Bahraini.TV

October brings an end to the humidity that keeps Bahrainis indoors for four months in every year. It also heralds a new political season for the poorer Shia villages, where in recent weeks protesters have taken to the streets by day and daubed anti-government graffiti by night. In northern settlements such as Karbabad and Diraz, the roads are mottled with black scorch marks, the scars left by barricades of burning tyres.

Bahrain has a long history of political activism: “There had been riots, and burning of cars, and it was said [it turned out to be untrue] that one of the sheikhs had been pulled from his car and stoned to death,” a visiting archaeologist wrote in 1956, after a scuffle in a vegetable market escalated into a national strike.

Back then, the focus of resentment was the British colonial presence. These days, the protests have a sectarian flavour. Bahrain is the only country in the world where a Shia majority population is ruled by a Sunni minority, led by the ruling Al-Khalifa family. Shia citizens account for 60 to 70 per cent of Bahraini nationals, yet hold only 13 per cent of high-ranking public posts, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.

This figure has fallen from about 25 per cent at the beginning of the decade, says Nabeel Rajab, from the centre. “The biggest problem is inequality, people feel marginalised, they feel like second or third-class citizens,” he says.

Add to this shortages of housing and well-paid jobs, and you get a combustible mix. “There is a lot of resentment among these young people,” says Abduljalil Alsingace, a senior official from Haq, an opposition movement associated with many street protests.

“They can’t afford to marry, they can’t get a house, and they see Syrians and Pakistanis being given jobs in the security forces and their families given homes by the government.”

In an attempt to defuse tensions, the government has stepped up the pace of social reform. It has pledged to double average household income by 2030, and intends to build 50,000 low-cost homes in the next five years. “It’s a slow process, we don’t have the financial resources of Qatar or Abu Dhabi, but it is a priority,” says Sheikh Mohammed bin Essa al-Khalifa, chief executive of the Economic Development Board and a member of the ruling family.

Wary of a return to the civil unrest of the 1990s, when bombings and bloody clashes between Shia protesters and security services left more than 30 dead, the authorities have reined in heavy-handed tactics. “Ten years ago, the security could come in your house and break your things. Now, they need to have a certificate [search warrant],” says a Shia resident of Sitra, an industrial area to the east of Bahrain.

Discrimination has proved a stickier charge. At the end of October, a three-kilometre human chain of more than 2,000 demonstrators lined Manama’s eastern waterfront to protest against “political naturalisation” – the award of nationality to foreign, especially Sunni Arab and Asian, members of the military and security forces.

Shia groups claim they are excluded from jobs in the military and other security services, and accuse the government of attempting to alter the sectarian balance of the island.

“In the past, just a few hundred people would get citizenship every year, but the rate has really increased in the past seven years,” says Ebrahim Sharif al Sayed, secretary-general of the National Democratic Action Society, which helped organise the rally. As many as 9,000 foreigners a year have been naturalised recently, he says – a significant number for an island of just 1.2m people. “Many of them are poor or from Bedouin backgrounds, so they have large families, and these families are not reflected in the statistics.”

In a rare public statement on the issue in October, Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid bin Abdullah al-Khalifa denied claims of systemic discrimination. “The king has ordered the naturalisation of 7,648 since the start of the decade, 95 per cent of whom are Shia,” he told the pro-government daily Al-Watan.

Finding common ground may prove difficult: “I wish they would meet the opposition’s concerns on naturalisation,” says a senior western diplomat. “The Shia exaggerate it but it’s clear there are new neighbourhoods of Syrians that were not there a few years ago.”

The Al-Khalifa family bears the brunt of the graffiti in many Shia villages. But what worries the authorities are the stencilled faces of religious leaders from other countries, such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq, and Ayatollah Khamanei of Iran.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many Arab governments have been concerned by the perceived spread of Iranian influence across the Middle East. Iran has posed an overt threat on at least one occasion in Bahrain’s recent history, when it backed a failed coup attempt in 1981. Yet analysts say the main grievances of the kingdom’s Shia communities today are social, rather than political or religious, in nature.

“There has been a tendency to point the finger of blame at Tehran for the slightest disturbance, and to assume demonstrations are instigated from overseas, but I’m not sure many Bahrainis look to Iran for political inspiration,” says Steven Wright, a specialist in Gulf politics at Qatar University. “The demands for political change really stem from socio-economic issues, from poverty and discrimination. Dressing it up as a sectarian problem only masks these underlying social concerns.”