With the exception of Bahrain, the nationals of the GCC states are predominantly Sunni Arabs. Despite this numerical supremacy, the relationship of the Shia communities to the Sunni leaderships within these countries is one of the main features of internal security. This is a concern in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait in particular, while in Dubai the presence of a large Iranian national population feeds different security concerns. Without exception, the GCC countries maintain polities in which issues of inclusion and exclusion among national ‘citizens’ are largely outside of the public debate. This is indicative of a traditional politics in which political power emanates from a narrow circle of key ruling family members and their merchant allies. This patrimonial structure is not confined to the Arab Gulf states, but elsewhere in the Arab world it is partly obscured by the power wielded by dominant political parties, ideologies and militaries.
The growth in Shia regional power features strongly in the often divisive domestic politics of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and sometimes encourages semi-public expressions of concern from leading regime members about further steps in the putative reform process. This factor is also growing in importance in the increasingly poisonous politics of Kuwait, where it plays a part in hindering cooperative decision-making. However, fear of a Shia Islamist regime in Iran, allied with a Shia Islamist-dominated government in Iraq, is not what prevents Gulf Arab leaderships addressing the demands of large sections of their national populations. The so-called ‘Shia problem’ relates to a wider pattern of exclusiveness that, in different degrees, affects all the GCC states. These states are prisoners of a narrow and non-transparent mode of decision making not significantly changed since the current ruling families established their predominance more than 100 years ago.
Understanding the position of the Shia communities within the different GCC states needs to take account of the specific circumstances within each country. However there is one broad theme common to all. The Arabic word for ‘citizenship’, muwatinah, is widely used in Gulf Arab political discourse. It is taken from the word for nation (watan) and implies a common national belonging. In the highly conservative hereditary monarchy of Saudi Arabia, for example, there is a department within the Royal Court dedicated to addressing the ‘needs of muwatineen (citizens)’. Nationals throughout the Gulf are commonly addressed as ‘citizens’ by their leaders. However a number of GCC states lack even a formal legal equality among ‘nationals, while to varying degrees all Gulf states deny a national passport to a numerically significant minority who view themselves as nationals.
The overwhelming majority of nationals in the UAE, for example, hold a national passport. However most UAE passport holders are not permitted to be candidates or vote in elections to the consultative assembly, and many also lack full entitlement to government services. In September 2008 the UAE launched a national registration process under which these ‘nationals’, and those with foreign or without nationality (bidoon), can seek Emirati nationality. It is proving a slow process. In Qatar, legislation passed in 2005 defines two classes of citizenship. Qataris described as ‘native’ citizens are those with lineage beginning before 1930; those without this are referred to as ‘naturalized citizens’, an implied second class of citizenship. Estimated at only 1/3 of the total population of Qatari citizens, ‘native citizens’ can stand and vote in elections, including for a long promised elected national legislature. The ability of the remaining two-thirds of Qatari nationals to do so is restricted. Would-be election candidates, for example, have to prove that their father was born in the country. Whether seeking nationality, or trying to qualify for the Qatari ‘native citizenship’, proof of lineage requires the documentation standards of today for a pre-state era lacking a regulated and in many cases even a sedentary existence.
The UAE officially acknowledges as ‘stateless’ (bidoon; literally ‘without’) around 10,000, representing 1% of the official Emirati ‘national’ population – although the real number is assumed to over 10% of the Emirati national population. Officially, the Kuwaiti bidoon figure is 70,000; representing about 7% of the population of Kuwaiti nationals (although there could as many as 120,000) .The Emirati and Kuwaiti bidoon do not possess national passports and only receive government services on a selective basis. In Kuwait, nationality, while equating with full political participation, requires proof of lineage going back to before 1921. However selective inclusion took place in the 1970s before regional upheaval and later Iraqi invasion made the acquisition of Kuwaiti nationality harder. There are also bidoon in Saudi Arabia and throughout the GCC, but proportionately less than in the UAE or Kuwait.
