.php?show=news&action=article&id=4717
On 14th March 2011 Saudi forces crossed the border with Bahrain and entered the country to crush the Revolution that had started one month earlier. The deafening silence by the West on the Saudi occupation of Bahrain has been shameful. The double standard policy of the West has shocked anyone with clear conscience. The West has abandoned its support for the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain and opted to support the Gulf monarchies that cannot be reformed or modernised in any shape or form.
Madawi Al-Rasheed: It is always a pleasure to address this distinguished audience. I am interested in the question of the Saudi response to the Arab spring. I think that in order to understand the response we have to look at the Saudi internal challenges. These internal challenges determined how Saudi Arabia responded to the Arab uprisings. It couldn’t have been a worse moment for the Saudi leadership for these uprisings to emerge.
First it had an aging leadership that is trying to navigate security and survival in the middle of internal political, religious and social schisms with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is today witnessing serious debates and real and virtual protests among several groups in Saudi Arabia.
Obviously we have seen serious demonstrations starting in Qatif last year and other villages moving to other places in Saudi Arabia. The most recent one was a demonstration and civil disobedience by female students in one of the universities in Abha. We have also seen other types of mobilisation by women’s groups. For example, last summer, there was a campaign for driving that several women participated in and there were calls for demonstrations in March last year that didn’t materialise.
The point that I am trying to make is that Saudi Arabia has not been immune from the kind of protest that has swept the Arab world from Morocco to Bahrain to Iraq and even sleeping Muscat.
Saudi Arabia responded to these kinds of minor protests that had taken place by deploying three strategies internally. The first one was the heavy deployment of security forces everywhere, not only in the eastern province (Qatif) but also in other parts of the country. There is a heavy security presence everywhere.
The second strategy was to deploy the religious establishment and the religious establishment improvised by adopting two strategies. The first one was the reiterate the view that civil disobedience and peaceful protest is forbidden in Islam and the second strategy of the religious establishment is to heighten among its followers sectarian tension and schism. During the last year I do not think I have witnessed in Saudi history more sectarianism than I have recorded in the past twelve months since the events in Bahrain on 14th February. So these were the two strategies of the religious establishment.
And finally there was the economic side whereby the Saudi leadership promised and distributed some economic benefits in order to buy time and to buy loyalty.
These internal tensions have determined how Saudi Arabia responds to the Arab uprisings. At the beginning of the Arab revolt we heard that Saudi Arabia is a counter revolutionary force. I want to make a serious distinction here because there is a difference in the way in which Saudi Arabia dealt with several uprisings. There are three strategies.
The first one was containment and we see this in North Africa. The second one was a counter revolution and there are two places where Saudi Arabia deployed that. Unfortunately for the Bahrainis it was in Bahrain and counter revolution was actually carried out by direct military intervention. In Yemen Saudi Arabia played a counter revolutionary role but by negotiations and trying to reach a solution that suits the Saudi leadership as a result of negotiations. The third strategy was to support revolution and this is what we have seen in Syria.
So let me just describe some of the events that come under containment in Tunisia and Egypt and possibly in Libya, counter revolution in Bahrain and Yemen and supporting revolution in Syria.
First of all Saudi Arabia and its main religious groups and even the media denied the Arab revolts and their transformative character in the sense that there was quite a lot of talk in the public sphere about these revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia as fitna, as a kind of dissent and invoking a long term religious heritage that even forbids oppressed people from rising against their rulers even by peaceful means.
Therefore in Tunisia and Egypt from the very beginning, Saudi Arabia stood with the regimes. It was so clear that they were with the regimes. I can give you some examples of how they did it. First of all with Bouazizi set himself on fire many religious scholars regarded this as suicide which is condemned by Islam. And also they attributed to weak faith and inability to endure hardship. Interestingly in one of the towns in northern Saudi Arabia a person committed suicide as a result of a series of events and hardships and the immediate reaction you get is that he should be blamed for it because his faith his weak because he is a sinner. Bouazizi was seen in the same sort of way. Saudi Arabia supported the Tunisian regime. Tunisia had some intimate security relations with Saudi Arabia but it wasn’t the jewel in the crown. Although Tunisia had the privilege and the pride that it started the Arab spring in its relations with Saudi Arabia it wasn’t that important.
When the Egyptians got rid of Mubarak in 18 days this created a crisis for Saudi Arabia but also an opportunity. The way the Saudi regime saw the Egyptian uprising was that it would deprive them of their main ally. Mubarak was an ally, the needed him for so many reasons one being a counter force against Iran in a future conflict or confrontation. Therefore they tried their best to prolong the crisis in Egypt and promised Mubarak some millions in order to compensate him for loss of American aid. Many Egyptians discovered later on that this aid was not coming.
There was a serious shock that if Mubarak fell Saudi Arabia would be deprived of one of its main allies. Even though Egypt was seriously weakened as a result of its economic situation and had actually become so marginal in Arab politics we find that it still mattered to Saudi Arabia to have Mubarak in power.
We find that Saudi Arabia did not congratulate the Tunisian people for their revolution, they did not welcome Tunisian official until very recently almost a month ago. In February the Prime Minister of Tunisia went to Saudi Arabia without talking in public about the repatriation of Zine El Abdine Ben Ali.
Once it became clear that the revolutions are in full swing and there is no point in returning to the status quo Saudi Arabia tried to manoeuvre to contain the outcome. The irony is that Islamists have come to power as a result of free elections in these countries from Morocco all the way to Egypt. One would think that Saudi Arabia which claims to be an Islamic country would actually be happy about the Islamists coming to power but the opposite happened and this is interesting. Saudi Arabia does not want any kind of Islamic political system that combines Islam with democracy. Therefore the real challenge for Saudi Arabia today is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood present the Saudi regime with an alternative to the so-called hereditary Islamic rule and therefore you can see and monitor the tension and see how the government through its media launches attaches on the Muslim Brotherhood in order to undermine the Islamic project.
