After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (26 page)

The issue seems to be being dealt with in more or less the same way as in Kuwait, with the government forming committees, but then being slow to act. In 2008, following the setting up of several bidoon registration centres, about 1300 bidoon were naturalised, but only because they were somehow able to prove their pre-1971 ancestry.
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As reported by a state-backed newspaper, many of those queuing at the centres were in a highly emotional state, being conscious of the decades-long wait their families had suffered. As one hopeful bidoon described of the process: ‘this will change everything for us and for our children… becoming Emirati will be like being born again’.
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Another stated that ‘I will carry the country’s emblem on my head and my love for it in my heart’. Significantly, after this small number of naturalisations the minister for the interior was quick to underline the fact that citizenship in the UAE is a privilege and a reward for loyalty and political acquiescence, rather than a right. Specifically, he warned that ‘loyalty is a condition of citizenship and new citizens are expected to embrace the values that have ensured social stability and security for all. The constitution allows for revoking citizenship from anyone who does not deserve it’. When a newly naturalised citizen was asked for his thoughts on this message, he stated simply that ‘those who drink from a well would never throw dirt in it’.
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Since then, there have been no tangible improvements, with government officials and other pro-government spokespersons usually highlighting the potential disloyalty and reliability of bidoon given their uncertain pasts. The director of the immigration and naturalisation department in Abu Dhabi, for example, not only claimed that the main problem was that bidoon were registering under different names because they treated citizenship as a ‘lottery’, but also echoed the arguments of Kuwaiti officials, explaining in 2009 that ‘…the vast majority of those who claim to be bidoon are in fact illegal immigrants… who have
destroyed documents from their home country in a bid to be granted UAE nationality… there are some who are real bidoon, but unfortunately they get mixed up with the vast majority who claim to be bidoon’. Similarly, a UAE national academic argued that ‘…many of these people came here in the 1980s and destroyed their documents to stay in the Emirates [because] they don’t want to leave the country. They came to the country for political reasons and many came into the country illegally’.
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Furthermore, the government remains committed to using the threat of revoking citizenship as a means to ensure acquiescence. As discussed later in this book, in December 2011 seven activists promoting an Islamist agenda were stripped of their passports and thus relegated to being bidoon.

Other significant stateless populations are believed to exist in Saudi Arabia, where there are an unknown number of bidoon. These also appear to be subjected to widespread discrimination, especially in legal cases, with frequent reports of government officials or other spokespersons claiming they have no rights. In December 2011, for example, six stateless persons who were sentenced to hand and foot amputations after having signed coerced confessions to a crime of armed robbery, were told by prison staff that as bidoon they had no rights.
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In Bahrain there are thought to still be several thousand bidoon. Although the Bahraini government did naturalise a few thousand Iranian-origin bidoon in 2001, following on from the aforementioned national action charter, the state has, like the UAE, recently demonstrated its willingness to revoke citizenship and return residents to bidoon status if necessary. In 2010 a prominent cleric and former bidoon who has criticised the government was promptly stripped of his passport on the grounds that he and his family had ‘not obtained citizenship via legal means’ back in 2001.
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This was a clear warning to other former bidoon.

Discrimination against Shia communities in the Gulf monarchies is now as commonplace as that against stateless persons. The worst example has always been in Bahrain, where historically the Shia have formed the majority of the indigenous population yet—in a dynamic not dissimilar from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—for much of the modern period they have been ruled by a Sunni minority, since the described ascendancy of the Bani Utub clan and eventually the Al-Khalifa family. Sporadic protests and insurgencies by the Shia in the early and mid-twentieth century—notably a 1920 petition to Britain that they were facing mistreatment
from the ruling family and a 1956 general strike—were put down with force, often on the grounds that the Shia were in effect a fifth column of the Shah’s Iran. Indeed, in 1957 Iran’s parliament had passed a bill declaring Bahrain to be Iran’s 14
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province, although this claim was later dropped following a United Nations’ administered opinion poll of Bahrain’s residents in which the overwhelming majority voted to remain independent. But later in the twentieth century, especially following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Al-Khalifa’s claims in 1981 that they had uncovered a pro-Iran plot,
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the persecution of Bahrain’s Shia increased. The resulting tensions, along with a widespread belief that Shia were being discriminated against in terms of employment opportunities and state benefits, eventually led to a full scale intifada in the 1990s which claimed the lives of over forty protestors and led to the jailing and exiling of several major opposition figures. Moreover, in 1996 the government claimed to have uncovered a fresh Shia plot, this time by an Iran-backed offshoot of Hezbollah in Bahrain.
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By the end of the intifada and the launch of the aforementioned 2001 national action charter, approximately 70 to 75 per cent of Bahrain’s national population were still believed to be Shia—mostly indigenous Shia Arabs
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or ethnically Persian Arabs who had long been settled on the island.
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Since then it is believed that the proportion of Sunni Bahraini citizens has increased, mostly due to government manipulations and ‘demographic engineering’. In particular, the government is believed to have been offering citizenship to non-indigenous Sunni Arab and African families in an effort to boost the Sunni contingent of the national population and thus limit the influence of the Shia.

