Bahrain's Uprising

Resistance and Repression in the Gulf

Ala'a Shehabi, Marc Owen Jones, Ala'a Shehabi, Marc Owen Jones

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783604364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amid the extensive coverage of the Arab uprisings, the Gulf state of Bahrain has been almost forgotten. Fusing historical and contemporary analysis, Bahrain's Uprising seeks to fill this gap, examining the ongoing protests and state repression that continues today. Drawing on powerful testimonies, interviews, and conversations from those involved, this broad collection of writings by scholars and activists provides a rarely heard voice of the lived experience of Bahrainis, describing the way in which a sophisticated society, defined by a historical struggle, continues to hamper the efforts of the ruling elite to rebrand itself as a liberal monarchy.

PART ONE

Voices of the condemned

CHAPTER 1

A trial of thoughts and ideas

Ibrahim Sharif

TRANSLATION BY AYESHA SALDANHA

Ibrahim Sharif al-Sayed is the General Secretary of the National Democratic Action Society (Wa

ad), a secular Bahraini political society. He was taken from his home at 2 am on 17 March 2011 by men in plain clothes, who had surrounded his house and pointed a gun in his face. For a detailed account of his brutal and humiliating experience with the state security services, please see the footnote.¹ This is his speech before the Supreme Court of Appeal.²

I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak before this esteemed court, especially after we were deprived of the right to defend ourselves in front of the two National Safety Courts. We were deprived in spite of the gravity of the charges levelled against us, and their vast divergence from the truth. The prosecution’s rhetoric could not hide this truth, for their claims depended on statements extracted under torture or on testimony given by ‘secret sources’ fabricated by the National Security Agency (NSA). These fallacious claims were exposed following the publication of the report by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI, also known as the Bassiouni Commission), claims formulated in order to justify predetermined convictions.

A trial against ideas

This trial, gentlemen, has been from the very beginning an attempt to try ideas and intentions. In order to prove the charges against me, the prosecution has cited a number of quotes it attributes to me, such as ‘there is no legitimacy for a regime that kills its people’, ‘the 2002 constitution has no legitimacy’, ‘the regime lacks legitimacy’, ‘the regime has lost its legitimacy’, and ‘the Bahraini army is not for the nation’. In addition, I am quoted as saying that the ruling family are invaders and that they have seized the wealth of the country, and that I would prefer a republican system and have called for the fall of the representative councils. Despite the availability of a large number of visual and audio recordings of me, as well as my writings published both before and after the popular uprising began on 14 February 2011, the prosecution has failed to provide one shred of evidence that I have called for the use of violence or worked to topple the regime by force.

Ideas, gentlemen, cannot be killed or incarcerated, nor can they be defeated in this court or any other tribunal of the state. The only court that can try ideas is the court of public opinion, and the sentence issued by the court of public opinion is either one of defeat for that idea, and consequently its eradication, or one of its vindication and consequently its spread.

The causes of the political crisis

We are here today not because of what happened on 14 February. That remarkable day in the history of Bahrain was the result of a decades-long failure of the political system that had its roots in the dissolution of the elected National Assembly in 1975. Yet in February 2001, Bahraini citizens’ hopes were high. The government and the opposition had agreed to begin a new chapter in the form of the National Action Charter, whereby the King made a number of commitments, including a return to parliamentary life, the preservation of the 1973 constitution, and a move towards a higher democratic process by the creation of a constitutional monarchy ‘similar to that seen in long-established democracies’. The government, however, quickly reneged on its promises. In 2002, the King unilaterally decreed a new constitution that expanded his executive powers and stipulated the creation of an appointed Shura Council. In short, these constitutional amendments all came at the expense of the people and the authority of their elected council. Since that date, the government, through legislation and other means, has been reversing the limited reforms that took place following the promulgation of the charter. This is especially true within the realm of public liberties, and the regime has rebuilt the security state through its various apparatuses that are expert at monitoring, trapping, and punishing the opposition.