Therefore the only option for Saudi Arabia is to support Scarf the security council as a counter force to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and at the same time sponsor other Islamists who might challenge the supremacy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore these are strategies to contain the outcome in Egypt. What worries Saudi Arabia is that if there is an open election there might be some forces that might come to power in Egypt that may actually not be so friendly to Saudi Arabia be they the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups.
So the strategy is to contain the outcome.
I don’t know whether this will work. I think it is such a short time to predict how the situation in Egypt would actually develop in the future. But one thing that Saudi Arabia does not want is for Egypt to be able to maintain its independence and make decisions and policies that reflect the elected parliaments constitution and composition.
Saudi Arabia therefore saw the Egyptian revolution as a challenge, as a threat but also as a positive things because a weaker Egypt, an Egypt that is busy with its daily affairs and a deteriorating economy would give an opportunity for Saudi Arabia to actually reach that dream that it had maintained since after 1967 and that is to lead the Arab Sunni camp. This has been a project for Saudi Arabia for the last four decades. Whether it will happen we will have to see. I have my doubts that that will be the outcome because I think it is very difficult even for Egyptians who are exhausted by their economy and needs to simply become agents of Saudi Arabia. Egypt is too big to be able to be contained as the Saudis would prefer it to be although there are serious economic challenges facing it.
Let me move now to Bahrain and this is where we see the counter revolution in its full swing. First of all the Saudis from the very beginning presented the Bahraini pro-democracy movement as a sectarian, Shia conspiracy backed by Iran against the Sunni majority. We have heard this again and again since the very beginning. My view as somebody who is not a specialist on Bahrain, but I have read secondary sources on Bahrain. We see that there is a kind of mobilisation in Bahrain that has not been witnessed anywhere else in the Gulf. From the early 19th and early 20th century there is resistance against colonial rule. Bahrain has always been engaged with Arab politics. It is very difficult to believe what the Saudi propaganda is saying about the Bahraini pro-democracy movement. They had been communists before, they had been Baathists, they had been nationalists and over the past three or four decades they had been Islamists.
I don’t see how Wafd can be a Shia conspiracy backed by Iran. But all the diversity of the forces in Bahrain has been eradicated by this discussion of Bahrain as a fifth column. What worried Saudi Arabia most in Bahrain was the fall of Hamad and the ruling family. It would be the first precedent that would be created in the Gulf that would depose these kind of family dynasties. It may bring the prospect for the future downfall from Kuwait all the way down to Muscat and also Saudi Arabia.
So it was so important to keep Hamad in place not for the sake of the Bahrainis but for the sake of Saudi Arabia itself. Saudi Arabia would never allow such a development. So that is why it was so crucial for the Saudis to move in very quickly with the other Gulf states in order to suppress this uprising.
Unfortunately for the Bahrainis the move meant that the crisis is prolonged and it becomes very difficult to reach compromises. Only today six opposition groups called for dialogue for a leadership. But when a country’s minority ruler is backed by another power its very difficult to reach compromises and this has been so clear historically. Once you have one country, big brother like Saudi Arabia with all the means available backing a minority regime, the regime is no longer accountable to its own people because it can secure the backing of a foreign power.
There are so many scenarios about confederations and unity about whether Bahrain should be the 14th province of Saudi Arabia or the 14th province of Iran. I think the Bahrainis had the opportunity to say what they wanted and that is in the seventies. They wanted the opportunity to be an independent state and an Arab state rather than an Iranian satellite.
Now the critics would say things have changed since the 19th century. Bahrain today wants to be part of Iran. I have not yet met a Bahraini who would like Bahrain to become a province of the vilayat al fakhi in Iran. I haven’t come across them. Maybe they do exist. The regime is very good at providing us with evidence that if you raise the picture of Khameini or Khomeini in the streets and villages of Bahrain than those people are loyal to Iran.
I have seen in Lebanon, the heartland of Sunni Islam, huge portraits of King Abdallah and King Fahd and nobody is saying that those people would like to be the citizens of Saudi Arabia. Maybe they would like to. I don’t know. This kind of imagery and iconography is today used in order to prove a point, to prove that those people are not loyal.
My answer to this is if you ask a Filipino who has the photo of the pope in her bedroom does that mean that her loyalty is to the Vatican or to the Filipino state. This is a community that has transnational links and it is the fault of the regime which does not allow them to have their own marjaia or hawzat to produce their religious scholars that drives them to seek religious scholars or religious knowledge from somewhere else. These are religious communities that exist everywhere. We live in a globalised world and the same thing happens among Sunni Muslims. If you go to some mosques in Birmingham you would find that they are connected by satellite TV to the mufti of Saudi Arabia. They receive religious knowledge from him by skype. Therefore do we say that these Muslims are not royal to Britain or that they receive orders from the mufti. In terms of their citizenship and loyalty we have to use a different kind of discourse.
There is also Yemen but I don’t have time to go into it. The same thing happened. Saudi Arabia did play a counter revolutionary role there in the sense that it helped to prepare a safe exist for Ali Abdullah Saleh diluting the revolution. But I think the situation is not finished. There are certain groups in Yemen that are resisting this kind of arrangement whereby the old system stays but some individuals are taken out. Ali Abdullah Saleh mainly. Everybody else is still in place. We will see whether this will develop into a secure country that reflects the desires of the people that gave their lives in Sana and other places.
In Syria we have a clear example of Saudi Arabia supporting a revolution. So here their reaction to a regime that deprives everybody of their human, political and civil rights is to support the Syrians. This is realpolitik. I think that Saudi Arabia wants to defeat Iran in Syria rather than support the Syrian people. I said this from day one especially when King Abdullah last summer announced that he worries about Bashar killing his own people.
