THE
ROVING EYE The Gulf's terror of
democracy By Pepe Escobar
There's a specter haunting the Persian
Gulf: democracy.
This Tuesday, no less
than 20% of the population of Bahrain poured into
the Lulu (Pearl) roundabout in Manama in its
biggest anti-feudal monarchy demonstration
intimately connected to the great 2011 Arab
revolt. A whole cross-section of Bahraini society
- teachers, lawyers, engineers, their wives and
children - rolled along in a wide, unbroken column
of red and white, the colors of the national flag.
This Wednesday, there were reasons to
believe the revolt was finally hitting the holy
grail, ie, the House of Saud, as 100 youngsters
hit the streets of Hafar al-Batin, in northeast
Saudi Arabia, calling for the end of its
drenched-in-oil feudal monarchy. What's
extraordinary is that this happened as "Custodian
of the
Two Holy Mosques" Saudi King
Abdullah, 85, was returning home after three
months following surgery in the US and
convalescence in Morocco - amid massive regime
propaganda, complete with Orientalist touches such
as men in white robes doing traditional Bedouin
sword dances on special carpets.
For the
House of Saud, the revolt is the ultimate
nightmare; as the whole world knows by now, tiny
Shi'ite-majority Bahrain borders the large Shi'ite
majority oil-producing parts of Saudi Arabia. So
no wonder King Abdullah had barely set foot on his
carpets when he went pre-emptive to quell any
possible democracy-yearning moves, launching a
US$35 billion program that includes one year of
unemployment benefits for jobless young people,
and adding into a national development fund which
helps people to buy homes, set up businesses and
get married.
In theory, Saudi Arabia has
pledged no less than a massive $400 billion until
the end of 2014 to improve education, healthcare
and infrastructure. Chief economist at Banq Saudi
Fransi, John Sfakianakis, euphemistically puts it
as "the king trying to create wider trickle down
of wealth in the shape of social welfare''.
Invariably, euphemism stops at politics;
there's no sign the king will invest in the
political aspirations of his subjects - as
political parties, labor unions and protests
remain absolutely banned. And there's no evidence
he's inclined to address the huge social problems
- from government repression to religious
intolerance - which have forced him to announce
this multibillion "trickle down" gambit.
And guess who was there to greet King
Abdullah and discuss the "crisis"- code for The
Great 2011 Arab Revolt? That's right – his Sunni
neighbor feudal monarch, King Hamad al-Khalifa of
Bahrain. Killing them softly with our
song The Western-concocted Disneyworld
narrative that King Hamad was "reform-minded",
interested in "advancing democracy" and
"preserving stability", was totally shattered by
his mercenary army firing live ammo from
anti-aircraft guns from APCs at protesters who
were carrying flowers, or American Bell
helicopters overhead chasing people and shooting
at them.
A Twitter posting last week by
Bahraini journalist Amira al-Husseini summed it
all up; "I too love Bahrain. I am Bahraini. My
blood is Bahraini - and I witnessed my country die
in the eyes of its children today."
The
Shi'ite rebellion against the over-200-year-old
al-Khalifa dynasty - invaders from the mainland,
by the way - has in fact been going on for
decades, and includes hundreds of political
prisoners tortured in four prisons in and around
Manama by Jordanian "advisers", and a regime whose
army is mostly composed by Punjabi and Pakistani
Baloch soldiers.
It took quite a while -
but then that strategic phone call from Washington
made sure to the al-Khalifa to at least manage the
killing with a little more savvy.
The
record of how US foreign policy has nimbly adapted
to the great 2011 Arab revolt yields a few
lessons. Egypt's ousted president Hosni Mubarak
and Bahrain's King Hamad are "moderate" and
certainly not "evil"; after all they were and are,
respectively, pillars of "stability" in MENA
(Middle East-Northern Africa).
On the
other hand, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Syria's
Bashar al-Assad are really bad, because they are
not submissive to Washington's diktats. The moral
scale conditioning the US response is directly
determined by the degree the dictator/feudal
monarch in question is a US satrap.
This
explains the instant US revulsion (by the State
Department, and only this Wednesday by President
Barack Obama himself) at Gaddafi's bombing of his
own people, while US corporate media and scores of
think-tank analysts scramble to see who comes up
with the most elaborate adjectives crucifying
Gaddafi. Nothing beats denouncing a dictator who
doesn't fit the Washington lackey model.
Meanwhile, on the other side of MENA,
there was hardly a peep when Hamad's repression
apparatus - partly imported from Saudi Arabia -
killed his own citizens at the Pearl roundabout.
