Bahrain Analysis: Can the Kingdom Learn from Northern Ireland? (Diboll)

Funeral for two teenagers killed by British Army, 1972Dr Mike Diboll writes on his blog:

I first thought of the similarities between the situations in Bahrain and Northern Ireland back in December 2008. This was the result of two incidents.

I lived at that time in Al Janabiya, a well-to-do professional neighbourhood with a mixed Sunni, Shia and Western expatriate population. My daughter was born on 8^th December 2008 at Jidd Hafs Maternity Hospital, a state-sector hospital in a relatively deprived Shia heartland village. To get to it, I had to drive past Saar, another Shia village, through Saar West, a high-end expat residential area. At the crossroads on the road that leads from Saar to Saar West, I saw my first confrontation. At the Saar end, youths had erected barriers and were pelting the paramilitary Interior Ministry riot police with half-bricks and the occasional Molotov. The ground between the youths and the police was littered with debris, and the police were replying with baton rounds (rubber and plastic bullets), and CS gas. Masked civilians were mingling with the police, some of them armed. The scene brought memories of grainy media images of Northern Irelandcrica 1968 vividly to mind.

A few days later my daughter was born, slightly prematurely by caesarian section. There were some complications, so my wife and daughter had to stay as in-patients in Jidd Hafs Maternity Hospital for ten days. I visited the hospital every day, and when my daughter was four days old there was a minor altercation between local youths and the riot police. As was often the case, the youths pelted the police, who responded by firing CS gas in an indiscriminate manner in the immediate vicinity of the hospital. Gas got into the hospital, and my daughter had to be moved to an incubator. Emotionally, this was a turning point for me, as it was at that point that I understood “in my heart”, as it were, how a large section of the population was being treated by its own government, a government that at that time was paying my salary.

The second incident, also around the time of my daughter’s birth, came when I was teaching an undergraduate 4^th year elective course Postcolonial Literature for the College of Arts, University of Bahrain. Previously the course had been taught in a way that conformed to an official Arab Nationalist inspired curriculum, in which the ruling Khalifah regime had somehow fought alongside Gamal Abd Al Nasser and others in some grand pan-Arab struggle against European colonialism, with the Arabic and English literatures of the C20th somehow providing evidence for this.

I decided to ditch this curriculum, which all the students knew was bunk, with something a little more contemporary. I selected a reader Quinn and Baldwin’s 2007 Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction, which is divided into regional sections, “The Caribbean”, “India/Pakistan”, and so forth. I allowed students to select short texts for reading and discussion, and to my surprise the section “Ireland” was overwhelmingly the most popular, with texts like Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” (1931) and Mary Beckett’s “Belfast Woman” (1980) stimulating heated discussion. One young woman, who was to become one of Bahrain’s most prominent opposition activists, treated me and the class to a potted history of just why the Northern Ireland experience was relevant to Bahrain; after class, two loyalist young men, who would subsequently become active pro-regime baltajiyya, tried to warn me off the subject. Never again would I perceive the teaching of literature in Bahrain to be a politically “innocent” activity.

….Reflecting on Ireland….

Reflecting on these incidents from the perspective of February 2012, with the first anniversary of the February 14^th revolution approaching, I believe the lessons that can be learned from the Irish experience are more important than ever.  Put bluntly, and somewhat crudely, Northern Ireland and Bahrain are both societies in conflict, the tensions both societies have experienced stemming in large part, although not wholly, from a shared experience of British Imperialism, and subsequent “security” interests that have lasted into the C21st.

Pointedly, Northern Ireland suffered a simmering low-intensity civil war that lasted 40 years claiming thousands of lives through the murderous activities of both ethno-sectarian terrorist groups and the British and Northern Irish security forces. This conflict crippled and traumatized tens of thousands, and caused billions of pounds worth of economic damage to the UK, the Irish Republic, and above all Northern Ireland, from which the province will probably never fully recover. Before anything like a lasting settlement could be reached the conflict spread to the mainland UK, with devastating bomb attacks in London, Manchester and elsewhere over a 20 year period, with further killings in several European countries.

