Arafat Alkhalaf/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Bahrain’s Uprising: Resistance and Repression in
the Gulf is the culmination
of four years of work by various authors from different backgrounds, including
academia, the arts, politics, and education. The diverse
selection of contributors was designed to capture how the uprising was
interpreted by Bahrainis or those drawn to ‘Bahrain’ for whatever reason. Rather
than solely adopting a postcolonial, political economy or sectarianism-centred
approach, (all popular in studying the Gulf), we thought resistance and
repression would work as a more appropriate lens to explore both the
contemporary uprising and Bahrain’s lengthy history of contentious politics.
By having
this concept driven approach, we could use different disciplinary angles and
methods, ranging from historical analysis, to cultural studies and
ethnographies. It was important to
include authors who had experienced the uprising in different ways, yet who
were ultimately driven by a concern for social justice. Here we want to touch on a few elements of the uprising which reflect this concern with social justice, resistance and repression,
including postcolonialism, foreign actors, human rights, and social media.
Postcolonialism and
foreign patrons
Inevitably,
aspects of colonialism and postcolonialism play an important part in this.
Allow me to digress somewhat. Back in 2011, I recall a very defensive member of
the Foreign Office lambasting a young intern at the think tank Chatham House.
The intern had said, in a rather offhand manner, that the British had long been
propping up the Al Khalifa regime. The FCO employee took grave offence to this,
and began to eviscerate the young intern (figuratively, of course). The room
fell into awkward silence. When I think back to that moment, I feel that had I
handed the intern this book, she would have had some solid ammunition with
which to assail the FCO employee. Indeed, one of the book’s main strengths is
the detail it provides not only on the extent of British political, economic,
and security support to Bahrain, but also Britain’s role in shaping
institutions, and particularly the security apparatus. Without a doubt, British
support has frequently been a crucial factor in allowing the oppressive Al
Khalifa regime to continue, and this book details that fairly forensically. It
also documents formally for the first time, in book form, the personal role
played by British agents in brutalising Bahraini detainees, or aiding and
abetting a culture of impunity.
We did not,
however, want to embark on a postcolonial polemic and I like to think we have
remained critical without resorting to the facile or occidentalist. We note,
for example, that despite the institutionalisation of Al Khalifa rule through
British protection, it was British-led reforms that had, for a while, tempered
the brutal excesses of the Al Khalifa regime, which had hitherto tyrannised the
indigenous Baharna population. Post-independence, British control diminished. Bahrain’s
independence and subsequent recolonisation by Saudi Arabia have had an enabling
effect. That, coupled with the Iran-Iraq war seemed to result in a ‘culture of
revenge’, whereby the Al Khalifa regime, untempered by restraint and galvanised
by Saudi reactionism, reasserted their feudal dominance over the indigenous
Baharna population. With the Saudis conducting the type of imperial
intervention previously reserved for the British, the latter have undertaken a
more surreptitious, neo-colonial form of influence. The British, for their
part, are happy to supply weapons, police training, PR, and crucially,
legitimacy in the eyes of the international community to the Bahraini regime.
As Rosemary Hollis said, the British went out the door and came in through the
window.
Ultimately
though, this book really stresses how the ambitions and foreign policy
objectives of foreign powers have often characterised internal repression and
resistance in the country. Bahrain, trapped between the two hegemons of Saudi
and Iran, and geopolitically important for the US and UK, cannot be an
independent actor in the local or global stage. A British and American military
presence equates to transatlantic support for the authoritarian status quo,
while Saudi boots on the ground virtually guarantee that even armed
insurrection would have little effect on the incumbent order. Coupled with
this, foreign companies and states, from Korea to France, benefit from selling
weapons, spyware, and other products to Bahrain. After all, repression is big
business, but what is important here is looking at both repression and
resistance as less a state-led affair, and more a phenomenon involving multiple
regional and international actors and interests. Donatella della Porta once
talked about the policing of transnational protest, yet in Bahrain, we can
clearly see the development to transnational repression of local protest, and
transnational protest over local issues.
Social media, propaganda,
and surveillance
The British,
the Saudis, and the Americans have, in their various ways, helped to control
dissent, be it in the form of simply acting as a deterrent, to actually putting
boots on the ground. Yet this volume expands concepts of repression and control
beyond simply coercive violence. British and American PR companies have, for
example, led the way in laundering the reputation of the Bahraini government,
an aspect explored by myself and by John Horne in the book. These private
enterprises, often run (particularly in the case of the UK), by British
establishment figures or ex-military men, have attempted to absolve the
Bahraini government, deflecting criticism using various lines of debate. In
addition to this, European companies like Gamma International sell spyware that
thrives in social media, infecting the computers of Bahraini dissidents or
those who are critical of the regime.
The book is an attempt to make the ‘forgotten uprising’ less forgotten.
Unsurprisingly
then, the book also problematises the technological utopian position that
places social media as a tool of democratic emancipation. While social media
has been an important outlet for the opposition, it was also manipulated by
pro-status quo forces as an effective tool of surveillance, sectarianism, and
intimidation. The book’s chapter on social media stresses that social constructivism
and technological determinism are not mutually exclusive, and reveals how high
internet penetration rates and large social media take-up, combined with
Bahrain’s small size, facilitated witch hunts and peer-to-peer surveillance
through Twitter and Facebook. So pervasive was the problem, that at least one
Bahraini internet troll was found to have broken international law.
