"The Uprising is Over. But What Is the Price of Bahrain's Victory?"

The Uprising is Over. But What Is the Price of Bahrain’s Victory?

So asks Bahrain watcher Justin Gengler in a post on September 30 regarding the state of the protests there that began on February 14, 2011 in the island nation, where despite an ever-growing dearth of international media coverage, tweeps are still being arrested for criticizing the ruling family, the riot police are surrounding entire villages to go after “enemies of the state,” whether they are dissidents or street thugs, and jail sentences are upheld against doctors who treat injured protestors:

[T]he uprising proper has ended.  Or, rather, it was made to end by the sweeping security response initiated with the State of National Security and subsequently entrenched via Bahrain’s effective “sectarianism as security” political strategy.  In this sense, the actual rebellion has long been over, and “major combat operations,” as some like to say, essentially were concluded with the second clearing (and for good measure razing) of the former Pearl Roundabout.

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To reference the “failed February 14 uprising” is seen as insulting the very memory of those who died, and who continue to die and risk bodily harm, in their pursuit of basic societal and political reform. In fact, however, it is simply to admit the overwhelming material and tactical superiority of one side over the other, a military dominance that students of insurgency and civil war have long noted.

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With its sustained deployment of police and military units along with a labyrinthine edifice of security checkpoints, the state has largely succeeded in penning demonstrators into their respective villages, now isolated even more than they were prior to February 2011 (which is saying a lot). (More recently, the state has shifted to allow protests in finite areas, namely along al-Budaiyi’ Road, while blocking them elsewhere.) Such an effort, combined with the decades-long exclusion of Shi’a from those professions that entail the use of weapons, has created a sort of double defense.

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Bahrain has also seemingly won its other war on the international front. Having done its diplomatic duty in allowing the BICI to investigate the uprising, it has successfully resisted pressure to do anything more. On the contrary, since December 2011 political change has been in the opposition direction. As witnessed](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/world/middleeast/bahrain-confirms-police-killed-protester.html) once more only days ago, protesters continue to be met with deadly force in confrontations with police.  Activists, including Nabeel Rajab and most recently Zaynab al-Khawajah, have been sentenced to prison for no more than insulting the prime minister and King Hamad, respectively. One political society (’Amal) has been dissolved, while another (al-Wifaq) may be on the brink.

Looks like those PR Newswire plants and anti-Iranian tirades paid off. Of course, such massaging of the facts on the ground don’t alone account for this. The US’s overriding concern was its 5th Fleet, but even the US saw no such thing as an Iranian hand in the protests. It wasn’t inclined to take anything but the most tepid of steps in support of the protestors, regardless, having “lost” Egypt and Tunisia already.  Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, was willing to throw thousands of security officers across the border, terrified of what might happen in its Shia-heavy Eastern Province should dangerous thoughts like constitutional reform spill over, as the Washington Post reported recently, outlining how Shia activists and (Wahhabi) security officers are trading bards (and according to both sides, gunfire) in the key, but impoverished, oil producing region.

While some demonstrators have resorted to violence and sectarianism, Gengler has  shown how the regime used disproportionate force against the opposition and worked to make the atmosphere as sectarian as possible to discredit the predominantly Shia initiators of the protests. Not unlike how Assad wants the world to think that his fight can be reduced to a narrative of cosmopolitan Syria versus angry Sunni peasants (beards!) and foaming-at-the-mouth jihadists (even thicker beards!) being armed by a neo-Ottoman Empire.

The Syria comparison (minus the snark, obviously) is Gengler’s. He sees a Bahrain now increasingly riven by sectarianism, as two of the short-term benefits the monarchy won for itself was a more energized Sunni minority and a discredited Shia parliamentary bloc. These accomplishments diffused the “Arab Spring” in the Gulf state, to the delight of the royals, but what are you left when your core supporters are now demanding a bigger slice of the welfare cake to “keep the peace,” and the critics now view the constitutional reformers as naive at best, Quislings at worst?

To turn an old Russian saying on its head, no matter how hard you hit them, they don’t stay quiet forever afterwards.