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205 PART FIVE BAHRAIN On February 14, 2011, in the wake of events in Tunisia and Egypt, Bahraini demonstrators massed at the Pearl Roundabout at the edge of the capital city of Manama and demanded economic and political reforms.They did not call on that day for the ouster of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, but the fact that they were protesting on the anniversary of the king’s decade-old reform project, the National Action Charter, sent a clear message. On the third night of the occupation of the roundabout,security forces attacked the encampment,killing four.The violence radicalized protesters and demonstrations spread across the island. Public opposition to the rule of the Al Khalifa has existed since the early years of the British mandate government in the 1890s. The political opposition became closely linked with organized labor in the burgeoning petroleum industry beginning in the 1930s.In 1965, when hundreds of Bahrain Petroleum Company workers were fired, the General Trade Union led an uprising against the company and British colonial management that lasted for over a month before it succumbed to the security forces’ campaign of arrests and killings. At the time of Bahrain’s independence in 1971, there was thus an established, broad-based political opposition which the monarchy sought to blunt with various initiatives, such as establishment of a partially elected legislative body in 1973. Despite its limited powers, the assembly proved to be a thorn in the side of the regime. It was abolished in 1975 and the two-year-old constitution suspended. Petition signings, demonstrations, and skirmishes continued sporadically during the 1970s and 1980s. All were met with increasing brutal suppression by the Bahrain Defense Forces and the Security and Intelligence Services,the rechristened colonial-era intelligence agency. In the crackdown following the constitution’s abrogation, much of the opposition leadership was imprisoned and forcibly exiled. This period of repression altered the character of the opposition, which had been secular and whose parties had mixed Sunni and Shi‘i membership. As these organs were dismantled, opposition politics devolved to leaders of Bahrain’s highly segregated “villages”—now more like neighborhoods of metropolitan Manama—and focused on the grievances of the Shi‘i majority against the Sunnidominated state and armed forces. Bahrain is the smallest of the Arab Gulf states and the most densely populated with 1.25 million inhabitants. A significant proportion of this population (about 60 percent) are immigrants, as in other Arab Gulf countries. Bahrain’s native population, however, is about 206 two-thirds Shi‘i, while in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait the Shi‘a are a minority. Part of the Al Khalifa’s strategy for maintaining power has been to manipulate sectarian tensions among the population.The strategy involves two prongs. One is that government largesse, such as civil service jobs, business contracts, housing, and other forms of welfare, is preferentially distributed to the Sunni population. Indeed, Bahrain’s non-migrant population is the most economically stratified in the region. The other is to try to boost the Sunni population through the extensive use of migrant labor. Bahrain’s military and police have effectively barred native Shi‘a from employment, instead recruiting and naturalizing personnel from other Arab states and Pakistan. All the while, the unemployment rate of Shi‘i males is considerably higher than that of Sunnis. The Al Khalifa have reasoned that as long as a large enough minority of the population, including the business elite and the armed forces, feels beholden to the regime, the complaints of the Shi‘i majority will not pose a serious threat to the monarchy’s legitimacy. The 1990s saw another outbreak of protests against the regime’s systematic sectarian discrimination and the continuing suspension of parliamentary democracy. The unrest lasted for several years,during which thousands were arrested,many of whom were tortured by the security services. King Hamad, who succeeded his father, Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, in 1999,again sought to quell popular opposition by declaring an amnesty,abrogating some of the most repressive laws,and introducing a quasi-constitution in the form of the Bahrain National Action Charter.The Charter created a tightly controlled parliament whose lower house was elected from gerrymandered districts to return disproportionate Sunni representation and whose upper house was appointed by the king. The largest Shi‘i political grouping, al-Wifaq, boycotted the first elections in 2002, but ran in the 2006 poll and won 45 percent of the seats. Al-Wifaq’s...

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