I have no sympathy for Bashar. I think he is as bad as Mubarak or the Saudis. It is a very minority regime that oppresses its own people. But that does not mean that Saudi Arabia is going to save the Syrians. It is unlikely that they will. They have their own agenda in Syria and Syria is extremely important not only to defeat Iran in Syria but also to defeat Iran in neighbouring Lebanon.
We have to understand that over the past five or six years Saudi Arabia has lost quite a lot of its influence in the region. First of all in Iraq. Iraq is no longer a place where Saudis can actually dictate any policy. They have lost their influence among the Palestinian factions. They tried to organise some kind of talks and reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah with no success. Qatar has hijacked the project from Saudi Arabia.
They have also lost their influence in Lebanon especially after the war with Israel in 2006 and then the clashes in Beirut between Hezbollah and other factions. So the influence of Saudi Arabia has eroded in these hotspots of the Arab world and therefore Syria becomes extremely important in order to contain Iran in the region and hoping that a pro-Saudi regime would emerge in Syria.
So in a way this Syrian crisis is far from being resolved. It will actually escalate and I can’t see how it can be resolved now. I think with the intervention of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and also some perhaps covert operations from the West it will escalate and change the map of what used to be called the Levant.
My biggest worry is the rethinking of the region along sectarian lines so we have an Allawi state, a Shia state, a Hezbollah state in the south of Lebanon, a Druze state and then perhaps a Sunni arrangement between the Sunnis of Iraq, the Sunnis of Syria and pockets of ethnic minorities such as the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a Kurdish enclave in Syria and we could go along dividing the region even further.
That is against my belief. Here I stop being an academic. I would not like to see the region divided along sectarian lines and having little emirates re-emerging. The tyranny of the sect is unbearable for everybody. My hope for the region is to have a civil state where people are respected and given their rights as citizens not as groups belonging to Shia, Sunni, Alawi or Christian if we are talking about Lebanon. I think I will stop there.
Dr Kristian Ulrichsen : I would like to pick up on the second part of the talk on the role of the West. Adding to what Professor Madawi said about Syria. This has been the most surreal experience of the last year. The Saudi Foreign Minister expressed his support for arming the opposition to an authoritarian regime. This is incredible that this would happen. The Saudi would react to organized protest in the same way. This is what led the Syrian envoy to the United Nations to propose a peace-keeping force to Qatif and to Bahrain to protect the local people there from the Saudi oppression. He may have been speaking tongue in cheek grandstanding at the UN but I think it contains more than a grain of truth.
When the revolution at Pearl Roundabout started last year there were two almost inevitable things that were bound to happen. The first was that Saudi Arabia would intervene once the extent of the uprising became visible. The second was that the West would keep a degree of silence, complicity in fact in that action.
In any form of monarchical government in the Gulf the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the Bahraini ruling family, the Al Khalifa, are the weakest link in that chain. We have seen at regular intervals over the past 80 or 90 years regular cycles of mobilization or society demanding political and economic rights and the ruling family having cycles of partial political openings followed by political closures. We have seen that over the past ten or 15 years alone.
What changed last year was the scale of the uprising in February and March last year when we had tens and even hundreds of thousands of people out on the street. It was a social mobilization. It wasn’t Shia against Sunni. It was Shia with Sunni, people from all walks of life. One of the slogans was ‘no Sunni, no Shia, only Bahraini’. This panicked the ruling family and their supporters into the response they made. Clearly there was a social movement developing which had to sweep away the vestiges of monarchy in this extremely sensitive island which is a microcosm of the wider power shifts and structures in the Arab world and the Middle East and the Iranian world.
Bahrain is a cockpit of geo strategic interests of Saudi Arabia and Iran. When people speak of the kind of alleged Iranian interference in Bahraini affairs it is staggering that no one speaks of the Saudi interference in Bahraini affairs which was invited by the ruling family. If you are looking external manipulation and external intervention into the affairs of a sovereign country then I don’t think you can isolate one example and claim to instances of another when they don’t actually exist.
I think that since the beginning of the revolution last February the degree of Saudi involvement was inevitable. We saw that in the 1990s in the previous uprisings/revolutions. This has placed the West in a very difficult position. Britain has long historical linkages with Bahrain not just in its protective status until 1971 but in the security services. People will recall the role of Charles Belgrave (1926 – 1957). He was in many ways the real ruler of Bahrain, the right-hand man of the emir.
Britain intervened in 1923 to arrange a succession to serve its own interests. Belgrave was interestingly swept away in 1957 as a direct result of the pan Arab nationalism at the time of the Suez crisis and popular anger and disgust at Britain’s role in the tripartite aggression against Egypt. He was quickly replaced. From the1960s Ian Henderson was the backbone of the Bahraini security services. He had a very unsavoury past. He was the architect of the crushing of the Maw Maw rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. He remained in Bahrain in Bahrain from 1966 until 1998 and was directly involved in the torture of many of the detainees during the uprising in the 1990s. He is still living in Bahrain as far as I am aware.
Britain has a long and inglorious record in the involvement of the security affairs of Bahrain which continues to this day with the appointment of John Yates . We would have thought that after the recent Leverson inquiry and the allegations of Yate’s behaviour over the past two or three years he might be beyond the pale. His deep expertise in the manipulation of the media makes him ideal for taking on the position he had in Bahrain. He gave a remarkable interview about a month ago shortly before the anniversary of the uprising in which he said he was hoping to translate British crowd control methods into the Bahraini context. I think he was referring to the issue of kittling. I would be concerned if he ever returns to the UK and tries to transfer Bahraini crowd control measures here. That would be alarming and probably appealing to some people in government.
