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Saudi's Shi'ites walk
tightrope
By John R Bradley
Earlier this month, when Saudi Arabia's
Shi'ites voted in the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern
Province during the second of three phases of
nationwide elections for municipal councils,
Shi'ite candidates were returned in districts
where there was a clear Shi'ite majority
population. Where there was not, Sunni candidates,
who had the semi-official backing of the Wahhabi
religious establishment, were elected, just as
their Wahhabi cousins in Riyadh had swept the
board a few weeks earlier.
The more
unexpected news was ignored by the Western media,
namely that Hussein Abdul Rahman al-Khamis, one of
the most popular Shi'ite candidates in the al-Hasa
region, was disqualified from running just a day
before polling day, the only candidate thus far in
the two phases of elections to be removed from the
list of those standing for office.
"I
still don't know why I was excluded. People who
were going to vote for me are also shocked," he
told al-Jazeera TV on polling day, adding that the
paper which announced his exclusion had no
official stamp on it.
Why was al-Khamis so
hastily excluded?
One reason could be
that, unlike the other Shi'ite candidates in
al-Hasa region, he lived in a Sunni-majority
district. The electoral rules allowed voters to
cast one vote for a candidate in their own
district, but also another vote for a candidate in
each of the other five districts of al-Hasa.
As the only Shi'ite candidate in his own
district, al-Khamis would, by default, have
attracted the majority of votes from the Shi'ites
living in the other five districts. The result: a
Shi'ite candidate in a landslide victory in a
Sunni-majority district. The prospect, it seems,
was simply too awful for the 24 Sunni candidates
standing against him to contemplate.
Throughout the ruling al-Saud family's
various victories and defeats and alignments and
realignments with tribal chieftains, Bedouin clans
and sedentary peoples over the past century, there
has remained only one constant: outright hostility
from the Wahhabis to the Shi'ite sect.
So
the question everyone was asking, after the fall
of Saddam Hussein in 2003, was what would stop the
Shi'ites of the Eastern Province, who have no
obvious incentive to support the al-Saud regime
that oppresses them and damns them as "infidels",
from welcoming US forces if they rolled into the
Eastern Province to "liberate" Saudi Arabia's oil
fields?
After the fall of Baghdad, the
image of more than a million Shi'ites on the
streets of Iraq marking the Ashura commemoration
for the first time in living memory was not lost
on the kingdom's 900,000 Shi'ites, who have
historic links with their co-religionists across
the border.
Other, subtler historic
tensions were also brought to the surface.
In 1802, Wahhabis supported by the al-Saud
penetrated Karbala, the Shi'ite holy city in Iraq,
and destroyed the mausoleum of Hussein, a grandson
of the Prophet whose martyrdom Shi'ites
commemorate during Ashura. With that attack on the
tombs of Hussein and his followers, the al-Saud
ruling family, and their Wahhabi backers, declared
their open hostility to the Shi'ite sect.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein, three
massive car bombs exploded in Karbala, killing
hundreds and maiming many more. Locals
instinctively blamed "Wahhabis", meaning Saudi
jihadis who had sneaked across the border to join
the insurgency. The majority of suicide bombings
in Iraq have been carried out by Saudi jihadis,
who are seeped in Wahhabi ideology. It was as
though history was repeating itself. And in Ashura
this year, the Shi'ite's worst fears were
confirmed, after a car bomb in the Shi'ite city of
Hilla killed 125. Again, locals marched to
reiterate where they thought the blame lies: "No
to terrorism" and "No to Ba'athism and Wahhabism"
they shouted.
Deep loathing of Shi'ites,
an ingrained habit of associating them with
hostile external and internal powers, and fears
among religious hardliners about the future
position of Wahhabi clerics in a reformed Saudi
political system that might grant Shi'ites their
rights, all meanwhile continue to feed
anti-Shi'ite sentiment inside Saudi Arabia itself.
The exclusion of al-Khamis from the official list
of candidates in al-Hasa was just another
manifestation of that.
In a region
obsessed with conspiracy theories, many Saudis,
both Sunni and Shi'ite, think that Washington has
plans to split off the Eastern Province into a
separate entity, and seize control of the oil
reserves after Iraq has stabilized. No amount of
appeasement from the al-Saud is, in the meantime,
going to pacify extremist Wahhabi elements - or,
for that matter, the majority of the Shi'ites in
the Eastern Province, who, not satisfied with
token gestures, seem certain to exploit their
ambiguous position when it comes to the issue of
their loyalty to the Saudi state to push even more
strongly for greater freedom and rights.
But the irony is that, as a result of the
insurgency in Iraq and the suicide bombers
routinely attacking Shi'ite civilians, the Saudi
Shi'ites, rather than becoming more restless, may
in fact see greater virtue in continuing to
support the al-Saud regime.
The reason is
that Iraq is proof of how, should the al-Saud be
overthrown in a violent Islamic revolution led by
al-Qaeda and inspired by Wahhabism, the Shi'ites
are now more aware than ever that they will likely
find themselves first in the firing line, at least
after the al-Saud princes themselves have been
done away with.
John R Bradley
is the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside
a Kingdom in Crisis. He has reported
extensively from Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle
East for many publications, including The
Economist, The New Republic, Salon, The
Independent, The London Telegraph, The Washington
Times and Prospect. His website is www.johnrbradley.com.
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