None of this has happened yet in Bahrain, but close resemblances to the early days of “The Troubles” and the current situation in Bahrain, combined with the general volatility of the MENA region, demand that those concerned with Bahrain look closely at Northern Ireland in order to learn lessons from that conflict which might prevents Bahrain and her neighbours from experiencing violence on a Northern Irish level, or worse.

Some background

Ireland was partly conquered by Norman knights brining English and Welsh settlers during the AD 1100s, but eventually these were assimilated into the Irish population through marriage and acculturation. Deeply proud of its Celtic Christianity, Ireland refused to accept English king Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome. The English conquered Ireland in a series of wars that lasted throughout the 1500s, enforcing English law, the English language, and the Church of England.

Most English settlement had been in central and south-east Ireland, but in the early 1600s, around the same time as England was colonizing the Americas, waves of English and Scottish settlers colonized the north-east of Ireland, hitherto the most Gaelic part of Ireland. Most of these settlers brought more extreme forms of Protestantism than that of the Church of England. This wave of settlement continued until around 1700, by which time the north-east of Ireland had a permanent Anglo-Scottish Protestant majority, who helped England to maintain control over the whole of Ireland.

Ireland achieved its independence in 1921, following a long struggle and a civil war. The 1921 settlement involved the formation of an independent Republic of Ireland (“Eire”), and the six-country province of Northern Ireland, in union with the United Kingdom. While the Protestants had been a minority in Ireland as a whole, Northern Ireland was established as a British homeland for north-east Ireland’s Protestant majority, although Northern Ireland has a large minority of Roman Catholics who tend to identify as Irish rather than British or Northern Irish. The population of Northern Ireland is around 35% Catholic, and about 65% Protestant. Catholics tend to define themselves politically as (Irish) “Nationalists”, Protestants as “Unionists”.

A small but significant minority of Catholic Northern Irish never supported the division of Ireland into two states, leading to the formation of the Irish Republican Army: freedom-fighters, guerillas, asymmetrical warriors, terrorists, organized criminals, gangsters, or psychopaths, depending on one’s perspective. The IRA, far-left Irish nationalists, were committed  to an armed struggle to undo the partition of the island of Ireland and thereby complete the project Irish unity that had been thwarted by the British.

A far larger number of Catholic Northern Irish believed they were discriminated against by the British-run Northern Irish state, and formed a Civil Rights Association in 1968, inspired by the African-American Civil Rights movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated that year. The Civil Rights Association began demonstrating for civil rights, equal opportunity, one-man-one-vote and an end to sectarianism. In response, extreme Unionists formed “Loyalist” militias and vigilante groups to harass and intimidate the Civil Rights movement.

The security forces in Northern Ireland were Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary police force that was almost entirely Protestant, and the Ulster Defense Regiment, a volunteer military force also closely associated with Protestantism and Unionism. Youth in the Catholic majority areas of Northern Ireland responded to intimidation from the Loyalist militias, the RUC and the UDR through street fighting, using rocks and molotovs. The British Army were sent in by the British government to maintain law and order, initially by protecting the Catholic areas from Loyalist attacks. However, as the violence escalated, they became increasingly associated with the Unionist cause. They were to stay in Northern Ireland until 2007.

On Sunday 30^th January 1972, soldiers from the British Army’s elite Parachute Regiment opened fire on unarmed protestors at a Civil Rights march in the city the nationalists call Derry and unionists call Londonderry. Fourteen protestors were killed, and two seriously injured when they were run over by police vehicles. Prior to 1972, the IRA had been viewed by most of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland as a small group of criminally inclined extremists. Following “Bloody Sunday” large numbers of angry Catholic youth joined the IRA, rationalizing that, “If I’m going to be shot I’d rather be shot carrying a gun than carrying a banner.”

Nevertheless, the tactics used by the IRA, which included mass-murder through indiscriminate bomb attacks, raising money through organized crime, and the gangster-like intimidation of moderate elements of their own communities ensured that even at the height of the Troubles, the IRA struggled to gain the support of the majority of Catholics. Thus in a 1981 survey, people were asked to agree or disagree with the statement “The IRA are basically a bunch of criminals and murderers”, 92% or Protestants agreed with this, but so too did 66% of Catholics.

