Island kingdom ever more divided

A masked youth runs off after spraying an Anti-government slogan supporting protesters. Photo / AP

A young man, his face masked by a red cloth so that only his eyes are visible, strides at the head of a crowd of protesters down the street in the Shia village of Nuwaidrat in Bahrain.

The people behind him look as if they expect a confrontation with the police. Some wave Bahraini flags, which have become the symbol of the pro-democracy protesters. "Soon the police will start shooting," warns an onlooker as two police vehicles screech to a halt. Soon we hear the thump of tear-gas canisters being fired.

Signs of revolt simmering just beneath the surface are everywhere in Bahrain, five months after protesters first demanded reform.

Inspired by the Arab awakening, thousands of demonstrators took over Pearl Square in the centre of Manama, the capital. A month later, on March 15, security forces, backed by troops from Saudi Arabia, drove out the protesters, bulldozed the square and launched a pogrom against the majority Shia community which supported protests.

Bahrainis, Shia and Sunni, are still traumatised. "I was expecting the Government to thank us for treating so many people during the crisis," recalls one doctor of moderate political views, subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation.

A 64-year-old man, active in the defence of human rights, named Mohammed Hassan Jawad, who is still in jail, gave details to his family about how interrogators had tortured him with electric shocks to his genitals, legs, ears and hands. They made him bow down before a picture of the Bahraini King, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and told him to open his mouth so they could spit in it, adding that "unless you swallow the spit we will urinate in your mouth instead". His family, allowed to see him for only brief supervised periods, noticed that his toe-nails were dead and black from the electric shocks.

Bahrain should have been the one place in the Arab world where compromise was possible between rulers and ruled, and between Sunni and Shia. Instead it has joined Beirut and Jerusalem, with communities polarised by hate and suspicion. The shock of what happened is all the greater because Bahrain regards itself as one of the most liberal and best-educated countries in the Gulf. Unlike the Saudis, women drive cars and hold important government jobs.

The simple explanation for the human disaster that is consuming Bahraini society is the Government overreacted. The Khalifas felt their rule was under threat as long-established despots across the Arab world were overthrown. They treated moderate reformers as if they were professional revolutionaries.

Without any evidence, the authorities demonised Iran as the hidden hand behind demands by Shia for an end to discrimination. Bahrain has always been divided between the Sunni ruling elite and the Shia, but since March this has turned into something closer to an anti-Shia pogrom. Evidence of sectarianism is widespread. After watching the beginning of a riot in Nuwaidrat, we drove to a quieter part of the village where 10 Shia mosques were destroyed three months earlier. A local man, writing a history of Shia mosques and holy sites in the neighbourhood, points to a heap of rubble, saying: "This used to be the Momin mosque. There has been a mosque here for 400 years."

He describes how, on April 19, military and police surrounded the area. By the time they withdrew, 10 out of 17 Shia mosques had been levelled. It was worse. Shia revere the burial places of their holy men, but in two places in Nuwaidrat the graves had been dug up by soldiers or police.

The historian points to a hole in the ground, saying this was the site of the grave of a Shia holy man called Mohammed Abu Kharis, who died 200 years ago. "They dug up his bones and threw them away."

The official explanation of the destruction of at least 35 Shia mosques and religious sites is they had been built without permission. It seems unlikely the Government could suddenly have been possessed by an overwhelming desire to use the army and police to enforce building regulations. Many Shia suspect the Saudis were behind the destruction, since this is in the tradition of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia.

One Shia leader has a different explanation, believing that the purpose of government-backed sectarianism is to intimidate the Shia community.

Official policy may not be so carefully calculated. Lubna Selaibeekh, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Education, says she is "appalled" by claims students are being denied scholarships because they are Shia or have taken part in protests. She agrees that 6500 out of 12,000 teachers in Bahrain took part in a strike to support the demonstrators at Pearl Square, but says only those who broke civil-service rules will face punishment. She says the ministry has "no statistics on who is Shia or Sunni".

The Government may claim not to keep sectarian statistics, but its opponents do. Nabeel Rajab, head of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, has precise figures about discrimination showing that "in 2003, 18 per cent of top jobs in Bahrain were held by Shia; today it is 8 to 9 per cent". He believes the Government is seeking to change the demography of the island by sacking Shia and bringing in and naturalising Sunni from Sunni-majority countries.

He says the "Government is creating the ingredients for a civil war" because the more the Shia are marginalised, the angrier and more extreme they will become.

Some 2500 Shia have been sacked, though King Hamad has promised they will get their jobs back. It may no be that easy. Hussain, an IT specialist, was one of those who lost their jobs. He says there is now a layer of Sunni officials who do not want Shia to return. King Hamad claims to have offered compromise and national dialogue, but this still hovers uneasily between real concessions and PR. The "national dialogue" forum that has just ended was heavily promoted by the Government but turned out to be an unrepresentative talking shop. Much more serious is the investigative commission into what has happened in Bahrain since February, headed by human-rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, which has just started work in Bahrain. He sounds bemused by the degree of loathing with which the two different Bahraini communities regard each other. Bassiouni is optimistic the King and the Crown Prince want him to work as if he were leading a truth commission, apportioning blame. What happened in Bahrain persuades him of a darker truth. "When you scratch the surface, the worst of humankind appears," he says.

Gulf showpiece

Bahrain has a population of 1.2 million, half of them Arabs.

The oil rich state is run by a Sunni Muslim ruling elite, centred on the Khalifa royal family, who hold the main political and military posts. There are long-running tensions between Bahrain's Sunnis and the Shia Muslim majority.

The island nation is popular with tourists from the region, attracted by its relaxed social environment. A close ally of the US, it is home to the American Navy's Fifth Fleet

- INDEPENDENT