Alan Fisher
When the unrest which has swept across North Africa and the Arab world arrived in the Gulf, it landed in Bahrain.The kingdom may be small but its importance cannot be underestimated. It is caught in the crosshairs of three competing and strong influences which hope to shape its future. And that has the potential to alter the entire balance of the region.
Bahrain has always been different. In the energy-soaked region it has limited energy resources. The royal family is Sunni while the majority population is Shia – the branch of Islam followed by neighbouring Iran. Accusations have been circulating for months of Tehran’s backing for the Shia in Bahrain – allegations it denies. Yet Iran has built up a network of regional allies: the new Iraqi government, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and even the Syrian government have been given cash and arms. This support buys influence.
The Saudis have not been quite so brazen. Using their religious influence and massive economic power, Ryadh tends to quietly support regimes it favours, like the one in Bahrain, while funding rebels confronting those it does not.
Clearly feeling the pressure, Saudi Arabia has decided to act to stop Shias gaining greater influence in a country which is just across a long causeway. Responding to a call from King Hamid bin Isa Al Khalifa, it sent in troops to help crush protest in the country. As well as combating Iranian influence, there was a worry the uprising could spread to its own Shia minority.
The US tried to stop the Saudis. It has its own reasons for ensuring stability in the country. Its fifth fleet is based there and it considers the government pro-Western.
But relations between the US and the Saudis are at their coldest since the Iraq invasion eight years ago. Both the defence secretary, Robert Gates, and secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, have cancelled trips to Ryadh in the past two weeks. Officially the king was too ill to host them but it’s widely thought that he simply didn’t want to do so.
The Saudi king liked Hosni Mubarak, supported him, and saw him as an ally against Iran. He was furious that Washington abandoned the Egyptian president in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations. It is reported that he has made it clear to his closest advisers that ‘Saudi Arabia will never allow Shia rule in Bahrain – never’.
The crackdown – when it came – was swift and brutal. Online video services were awash with pictures of people who had clearly been shot – despite the authorities insisting there were no bullets fired.
So America is now lobbying behind the scenes for a new political process in the country – one that gives a greater say for the Shia under Sunni rule. This Washington believes could head off further trouble, but the Saudis and Bahrainis are worried that reform will create greater instability, that demand will not end until the regime is toppled.
The stakes for the US in Bahrain are higher than anywhere else at the moment, more than Libya or Yemen or even Syria. Saudi oil doesn’t just fuel most US cars and trucks, it moves global markets. Instability hikes up prices and could slow economic recovery. The US really needs Saudi help in countering the influence of Iran. Yet it is aware of the accusations that it only backs democratic reform when it suits or has little impact on its strategic interests.
The anti-government protesters were driven out of their camp in Pearl roundabout, and the massive monument which became such an iconic image was demolished within hours. The roundabout was torn up, the history of the past three weeks eradicated. What cannot be removed so quickly is the anger many people feel and their demands for changes in the kingdom in the crosshairs.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
Libya
The critical apartheid
of Britain’s coverage
of the war
Gordon Lawrie
Like little that has gone before, the events of the past week have forced me to reappraise what it means to be a citizen of the United Kingdom in the 21st century. To the extent that the actions of our government have gone unexamined by the media it must be concluded that a critical apartheid is currently being enforced; one that will not allow us to stray beyond the bounds of a world-view that is suffocatingly reductive in its ignorance and prejudice.
The ludicrous assertion being promulgated by our government – that a sovereign state cannot take military action to defend itself against insurrection by a heavily armed militia (later rebranded as civilian) – is quite breathtaking in its ramifications. According to this ‘Cameron doctrine’ we should have withdrawn from the disputed provinces of Northern Ireland in the early-70s and poor old Ted Heath should be huckled off to the ICC to face charges over the events of Bloody Sunday. Meanwhile armed insurrection is to be accorded a privileged status. Under the new revolutionary charter Rusasia will surely be required to withdraw from Chechnya while Israel must of course be prevailed upon to withdraw from the occupied territories.
But don’t go planning a stag weekend to Grozny or the Golan Heights. I have a feeling that this doctrine will only be deployed against militarily weak, non-nuclear states. For we have created a perverse system through which the strong can pummel the weak into submission having first ensured that the underdog has been forbidden from defending himself. It’s a curious mix of legalism and brutality. Indeed the idea that we can now take ‘any means necessary’ seems more appropriate to Malcolm X than the UN while the phrase ‘legitimate target’ was last used by self-justifying IRA bombers before it issued from the mouth of our defence secretary (a doctor of medicine no less). The worst have indeed been full of passionate intensity while their putative betters lack any conviction: as Mad Dog Cameron slavers for a piece of the Libyan action, Clegg – true to form – is the dog who will not bark.
The coalition government is entitled to debase itself but in so doing it has also made a mockery of those institutions which are meant to enshrine our commitment to human rights and the rule of law.
