Informed Comment

Members of parliament from the Shiite Wifaq Party, which had 18 of 40 seats in the lower house of the Bahrain legislature, have resigned en masse from their positions. They were objecting thereby to the deaths so far of 5 protesters and the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators early on Thursday morning by government security forces.

Streets were empty late Thursday in Manama, in the wake of the clearing of the downtown Pearl roundabout of demonstrators by security police, who took down their tents.

Euronews in Arabic reports that the Bahrain army stationed tanks in downtown Manama and then announced a ‘Communique No. 1′ in which they pledged (or threatened) to use decisive force to establish ‘order’ in the country (i.e. no more big demonstrations will be tolerated).

In the meantime, physicians and nurses demonstrated at having been prevented from treating in the field the hundreds of injured after the crackdown on Thursday morning.

Friday morning, a small group of 200 mourners came out for the funeral in a village of protesters killed by security police on Thursday. They chanted slogans calling for the overthrow of the Sunni monarchy.

Both the withdrawal of Wifaq from the government and the turn of chanting to anti-monarchy slogans are very bad signs for national cohesion. The Shiites of Bahrain, about 70% of the citizen population, have now largely withdrawn from the body politic, remaining only as disenfranchised and sullen subjects of a monarchy many can no longer abide. Many Shiites are saying that the government, by attacking peaceful protesters, has lost all credibility.

Aljazeera English has video on Thursday’s violent crackdown:

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Bahrain’s king, Hamad Al Khalifa, ordered troops and tanks into Pearl Square in downtown Manama in the early hours of Thursday morning. They fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and used batons to clear the hundreds of demonstrators who had decided to stay the night in the square, killing four protesters and injuring 95. About 50 tanks were reportedly on their way to the site on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, thousands of protesters had come out to mourn the second of two dissidents who had been killed by police repressing earlier demonstrations.

Aljazeera English covers what happened during the day on Wednesday:

Then the military decided to move in to crush the dissident forces.

Then Aljazeera English on Wednesday night delivered the bad news:

The differences between Bahrain on the one hand and Tunisia & Egypt on the other are legion. But the strong ethnic and sectarian divide between the minority Sunni king and the majority Shiite population is key here. The military that crushed the mostly Shiite protesters on Thursday morning is Sunni. The secret police are Sunni (and sometimes even expatriate Pakistanis & etc.) If the Shiites got what they wanted, i.e. more democracy and a weaker monarchy, then the interests of the Sunni ruling class would be profoundly endangered.

In Bahrain’s case, the interest of the Saudi state in backing the Sunni monarchy, and fear that the Shiites would favor Iran, complicates the story regionally. Saudi Arabia is very wealthy and very nearby (a causeway connects the main island of Bahrain to the Saudi mainland, across which Saudi expatriates come in, and act as a support for the king against his own Shiite population).

Tunisia and Egypt are much more unified populations, mostly Sunni and Arab. The military in neither place was afraid that if the strong man was overthrown, some alien ethno-sectarian group might take over that would imperil the prerogatives of the existing Establishment. Nor were there big regional geopolitical divides, though of course the far rightwing Likud government of Israel preferred that Mubarak remain as strong man. It was not powerful in Egypt, however, while Saudi Arabia is powerful in Bahrain.

Both Tunisia and Egypt were class-based movements, protests of the blue and white collar workers. While economic grievances are important in Bahrain, they are being reworked as sectarian grievances, since most of the rural and small-town poor are Shiites.

There is still no guarantee that the Sunni government will succeed in repressing the movement of the Shiite majority for more democracy in Bahrain, but determination to use force against protesters does raise the cost of activism significantly, and sometimes can tamp it down.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Jeremy Pressman writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:

Since Mubarak’s departure, I have followed several discussions among academics and analysts about what just happened. Some contend it was a military coup . Many others call it a popular revolution.

I am not surprised about this disagreement because while the general pressure that was brought to bear on Mubarak came from millions of Egyptians taking to the streets, the final push came from Egypt’s generals who saw the writing on the wall, even when Mubarak himself stubbornly clung to power. (Maybe it was a coupvolution?)

But the coup vs. revolution divide is not just an academic debate. The combination of these two elements will likely greatly influence the direction Egypt takes over the next 6-12 months. As Juan Cole noted on February 13, “For the moment, Egypt is a strange kind of military dictatorship, with various safety valves for popular input and a set of promises for the future. But then, it has been that for some time– it is just that the promises may now be more credible and a transition to something else may be possible.”

Will the leaders of the armed forces still think about how to protect their military, political, and economic power? Absolutely, and I would not expect them to do otherwise.

At the same time, we know the generals witnessed the same mass movement that captivated not only the Egyptian populace but also the rest of the world. The cost of blocking genuine political reform would clearly be higher than in the aftermath of a conventional coup where the initial pressure for change came from the military itself. In this case, the January 25 movement was an impressive mass movement with extensive preparation, transnational learning, and broad public involvement.

Moreover, I fear the understandable focus on the fact that it took only 18 days to topple Mubarak – amazing, yes – obscures the years of planning, protesting, organizing, and learning by many Egyptian groups. By all appearances, this was a hard-fought and well-earned victory, not a flash in the pan.

What I am left wondering is whether the military can relinquish political power, perhaps even to the point of formal civilian rule over the armed forces, and still hold onto its economic empire. With Gamal Mubarak “badly in need of a good career counselor,” the military’s economic arms might even have a freer hand.

(A succinct take is here: “And it seems that the military, now as “national capitalists,” have seen themselves as the blood rivals of the neoliberal “crony capitalists” associated with Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal who have privatized anything they can get their hands on and sold the country’s assets off to China, the US, and Persian Gulf capital.”) Because while the desire for political freedom played a central role in the uprising, economic want did as well. What happens if Egyptians see progress on one but not the other?

Jeremy Pressman
Alan R. Bennett Honors Professor
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Connecticut

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments