Getting back out there

By N.P. and M.R. | MANAMA

THE annual mourning for Zein al-Abdin al-Sajjad, an eighth century martyred Shia Imam, is a relatively minor event, even in Iran where Shias hold power. But in the little island kingdom of Bahrain, where the Shia majority chafes at their subjugation under a Sunni ruling family, the Al Khalifas, it has become another excuse to reclaim the streets. “We celebrate the most minor festivals now, even more than Iran,” says Jasim Hussein, a former parliamentarian of Wefaq, a Shia party seeking a negotiated end to the pro-democracy uprising that erupted in February 2011.

The political process has been frozen for the 22 months since the government launched a ferocious clamp-down, backed by troops borrowed from across the causeway to Saudi Arabia, that has left some 90 people dead—a grim total given that native Bahrainis number just 600,000, out of an overall population of 1.3m. Mass arrests, show trials, harsh sentences and incitement to sectarian hatred have blunted the opposition’s momentum. Crucial support from liberal-leaning Sunnis has waned, and much of the business community would like to forget the troubles and move on.

But Shia religious activism is more visible than ever. On a balmy night in the old souks of Manama, Bahrain’s capital, muscular, black-clad youths chant dirges and chest-thump past shrines adorned with dramatic tableaux of Shia saints. Yet the spirit is festive. Men feast on sweetmeats and hot, saffron-infused sheep’s milk freely distributed in stalls. Not a policeman is in sight. “What’s there to mourn about,” asks a civil servant, who covertly supports Amal, an anti-monarchy group, “when time is on our side.”

Such bravado is still widely shared among working-class Shias. On December 14th, a coalition of opposition groups mounted a daytime protest march joined by tens of thousands, defying a ban on public gatherings of more than five people imposed in October. In the mostly Shia villages west of Manama, activists taunt the security forces relentlessly, some nights with slogans, others with crude petrol bombs. Despairing of Wefaq’s trust in a constitutional process, activists from a growing grass-roots youth group, the February 14 Movement, mask their faces and mount makeshift stages to rouse the crowds with calls to topple the Al Khalifas. Images of detainees hang by the dozen in a mock cage erected in the central square of Diraz, a Shia coastal town. Nearby stands a billboard with gruesome photos of babies allegedly asphyxiated by tear gas. Here, unlike in Manama, the authorities have tired of blacking out graffiti. The walls declare “Death to Hamad”, Bahrain’s self-proclaimed king.

Repression continues, albeit less violently than when the uprising started. In a sign of relative leniency, an appeals court on December 11th reduced the sentence on a prominent human rights activist, Nabeel Rajab, from three to two years, still a remarkably harsh retribution for organising and joining “illegal gatherings”. Security forces have ostensibly been retrained to curb their excesses, but still regularly conduct house-to-house raids in Shia villages. Authorities have rebuilt only five of the two dozen Shia shrines they destroyed during the worst days. In a disturbing new tactic, the government in November summarily stripped 31 Bahrainis of their citizenship. Half those affected already live in exile, but the fate of the others, some of whom appear to have been singled out because of Iranian ancestry, remains unclear.

Last year, Bahrain’s rulers appeared to open a door to compromise by accepting, with reservations, the rulings of an impartial international inquiry that they had invited. POMED, a Washington-based advocate of democracy in the Middle East, reckons that Bahrain has implemented only three out of its 26 recommendations. But Saudi tanks have disappeared from the main roads, and some unionists who joined the protests have recovered their jobs. In contrast to the region’s harsher security regimes, opposition leaders brief journalists in hotel lobbies.

More tellingly, Sunnis are no longer mere cheerleaders for the Al Khalifas. Inter-sect marriage rates are still sharply down, but the boycott Sunnis waged on Shia merchants is petering out. Sunni thugs who went on pogroms armed with swords have retreated back to Muharraq, an island suburb of Manama. And many Sunnis are increasingly voicing the same socio-economic grievances as Shias. They gripe about the lack of affordable housing, the low pensions, utility hikes and the ruling family’s penchant for grabbing land and power. “We feel the Al Khailfas are defending their own interests, not Sunnis,” says a member of the National Unity Gathering, a Sunni caucus. Ten of the 22 cabinet posts are filled by royals. The country’s prime minister, an uncle of the king, has spent 41 years on the job, longer than even Libya’s late Colonel Qaddafi.

So nervous do the Al Khalifas seem of their people—Sunnis and Shias alike—that they disinvited both from a security studies conference held earlier this month in the capital. The organisers opted for pliable migrant worker drivers to ferry delegates, not local ones who might speak their minds. And while giving the podium to Syria’s Sunni opposition, they kept Bahrain’s Shia ones safely away with road-blocks defended by armoured cars. Fittingly for a conference called the Manama Dialogue, Bahrain’s supposedly reformist Crown Prince launched the event with an appeal for an internal dialogue as “the only way forward”. But given that few of his subjects were present, it seemed primarily aimed for international consumption.

Even that seemed too much for some hardline royals. “No to dialogue with treacherous terrorists,” tweeted a rival prince. Fearing he might be considered a rogue, the king’s advisors quickly backpedalled. He meant dialogue between Sunnis and Shia, they said, not government and opposition. Fearful of backstabbers, the Crown Prince—who was sidelined after the arrival of Saudi tanks torpedoed an earlier, aborted attempt at US-brokered negotiations—profusely thanked the British government for its support, but pointedly not the more openly pro-reform Americans. While William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, declined to meet Bahrain’s Shia dissidents, American officials who attended the conference rushed after them. America's assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, Michael Posner, appealed to the Al Khalifas to drop charges against non-violent protestors. Three days later he received an answer, with the sentencing of Mr Rajab.