Given this role, given the backbone geostrategic considerations Bahrain is of key importance to the British and also to the Americans clearly in terms of its posting of the US fifth fleet. At this time with the escalation of tension with Iran the increase in rhetoric between the US and Israel on the one hand about running out of patience. There is the feeling that in an election year there could be some sort of action. I don’t think there will be any action but there will be an increase in rhetoric against Iran which in many ways makes it even harder to hope that there will be some kind of US or British leverage on the Bahraini ruling family.
Clearly Bahrain is the backbone of the US position in the Gulf by virtue of hosting the US fifth fleet. The US is not going to take liberties with one of its core regional allies at this moment in time. They sacrificed Mubarak who was a key American ally in the Middle East but he wasn’t positioned in the same kind of way as the Bahraini ruling family are caught between supposed Iranian hegemonic ambitions on the one hand and a Saudi-US alliance on the other. That makes it even more difficult for any pressure being applied by the West on the Bahraini ruling family as they try to perhaps make statements in support of meaningful reform. Most people know that that is simply not on their agenda.
Bahrain Watch has gone into a great detail about whether the recommendations of the Bassiouni report have been implemented and degree to which they have been sidelined or ignored is incredible. Even perhaps more remarkable was debate in the House of Lords last week on the position of the Arab uprisings one year on and on Britain’s role in the whole area. There was hardly any mention of Bahrain at all. The Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Lord Howell, had a lot of words over the situation in Libya which stands as a testament to Britain’s incompetence in any form of engagement with the Middle East and North Africa. He had a lot of condemnation of the actions of the Syrian regime as you might expect but on Bahrain he had two sentences basically for further commitment by all sides to dialogue.
If one side is uncommitted to an equal sharing and distribution of power then there is a limit to what they can achieve particularly if the opposition societies in Bahrain have tried to engage and settle their differences and find a compromise settlement. They tried in 2000 after the initial boycott in 2002 the major parties gave the government benefit of the doubt in 2006. Having that benefit of the doubt shredded, having their own credibility called into question to participate in what was a political opening of some sort which later turned out to be little more than political window dressing by the ruling family why should they believe the ruling family now?
I think Britain places too many hopes in the reforming element of the ruling family, notably the crown prince perhaps turning a blind eye to the extent to which he has been marginalised or sidelined within the family. But as we have seen in the case of Saif Al Islam putting your faith in alleged ruling family reformers can backfire spectacurely because when push comes to shove they are still members of the ruling elite and the ruling family and they are unwilling to sacrifice their position of power.
We saw this very clearly in Libya whenSaif Al Islam sacrificed all his credentials as a reformer and all the hopes placed in him by the West for the sake of staying in power. I suspect we will see that in Bahrain also if the Crown Prince ever has to make that choice.
In Bahrain we have already seen the whole Economic Development Board vision of a business friendly shredded. In London I used to see taxis with ‘business friendly Bahrain’ painted on the doors and on the busses. I have several stamps in my passport with the stamp business friendly Bahrain. That whole concept has been shredded. It was the cornerstone of the vision of 2030. It was the cornerstone of attempts to diversify the economy, of trying to present Bahrain as an investment friendly country looking at engagement on multiple levels, playing on its position as a leading financial centre in the region. All this has been shredded to stay in power despite the societal demands for a fair position in the decision-making process.
I think we have seen over the last year a lot of very cold truths which may have been suspected by people in the Bahraini opposition who doubted the sincerity of the ruling family regarding meaningful reform. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for those in the West who have a relationship with the Bahraini ruling family or for that many any ruling Gulf family to try to push under the carpet. That will continue to be the story.
We will see the Bahraini Grand Prix going ahead on April 23rd so that will be an early test of the degree to which the spotlight will be shone on the Bahraini settlement last year. It will be interesting to see whether during the Grand Prix there will be an opportunity for the opposition to mobilise to take advantage of the spot light that is being shone on the kingdom or whether the ruling family will attempt to manipulate and present a deeply one-sided picture of the semblance of normality.
We saw in the run-up to the election in 2010 a number of incredibly patronising pieces even in The Independent a very respectable British newspaper which extolled the virtues of Bahraini democracy – a new institution coming to terms with its newly found role and responsibilities. If we were to see that again it would be deeply complicitous.
Given the Bahraini ruling family’s obsession with pr and spin and hiring pr companies to do their work for them I suspect we may well see that. We have seen British companies working for the regime trying to place articles in the Guardian and other newspapers. It is much harder to turn a blind eye to what is happening in Bahrain and other parts of the Gulf and to buy the regime’s rhetoric hook line and sinker. I suspect that places the government in a difficult position. They want to engage.
Clearly the Bahraini and the Saudi ruling family is a major commercial ally, a source of an incredible amount of foreign investment into the UK at a time or recession it is more important for British trade and industry to get Gulf foreign investment into the country for British jobs. It is going to be a very difficult position for them for them to straddle these diverging pressures and to maintain a degree of dignity while the do so.
Madawi Al-Rasheed is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, London. Her research focuses on history, society, religion and politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Middle Eastern Christian minorities, Arab migration, Islamist movements, and state and gender relations.
Recent publications include Politics in an Arabian Oasis (I.B. Tauris 1991), A History of Saudi Arabia (second edition CUP 2010), Counter Narratives: History, Contemporary Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (Palgrave 2004),Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (Routledge 2005), Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (CUP 2007), Kingdom without Borders: Saudi Political, Religious and Media Frontiers (Hurst 2008) and Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World (I.B. Tauris 2009), and mazaq al-islah fi al-saoudiyya (Saqi). She is a regular contributor to al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and other television/radio programmes. Some of her articles are posted in English and Arabic on http://www.madawialrasheed.org/
Dr Kristian Ulrichsen is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914-22, Insecure Gulf: The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-Oil Era, and The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order.
Prof. Madawi Al-Rasheed & Dr. Kristian Ulrichsen
Open Discussions – Gulf Cultural Club
20th March, 2012
http://www.gcclub.org/index.php?show=news&action=article&id=4717
On 14th March 2011 Saudi forces crossed the border with Bahrain and entered the country to crush the Revolution that had started one month earlier. The deafening silence by the West on the Saudi occupation of Bahrain has been shameful. The double standard policy of the West has shocked anyone with clear conscience. The West has abandoned its support for the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain and opted to support the Gulf monarchies that cannot be reformed or modernised in any shape or form.
Madawi Al-Rasheed: It is always a pleasure to address this distinguished audience. I am interested in the question of the Saudi response to the Arab spring. I think that in order to understand the response we have to look at the Saudi internal challenges. These internal challenges determined how Saudi Arabia responded to the Arab uprisings. It couldn’t have been a worse moment for the Saudi leadership for these uprisings to emerge.
First it had an aging leadership that is trying to navigate security and survival in the middle of internal political, religious and social schisms with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is today witnessing serious debates and real and virtual protests among several groups in Saudi Arabia.
Obviously we have seen serious demonstrations starting in Qatif last year and other villages moving to other places in Saudi Arabia. The most recent one was a demonstration and civil disobedience by female students in one of the universities in Abha. We have also seen other types of mobilisation by women’s groups. For example, last summer, there was a campaign for driving that several women participated in and there were calls for demonstrations in March last year that didn’t materialise.
The point that I am trying to make is that Saudi Arabia has not been immune from the kind of protest that has swept the Arab world from Morocco to Bahrain to Iraq and even sleeping Muscat.
Saudi Arabia responded to these kinds of minor protests that had taken place by deploying three strategies internally. The first one was the heavy deployment of security forces everywhere, not only in the eastern province (Qatif) but also in other parts of the country. There is a heavy security presence everywhere.
The second strategy was to deploy the religious establishment and the religious establishment improvised by adopting two strategies. The first one was the reiterate the view that civil disobedience and peaceful protest is forbidden in Islam and the second strategy of the religious establishment is to heighten among its followers sectarian tension and schism. During the last year I do not think I have witnessed in Saudi history more sectarianism than I have recorded in the past twelve months since the events in Bahrain on 14th February. So these were the two strategies of the religious establishment.
And finally there was the economic side whereby the Saudi leadership promised and distributed some economic benefits in order to buy time and to buy loyalty.
These internal tensions have determined how Saudi Arabia responds to the Arab uprisings. At the beginning of the Arab revolt we heard that Saudi Arabia is a counter revolutionary force. I want to make a serious distinction here because there is a difference in the way in which Saudi Arabia dealt with several uprisings. There are three strategies.
The first one was containment and we see this in North Africa. The second one was a counter revolution and there are two places where Saudi Arabia deployed that. Unfortunately for the Bahrainis it was in Bahrain and counter revolution was actually carried out by direct military intervention. In Yemen Saudi Arabia played a counter revolutionary role but by negotiations and trying to reach a solution that suits the Saudi leadership as a result of negotiations. The third strategy was to support revolution and this is what we have seen in Syria.
So let me just describe some of the events that come under containment in Tunisia and Egypt and possibly in Libya, counter revolution in Bahrain and Yemen and supporting revolution in Syria.
First of all Saudi Arabia and its main religious groups and even the media denied the Arab revolts and their transformative character in the sense that there was quite a lot of talk in the public sphere about these revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia as fitna, as a kind of dissent and invoking a long term religious heritage that even forbids oppressed people from rising against their rulers even by peaceful means.
Therefore in Tunisia and Egypt from the very beginning, Saudi Arabia stood with the regimes. It was so clear that they were with the regimes. I can give you some examples of how they did it. First of all with Bouazizi set himself on fire many religious scholars regarded this as suicide which is condemned by Islam. And also they attributed to weak faith and inability to endure hardship. Interestingly in one of the towns in northern Saudi Arabia a person committed suicide as a result of a series of events and hardships and the immediate reaction you get is that he should be blamed for it because his faith his weak because he is a sinner. Bouazizi was seen in the same sort of way. Saudi Arabia supported the Tunisian regime. Tunisia had some intimate security relations with Saudi Arabia but it wasn’t the jewel in the crown. Although Tunisia had the privilege and the pride that it started the Arab spring in its relations with Saudi Arabia it wasn’t that important.
When the Egyptians got rid of Mubarak in 18 days this created a crisis for Saudi Arabia but also an opportunity. The way the Saudi regime saw the Egyptian uprising was that it would deprive them of their main ally. Mubarak was an ally, the needed him for so many reasons one being a counter force against Iran in a future conflict or confrontation. Therefore they tried their best to prolong the crisis in Egypt and promised Mubarak some millions in order to compensate him for loss of American aid. Many Egyptians discovered later on that this aid was not coming.
There was a serious shock that if Mubarak fell Saudi Arabia would be deprived of one of its main allies. Even though Egypt was seriously weakened as a result of its economic situation and had actually become so marginal in Arab politics we find that it still mattered to Saudi Arabia to have Mubarak in power.
We find that Saudi Arabia did not congratulate the Tunisian people for their revolution, they did not welcome Tunisian official until very recently almost a month ago. In February the Prime Minister of Tunisia went to Saudi Arabia without talking in public about the repatriation of Zine El Abdine Ben Ali.
Once it became clear that the revolutions are in full swing and there is no point in returning to the status quo Saudi Arabia tried to manoeuvre to contain the outcome. The irony is that Islamists have come to power as a result of free elections in these countries from Morocco all the way to Egypt. One would think that Saudi Arabia which claims to be an Islamic country would actually be happy about the Islamists coming to power but the opposite happened and this is interesting. Saudi Arabia does not want any kind of Islamic political system that combines Islam with democracy. Therefore the real challenge for Saudi Arabia today is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood present the Saudi regime with an alternative to the so-called hereditary Islamic rule and therefore you can see and monitor the tension and see how the government through its media launches attaches on the Muslim Brotherhood in order to undermine the Islamic project.