With the exception of Qatar and the UAE, all national passport holders in the GCC states are officially entitled to all the attributes of national citizenship. Bahrain’s expansion of nationals is far faster than in neighboring countries, but is exclusively targeting Sunni, largely Arab, foreigners and their families in order to redress the population imbalance in favor of the Sunni Arab minority. Historically other Gulf Arab states “naturalized” in a way that favored those drawn from the Sunni Arab bedouin culture of Arabia or fellow Sunnis from the Levant, for example. However Bahrain is currently pursuing its naturalization at a fast pace and with generous rewards. Such a policy underlines a de facto inequality in Bahrain evident in public sector employment patterns for example. Estimates widely vary of the number of outsiders who have been ‘naturalized’. Some 2-3,000 have been naturalized since 2002, say the government; 6-7,000, say cautious critics. However a recent official upward revision of the overall Bahraini population to a total of 1.1 million, suggests, say the Shia opposition, that roughly 50,000 Sunni Arabs may have been added to the population of Bahraini nationals.
The common thread in this denial of full and equal citizenship is Gulf Arab ruling families’ conception of power – in law and in practice – as the prerogative of a few. The historical evolution of Gulf polities as tribal alliances in which a preeminent family bonded through marriage, financial support and religious legitimacy with others from a similar tribal heritage cannot fit with a common citizenship standard. The 1930 ‘native citizenship’ threshold in Qatar excludes a rebellious Sunni Arab tribe, large portions of which assisted a Saudi-sponsored coup attempt in 1996. More importantly, it substantially reduces the number of Qataris enjoying full citizenship who have an Iranian heritage. After the arrival of major oil revenues in the 1950s, the majority of the Qatari population were so-called “Iranians”. Typically these Iranians were Sunni and Arab (there are very few Shia among the nationals of Qatar, or the UAE and Oman). Many of these so-called ‘Iranians’ are known throughout the Gulf as hawala (‘returnees’). In other words they are ‘original’ Gulf Sunni Arabs. Many of them originate from the territory that today constitutes their home state. Many travelled to Iran due to the decline of the Gulf economy in the 1930s and then returned back two decades later. Ironically, many of those tribes who are very much the ‘in’ groups of today’s Qatar, came from Iran originally, but their longer term presence on the southern shores of the Gulf and their proven historic loyalty have made them a pivotal part of the alliance with the ruling al-Thani family. In the UAE, especially in Dubai, there is a strong huwala presence among the elite, although their sense of belonging, and their enjoyment of full national rights, can vary.
Gulf territorial boundaries were imposed by regional and extra-regional powers and today overlay what was often fluid tribal settlement fifty years ago. In the contemporary era these political boundaries are being rigorously policed by local states to ensure an assumed national loyalty is maintained on a correct basis. The ‘correctness’ of an individual’s national credentials in the UAE and Qatar depends on family politics. Elsewhere in the Gulf there is largely an equal citizenship standard in law, at least for all passport holders. In practice however things are different.
Political processes that revolve around hereditary senior positions cannot, by definition, be properly inclusive. At best they incorporate an elected voice in the public legislative process. Such polities cannot hope to adequately address the grievances of ‘out’ groups, whether former dissenting tribes or those considered too ‘Iranian’, even if, ironically, the religious and ethnic credentials of the latter, as Sunni Arabs, fit with the ‘in’ groups.
In Bahrain the demographic split between Muslim communities under a Sunni Arab monarchy has become more acute over the last four decades. In that time the country has shifted from a relatively progressive and inclusive nationalist politics conducted mainly in opposition to Britain, to a politics measured in terms of hostility or sympathy with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Strategies of partial Shia incorporation through economic and political concessions saw some success in Kuwait from the 1990s. However such efforts in Bahrain have struggled to satisfy a majority Shia population who continue to see a genuinely empowered legislature as the only way to institutionalize political and religious guarantees. Islamism in Bahrain – of both the Shia and Sunni variety - encourages political polarization. Bahrain’s sectarian politics is one in which the periodic interference of Iran continues to enable the ruling family, the al-Khalifa, to present itself to other Bahraini Sunnis as their best defense, while the political reform progress begun in 2002 provides the Shia activists of al-Wefaq with their only legal political outlet for the past 30 years. The limitations of that process however are likely to continue to divide the Bahraini Shia. An unelected upper chamber of parliament ensures that real power remains within the traditional circles around the al-Khalifa. However, returning to illegal opposition politics holds little appeal for al-Wefaq. There is Shia clerical blessing for utilizing an elected platform for demanding enhanced Shia rights, whether in Bahrain or elsewhere in the region. Domestic factors however will ultimately determine whether Bahraini Shia politics see further popular agitation beyond the periodic street skirmishes.