Years of political tension, the absence of true popular participation, and rampant corruption amongst the ruling elite all pushed this country to the brink of a crisis. All that was needed was a spark, and this came in the form of the Arab Spring, which turned it into a popular uprising. This uprising was led by youth dreaming of freedom and dignity, who believed that sacrifice and peaceful protest would force the government to respect the will of the people. Even the Bassiouni Commission recognised that in the beginning, the movement’s demand was for reforms, not for regime change. It added, however, that ‘when demands for reforms were rebuffed, the demands became ones for regime change’.³

Bahrain was on the verge of an explosion, yet the authorities thought that they had the tools to prevent a possible ‘Bahraini Spring’. However, their media propaganda machine, supported by a system that distributes benefits to the new political class formed by pro-government organisations and parliamentary and municipal representatives, was not up to the task. Neither were their tactics of dividing society along sectarian lines, expanding the state’s bureaucracy, co-opting former opponents to promote state policies and, most importantly, enhancing the state’s security and intelligence capabilities.

To the dismay of the authorities, the political and social build-up on the ground was far greater than the resources that they had amassed to confront the protests. Indeed, the regime had overlooked the fact that it itself was the biggest cause and instigator of this uprising. For example:

• the growing frustration amongst citizens, especially Shi

a, with rapid demographic change brought about by the process of political naturalisation. Added to this the continued discrimination against citizens on a sectarian basis, such as restricting employment opportunities for Shi

a citizens in the military;

• the distribution of public lands amongst the ruling elite and their transformation into private estates for senior ruling family members and their supporters;

• corruption within government bodies and the inability of the National Audit Court to curb it despite the numerous violations it records every year in its annual report, and the inability of the state to hold senior violators accountable, particularly members of the ruling family. This was evident recently with the corruption case filed in the United States against Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) which also involved the American company Alcoa, when corrupt agreements eventually caused Alba losses of about one billion dollars.

We should be proud that our young people have not ceased to dream of a more beautiful day than today, a better system than this, and a more just form of government than this. Inspired by the other Arab uprisings, our youth proved its connection to the wider Arab nation and its determination to use peaceful protest to force the regime into comprehensive reform. Instead of throwing them in jails and detention centres, the government should have engaged in dialogue with these young Bahrainis, who continued to use peaceful means despite the use of arms against them.

An ethical stance against violence

Although the charges against me were not based on any factual evidence, nor any actions or statements that myself or my organisation Wa

ad made, I was convicted in both National Safety Courts. The charges are unfounded and baseless. They are simply not aligned with my stance, nor with that of the organisation to which I belong.

Allow me to clarify my position and the position of Wa

ad. It is based on the principle of rejecting the use of violence and force as an engine for political change. I believe that means and goals should be of the same nature. If a group’s goal were to seize power in order to establish authoritarian or totalitarian rule, then surely the means to achieving this would have the same nature as the goal – violence, force, and bloodshed – because everything has become permissible. That group would believe that the end justifies the means. However, if the goal is democratic transformation then the way should be to turn to peaceful popular will, either through the ballot box or, if unavailable, through peaceful protests and perhaps civil disobedience. Advocates of such an approach, and I am one of them, are totally opposed to using arms, violence, or force, which all lead to severe damage to both the cause and its defenders. When Mahatma Gandhi was struggling against racist laws in India, he told his supporters, ‘I am ready to die for many causes, but my friends, there is not one cause that deserves killing for’. This is how our political movement and uprising should be.

From a practical point of view, I do not need to spend much effort proving that change through force is unfeasible in Bahrain, given the large imbalance of militaristic power between an unarmed population that does not own one piece of weaponry and a government and its allies who are heavily armed and ready to intervene within just a few hours. I can say with certainty that the only beneficiary of violence is the regime, because it can use it to drag the opposition away from the battle of values and ideas, in which opposition has the upper hand, towards the battle of arms and force which the regime wins. When the two sides use force and violence to impose their will on each other, then the difference in ethics and values between the two sides almost disappears, and it becomes difficult to retain the interest of international peace and human rights organisations in the justice of our cause. In that way, we exhaust the moral advantage our people need to continue in their struggle for a just, democratic state. Violence is a culture produced by tyrants. It is a culture that will destroy a society if its people and political opposition adopt it.

