Vol. 75/No. 12      March 28, 2011

Worried about the stability of its close ally, Washington has dispatched Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Bahrain over the last few weeks to show support for the king, while urging some concessions in the hope they might stabilize the regime.

After opposition figures called the Saudi-led force an “overt occupation,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney stated, “This is not an invasion of a country.”

Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which operates in the Arab-Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman, and the Indian Ocean. The fleet is central to projecting U.S. military power in the Middle East and South Asia. Last May the Navy announced it planned to spend $580 million to double the size of the base.

A small country of some 1.2 million, Bahrain is nevertheless a regional banking center. It also has one of the largest oil refineries in the Middle East, one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world, and strategic maritime trade ports. The regime rests on a narrow base of banking and oil-rentier capitalists among the Sunni minority. More than half the population is migrant workers, mostly from South Asia. Migrant workers are denied the most basic rights of citizenship and have not been part of the protest movement.

The antigovernment protests are based among Shiite Muslims, who are 70 percent of Bahraini citizens. Although there are some mixed neighborhoods and many Shiite-Sunni marriages, Shiites face widespread discrimination in housing, jobs, and government services and are essentially banned from the army and police. The Bahraini armed forces and police are mostly Sunnis from Jordan, Yemen, and Pakistan.

While Bahrain is nominally a “constitutional monarchy,” the king appoints one of the two houses of its parliament and political and economic power is dominated by the al-Khalifa family. Districts for the elected house are gerrymandered to ensure that Shiite influence is diluted.

The size and persistence of the antigovernment demonstrations have taken the regime by surprise. More than 100,000 demonstrators packed downtown Manama February 22, just days after security forces killed seven protesters. On March 13 thousands blocked the city’s financial districts.

Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was in Bahrain during some of the protests, complained that the demonstrators “are overwhelmingly Shia” with little Sunni participation. But what really bothered him was that some protestors have raised not reforms but getting rid of the monarchy. “Imagine Bahrain without the al-Khalifas” read one sign Kristof saw. “That kind of thing is utterly inappropriate,” he wrote just days after the actions were attacked by the regime’s police.

Unlike the other Gulf emirates, many trade unions are legal in Bahrain and there is a history of strikes, sit-ins, and other protests around wages and work conditions. The main union federation backs the antigovernment movement.

While Shiites are generally lower paid than Sunnis, migrant workers face the worst conditions. In an interview with the International Trade Union Confederation in December, union organizer Fadhel Abbas Ali said Bahraini construction workers like himself made just under $400 a month in 2004. But for the “80 percent of the workforce [who are] mainly Indians and Filipinos” the wage was $185 a month or less.

Abbas said he was working to bring Bahraini and migrant workers into the union at Precast Concrete Company. Because the Indian workers are well organized, Abbas said, the government is replacing many of them with Vietnamese.
 
 
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