Since a month and a half of the Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia, and a month since the rumbling began in Egypt, the Arab world has seen the departure of two of the oldest surviving rulers. Moreover it looks very likely to drop another one from the ranks of rulers in Libya, and changes appear highly probable in Bahrain as well. Intermittent demonstrations on the streets of Yemen and Jordan, alongside promises of reform in Amman and Sanaa and sops even from Riyadh bring upfront the obvious question: is a major change likely in the dispensation of power and authority in the Arab world?
The question appears particularly pertinent because the regimes that have come under stress in the last couple of months are structurally different, even though they are all authoritarian in character: Egypt was ruled by an elected president; Jordan is governed by a tribal monarchy (as is Bahrain); Libya is a tribal Jamahirya (People’s Republic), without any elected president. Also, while Libya and Bahrain are essentially rentier states, Egypt is much less so and Jordan definitely not. There is, therefore, a need to understand the dynamics of power and authority in the region. In the present context, Libya and Bahrain make useful case-studies of the problem.
The case of Libya is pretty unusual by any standards[1]. Comprising of the three regions of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan, Libya is for all practical purposes a tribal confederacy inhabiting a territorial state. The people of Libya are generally classified into about 140 tribes and clans, of predominantly Arabic, autochthonous Berber and Arabic-Berber ethnic origins (with some others like Tuaregs and Tebou). Organised initially under the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently occupied by Italy as a colony, these tribes did not experience much sedentarisation before the 20th century (unlike their counterparts in Egypt, but quite like Jordan, Turkey, or Iran). Having precious little urban population to deal with (barring the Arabs on the coast), the Kingdom of Libya that came into being in 1951 was heavily dependent on the tribal levy to provide the military strength required to hold together what was territorially the fourth largest country in Africa. Discovery of oil reserves in 1959 turned Libya wealthy, but the concentration of resources in the hand of the reigning King Idris I and the urban Arab elite, generated a lot of disaffection among the military.
Muammar al-Qaddhafi, inspired by example of Nasser’s Egypt, toppled King Idris, and established a revolutionary order in 1969 with an economically redistributive agenda. Since then, Libya has been ruled by a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) with Qaddhafi as the Leader of the Revolution. Power was nominally made over to the Mu’tammar al-Sha’ab al-’Amm (General People’s Congress of GPC) in the 1970s, comprising delegates chosen by 22 regional people’s Congresses, chosen in their turn by local people’s Congresses from the 1,500 urban wards. Nevertheless, the potential of direct democracy latent in this Jamahirya was heavily circumscribed by the RCC, which can override any decision pushed by the cabinet (drawn from the GPC), largely because of the military support behind RCC and Qaddhafi[2].
Qaddhafi ensured sustained military support for the regime by the time honoured practice of divide-and-rule, playing up inter-tribal animosities. For instance, the largest tribe in eastern Libya (i.e Cyrenaica), the Misuratas, were kept weak largely to court the influential but smaller al-Awaqir tribe. Similarly, while the largest Warfalla tribe along with the second largest, the Magariha, have been the traditional bastions of Libya’s security establishment, power is concentrated in the much smaller Qaddhafah (Qaddhafi’s own) and Zuwaiha tribes.
Despite Libya’s incrementally growing volumes of exports (after the removal of UN sanctions in 2003 and all others by 2006), which now stand at 1.54 million barrels per day, the benefits barely trickle down and are mostly cornered by the ruling elite[3]. Severe and sustained repression has enabled Qaddhafi to put a lid on domestic discontent for over four decades, but finally things appear to be changing. Disaffections have finally crossed the tribal barriers, and is tolling the bells for the Revolutionary Leader.
In contrast to Libya, Bahrain is ruled by a constitutional monarchy. The hereditary leadership is vested in the al-Khalifa family of the Sunni Muslim Bani Utbah tribe that has been dominating political life in the Shi’i majority country for centuries. The Shias are mostly of Arab origin. Made a protectorate of the British Empire in 1868, Bahrain was claimed by Iran as (then) its 14th province in the 1920s. Discovery of oil in 1932 changed the economic landscape till then dominated by pearl-fishing and strengthened the authority of the al-Khalifa family, who held the emirate of Bahrain under British protection.
Upon gaining its independence in 1970, Bahrain experienced a period of considerable prosperity during the oil boom of the 1970s, but by the 1990s the tap began to indicate signs of drying up. In absence of any fresh discovery of oil reserves, Bahrain’s oil deposits are projected to run out by 2020.[4] This prompted the al-Khalifa regime to diversify the economy of the island nation by projecting Manama as the major banking centre in the Middle East and cash in on Beirut’s decline on account of the Lebanese civil war. Bahrain today is a major hub of Islamic banking, vying with Kuala Lumpur for the top slot.
The principal source of social tension in Bahrain is the substantive grievance among the kingdom’s Shi’i that the benefits of oil and banking prosperity have not quite trickled down to them. Such disaffection come to the surface repeatedly, and triggered attempted uprisings in the 1980s and the 1990s by Shi’i Islamists.
In both Libya and Bahrain, however, the commonalities of the nature of grievances are as striking as the differential character of their regimes. Qaddhafi’s ability to negotiate the dynamics of Libyan politics along tribal lines was founded almost entirely on the basis of oil revenues (95% of export earnings, 25% of GDP, 80% of government revenue); similarly the strength of the al-Khalifa family comes from the kingdom’s oil revenues (70% of the state’s revenue earnings). Both Libya and Bahrain have been witnessing problems, which have accentuated in the last decade. Libya’s status as an international pariah for over two decades since the Lockerbie bombings took its toll on the economy, because international sanctions prevented any major investment in fresh exploration or more efficient drilling technology. This along with Qaddhafi’s fear that his WMD programme might make him the next American target after Iraq in 2003 prompted him to gradually begin to open up Libya to the global economy. It in turn generated unwelcome strains on a people who were otherwise hard pressed, causing their disaffection to boil over.
Similarly, the Kingdom of Bahrain was forced to institute elections for the lower chamber of its legislature only in 1999 as it found it imperative to roll back some of the benefits accorded to its citizens as oil revenues began to decline. In a country where 80% of the cabinet is drawn from the royal family, and an overwhelming share of positions of significance and a large share of wealth are cornered by the minority Sunni community, Parliament has begun to be dominated by politicians, Shi’i and Sunni alike, who are demanding the Shari’ah[5]. Demands for restricting the authority of the King and the royal family have been growing ever since the ’opening up’ of the Bahraini economy, which have hurt the ordinary people considerably. The economic crisis of 2008-09 deepened popular resentment against liberalisation to grow strong and prompted the Kingdom to institute tough immigration regime in 2009.
If the people claiming the streets of Manama and Tripoli have anything in common, with each other and with the people of Cairo, and elsewhere in the Arab world, it is determination to broaden the social base of power structure, which has been characteristically very narrow. Whether a regime came to power on the wings of any colonial power (viz. Bahrain) or leading a popular revolution (Libya), the temptations posed before rentier states have invariably kept the ruling elite immune to the travails of the people they claim to represent. 2011 appears to be year when people claim and reclaim power and authority in the Middle East.
– Kingshuk Chatterjee, Asst Professor, History, Calcutta University
[1] See Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, New York: Routledge, 1992.
[2] Nathan Alexander, ’Libya: the Continuous Revolution’, Middle Eastern Studies, 17/2 (April 1981), pp. 212-19.
[3] www.cia.gov.library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ly/html
[4] www.cia.gov.library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ba/html
[5] Roger Owen, op. cit. p. 98.
