Clampdown Dents Bahrain’s Image as Stable Eden

According to local legend, this island state, set like a pearl in the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf, was the site of the biblical Eden.

Scholars now discount Bahrain as the backdrop for the book of Genesis, but the tale still clings, and clerks in the tourist office here cheerfully recall it with a wink and a smile.

These days, however, Bahrain is about as far from Eden as one can get.

Authorities and anti-government demonstrators are entangled in a violent power struggle amid a political landscape dense with neocolonial intrigue, Islamist rage and oil-lubricated ostentation.

The protests, centered in the poor Shiite Muslim villages that radiate out from this upscale capital, began with marches and placards and have graduated to Molotov cocktails and exploding propane tanks. Anti-government rioters have torched buildings and sabotaged power stations. Three policemen have died.

The police response has escalated from tear gas to rubber bullets to live ammunition. Security forces have killed a dozen residents and arrested hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. Many of those detained have disappeared into the regime’s penal system, held without charge.

Strategic Location

For some, including the Bahrain government, the trouble here represents an Iranian thrust across the Persian Gulf. They see an attempt by Tehran’s mullahs to subvert this country’s pro-Western, Sunni Muslim monarchy and replace it with a radical Shiite regime that can export violence to Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries.

Others, human rights groups among them, portray it as the effort of a repressive oligarchy to maintain power against a popular democratic uprising. They contend that the country’s security force, run for almost 30 years by an enigmatic British expatriate, operates with chilling brutality while Bahrain’s two most prominent Western patrons, the United States and Britain, discreetly look the other way.

However one sees the situation, the United States has a great deal at stake in the outcome. Bahrain is strategically placed midway up the Persian Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, portal for much of the oil fueling the West’s industrial democracies. A major U.S. Navy facility on Bahrain’s main island services ships guarding the waterway against Iranian and Iraqi adventurism.

Bahrain also is a linchpin in the regional economy, the base for financial and other support services to Gulf nations with greater petroleum reserves.

The government here appears to be in no immediate danger of falling. On Sunday, the entire Cabinet resigned, but the reshuffling leaves the ruling family--the Al Khalifa dynasty--and its policies intact.

Meanwhile, the confluence of events in Bahrain--economic dislocation, democratic yearning, religious activism--rings alarms all over the Arab world and beyond.

As the mercury edges toward triple digits, shoppers move languidly through the souk at the center of Manama, tending toward the shaded side of the street. The labyrinth of storefronts often seems less a traditional Arab bazaar than a suburban mall--windows filled with electronic goods, computer games and souvenir caps stitched with silhouettes of camels or palm trees, or the logo of the Chicago Bulls.

Beneath the gateway leading into the market are clustered navy blue pickups and vans of the security police. A couple of uniformed Pakistanis--many of the security officers are foreign-born--lounge against a truck, machine guns dangling from shoulder straps.

In the high-rise luxury hotels facing the bay, European, American and Japanese business people and tourists confer beneath lofty atriums or windsurf on protected inlets. Brazilian jazz ensembles or Philippine rock bands lend musical ambience.

This is the Bahrain of the brochures, a sophisticated, Westernized emirate connected by causeway to the austere, albeit very wealthy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But the pleasant rhythms of Manama mask a different Bahrain--one visible less than 10 miles away in the narrow and dust-clouded streets of the Shiite village of Sanabis. There, nearly every wall is marked with painted-over anti-government graffiti and many of the young men are bitterly jobless. Analysts say unemployment ranges as high as 40% in Bahrain, and the Shiites, who account for 60% to 70% of the population, have borne a disproportionate share of the hardship. They also are denied senior positions in the government and most businesses.

At the same time, the ruling family has left its fingerprints on nearly every profitable enterprise in the island nation, including tourism, land, petroleum and the import of foreign workers, leading one Manama lawyer to complain, “This isn’t a country, it’s a company, and everything belongs to him [the emir].”

The Al Khalifa family arrived in conquest from the Arabian mainland in the 18th Century and has more or less ruled Bahrain ever since, most of the time under the quasi-colonial protection of the British.

Britain lowered the Union Jack for the last time in Manama in 1971, and Bahrain adopted a constitution providing for an elected Parliament to govern in cooperation with the emir, Sheik Isa ibn Salman al Khalifa. The commitment to democracy proved transitory; in 1975, only 20 months after election of the first National Assembly, the emir dissolved it. Parliament never has been recalled; the emir rules by decree.

There have been two petitions since 1992 calling on the emir to restore the constitution and reinstate Parliament. For a society percolating with often-violent discontent, Bahrain’s middle class maintains an almost quaint faith in the power of the petition. One has been signed by 22,500 people, and is still being circulated. That is a formidable number in a country with an estimated 400,000 citizens (in a population of about 525,000), but the emir refuses to accept it.

One former government official active in the petition drive is quick to condemn those demonstrators who have resorted to violence--a small minority, he assures a visitor--but he is bewildered at the ferocity of the response by police, who have even been accused of desecrating village mosques.