Therefore the only option for Saudi Arabia is to support Scarf the security council as a counter force to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and at the same time sponsor other Islamists who might challenge the supremacy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore these are strategies to contain the outcome in Egypt. What worries Saudi Arabia is that if there is an open election there might be some forces that might come to power in Egypt that may actually not be so friendly to Saudi Arabia be they the Muslim Brotherhood or other groups.
So the strategy is to contain the outcome.
I don’t know whether this will work. I think it is such a short time to predict how the situation in Egypt would actually develop in the future. But one thing that Saudi Arabia does not want is for Egypt to be able to maintain its independence and make decisions and policies that reflect the elected parliaments constitution and composition.
Saudi Arabia therefore saw the Egyptian revolution as a challenge, as a threat but also as a positive things because a weaker Egypt, an Egypt that is busy with its daily affairs and a deteriorating economy would give an opportunity for Saudi Arabia to actually reach that dream that it had maintained since after 1967 and that is to lead the Arab Sunni camp. This has been a project for Saudi Arabia for the last four decades. Whether it will happen we will have to see. I have my doubts that that will be the outcome because I think it is very difficult even for Egyptians who are exhausted by their economy and needs to simply become agents of Saudi Arabia. Egypt is too big to be able to be contained as the Saudis would prefer it to be although there are serious economic challenges facing it.
Let me move now to Bahrain and this is where we see the counter revolution in its full swing. First of all the Saudis from the very beginning presented the Bahraini pro-democracy movement as a sectarian, Shia conspiracy backed by Iran against the Sunni majority. We have heard this again and again since the very beginning. My view as somebody who is not a specialist on Bahrain, but I have read secondary sources on Bahrain. We see that there is a kind of mobilisation in Bahrain that has not been witnessed anywhere else in the Gulf. From the early 19th and early 20th century there is resistance against colonial rule. Bahrain has always been engaged with Arab politics. It is very difficult to believe what the Saudi propaganda is saying about the Bahraini pro-democracy movement. They had been communists before, they had been Baathists, they had been nationalists and over the past three or four decades they had been Islamists.
I don’t see how Wafd can be a Shia conspiracy backed by Iran. But all the diversity of the forces in Bahrain has been eradicated by this discussion of Bahrain as a fifth column. What worried Saudi Arabia most in Bahrain was the fall of Hamad and the ruling family. It would be the first precedent that would be created in the Gulf that would depose these kind of family dynasties. It may bring the prospect for the future downfall from Kuwait all the way down to Muscat and also Saudi Arabia.
So it was so important to keep Hamad in place not for the sake of the Bahrainis but for the sake of Saudi Arabia itself. Saudi Arabia would never allow such a development. So that is why it was so crucial for the Saudis to move in very quickly with the other Gulf states in order to suppress this uprising.
Unfortunately for the Bahrainis the move meant that the crisis is prolonged and it becomes very difficult to reach compromises. Only today six opposition groups called for dialogue for a leadership. But when a country’s minority ruler is backed by another power its very difficult to reach compromises and this has been so clear historically. Once you have one country, big brother like Saudi Arabia with all the means available backing a minority regime, the regime is no longer accountable to its own people because it can secure the backing of a foreign power.
There are so many scenarios about confederations and unity about whether Bahrain should be the 14th province of Saudi Arabia or the 14th province of Iran. I think the Bahrainis had the opportunity to say what they wanted and that is in the seventies. They wanted the opportunity to be an independent state and an Arab state rather than an Iranian satellite.
Now the critics would say things have changed since the 19th century. Bahrain today wants to be part of Iran. I have not yet met a Bahraini who would like Bahrain to become a province of the vilayat al fakhi in Iran. I haven’t come across them. Maybe they do exist. The regime is very good at providing us with evidence that if you raise the picture of Khameini or Khomeini in the streets and villages of Bahrain than those people are loyal to Iran.
I have seen in Lebanon, the heartland of Sunni Islam, huge portraits of King Abdallah and King Fahd and nobody is saying that those people would like to be the citizens of Saudi Arabia. Maybe they would like to. I don’t know. This kind of imagery and iconography is today used in order to prove a point, to prove that those people are not loyal.
My answer to this is if you ask a Filipino who has the photo of the pope in her bedroom does that mean that her loyalty is to the Vatican or to the Filipino state. This is a community that has transnational links and it is the fault of the regime which does not allow them to have their own marjaia or hawzat to produce their religious scholars that drives them to seek religious scholars or religious knowledge from somewhere else. These are religious communities that exist everywhere. We live in a globalised world and the same thing happens among Sunni Muslims. If you go to some mosques in Birmingham you would find that they are connected by satellite TV to the mufti of Saudi Arabia. They receive religious knowledge from him by skype. Therefore do we say that these Muslims are not royal to Britain or that they receive orders from the mufti. In terms of their citizenship and loyalty we have to use a different kind of discourse.
There is also Yemen but I don’t have time to go into it. The same thing happened. Saudi Arabia did play a counter revolutionary role there in the sense that it helped to prepare a safe exist for Ali Abdullah Saleh diluting the revolution. But I think the situation is not finished. There are certain groups in Yemen that are resisting this kind of arrangement whereby the old system stays but some individuals are taken out. Ali Abdullah Saleh mainly. Everybody else is still in place. We will see whether this will develop into a secure country that reflects the desires of the people that gave their lives in Sana and other places.
In Syria we have a clear example of Saudi Arabia supporting a revolution. So here their reaction to a regime that deprives everybody of their human, political and civil rights is to support the Syrians. This is realpolitik. I think that Saudi Arabia wants to defeat Iran in Syria rather than support the Syrian people. I said this from day one especially when King Abdullah last summer announced that he worries about Bashar killing his own people.