Northern Ireland has approximately the same population as Bahrain. The Troubles cost over 3,500 lives and 35,000 serious injuries, arising from 40,000 shooting incidents and 9,500 bombs, 14,000 armed robberies, and 9,000 arson attacks. Northern Ireland provides Bahrain with a dire warning of what can go wrong when a divided society goes wrong, but it ought to be able to provide insights into how to prevent things from getting that bad.

Comparison with Bahrain.

Bahrain is comparable with Bahrain in a number of regards. Both Northern Ireland and Bahrain have a history of British involvement during Imperial and colonial times through to the present day. In both Bahrain and in Ireland as a whole Britain supported representatives of a minority population as agents enabling British control of a wider region, this involved colonization in order to increase the numbers of the minority population. The Bahrain regime’s controversial “tajnees” or “political naturalization” programme of the 2000s has precedents taking back to the British control of Bahrain during the C19th and C20th. Both Bahrain and Northern Ireland are small political entities sandwiched between larger and more powerful neighbours who exert a powerful influence over the politics and society of the smaller polities. Northern Ireland is between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, Bahrain between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In both Northern Ireland and Bahrain colonial rule left behind a legacy of divided society and sectarian inequality.

Northern Ireland, the best studied “Society in Conflict”

Northern Ireland is the best-studied society-in-conflict in the world, with some 9,000 quality studies being commissioned by a very diverse range of stakeholders across a wide range of scholarly disciplines — anthropology, conflict studies, cultural studies, demographics, economics, history, law, political science, psephology, social psychology, sociology — covering six decades. For this reason alone Ireland must have much to teach Bahrain, where objective research amounts to a very small handful of studies.

The “Internal-Conflict” Paradigm: Towards a Comparative Analysis

“Orientalist” approaches to MENA Area Studies often suggest implicitly or explicitly that the region is a case apart, that what applies in much of the rest of the world either does not apply in MENA, especially in its Arabic-speaking regions, or only applies following substantial modification. While I acknowledge the value of specialist area knowledge and insight, I reject the smug and essentialist assumptions behind this “Middle Eastism”, preferring instead a comparativist approach, where insights from one context can help bring about a “paradigm shift” in the study of another.

Indeed, it was just such a study, Frank Wright’s 1987 book Northern Ireland: a Comparative Analysis, which helped bring about a paradigm shift in the way the Northern Ireland conflict was understood. Prior to Wright, there were two competing paradigms on Northern Ireland, a “Traditional Nationalist” one, which said that the conflict was purely and simply the result of British interference in Ireland, and that the conflict would end with a united Ireland, and a “Traditional Unionist” paradigm, which stated there are two different peoples in Northern Ireland, an Irish one and a British one, necessitating Northern Ireland’s union with the UK against the southern, nationalist threat.

Wright’s book helped develop a new paradigm, the “Internal-Conflict” paradigm, which instead of looking for the source of the conflict exogenously, in terms of the interests and machinations of outside powers, looked at the conflict endogenously, in terms of cultural, economic, ethnic, psychological, social, and other factors at play insideNorthern Ireland’s communities. Interestingly, Wright achieved this paradigm shift through comparing the Northern Ireland conflict with similar conflicts from across the world, including the MENA region examples provided by Cyprus, Israel-Palestine, and Lebanon. It was precisely the paradigm shift from an essentialist-nationalist view of the Northern Ireland conflict to the Internal-Conflict one which enabled the cultural and psychological shifts to take place that made the subsequent Northern Ireland Peace Process possible, and the subsequent relative peace.

It is my belief that the current polarization of the conflict in Bahrain is the result of opposing and irreconcilable narratives based on essentialist, ethno-sectarian intellectual paradigms in which external powers loom large. Because these paradigms are irreconcilable, the trajectory of the Bahrain conflict will be toward an intensification of violence, unless it is possible to bring about a paradigm shift comparable to that which was achieved in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, which enabled the Peace Process of the 1990s, and the tentative, if fragile peace of the C21st. This new Bahraini paradigm will have to be an “Internal-Conflict” one, which will bring about a serious examination on the part of all parties of the purely endogenous factors that are at present providing the centrifugal energy that is tearing Bahrain apart. As the MENA region provided Wright with new insights into Northern Ireland, it is my contention that a close examination Northern Ireland can help bring about the paradigm shift that may enable Bahrain to pull back from the brink.

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