“It’s like it’s some sort of revenge,” said the former official, who like most of those critical of the government spoke only on condition of anonymity. “Whatever relationship the government had with the people has deteriorated.”

And the crackdown won’t work, he added.

“It is not ended. They will not surrender.”

‘The Foreign Hand’

Government officials blame the unrest on “the foreign hand,” or “outside support,” and everyone in the country knows who they mean: the Iranians, who laid formal claim to Bahrain until 1970 and were linked to violence in the island nation in the early 1980s.

But the evidence of Iranian involvement remains circumstantial at best.

Some of the clergy leading the protests were trained in Qom, Iran, a center for Shiite scholarship. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, among the most prominent of the country’s banned dissident groups, maintains an office in Tehran. But it denies formal links to Iran, and its main office is in London, headquarters to the Bahraini exile organizations.

“I am Sunni; I am a secularist, not religious,” said one executive close to the activists. “In all the time I have sat and talked with these people, I have never sensed they have that aim in their heads. . . . Their aim is entirely constitutional.”

Washington also is dubious about a direct Iranian connection.

“Iran did not create the problems. They’re home-grown,” one U.S. official said. “Most of Iran’s activities are limited largely to propaganda. They aren’t providing any significant aid or arms, as they are to other groups in the region.”

A politically moderate lawyer in Manama who represents many of those arrested dismisses the government theory but acknowledges that militant Bahraini clerics have managed to harness their religious fervor to popular discontent with the economy.

The dual appeal was evident in the unlikely event that ignited the current unrest--a marathon sponsored in November by a local service club.

When the mostly Western runners, clad in shorts and tank tops, passed through a depressed Shiite village, the message that came through to the villagers was this: Not only do the rich foreigners take your jobs, they dishonor your religion with their immodest dress.

The runners were barraged with rocks, and within weeks the government had arrested and deported Ali Salman, a charismatic young Iranian-trained cleric blamed for leading the disturbance.

Rather than ending the protests, his deportation only intensified them. Salman now is in London, seeking political asylum and in touch with followers by fax machine. “After they deported him, he became a hero,” the lawyer said.

It is said here that Ian Henderson, director of state security in Bahrain, avoids photographers, publicity and the accouterments of wealth that could come easily to a man of his power in the Gulf.

Henderson, 67, was a veteran of Britain’s battles against the nationalist Mau Mau in colonial Kenya when he arrived in Bahrain in 1966. The British bowed out five years later, but Henderson stayed, and his security force is empowered to incarcerate suspects for as long as three years without charge.

While Henderson may be considered an elusive figure of curiosity and even some awe, the emotion most frequently engineered by the force he heads is fear.

“You know, of course, all the telephones are bugged,” one former official told a visiting reporter in a typical comment. “If they ask me if I have talked to you, I will deny it.”

To figure out why, one only has to listen to Mohammed--a 21-year-old student from Sanabis now living in exile--recount his three-day encounter with Henderson’s men.

Arrested at a demonstration in February, Mohammed was pulled into a police station and advised he would be the “guest” of the government for the foreseeable future.

When he initially refused to answer questions, which were asked in English and translated for him into Arabic, the guards slapped his face and then locked him into a cell. Later, at 2 a.m., they shackled him and brought out the rubber hoses.

Isolated, humiliated, frightened and pained, Mohammed says he put his signature to a pledge not to participate in any more demonstrations and was released. The following day, he says, he marched once more and then boarded a plane to a nearby Arab country, where he has related his story to Amnesty International, among others.

Amnesty has been among those most critical of the Bahrain government’s response to the protests and the Draconian security laws. The London-based organization estimates that 1,300 people have been arrested; many have been nabbed in midnight raids on their homes or at roadblocks that encircle the Shiite villages.

Like much in Bahrain these days, that figure is in dispute. Some sources close to the demonstrators say that as many as 5,000 have been detained at one time or another since December. Others in the island nation say that fewer than 1,000 remain behind bars.

There is agreement, however, that at least a dozen demonstrators have been killed by authorities. Activists circulate photographs of the bodies, including a man whose head was shot away when he leaned out the window of his home during a protest.

Security Clampdown

For the past few weeks, the security clampdown has kept the lid screwed down on the demonstrators. Earlier this month, the government felt confident enough to release 150 prisoners and suggest that more might be freed soon.

Sunday’s Cabinet shifts open the way for what one official described as “new blood,” but London-based dissident Mansour Jamri dismissed the move as “a cosmetic change.”

“They aren’t changing direction, they’re just changing faces,” Jamri said in a telephone interview.

Henderson, meanwhile, has been telling acquaintances that he’d like to retire. The emir, he contends, just won’t let him. That may change. The Times of London reported in February that Henderson has advertised for a butler and maid for his English country house.

Turner was recently on assignment in Manama. Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington and Andrew Van Velzen of The Times’ Toronto Bureau contributed to this report.