User:Tibooow/sandbox

Shia_Islam_in_Saudi_Arabia#Restrictions_and_persecutions#2011-2012_Saudi_Arabian_protests

My goal is to add a section in the page Shia Islam in Saudi Arabia linked to the topic of the 2011-2012 Saudi Arabian protests (which have their own page). The aim of my section is to link those protests to the treatment/consideration of the Shias in the country.

2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests
See Also: Anti-Shi'ism, Qatif conflict, 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests

In the context of the Arab Springs, the only province with a majority Shia population, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, arose against the Saudi regime in 2011 and 2012. The Shia protesters were repressed in blood, and their situation did not improve. These protests were a turning point in the relations between the Saudi Shia minority and the Saudi regime because they led to the radicalisation of both sides. The protests took place in a region where competing states use sectarianism to expand their influence. Sectarianism is when the support of some people or organisations for a religious or political group is so strong that it can cause troubles to other groups. In fact, a proxy war has emerged between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf region. They both aim at having the regional hegemony based on a narrative of their legacy of two civilisations, repectively the Persians and the Arabs. However, the violent sectarian confrontation between Shias and Sunnis in Saudi Arabia is recent. For long, the predominant politics were of reasonable accommodation between the sects and religions. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist conception of Shia Islam rose up in Iran as opposed to the quietist conception of Shia Islam. That means that religion had a strong role in the Iranian policies. In reaction, the Sunnis tended to stiffen their own interpretation of Islam. In Saudi Arabia it was translated by an acute Salafism.

The sectarian discourses have been used by Saudi Arabia and Iran to acquire the regional hegemony but the practice of sectarianism is more tempered. On the Iranian side, defending Shia minorities in practice means abandoning their universalist revolutionary message. On the Saudi side, using the radical Sunni rhetoric means strengthening the Sunni radicals. Since the Saudi regime is allied with Western countries such as the United-States, it would then be the target of these radical groups. Even though, the Saudi regime uses the distinction between Sunnis and Shias in an attempt to highlight the religious and cultural difference of Iran compared to the other Gulf countries. In fact, the confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia is mostly the product of political factors and of regional ambitions. Sectarianism is a part of this showdown, not than a cause of it.

In this context of sectarianism linked to regional competition, protests took place in Qatif region, East of Saudi Arabia, a region predominantly inhabited by Shias. The region is rich in oil and most of the workers of the national Saudi oil company, ARAMCO, were used to organising protests for the workers' rights. Protests erupted following several triggers including the self-immolation of a man in the city of Samtah, South West of Saudi Arabia. The Shias of the East of Saudi Arabia organised demonstrations after having heard of some Shia protests in Bahrein and in reaction to Saudi Shias being imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for their alleged, but debated, culpability for the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996. The protests then spread due to the youth mobilisation, especially on social media but never really made it outside the predominantly Shia Eastern province of Saudi Arabia.

At first, the protesters' demands were similar to those of the Arab Springs taking place in other countries of the Middle-East, so to say individual freedoms rather than religious rights. In fact, the religious practices of the Shias in the Eastern province were accepted by the central authority. For example, since the conquest of Al-Ahsa in 1913, which marked the integration of this majority Shia region to the Saudi Sultanate, the Shias established some courts which were accepted by the Saudi State and which provided justice according to Shia principles. Those liberties offered to Shias did not exist in regions of Saudi Arabia where the Shias were a minority. But, at the same time, the official religious discourse in Saudi Arabia was condemning the Shia practices. Other demands of the protesters consisted in asking for more autonomy for the region. For this reason, and because of a fear of a "Shia encirclement," the Saudi regime responded. It began by countering the protests in the region of Qatif.

