Protests flare nightly in smaller villages, home to many of Bahrain’s majority Shiite Muslims. They say the Sept 24 vote, a national dialogue and an investigation into alleged abuses have done little to address grievances that brought them out onto the streets in the first place.
What the last seven months have shown is that the potential for real change is quite limited within the existing confines," said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. "We’re at a stalemate and I don’t think either side has a clear strategy going forward of what exactly to do.
" Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim rulers quashed Shiite-led protests after the demonstrators became increasingly strident in their demands for an end to sectarian discrimination and a greater say in government.
At the government’s request, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent in 1,500 troops to help suppress the unrest in Bahrain, a strategically important island off the coast of Saudi’s oil-rich Eastern Province and home to the biggest US military presence in the region, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
At least 30 people were killed, hundreds wounded and more than 1,000 detained in the crackdown on protesters. Eighteen members of Bahrain’s largest opposition bloc, Al Wefaq, resigned from the 40-seat parliament in protest, triggering Saturday’s by-election. Wefaq is boycotting that too, and is struggling to control more radical opposition elements.
The government’s handling of the protests and ongoing uncertainty has tarnished Bahrain’s image as a business-friendly Gulf hub where banks had thrived over the past two decades after relocating there after Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s.
Already this year, French bank Credit Agricole has said it will close its Bahrain office, BNP Paribas plans to move some of its back-office operations out of the country and JP Morgan was reported to have relocated its regional private banking headquarters to Dubai.
The government has accused the opposition of pursuing a sectarian agenda with backing from Iran, the non-Arab Shiite giant just across Gulf waters.
"The people who want to try and sabotage the upcoming by-election don’t speak on behalf of the rest of Bahrain," said Abdul-Aziz Mubarak Al-Khalifa, international counselor for the country’s Information Affairs Authority. "Al Wefaq don’t have a monopoly on parliamentary life here.
Bahrain launched a national dialogue in July to discuss reforms, but Wefaq also pulled out of that forum and called it a charade after the opposition bloc was accorded only 35 seats out of 300 at the table.
Based on the talks, King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa agreed to expand the elected lower house’s powers of scrutiny. Yet the appointed upper council, the Shura, was left untouched.
Separately, Bahrain invited and funded a high-profile line-up of international human rights lawyers to look into the unrest. That was undermined by a series of gaffes from the panel’s head, Cherif Bassiouni, who seemed to have prejudged the inquiry’s outcome, due by the end of October.
"Given that the National Dialogue proved to be an outright failure, and that the commission also looks very unlikely to succeed, the outlets in terms of political mobilisation for the Shia are now very, very limited," said Michael Stephens, analyst at the Doha-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
The by-election on Saturday is likely to deepen the impasse by shutting the opposition out of the political process and discrediting it as a way of reaching meaningful consensus, analysts and activists say.
Without Wefaq, they say, Bahrain’s next legislature is bound to be lopsided, precipitating a loss of faith in politics that will force people to look outside the system for leverage. "People have no trust now and they have nothing to do on the political side so they say they are going to continue to demand on the street side," said Ali Al-Aswad of Wefaq, who had vacated one of the seats.
Activists called for a big demonstration on Friday on the eve of the election, dubbing it "Return to Pearl Square". Friday has become a day of protest across the region, as it falls on the weekend when people are off work and gather for prayer. Pearl Square was a central roundabout in Manama and epicentre of the protest movement earlier this year.
After Bahrain imposed martial law and cleared the square, its monument – featuring a concrete ball in a nod to the country’s history as a pearl harvesting and trading hub – was razed.
In the Shiite villages ringing the capital Manama, people often show up at rallies carrying small-scale, home-made models of the demolished monument. Cooking gas canisters are being taken from outside homes and blown up, and increasingly critical caricatures of the king are sprayed onto walls overnight, residents say.
"There’s a sense of foreboding and that things are going to get worse and that’s clearly what’s happening. Frankly the young men are not quite so scared of the tear gas and the stun grenades as they used to be," said Stephens.
