ENOUGH!

Sectarianism reared its ugly head again on several fronts, all in a period of one month. It’s warning is quite clear, if this problem is not resolved at root level very soon, we really should just pack up and go somewhere else because the future on these islands doesn’t look too good.

First we have the events of Ashoora where the loyalty of the Shi’a population was put in question due to various placards, signs and pictures of foreign religious leaders as well as some processions chanting politically charged slogans against the government and its leaders.

Shortly thereafter 3 webmasters were taken into investigative custody charged with incitement to hatred of the regime amongst others, the charges collectively could carry a prison sentence of 10 years.

A few days later we had demonstrations by the Committee for the Unemployed waving Bahraini flags and bread to indicate their hunger and their need for employment.

Then we had the parliamentary debacle with the right honourable MP Jassim Al-Saidi accusing both the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Labour of adopting sectarian principles in their employment policies in their ministries, alluding to clearly favouring Shi’as for available posts.

All of these events share common denominators as they are indicative of what the Shi’a community feel in this country: subjugation, segregation, intimidation and marginalisation from jobs and opportunities, yet they constitute the largest group on these isles, and have always been.

Is this the truth though? Are Shi’a marginalised? Numbers categorically prove that this is indeed the case:

• they occupy 18% of the highest ranking public offices
• out of 47 ministerial and deputy ministerial position, the shia occupied 10 ie 21%. No Shi’a in the interior, foreign, defence, security and justice ministries.
• out of 64 employees in the General Prosecutor’s office, only 4 are shia ie 6%.
• in the back offices of the Shura council, out of 56 offices, 13 (ie 20%) are occupied by Shi’a. Out of these 13, 6 out of these are drivers!! It doesn’t get that much better for the elected council- out of 108 positions, 39 are occupied by Shi’a. Noting that none occupy decision-making roles, the roles represented by Shi’a are driver, cleaner, technicians, clerks.
• Shi’a not allowed to own land in Riffa.
• unemployment among the Shi’a stands at 40%.

source: Arabic Network for Human Rights Information via Babbling Bahrania

Or is it that the Shi’a are simply not capable of filling in these positions? Could it be possible that from a population of more than 250,000 souls, the government and government-controlled enterprises cannot find the capable persons from within this vast pool? It doesn’t make sense, or does it?

This could be the case only if the prejudice has been systematic through decades whereby the Shi’a were not given opportunities of education and health services as their Sunni counterparts have enjoyed. Or job and development opportunities have been held in near-exclusivity to the Sunnis and a selected few of the Shi’as, those who are close to the ruling family for instance.

A situation like this would force the normal Shi’a household to concentrate their efforts on feeding their families, rather than concentrate on education and development. This would naturally allow them to regress into a downward spiral of poverty, rather than progress into productive members of this society.

What would the solution be to this dire situation? The definitive answer must be for everyone, especially the leadership, to fight this phenomenon completely and criminalise any form of discrimination. Make it an offense to discriminate against not only sectarian background, but also ethnicity, gender, sex, colour, race and any of the many benchmarks which some have chosen to define what is acceptably Bahraini and what is not.

Unfortunately, the parliament refused to face up to its role in protecting the dignity of the Bahraini citizen by criminalising prejudicial situations. In fact what it is doing now is spearheading the drive to sectarian strife. It is the norm now within what should be the doyen of democracy that all actions have sectarian underpinning, if a Shi’a minister is questioned by a Sunni MP, then you can bet that quite a vigorous questioning session is being planned as a follow up to question a Sunni minister by a Shi’a MP. Sometimes these sessions are quite entertaining as it is quite clear that some hapless MPs were wound-up and let go, as happened by our brilliant right honourable MP Jassim Al-Saidi whose sectarianism is well known when he questioned both the Justice and the Labour ministers regarding their employment policies… rather than reserving the very same questions to the ministers of the Interior and Defence whose ministries are a known no-go areas for the majority of Bahrain’s citizens.

Placatory gestures are not enough to resolve a situation like this. With all due respect to the Prime Minister who has brought the farcical situation between the right honourable Al-Saidi and the minsters of Justice and Labour to handshakes and kisses and declarations of loyalty in the time-honoured Arabian tradition, this situation is far from resolved.

The Prime Minister is known for his political astuteness, business shrewdness and flexibility in apprising situations and arriving at solutions that would take others many months or possibly years to arrive at, so I would be rather surprised if he let the matters be at this situation.

What he should strive to do now more than ever is face his critics by patently proposing legislation to criminalise discrimination in all its forms, and encourage the parliament to quickly study and ratify these laws. There are various templates from the United Nations for instance which could be used as a basis for his own proposed laws. I wouldn’t think that a lot of energy need to be expended on formulating these laws, rather, a lot of energy needs to be found to get the political will and courage to resolve this situation at root level, once and for all.