For long the regime co-opted a local class of notables in order to drive the public opinion. They did so, partly by appointing Shias as judges in the Shia courts of the region. However, in Qatif the notables were superseded after the Iranian Revolution by some political activists who were more radical in their demands and who were left-behinds of the redistribution policies driven by the notables. In fact, the majority of Shia notables followed Shia figures of authority, the Maraji', who advocated for a spiritual role for the clergy rather than a political one. By withdrawing from the field of clerical education, the notables let Shia Islamist movements taking that role. That is why, in 2011, the protests were led by young people, influenced by the previous radical movements, active on social media and independent from the notables. To slow down the protests, the regime aspired to rely on the notables who were looking to preserve some of their influence on the population against new local leaders. The notables appointment to positions of authority by the Saudi regime depended on their belonging to Shi'ism. Consequently, their interest was that the regime still saw Shias as a social group with a strong identity. The regime exploited this position to control the notables. From the notable point of view, either they supported the regime, with a risk of being removed from their positions by the protesters, or they supported the protesters, with a risk of being removed from their position by the Saudi regime. A declaration was signed by notables on the 21st of April 2011 calling for a break in the protests. The main signatory was Hassan Al-Saffar, a Shia scholar from Qatif who was considered as one the most important Shia leaders of Saudi Arabia, and who founded the Islamic Reform Movement in 1991. This movement descended from the Organization for the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula which aimed at a Shia revolution in Saudi Arabia. Despite Al-Saffar's call, the protests only halted when a Facebook page which had previously called for demonstrations, asked the protesters to let some time to the government to implement the changes it promised.

The main goal of the regime was to prevent the protests of the Eastern province to spill-over the rest of the country. To this end, the Saudi regime used a sectarian narrative opposing the Shia minority to the Sunni majority of the country. The Wahhabis brought to light some fatwas denouncing Shias as apostate. The media also repeated over and over an identity narrative differentiating the communities. In fact, the Saudi regime controlled lots of media broadcasting in and about Saudi Arabia through either co-option of coercion. Co-option strategies has been revealed by Wikileaks: the Saudi regime paid 2 million US$ to the Lebanese MTV Network in 2012 in order to counter media hostile to the Saudi Kingdom and in order for the channel to invite pro-regime Saudis as guests on talk shows. Wikileaks also revealed a co-option through advertisement. ONTV, an Egyptian channel invited the head of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Knowing that, the Saudi embassy asked the owner of the TV station to change its policies, arguing that, otherwise Saudi Arabia would stop its advertisements on the channel. Coercion was often used when media could not be co-opted, it could be done because the Saudi regime controlled the access to the two satellites through which the channels needed to pass to broadcast in Saudi Arabia. For example, Iranian TV channels were denied broadcasting on those satellites for one month in 2009 following accusation of support toward the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In general, the Saudi national media broadcast programs aimed at diverting the Saudi from politics and the Saudi international programs aimed at promoting an image of Saudi Arabia as a modern country. During the 2011 protests, they rather aimed at setting a sectarian agenda to counter what the Saudi regime interpreted as the Iranian influence in the Gulf. To do so, some Wahhabi clerics were relayed by some Salafi channels such as Almajd TV Network. They portrayed the Shias as infidels and as a threat. To this extent those channels reproduced Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's message and provoked Jihad.

The last strategy of the Saudi regime to repress Qatif unrests was the action of the Saudi police on the ground. The police was loyal to the regime partly because there were almost no Shias within its ranks. The Eastern province police, while formerly being under the control of the General Manager of the province, was, in practice, under the control of the central Saudi regime. The Saudi police's mission was mainly to protect a social order, the containment of the crime being only secondary. There also was a parallel religious police, called Mutawa, which was active in the region, and a secret service, the Mabahith, charged with counter-terrorism. The actions of the police were facilitated by the Saudi laws, and especially the absence of Constitutional ones, which protect people's freedoms in other countries.

Even though the Shias generally asked for more inclusion in Saudi Arabia, rather than to overthrow the monarchy, the State still treated this community as a security menace needed to be contained because of the regime's bias and stereotypes toward the Shias. While some social media activists were asking for what they called a 'Day of rage' (in reference to the first day of protests in Bahrein) on the 11th of March 2011, the police killed Faisal Ahmed Abdul-Ahad, one of the organisers of this event two weeks before the planned demonstrations and violently arrested several protesters on the 4th of March. On the one hand, this repression intimidated the people who thought to go on strikes on the 11th. On the other hand the protesters who carried on with the movement radicalised their practices. Consequently, the protests of the 11th of March in Qatif were minor: only a few hundred of people protested on that day whereas there were more than 26.000 members of the Facebook group organising it. Despite this failure of the protests, they became more and more violent in the following weeks which created a vicious circle. The police was heavily politicised and got closer to a military force while the rioters began to use incendiary projectiles and guns against the police. All of this led to a rhetoric of the regime criminalising the protesters in the eyes of the Saudi population. At least 17 protesters and one policeman were killed but the protests ended up slowing down due to the State repression.