That is not to say that Cameron has avoided attempts to justify his actions, especially where this foreign fracas can help distract from the domestic crisis. At the Conservative party conference he was correct in his assertion that this debacle is unlike Iraq for in that situation Blair and Bush went to some lengths to secure their legal and moral position before taking action. But they are both lawyers. Cameron is an ex-corporate PR man high on his own propaganda who may not realise that there is a line to cross. Indeed, what Blair did with some agonising – however genuine – Cameron has done with absolute alacrity. Curiously, Cameron states that this is not a moral crusade whereas I thought the basis for intervention was to ‘stop the slaughter’? What is he giving voice to if not a moral duty of intervention? It is certainly neither political nor economic.
The distraction has allowed our more dubious allies to take care of business unmolested by the world’s media. In the Yemen, President Saleh (enjoying his 33rd year in power) ‘kettled’ protesters by blocking their exits with burning tyres and then let his snipers go to work. Cameron has not issued one word of condemnation against this slaughter of civilians despite clear evidence of a massacre. So we can add inconsistency to incoherence and hypocrisy.
The coalition government is entitled to debase itself but in so doing it has also made a mockery of those institutions which are meant to enshrine our commitment to human rights and the rule of law. The ICC’s ‘timely’ announcement of investigations into Gadaffi’s actions – in the absence of any concrete evidence that he has massacred ‘civilians’ – make it appear as a mere instrument of Western foreign policy while the strong-arming of the Security Council makes the UN appear merely contemptible. Even our Crown Office has gone riding into the fray with its announcement that it is ‘preparing fresh charges’ in relation to the Lockerbie bombing. To what purpose? It seems that Cameron, Berlusconi, Sarkozy and Obama – all of whom are domestically depleted – will artificially resuscitate a Libyan opposition and push for partition of the country, creating a Vichy state.
But you won’t find any discussion of the Cameron doctrine in the mainstream media. So cosy has been their reporting that it might become mandatory for their roving correspondents to travel with a sofa and coffee table. The BBC has been particularly uninformative but perhaps it is obsessed with legacy issues. Of course the media are merely providing the level of critique that we have come to expect. We have been trained to respond to a narrative that would make a Hollywood plot seem convoluted. Our connection to a downed American aircrew is no more or less than to the Libyan tank-crew they have just obliterated yet we are habituated to identifying with the plight of one to the exclusion of the other. It is increasingly difficult to get off the emotive carousel when it is kept turning ever more rapidly by fresh acts of desperation and cruelty.
This cannot go on. We must accept that by binding ourselves to acting within the rule of low we deliberately fetter our freedom to act pragmatically, whimsically or emotionally. As the situation stands the law is being used to elevate whimsy, greed and opportunism. Of course we can completely ditch the commitment to human rights and the rule of law. If we wish we can live on the dodge, making and breaking alliances as it suits us, acting only as our self-interest dictates, simultaneously fawning over our ‘senior partners’ and demonising our weaker competitors.
I have a feeling that our PM would be untroubled by such a course of action. To the extent that Cameron is guided by anything it is a base mercantilism. Let’s not forget that he missed the beginning of the Libya debacle as he was busy tying the outgoing Mubarak government into costly defence contracts with the UK. I have no doubt that he would have been untroubled working for the East India Company during the opium wars. But the man who acts thus internationally can be expected to act no differently domestically. When our forces return to their medals and P45s they would do well to remember this.
The greatest tragedy is that a process that began with great hope in the Middle East has been hijacked by the West and is now overshadowed by shabby, murderous opportunism.
Just as I may criticise Cameron I am no apologist for Gadaffi. I do not see him as worthy of praise but neither do I see him as a floating signifier for all that is bad in the world. Curiously, given the way the press have portrayed him, both he and his troops appear to have acted with some small amount of rationality and restraint. Perhaps he remembers what it feels like to be bombed and to lose your daughter to an aggressor who does not discriminate between military and civilian targets. His greatest crime is that he has embarrassed the West by refusing to kowtow to its every petulant demand. In his refusal to capitulate and hand over his country to a puppet democracy he joins a list of morally ambiguous figures from Chiang Kai-shek to William Wallace.
Sadly we now live out a pale charade of liberty and have grown lazy and complacent in our supposed freedoms having never had to defend them. There is nothing in the history of liberation that would lead us to equate freedom with comfort. But it is a shallow, luxuriant democracy that cannot bind its representatives from doing great harm.
The greatest tragedy is that a process that began with great hope in the Middle East has been hijacked by the West and is now overshadowed by shabby, murderous opportunism. The sudden rise of Arab democratisation is matched only by our own downward progress. At some point our paths must cross, probably without our knowing it, and we will find our legalistic morality utterly debased. Given that we now occupy a position discernible not by the luminosity of our ideals but by their shadow, that point may already have been reached.
And what of the future? It is worth looking to the fate of the League of Nations, compromised to such an extent by crises in Abyssinia and Spain and by American exceptionalism that when real trouble arrived it was utterly hollowed out. We do a disservice to its successor in treating it as a rubber-stamping operation for whatever opportunistic adventure might serve our interests. And we had better tread carefully. Just as Gadaffi’s defences have been degraded – leaving Libya open to Balkanisation – so we have degraded our own institutions and through them our ability to ward off whatever misfortunes the future may throw in our path.
Gordon Lawrie is a former runner-up in the Scotland Young Thinker of the Year competition with which SR is associated. He is one of a panel of young people now writing regularly for SR.
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