Bahrain's Sectarian Challenge

Amman/Brussels  |   6 May 2005

If steps are not urgently taken to address political and social grievances in Bahrain, and in particular those of the Shiite community, the country could face escalating violence.

Bahrain's Sectarian Challenge,* the International Crisis Group's latest report, focuses on the Gulf state's complex and stratified society, where the majority Shiite community - as much as 70 per cent of the population - feels increasingly politically marginalised and socially disadvantaged. Though often touted as a model of Arab reform, Bahrain's fragile liberal experiment is now poised to stall, or worse, unravel.

"The overlap of political and social conflict with sectarian tensions forms a highly combustible mix", says Toby Jones, Crisis Group's Gulf States Analyst. "The current situation is inherently unstable, and if the impending change doesn't come through accelerated reform, it could come through a return to violence".

It has been over four years since Shaikh Hamad bin `Isa al-Khalifa announced a sweeping reform plan, and the government has taken steps to repair what was once a dysfunctional autocracy. But it so far has failed in two key respects. First, reform has been uneven and appears as simply the royal family institutionalising its grip on power.

More worryingly, it has done virtually nothing to tackle sectarian discrimination and tensions. Indeed, they have been exacerbated, and the Shiite leadership's control over more confrontational elements within its community is showing signs of wear.

Of greatest concern today are increasingly aggressive moves by the government, which more and more resorts to authoritarian measures to maintain order. A dangerous dynamic is building: government and opposition moderates need to act quickly.

The government carries most of the burden - first in acknowledging there is a sectarian problem that it helped to create. The government must end discriminatory practices; the state must follow through on business and labour market reforms; and the King must revisit the promises he made in the 2001 National Action Charter.

The responsibility also falls, in part, on the opposition. Though it should not necessarily end the boycott of elections, agree to a faulty reform process or endorse an unsatisfactory constitution, it should forge relationships with sectors within the state that are willing to accomplish change on the ground. At the same time, the leadership of al-Wifaq and other Shiite groups must continue to counsel restraint on their members.

Though Bahrain's sectarian challenge is, for the most part, a matter of internal political will, the international community also has a role to play. The U.S. in particular, as the country's principal benefactor and architect of a recent bilateral free trade agreement, should expand its efforts to help the government see through what it began in 2001 and find ways of raising the delicate issue of sectarian discrimination.

According to Robert Malley, Director of Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa Program: "The U.S. should praise Bahrain's reformist rhetoric a little less, and urge the government to match it with action a little more".