Making and Unmaking a revolution

By: Andrew Hammond

Media freedom has been one of the prime victims of the conflict in Bahrain since 2011. Both sides in

the conflict saw media as a key arena for propagating their message and winning support. The

protesters turned to outlets that would listen to them such as Iran’s Al-Alam, Al Jazeera English and

the new social platform of Twitter. The government and its supporters hit back and ultimately

proved successful in instrumentalizing both old and new media to crush the uprising and end at least

for now the threat to the entrenched elites who run the country and benefit from its political and

economic system.

A central element of the government media campaign was to provide a sectarian narrative of the

protest movement. It was essential for the dominant clique to present the Al Khalifa family as the

central pivot of the island’s political, social, economic and religious life, as a neutral arbiter among its

ethnic, religious and other social groups. The protesters were necessarily motivated by Shi’ite

sectarian sentiments: they wanted to empower Shia and disenfranchise Sunnis. The ruling family,

backed by Saudi Arabia, would be the saviour of the island’s fragile communal balance and diversity.

The protest movement did not in fact start as a sectarian movement, though the convergence

between Shi’ite Islamist political action, pressure for reform from marginalized socio-economic

groups, and democracy and rights activism is strong. With the connivance of colonial and neo-

colonial power Britain, the Al Khalifa have resisted empowering Bahrainis in a process of historic

ethnic, religious and social oppression. In the 1970s when leftist and Arab nationalist groups were

strong the regime put the parliamentary system aside; the political arena today is dominated by

Shi’ite political Islam, largely through the Wefaq organisation. The majority of those disenfranchised

happen to be Shia, and most have supported Wefaq in elections. Wefaq was unable or unwilling to

impose control over the more radical elements of the protest movement who were demanding a

republic, and this opened the door to the regime’s sectarianisation of the conflict.

Regional and international opinion has been split. The BICI report accused the regime of torture and

exaggeration of foreign sectarian intervention, but accepted the official parameters of gradual

reform through negotiation. Western governments have offered varying degrees of support for the

regime with token talk of the need to change the status quo. International media attention was

intense in February-May 2011 and maintained a centre attention span up to February 2012, the one-

year anniversary, but subsequently rapidly tapered off. Media coverage also acquiesced in the

sectarian narrative, depicting the conflict as one of minority Sunni regime vs. majority Shi’ite

opposition. The only objection the government had to this was the description of the ruling clique as

minority, over which it fought tooth and nail with foreign media (something I witnessed myself, in

numerous disputes with the Information Affairs Authority and the Minister of State for Information

Affairs).

However, the regime still correctly perceived a danger in media’s insistence on placing a spotlight on

Bahrain for as long as the “Arab Spring” theme retained an air of romance, and thus aggressively

targeted journalists tasked with working on/in Bahrain via a smear campaign of letters of complaint

to editors of foreign news outlets and trashy commentaries in local media (from my own experience,

I was once accused of being “one of the helpers of velayet-e fagih”). Yet media operated within the

epistemological framework sought by power with the simplistic Sunni-Shi’ite narrative, and any

attempt by a journalist to write around this framing would be bludgeoned to death by an editor in

London.

While media and government interest has slipped, the conflict remains. London and other foreign

capitals are full of Bahraini exiles, not least among them journalists. When international attention

returns, social and economic division in Bahraini society will likely be worse, making the resolution –

peaceably or through violence – all the more difficult.

 

Andrew Hammond is a senior policy fellow for ECFR’s Middle East & North Africa programme.

previously worked as a journalist with BBC Arabic radio. He was a founding member of the Cairo

Times news magazine. He spent ten years working as a correspondent for Reuters, including a stint

as Reuters bureau chief in Riyadh from 2006 to 2009. He has covered the Arab Spring uprisings in

Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, and Morocco and reported from Iraq before and after the overthrow

of Saddam Hussein.