A charge of violence to suppress and exclude the opposition

Our political history has witnessed many situations in which the government used the allegation of violence to suppress the opposition and exclude it. In 1956, the leaders of the National Union Committee,

Abd al-Rahman al-Bakir and his companions, were tried based on charges of attempting to assassinate the ruler, attempting to blow up Gudaibiya Palace and the airport, introducing military organisations under the facade of scouting organisations in order to overthrow the government, and breaching security during demonstrations. Predetermined verdicts of imprisonment and exile to the British island of St Helena were issued by a court headed by Shaykh Da

ij bin Hamad Al Khalifa. To his right and left were two other shaykhs of the ruling family in conflict with the leaders of the Committee.

The recent history of Bahrain proves beyond doubt that the main source of violence is the state, with its security and military apparatuses, and sometimes its tribal and fidā

īyīn militias.⁴ By accepting the Bassiouni report, the state has partially acknowledged its responsibility for some of the violence against peaceful protesters, as well as the killing under torture of five citizens in its prisons. It is also my duty to remind the prosecution and this esteemed court that, at a time when members of the opposition face false charges and are subject to harsh verdicts in courts because of their political opinions, the families of these victims continue to wait for justice and the punishment of the torturers.

Malicious charges

The charges against me were malicious from the very beginning, without basis or evidence to support them. The aim was to punish me for the positions I have taken and statements I have made in recent years. It is not surprising that a despotic regime uses all its bodies, from its intelligence apparatus, to its judicial system and security forces, to settle the score with its opponents. Traditionally, these apparatuses have been clever at fabricating, planting, and presenting evidence and witnesses to demonstrate the existence of ‘conspiracies to overthrow the government by force’. But this time their inefficiency and their haste to issue verdicts according to the orders of their superiors have provided us the opportunity to prove the malicious nature of these allegations from their inception. Examples of this are many, including the following: according to Major

Isa Sultan al-Sulayti of the NSA in the military prosecutor’s report of 30 April 2011, myself and others ‘provided material support necessary to carry out criminal plans using khums money’.⁵ Al-Sulayti claimed that I was amongst those who participated in ‘the attack on Sunni places of worship’, and that my goal was to declare an Islamic republic in Bahrain. He also claimed that I had joined a group with ‘a similar ideology to previous groups who had the same aim of establishing an Islamic republic beholden to Iran’, and that I sought, along with others, to ‘incite sectarian strife’ and ‘harm Sunni patients’. In addition, we had supposedly announced the establishment of an Islamic republic, and we believed in wilāyat al-faqīh⁶ as a principle of political governance. Didn’t this NSA major know that such claims about a person known for his liberal, secular ideas, and who is opposed to the very idea of a religious state, and is also a Sunni, would provoke laughter as well as pity for the low professional standards of the NSA, and its lack of scruples about concocting implausible charges? Is it possible that a person like myself, who was as dangerous as Major al-Sulayti alleged, would escape having his home, his personal computer, and his library full of political files and writings inspected? The reality is that neither my house nor anything in it was searched. As a matter of fact, the NSA men did not even come close to the door of my house, and before arresting me they even allowed me to hand over the contents of my pockets to my wife, without checking them!

The collusion of the military prosecution with the NSA regarding torture and extracting confessions was evident at every stage until 10 June 2011. The military prosecution did not allow me to meet privately with my lawyer during the investigation. I was not allowed to meet him until the commencement of the trial on 8 May 2011, 51 days after my arrest. Each investigation session with the military prosecution was preceded and followed by a session of torture, despite the fact that I informed the prosecution about it.

The prosecution officers were aware of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• About the Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: On the Prelude to the 14 February Uprising
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Bahrain’s Uprising: The Struggle for Democracy in the Gulf
• Part One Voices of the Condemned
• Part Two Configuring Dissent: Charting Movements, Space, and Self-representation in Bahrain
• Part Three Suppressing Dissent in an Acceptable Manner: Modes of Repression, Colonial Legacies, and Institutional Violence
• About the Contributors
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index