I have no sympathy for Bashar. I think he is as bad as Mubarak or the Saudis. It is a very minority regime that oppresses its own people. But that does not mean that Saudi Arabia is going to save the Syrians. It is unlikely that they will. They have their own agenda in Syria and Syria is extremely important not only to defeat Iran in Syria but also to defeat Iran in neighbouring Lebanon.
We have to understand that over the past five or six years Saudi Arabia has lost quite a lot of its influence in the region. First of all in Iraq. Iraq is no longer a place where Saudis can actually dictate any policy. They have lost their influence among the Palestinian factions. They tried to organise some kind of talks and reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah with no success. Qatar has hijacked the project from Saudi Arabia.
They have also lost their influence in Lebanon especially after the war with Israel in 2006 and then the clashes in Beirut between Hezbollah and other factions. So the influence of Saudi Arabia has eroded in these hotspots of the Arab world and therefore Syria becomes extremely important in order to contain Iran in the region and hoping that a pro-Saudi regime would emerge in Syria.
So in a way this Syrian crisis is far from being resolved. It will actually escalate and I can’t see how it can be resolved now. I think with the intervention of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and also some perhaps covert operations from the West it will escalate and change the map of what used to be called the Levant.
My biggest worry is the rethinking of the region along sectarian lines so we have an Allawi state, a Shia state, a Hezbollah state in the south of Lebanon, a Druze state and then perhaps a Sunni arrangement between the Sunnis of Iraq, the Sunnis of Syria and pockets of ethnic minorities such as the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a Kurdish enclave in Syria and we could go along dividing the region even further.
That is against my belief. Here I stop being an academic. I would not like to see the region divided along sectarian lines and having little emirates re-emerging. The tyranny of the sect is unbearable for everybody. My hope for the region is to have a civil state where people are respected and given their rights as citizens not as groups belonging to Shia, Sunni, Alawi or Christian if we are talking about Lebanon. I think I will stop there.
Dr Kristian Ulrichsen : I would like to pick up on the second part of the talk on the role of the West. Adding to what Professor Madawi said about Syria. This has been the most surreal experience of the last year. The Saudi Foreign Minister expressed his support for arming the opposition to an authoritarian regime. This is incredible that this would happen. The Saudi would react to organized protest in the same way. This is what led the Syrian envoy to the United Nations to propose a peace-keeping force to Qatif and to Bahrain to protect the local people there from the Saudi oppression. He may have been speaking tongue in cheek grandstanding at the UN but I think it contains more than a grain of truth.
When the revolution at Pearl Roundabout started last year there were two almost inevitable things that were bound to happen. The first was that Saudi Arabia would intervene once the extent of the uprising became visible. The second was that the West would keep a degree of silence, complicity in fact in that action.
In any form of monarchical government in the Gulf the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the Bahraini ruling family, the Al Khalifa, are the weakest link in that chain. We have seen at regular intervals over the past 80 or 90 years regular cycles of mobilization or society demanding political and economic rights and the ruling family having cycles of partial political openings followed by political closures. We have seen that over the past ten or 15 years alone.
What changed last year was the scale of the uprising in February and March last year when we had tens and even hundreds of thousands of people out on the street. It was a social mobilization. It wasn’t Shia against Sunni. It was Shia with Sunni, people from all walks of life. One of the slogans was ‘no Sunni, no Shia, only Bahraini’. This panicked the ruling family and their supporters into the response they made. Clearly there was a social movement developing which had to sweep away the vestiges of monarchy in this extremely sensitive island which is a microcosm of the wider power shifts and structures in the Arab world and the Middle East and the Iranian world.
Bahrain is a cockpit of geo strategic interests of Saudi Arabia and Iran. When people speak of the kind of alleged Iranian interference in Bahraini affairs it is staggering that no one speaks of the Saudi interference in Bahraini affairs which was invited by the ruling family. If you are looking external manipulation and external intervention into the affairs of a sovereign country then I don’t think you can isolate one example and claim to instances of another when they don’t actually exist.
I think that since the beginning of the revolution last February the degree of Saudi involvement was inevitable. We saw that in the 1990s in the previous uprisings/revolutions. This has placed the West in a very difficult position. Britain has long historical linkages with Bahrain not just in its protective status until 1971 but in the security services. People will recall the role of Charles Belgrave (1926 – 1957). He was in many ways the real ruler of Bahrain, the right-hand man of the emir.
Britain intervened in 1923 to arrange a succession to serve its own interests. Belgrave was interestingly swept away in 1957 as a direct result of the pan Arab nationalism at the time of the Suez crisis and popular anger and disgust at Britain’s role in the tripartite aggression against Egypt. He was quickly replaced. From the1960s Ian Henderson was the backbone of the Bahraini security services. He had a very unsavoury past. He was the architect of the crushing of the Maw Maw rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. He remained in Bahrain in Bahrain from 1966 until 1998 and was directly involved in the torture of many of the detainees during the uprising in the 1990s. He is still living in Bahrain as far as I am aware.
Britain has a long and inglorious record in the involvement of the security affairs of Bahrain which continues to this day with the appointment of John Yates . We would have thought that after the recent Leverson inquiry and the allegations of Yate’s behaviour over the past two or three years he might be beyond the pale. His deep expertise in the manipulation of the media makes him ideal for taking on the position he had in Bahrain. He gave a remarkable interview about a month ago shortly before the anniversary of the uprising in which he said he was hoping to translate British crowd control methods into the Bahraini context. I think he was referring to the issue of kittling. I would be concerned if he ever returns to the UK and tries to transfer Bahraini crowd control measures here. That would be alarming and probably appealing to some people in government.
