Saudi Arabia has pledged $5 billion, Kuwait $4 billion and the
United Arab Emirates $3 billion.
Last week, just a day before Morsi's ousting, verdicts were
announced in the "UAE 94" case – a mass trial of Emirati activists which has
been condemned by human rights organisations as
fundamentally
unfair. Of the 94 accused, 69 were given jail sentences of between seven and
15 years, while 25 others were acquitted. Many – but by no means all – of them
are members of al-Islah, a local Islamic movement which the authorities have
been eager to link to the Muslim Brotherhood.
We have seen many different opposition groups over the years.
These have been dealt with in different ways but one particularly effective
strategy has been demonisation – essentially trying to make any opponents in
your kingdom, sultanate or emirate part of a distinct "other" that the rest of
your population will hopefully bandwagon against, to help the ruling elite and
the regime ostracise them.
When we look at the Gulf states they have tended to pick upon
what's likely to be the most effective demon to get the bulk of their population
on board and connect that opposition to some kind of external threat – the
threat that's likely to alarm the west most at that time.
It's why most opposition groups back in the 1960s and 1970s
were described as Communist in the context of the Cold War. We also had the Arab
nationalist threat – all these Arab schoolteachers and doctors working in the
Gulf who were linked to the revolutionary movements elsewhere in the Arab world,
and Gulf rulers were very uncomfortable about this.
For example, after the
Suez
crisis, according to [British] Foreign Office archives, we even had Sheikh
Zayed, the first president of the UAE, remarking to British political agents:
"Why didn't you do to Nasser what the Russians have
done
to Budapest?" That was the level of antagonism they were hoping to
generate.
More recently, of course, we've seen political Islam and in
particular militant political Islam, terror linked to al-Qaeda, becoming the
obvious demon to create, connecting domestic opponents including human rights
activists, intellectuals and academics to supposed terror organisations. We've
seen this particularly in Saudi Arabia. We've also seen it in the UAE. For
example, a number of people who were part of the UAE 94 were actually accused
back in 2009 of being part of a terror cell to bring down the Burj Khalifa tower
in Dubai.
We've also seen the Shia fifth columns, especially in Bahrain
and Saudi Arabia being used very effectively to demonise opposition and generate
links with Iran.
Since the Arab Spring began these opposition containment
strategies have had to be ratcheted up a few notches because the Gulf monarchies
all face a range of increasing pressures. Of course their own populations are
very much experiencing a demonstration effect from the rest of the Arab world,
with people rising up against autocratic systems. This is coupled in something
of a perfect storm with the declining ability of all six of the Gulf monarchies
– or at least five of them – to keep up their wealth distribution strategies and
the allocative state that has historically formed their social contract with the
bulk of their citizens.
We've also seen the Gulf states being impacted very heavily by
modernising forces such as communications, social media and so on, and other
tools of protest that have proved effective in the Arab world.
The other thing that has caused increasing discomfort and more
alarm over opposition groups in the Gulf is the clear leadership deficit now –
we have many aged rulers who seem to be disconnected with their youthful
populations and seem over the last 18 months at least to have more or less
chosen the wrong path at every turn.
As for the demonisation strategies they have been using right
now, obviously in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain the Shia populations have borne the
brunt of this – it is the most effective way of convincing the US that the
ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are very much on the west's
side.
In the UAE it has been much trickier. The Shia population,
although fairly substantial in the emirate of Dubai, has historically been very
well integrated into the ruling establishment – in particular the merchant
population in Dubai. As with Kuwait, we have seen the Shia form something of a
loyalist backbone here, so the UAE has had to look a bit further, perhaps for
something less plausible to link their opposition to. Al-Qaeda of course remains
a good one. We still see people being arrested on security warrants, which is
very effective. We have also seen this link to the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood.
In fact the opposition in the UAE goes back quite far in time.
I first became interested in it several years ago when the internet started to
be used much more for debate by oppositionists.
There was a website created – UAE Hiwar – a few years ago.
Many Emiratis were using that to criticise the leadership, talk about the ruling
family, talk about the lack of rule of law, and so on. It reached fever pitch
early in 2010 when there was a
very
controversial trial of a member of the ruling family, Sheikh Issa, who ended
up being acquitted. The website was shut down shortly after, probably as a
result of that.
A lot of the discussion, as with al-Islah and the "UAE 94",
was not about overthrow of the ruling family. It was about making the UAU honour
sections of its constitution – that the UAE should be moving forward in an
evolutionary manner towards a multi-party elected democracy.
This is why the minister of state for foreign affairs is also
breaking the UAE's constitution ... he has made it quite clear that he does not
believe the UAE should be a democracy and that it's a different kind of
political system rooted in various eastern ways connected to tribe, religion and
tradition. But that's not what the UAE constitution says.
In 2011 we saw a cross-section being arrested. We saw the
UAE Five (not members of al-Islah
per se), we saw a noted economist,
we saw a blogger, etc -- essentially a cross-section of the population which the
leadership expected would be enough to create a sufficient red line to put off
other UAE nationals from discussing these topics more.
Then, in 2012, we had this massive crackdown. This was very
much linked to the indigenous al-Islah organisation which has its origins all
the way back in the early 1970s and was even sponsored by a member of the Dubai
ruling family at that time and then also Ras al-Khaimah's ruling family. What
we've seen with al-Islah is that the entire opposition in the UAE which actually
has many shades and colours is being lumped together with al-Islah.
We are supposed to be making this explicit link with the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which is tenuous at best.
This is very difficult to portray as just a single episode, as
something the UAE can write a line under. Far from it, it seems to be just the
beginning. Although conditions in the UAE are incomparable to the large chunks
of poverty-stricken Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, etc, nonetheless we have a
significant wealth gap. If one were to do a good empirical study of the UAE's
economy we'd find the five poorest emirates now contribute less to the UAE's GDP
than they did in 1971.
Something's going badly wrong. There's a wealth gap, a
corruption problem. We also have different strands of opposition emerging beyond
political Islam, beyond the liberals in 2011.
We even have senior members, including ruling family members,
including members of the old Zayed administration who are now beginning to write
letters to opinion-makers in the west (I have seen some of these myself). These
are major figures often, who served in key roles in the Zayed administration up
to 2004 and have very serious misgivings over the direction the UAE has been
taking."