In 2006 details of the policy unexpectedly came into the public domain following the publication of a lengthy report by Salah Al-Bandar—a British citizen of Sudanese origin who had been working for Bahrain’s Ministry for Cabinet Affairs. The report—now dubbed Bandargate—claimed to have uncovered a secret plot by a group within the government to ‘deprive an essential part of the population [the Shia] of their rights’.
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Moreover, it inferred that the group was trying to turn the Shia into a minority within just a few years and was busy working on ways to gerrymander electoral constituencies so as to reduce the clout of Shia members of parliament. Although Al-Bandar was promptly deported and the state-backed media was banned from reporting on the story, a protest was held demanding a thorough investigation.
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In 2008,
following the publication of official figures indicating that Bahrain’s total population had increased by more than 40 per cent between 2002 and 2007, tensions increased further, as it was deemed unlikely that all of the increase was due to expatriates or the naturalisation of stateless persons. Analysts have claimed that the natural rate of growth for the national population would have only yielded an increase of 47,000 persons, thus more than 72,000 were probably granted citizenship during this period.
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Indeed, in summer 2010 opposition groups in Bahrain estimated that between 65,000 and 100,000 Sunni nationals have been added to the country’s voter rolls in the last decade. Most of the newcomers
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seem to be housed in brand new villages in Bahrain’s hinterland, suitably distanced from the older, predominantly Shia villagers. Many seem to work for the state security services, the police, or the royal court, likely due to their unswerving loyalty to the Sunni elites. Interviewed by the
New York Times
in summer 2010, a resident of one such village—a settlement specifically for Sunnis employed in the security sector—stated that he and his two brothers worked for the police and that ‘…if the Shia took control of the country, they would pop out one eye of every Sunni in the country’.
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Unsurprisingly, Shia-led protests, most of which have focused on their socioeconomic discrimination or the jailing of their leaders, continued to gather pace following these revelations and the issue of sectarian manipulation is now very much at the core of the bloody revolution underway in Bahrain. However, even prior to 2011 these protests were being met with extreme force. In March 2009, for example, following the arrest of twenty-three Shia leaders, crowds had gathered to demand their release and carried placards with the slogans ‘We are against sectarian discrimination’ and ‘No, no to oppressing freedoms’. The Bahraini police—mostly made up of Sunni Bahraini nationals or Sunni expatriates from Jordan, Pakistan, and elsewhere—shot teargas canisters into crowds and for several days fought pitched battles in several Shia villages. Interviewed by the
New York Times
, Shia protestors complained that they were all but banned from holding military and security positions, and that ‘…there are no jobs because of naturalisation of foreigners, because of the political prisoners, because of the abuse of the rights of the citizen’.
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In August 2010, shortly before parliamentary elections were due to be staged, four more Shia activists were arrested including the spokesperson for a Shia political group called the Haq Movement for Liberty and
Democracy,
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the head of a Shia human rights group committed to helping those who have been tortured,
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and others belonging to a group that had—according to the government—been ‘created to undermine the security and stability of the country’.
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Commenting on the arrests, the head of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights claimed ‘I don’t think anyone in Bahrain believes those stories’ and predicted they would further inflame sectarian tensions in the country.
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By the end of the month it was thought that nearly 160 activists had been detained—initially high profile Shia political and human rights leaders, but later including ‘many young men not known as activists’. The official view was again one of denial, with spokespersons claiming that the detainees were ‘suspected of security and terrorism violations, and were not being held for expressing dissident political views’ and that ‘…the only thing the government did wrong was that it went too easy at first’. The government also stated that it would ‘…no longer tolerate unrest among the Shia’ and that those convicted of ‘…compromising national security or slandering the nation can be deprived of health care and other state services’.
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Writing for
The Economist
in October 2010, one week before the elections, one analyst tried to sum up the mood in Bahrain following these harsh government counter measures. In the short term, it was argued, the measures might work, as ‘Opposition and human-rights people could be frightened into acquiescence’. However, it was pointed out that due to the ‘…government’s mishandling of events in the past few weeks [it] has stirred a well of resentment that may, in the longer term, spell danger for the Sunni ascendancy—and even for the ruling house’. Significantly, the article also claimed that the government was ‘blatantly harassing the opposition parties, particularly the main Shia-dominated one’ and that its leaders were being ‘…assailed in the pro-government press with accusations of encouraging terrorism and being in the pocket of “outside powers”, meaning in essence Iran’.
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Indeed, when a British member of the House of Lords
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met with Bahraini Shia leaders in London, and when the British ambassador to Bahrain met Shia leaders in Manama, the Bahraini state-backed newspapers were full of allegations of British-or Iranian-engineered plots to overthrow the ruling family. A petition was even signed by prominent Bahraini Sunnis demanding the expulsion of the British ambassador on these grounds.

The Shia of Saudi Arabia have for many years also complained bitterly of discrimination. Unlike their Bahraini counterparts, they form
only a minority of Saudi nationals, albeit now a substantial minority of between 5 and 15 per cent, with most dwelling in the Eastern Province, close to Bahrain, and home to several of the kingdom’s key oil fields. Over the years, most of their complaints have been over the province’s relative underdevelopment compared to the rest of Saudi Arabia and the institutional discrimination they have faced, especially over public sector employment opportunities. There have been fewer protests than in Bahrain, nonetheless riots broke out in 1979—which were brutally suppressed—and in 2009 there were reports of attacks by Saudi security forces on Shia pilgrims.
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On occasion there has also been organised opposition, with 450 Shia activists signing a petition in 2003 entitled ‘Partners in One Nation’ which demanded the equal treatment of Shia under Saudi Arabia’s laws.
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