Given this role, given the backbone geostrategic considerations Bahrain is of key importance to the British and also to the Americans clearly in terms of its posting of the US fifth fleet. At this time with the escalation of tension with Iran the increase in rhetoric between the US and Israel on the one hand about running out of patience. There is the feeling that in an election year there could be some sort of action. I don’t think there will be any action but there will be an increase in rhetoric against Iran which in many ways makes it even harder to hope that there will be some kind of US or British leverage on the Bahraini ruling family.
Clearly Bahrain is the backbone of the US position in the Gulf by virtue of hosting the US fifth fleet. The US is not going to take liberties with one of its core regional allies at this moment in time. They sacrificed Mubarak who was a key American ally in the Middle East but he wasn’t positioned in the same kind of way as the Bahraini ruling family are caught between supposed Iranian hegemonic ambitions on the one hand and a Saudi-US alliance on the other. That makes it even more difficult for any pressure being applied by the West on the Bahraini ruling family as they try to perhaps make statements in support of meaningful reform. Most people know that that is simply not on their agenda.
Bahrain Watch has gone into a great detail about whether the recommendations of the Bassiouni report have been implemented and degree to which they have been sidelined or ignored is incredible. Even perhaps more remarkable was debate in the House of Lords last week on the position of the Arab uprisings one year on and on Britain’s role in the whole area. There was hardly any mention of Bahrain at all. The Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Lord Howell, had a lot of words over the situation in Libya which stands as a testament to Britain’s incompetence in any form of engagement with the Middle East and North Africa. He had a lot of condemnation of the actions of the Syrian regime as you might expect but on Bahrain he had two sentences basically for further commitment by all sides to dialogue.
If one side is uncommitted to an equal sharing and distribution of power then there is a limit to what they can achieve particularly if the opposition societies in Bahrain have tried to engage and settle their differences and find a compromise settlement. They tried in 2000 after the initial boycott in 2002 the major parties gave the government benefit of the doubt in 2006. Having that benefit of the doubt shredded, having their own credibility called into question to participate in what was a political opening of some sort which later turned out to be little more than political window dressing by the ruling family why should they believe the ruling family now?
I think Britain places too many hopes in the reforming element of the ruling family, notably the crown prince perhaps turning a blind eye to the extent to which he has been marginalised or sidelined within the family. But as we have seen in the case of Saif Al Islam putting your faith in alleged ruling family reformers can backfire spectacurely because when push comes to shove they are still members of the ruling elite and the ruling family and they are unwilling to sacrifice their position of power.
We saw this very clearly in Libya whenSaif Al Islam sacrificed all his credentials as a reformer and all the hopes placed in him by the West for the sake of staying in power. I suspect we will see that in Bahrain also if the Crown Prince ever has to make that choice.
In Bahrain we have already seen the whole Economic Development Board vision of a business friendly shredded. In London I used to see taxis with ‘business friendly Bahrain’ painted on the doors and on the busses. I have several stamps in my passport with the stamp business friendly Bahrain. That whole concept has been shredded. It was the cornerstone of the vision of 2030. It was the cornerstone of attempts to diversify the economy, of trying to present Bahrain as an investment friendly country looking at engagement on multiple levels, playing on its position as a leading financial centre in the region. All this has been shredded to stay in power despite the societal demands for a fair position in the decision-making process.
I think we have seen over the last year a lot of very cold truths which may have been suspected by people in the Bahraini opposition who doubted the sincerity of the ruling family regarding meaningful reform. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for those in the West who have a relationship with the Bahraini ruling family or for that many any ruling Gulf family to try to push under the carpet. That will continue to be the story.
We will see the Bahraini Grand Prix going ahead on April 23rd so that will be an early test of the degree to which the spotlight will be shone on the Bahraini settlement last year. It will be interesting to see whether during the Grand Prix there will be an opportunity for the opposition to mobilise to take advantage of the spot light that is being shone on the kingdom or whether the ruling family will attempt to manipulate and present a deeply one-sided picture of the semblance of normality.
We saw in the run-up to the election in 2010 a number of incredibly patronising pieces even in The Independent a very respectable British newspaper which extolled the virtues of Bahraini democracy – a new institution coming to terms with its newly found role and responsibilities. If we were to see that again it would be deeply complicitous.
Given the Bahraini ruling family’s obsession with pr and spin and hiring pr companies to do their work for them I suspect we may well see that. We have seen British companies working for the regime trying to place articles in the Guardian and other newspapers. It is much harder to turn a blind eye to what is happening in Bahrain and other parts of the Gulf and to buy the regime’s rhetoric hook line and sinker. I suspect that places the government in a difficult position. They want to engage.
Clearly the Bahraini and the Saudi ruling family is a major commercial ally, a source of an incredible amount of foreign investment into the UK at a time or recession it is more important for British trade and industry to get Gulf foreign investment into the country for British jobs. It is going to be a very difficult position for them for them to straddle these diverging pressures and to maintain a degree of dignity while the do so.
Madawi Al-Rasheed is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, London. Her research focuses on history, society, religion and politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Middle Eastern Christian minorities, Arab migration, Islamist movements, and state and gender relations.
Recent publications include Politics in an Arabian Oasis (I.B. Tauris 1991), A History of Saudi Arabia (second edition CUP 2010), Counter Narratives: History, Contemporary Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (Palgrave 2004),Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (Routledge 2005), Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (CUP 2007), Kingdom without Borders: Saudi Political, Religious and Media Frontiers (Hurst 2008) and Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World (I.B. Tauris 2009), and mazaq al-islah fi al-saoudiyya (Saqi). She is a regular contributor to al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper and other television/radio programmes. Some of her articles are posted in English and Arabic on http://www.madawialrasheed.org/
Dr Kristian Ulrichsen is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Logistics and Politics of the British Campaigns in the Middle East, 1914-22, Insecure Gulf: The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-Oil Era, and The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order.