Bahrain’s protesters

Bahrain’s protesters still won’t give up

AS EVERY monarch in the Gulf knows, even geysers of oil cannot keep all your subjects happy all of the time. Still, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may have been surprised that his recent appointment of 30 women to the kingdom’s 150-person shura council should provoke a public protest. The all-appointed body, a sort of proto-parliament, has limited influence; the move, announced on January 11th, was the long-expected response to demands for reform by a king who has gingerly promoted women’s rights since assuming the throne in 2005. Even so, dozens of conservative clerics picketed the royal court in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on January 15th, to condemn what one cowled sheikh decried as “dangerous changes” in the arch-conservative kingdom.

It was perhaps natural that fundamentalist Wahhabists, who have long been given leeway to impose their will in return for counselling obedience to the royal family, should be angered by a small step towards female empowerment. More surprising was their defiance of the Saudi ban on public demonstrations imposed two years ago in the wake of Arab uprisings elsewhere. But increasingly across the Gulf, once-cordial relations between rulers and ruled are strained. Not only has the small coterie of liberals long-critical of autocracy grown bolder. The political complacency of pampered religious conservatives can no longer be counted on, either.

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Freedom House, an America-based global advocacy group that ranks countries on political rights and civil liberties, has downgraded five of the Gulf’s six monarchies in the past two years. Judging by a recent region-wide flurry of arrests, trials and harsh sentences slapped on dissidents, future scores may well be worse. After the crushing of a pro-democracy uprising in Bahrain in 2011, none of the Gulf’s ruling families faces an immediate threat. But none is taking any chances.

For decades Kuwait, with its rowdy elected parliament and noisy press, has enjoyed relative freedom. Faced in recent months by unprecedented mass demonstrations demanding broader democracy, the sleekly rich city-state’s riot police have gained a nasty reputation for brutality.

Oman, at the other end of the region, is far more autocratic, but political opposition had been muted before a sprinkling of protests in 2011. In response the government promised reforms, but since last May it has instead jailed some 42 dissidents. Qatar boasts the world’s highest income per person, which explains why its citizens have remained quiescent even as their rulers promote dissent across the region via their satellite channel, Al Jazeera. But in November a Qatari court sentenced a poet, Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb, to life in prison for mocking the emir and his family.

Qatari law does not actually define such a crime or provide for so harsh a sentence, but a new law in the nearby United Arab Emirates conveniently does. Cybercrime legislation now makes it an offence simply to advocate “change in the political system”. But even without that law, the previously lenient Emirati authorities had been cracking down. In the past year they have arrested at least 77 bloggers and human-rights activists, stripped others of citizenship and denied 200-odd the right to travel. Many have been accused of belonging to secret cells associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. This, says Abdel Bari Atwan, who edits the Arabic daily al-Quds al-Arabi in London, reflects Gulf rulers’ anxieties about a regional domino effect.

All these milder monarchies now risk slipping into the habits of the Gulf’s worst human-rights offenders, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The 2011 crackdown by Bahrain’s rulers left nearly 100 dead and the island kingdom dangerously split between a Shia majority and loyalist Sunnis. Hopes of respite rose when the government accepted the recommendations of an international panel for reform. It has implemented almost none of them, however, and Bahraini courts have continued to dispense cruel justice. This month the highest appeal court upheld life sentences for seven men accused of calling for anti-government demonstrations.

Saudi Arabia, however, remains in a league of its own, ranked by Freedom House, along with North Korea and Equatorial Guinea, as one of the world’s least free nations. Its small, harassed band of rights campaigners celebrates such small advances as the induction of women into the shura council. But they face a double challenge—not only from the state but from a religious right that habitually brands democracy supporters as apostates from Islam. This leaves little room for advocating even basic rights for those who fall afoul of capricious sharia courts, such as Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan maid beheaded earlier this month for allegedly smothering to death an infant in her care.