That is not
to say it is all cynical. Amal Khalaf notes the importance of social media in
recreating sites and spaces of memory, noting how it enabled protesters to
affirm the symbolic power of Lulu long after it had been destroyed. In this
sense, the symbiosis of physical and digital sites of contestation complemented
each other to create and affirm the most potent symbol of the uprising—Lulu. In
this case, social media provided forms of counter memory that challenged the
homogenising and monolithic narratives of the government, whose destruction of
Lulu was a flawed attempt at eliminating the collective memory of the uprising.
On a similar note, John Horne talks of how creative resistance and symbolic
representations of torture on social media elicit more sympathy than the often
grisly and highly shared videos of state brutality that were so commonplace.
The connectedness afforded by social media also allowed the international
community to bear witness to the state-led repression. Perhaps this last point
is a truism of any uprising, but in Bahrain's case, with its limited
sovereignty, grabbing the attention of international actors was especially
important.
Human rights and the human
angle
The book also
charts the history of contentious politics in Bahrain. In particular, it
examines how the recent uprising, more so than any other in Bahrain’s history,
has led to a proliferation of national and international human rights organisations
focused on Bahrain. Yet paradoxically, this discourse of human rights, which
can bind young and old local actors together and serve as a language that
resonates with international players, can also be adopted, appropriated, and
manipulated by the regime to legitimise their position. Despite its mass
appeal, human rights discourse tends to focus on the outcomes of repressive
state actions that derive from a political system that is inherently corrupt, discriminatory,
and cronyist. In terms of a political solution and language, it does not
necessarily challenge the systemic problem, and tends to draw attention to
symptoms, rather than find a cure. Indeed, despite its merits, the human rights
turn in Bahrain's contentious politics is problematic, and the regime, as part
of their attempt to “upgrade authoritarianism”, as Steve Heydemann calls it,
now position themselves as a bulwark against extremism, protecting the human
rights of a population fearful of 'backward' Shi’a expansionism.
As well as
exploring the human rights phenomenon in the Bahrain uprising, we did not want
to forget the human experience of the uprising. Too much analysis can unhinge
the acute emotional power of people's lived experience. In order to capture
this more visceral sense of the uprising, we have included an eyewitness
account, a story of a real event, and a high court testimony. This is in
section one of the book, titled 'Voices of the condemned'. Ali al-Jallawi, one
of Bahrain’s best writers, retells his experience of torture and imprisonment
with wry humour and subtle wit, conveying the darkness of the experience with
powerful understatement as only a writer could. Ebrahim Sharif’s testimony—undeterred
by his brutal torture—in front of the high court of appeal is also included; an
eloquent, dignified and damning indictment that sums up the grievances felt by
a large swathe of Bahrain’s opposition. Tony Mitchell, an Australian expat,
gives a moving account about how witnessing the uprising made him realise the
extent of government propaganda. It also forced him to confront the ethical
situation of certain classes of expats in the Gulf, who are usually expected to
be politically acquiescent in exchange for a good job and a tax-free salary.
The forgotten uprising
Bahrain is a
tragic case, yet its importance has been swallowed up by the tragedies
elsewhere in the Middle East. This is particularly true of places like Syria,
where the scale of the tragedy beggars belief. Yet what makes Bahrain so sad is
not necessarily the fact that news channels were too busy, for example, to
cover it, but the deliberate process of obfuscation and propaganda designed to
legitimise the government’s violence, much of this coming from transatlantic PR
companies or legal firms. European and US media have condemned the repression of
the majority of the other Arab uprisings, but on Bahrain, many have been muted.
For this reason, it is easy for people to be more despondent and cynical about
a place where there appears to be an overwhelming coalition opposing political
change. It's not so much that it was forgotten; the real tragedy lies in
why it was forgotten.
Bahrain’s Uprising is an attempt to make the ‘forgotten uprising’
less forgotten. By combining analysis, storytelling, and narratives of the uprising,
we think we have created a volume that offers an intellectual and emotional
depth to understanding the context of Bahrain’s struggle. Academically, it
certainly captures the benefits of doing case studies, and highlights how both
repression and resistance are hugely influenced by multiple factors, including
cultural milieu, historic learning and even a country’s sovereignty. It is, as
we acknowledge in the introduction, far from complete, and we hope to do a
second volume that deals too with gender and migrant workers, aspects still
under-examined and overlooked in Bahrain. In the meantime, those interested in
propaganda, social media, social movements, visual cultures, identity politics,
history, and storytelling should all find something of interest in Bahrain's Uprising.
Bahrain’s Uprising: Resistance and Repression in the Gulf (Zed Books, 2015). Editors: Marc Owen Jones, Ala’a Shehabi. Contributors: Amal Khalaf, Ala’a Shehabi, John Horne, Zoe Holman, Tony Mitchell, Abdulhadi Khalaf, Ebrahim Sharif, Ali Al-Jallawi, Ayesha Saldanha.