ISLAMABAD – When President Barack Obama meets with representatives of Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf emirates at Camp David on Thursday, he’s expected to raise the topic of political liberalization in their nations to make them more receptive to internal dissent.
But political analysts focused on the region say the top officials in the room are unlikely to prove very receptive. Of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – only Kuwait has an elected parliament empowered to challenge the authority of its hereditary ruler, or emir. The parliament’s approval is required for the appointment of the crown prince.
In interviews in early April, after the announcement of a framework nuclear agreement with Iran, Obama said the biggest threat to the Gulf Cooperation Council’s six hereditary rulers wasn’t an invasion from Iran, but domestic dissatisfaction. Analysts who specialize in the region said the message was clear: Before you talk about a written security agreement, you need to do something about your internal politics.
“The administration is clearly signaling that, while it seeks strong cooperation on all matters, the security of the GCC regimes cannot be guaranteed absent some discussion of political reforms,” said Ayham Kamel, Middle East director for the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk research and consulting firm.
But that simply isn’t likely to happen. “Deep political reform is off the table for the Gulf leaders,” Kamel said. Instead, the Gulf countries are likely to continue with gradual reforms, introduced after the 2011 Arab Spring upheavals, that have increased participation by the public – including women – in public policy formulation and municipal governance to some extent but haven’t decriminalized opposition to their hereditary rulers.
Political parties are banned throughout the region, even in Kuwait and Qatar, the only countries where there is universal suffrage; critics are routinely arrested and convicted on charges of plotting to overthrow the monarchy.
Even random outbursts are a crime: A UAE citizen is on trial for criticizing the country’s leaders, after saying during a heated office conversation that they’d failed to secure the country (from an undisclosed threat).
The regretful unnamed defendant told a Dubai court in late April that his outburst was the consequence of “drinking too much coffee,” according to reports in the UAE’s state-owned news outlets.
Political analysts focused on the region said the most difficult passage of Obama’s planned conversation with Gulf Arab leaders might well be about disenfranchised Shiite Muslim populations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where governments view them as fifth-columnists for Iran, their strategic nemesis.
The largest Shiite community in the Gulf Cooperation Council lives in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province; Shiites make up 10 to 15 percent of the kingdom’s population of about 29 million people.
Protests in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province led to the July 2012 arrest of a prominent Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr; an anti-terrorist court convicted him last October of inciting sectarian strife and supporting rioting, and sentenced him to death. His brother and attorney, Mohammed al-Nimr, was arrested for tweeting the verdict.
That’s also the case in Bahrain, an archipelago off Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province Coast that hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Bahrain is the only Gulf Cooperation Council member in which Shiites compose a majority of the population, and its Sunni Muslim rulers have struggled to contain their democratic aspirations.
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