The United Kingdom is supporting “vicious autocracies” throughout the Persian Gulf to suppress the masses, and its opening of a new military base in Bahrain is in line with that “outdated imperial mindset,” says a British scholar and analyst.
“The UK is revealing that it is profoundly out of date in its foreign policy,” Dr. Rodney Shakespeare said in an interview. “It supports a vicious local elite, and in exchange that vicious local elite agrees to suppress the local population.”
“That is the situation in Bahrain, where the UK supports the killer Khalifahs — a dynasty without any laws without any culture and with no political and for that matter legal legitimacy,” Shakespeare said.
Britain’s Prince Charles inaugurated the Naval Support Facility (NSF) in the Bahraini capital of Manama on Thursday, marking the 200th anniversary of mutual relations with the Arab kingdom.
London plans to make the £30-million base its second busiest center of operations for the Royal Navy after Portsmouth, allowing its warships to resupply and undergo repair in the region without having to return to the UK.
“We have just opened a new naval base in Bahrain … in order to maintain the vicious autocracies in the Persian Gulf,” including Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Shakespeare noted.
“The UK government does this because it has an outdated imperial mindset,” he stressed.
In a visit to London last month, Bahrain’s monarch King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifah called for closer ties between the two kingdoms as he met with Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Theresa May and other British officials.
The UK’s willingness to expand ties with Bahrain comes at a time when the repressive Al Khalifah regime is under international pressure to end its years-long crackdown on a popular uprising.
Thousands of anti-regime protesters have held numerous demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis ever since a popular uprising began in the country on February 14, 2011. The protesters demand that the Al Khalifah dynasty relinquish power.
Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of the regime’s crackdown.