Israeli attacks in Lebanon or Palestine can periodically cause Shia disquiet in GCC states with large and concentrated Shia populations, as occurred in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in December 2008 over Gaza. This can sometimes overlap with Sunni Islamist anger at Israel, as recently seen in the Bahraini parliament. Often spontaneous, Shia street protests, however, feed the opposition of those Gulf Sunni politicians who seek to constrain domestic Shia ambitions. Street protests would grow significantly in the event of a US and/or Israeli attack on Iran over its nuclear program, although only in Bahrain is the force of numbers and anger over economic disadvantage liable to provoke any major upset. Iranian political connections to Gulf Shia communities are far less significant than in the 1980s, while the communities themselves, no longer led by exiled leaders, are focused on improving their domestic position. The presence of large numbers of Iranian nationals in Dubai is viewed with concern, both by Abu Dhabi and by the UAE’s western allies. However, given Iran’s dependency upon Dubai for finance, trade revenues and essential imports, few see the emirate as the frontline for any Iranian preventive action.
Nowhere perhaps is the inflexibility of the coalition underpinning local Gulf regimes more obvious than in Saudi Arabia. On the one hand the al-Sa’ud rule over a proportionally greater national population than elsewhere in the GCC and have a three century long role in Arabian politics that, unlike their GCC neighbors, has not depended on British armed backing. On the other hand the al-Sa’ud political alliance sought not just religious legitimacy, as is typical of Arab polities, but effectively conceded control over a large portion of domestic life to a highly conservative Sunni clerical class.
In the past Sa’udi Shia representatives exiled in Tehran could easily be branded pro-Iranian, as they still are in Bahrain. The ongoing inclusion of Sa’udi Shia in the National Dialogue launched in 2002, and their enjoyment of rudimentary municipal powers in Qatif, an impoverished part of Eastern Province, helps to offset this dated perception. However, as in Bahrain, the rise of a Shia Islamist-dominated government in Iraq, and the proximity of Iran-allied forces in southern Iraq, enables Sa’udi conservative clerical opinion to give domestic religious bigotry the appearance of strategic wisdom. This also finds a partial echo with some of King Abdullah’s half brothers, even if not with the king himself.
Since 2003 Kuwaiti politics have also become more affected by this strategic fear, compounding their long term sense of vulnerability in the northern Gulf, despite the perceived benefits of the removal of an historic Iraqi foe. The Kuwaiti ruling family, the al-Sabah, is divided over who should be premier and contains ambitious individuals seeking to enhance their own path to becoming emir. The identification of some Kuwaiti Shia with the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah is used by senior al-Sabah to tarnish domestic Shia critics, often using Sunni Islamist allies for this purpose, as occurs in Bahrain.
It will not be easy for Gulf rulers to counter domestic Sunni opposition to ‘concessions’ to the Shia in the future even if potential US-Iran engagement reduces the war risk. Distrust from Gulf Arab leaders about the direction of US policy was partly eased when US Iraq policy gave more attention to Sunni Arab concerns. A possible enhanced US understanding with Iran as a prelude to a major US troop drawdown in Iraq would not ease disquiet about local Shia, nor would Gulf Shia groups see this as a sign of enhanced US sympathy with their agenda. After the Shia took a leading role in Iraq in 2003, some Gulf Shia sought to leverage Washington’s apparent desire for wider regime change to stress that Gulf governments should reach an accommodation with Shia concerns, and this to some extent happened. However there is little expectation that the new US administration, even if it wanted to return to this aspect of a neo-con agenda, would be able to push local polities to shift domestic political balances in favor of such an ‘out’ group. Local politics, even with the theatre of highly vocal parliaments in the case of Bahrain and Kuwait, remains rooted in traditional and limited alliances. It is in this relatively inflexible context that the Shia, and others seeking redress, will have to continue to operate.
JIME Center.All rights reserved.