Well, rehabilitated terrorist Gaddafi has always
been a lunatic, while for Bahrain a long mantra
applies; Bahrain as "close ally" of the US, "small
but strategically valuable nation", home of the
5th Fleet, essential to ensure the flow of oil
through the Strait of Hormuz, bulwark against
Iran, etc.
Anyway, even after the
massacre, Sheikh Ali Salman, leader of the
largest, opposition Shi'ite party al-Wefaq, as
well as Ebrahim Sharif, leader of the secular
party Wa'ad, and Mohammed Mahfood from the Islamic
Action Society, have agreed to meet Crown Prince
Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa for a
monarchy-proposed dialogue.
Husain
Abdullah, director of Americans for Democracy and
Human Rights in Bahrain, is not convinced; "I am
not sure if the ruling family themselves are
serious about any serious dialogue because when
you watch the Bahrain TV, you see nothing but
sectarian attacks on those who are staying in the
Lulu roundabout-square."
For Abdullah,
what's in fact happening is "more people openly
calling for the regime to be toppled, through
peaceful means, and Bahrain to be ruled by the
people of Bahrain. In addition, there is a serious
call for complete (not partial, which is the case
now) civil disobedience in the country to force
the ruling family to leave the country in the same
manner that took place in Tunisia and Egypt." No
wonder the House of Saud is freaking out.
The uprising of Bahrain's 70% Shi'ites,
plus quite a few Sunnis - the protest mantra is
"No Shi'ite, no Sunni, only Bahraini" - started as
a civil rights movement. But the crown prince
would better deliver quickly - otherwise this will
become a full-blown revolution. For the moment
there's a lot of rhetoric about "stability",
"calm", "security", "national cohesion" and
nothing about serious electoral and constitutional
reform.
There are reasons to believe
Salman - following Saudi advice - may be trying to
pull a Mubarak and make vague promises for a
distant future. We all know how it ended up on
Tahrir Square.
The protesters started
asking for an elected prime minister, a
constitutional monarchy, and an end to
discrimination against Shi'ites. Now Matar
Ibrahim, one of 18 Shi'ite members of parliament,
says the gap between the demonstrators at the
Pearl roundabout and the official political
opposition talking to the crown prince has become
an abyss. The top rallying call around the Pearl
roundabout has become "Down, Down Khalifa."
Thousands of workers at the huge Alba
aluminum plant have already made sure that a very
powerful industrial and trade union movement backs
the mostly Shi'ite protesters. The head of the
Alba trade union, Ali Bin Ali - who happens to be
a Sunni - has already warned that they could go on
strike at any moment.
We want our
social rights Were peaceful, democratic
regime change happen in Bahrain, the mega-losers
would be Saudi Arabia and the US.
Bahrain
is a classic case of the US empire of bases
colluding with an unsavory feudal
monarchy/dictatorship. Naturally the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff favors dictatorship-dictated
"order and stability" - as well as old colonial
power Britain; the massacres of civilians in
Bahrain - and Libya - have been brought to you by
the Sandhurst military academy and BAE systems.
King Hamad graduated from the US Army
Command and General Staff School at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, and "takes a leading role in
directing Bahrain's security policy", according to
a 2009 WikiLeaks cable. He was defense minister
from 1971 to 1988 and is a big fan of US heavy
weaponry.
The "very Western in his
approach" crown prince for his part is a graduate
of a US Defense Department high school in Bahrain
and the American University in Washington.
Translation; two Pentagon-minded vassals are in
charge of delivering democratic reforms to
Bahrain.
International banking center
Bahrain - with a gross domestic product per capita
just under $20,000 - is also very high, alongside
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in the
scale of wealthy oligarchies based on slave labor,
the proverbial "large pool of migrant workers
providing cheap labor". It has spent a fortune
promoting itself as "Business Friendly Bahrain".
Last week it was more like "Bullet-friendly
Bahrain".
The great 2011 Arab revolt, for
all its specific reasons in different countries,
is definitely not about religion (as Mubarak,
Gaddafi and Hamad have claimed) - but essentially
working class unrest directly provoked by the
global crisis of capitalism.
Clash of
civilizations, end of history, Islamophobia and
other silly concepts are dead and buried. People
want their social rights, and to navigate the
waters of political democracy and social
democracy. In this sense the Arab street is now
the vanguard of the whole world. If the al-Khalifa
don't get it, they are bound to go down.
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