Secret Report on Muslims Clouds Bahrain Vote

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In the Persian Gulf island kingdom of Bahrain, residents were shocked recently by the release of a report detailing an alleged secret plan by the Sunni-led government to tilt the political playing field against the Shiite majority. The government swiftly expelled the report's author and slapped a ban on media coverage. But Bahrainis say the scandal is clouding upcoming parliamentary elections at a time when the government is seeking to hold on to its image of supporting slow but steady reform.

NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Bahrain.

PETER KENYON: In recent years, the Bush administration has regularly singled out this tiny island state off the coast of Saudi Arabia for its political reforms. In 2001, King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa promised a more open representative and democratic government and the following year held Bahrain's first parliamentary elections in three decades. This Bahrain will have the first woman member of parliament in the Gulf.

What hasn't received much attention are the complaints of many Shiites who boycotted the 2002 election, saying the king had failed to give the parliament any real power. This year, as lawmakers again stand for election, the ruling family appeared to be taken aback when a government advisor, Salah al-Bondar, released a 216-page, heavily documented report claiming that the government was spending millions of dollars to undermine Shiite political groups, planning anti-Shiites stories in newspapers, hiring Jordanian intelligence agents to monitor the opposition. And according to the report, most of the money to do this was coming from the royal family member charged with overseeing the elections.

Mr. ABDULHADI AL-KHAWAJA (President, Center for Human Rights, Bahrain): It's really shocking, especially that high officers are involved in this secret work.

KENYON: Abdulhadi al-Khawaja is president of the now banned Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says the scandal, known across Bahrain, is Bandargate, provided evidence for what many Bahrainis have long suspected.

Mr. AL-KHAWAJA: It's a conspiracy against opposition, against civil society, against Shia as a sect in Bahrain, as a majority. And again, we go back to that same reason: it's a small group running the country. They are afraid of the majority, afraid of free democracy, because they don't want to share power.

KENYON: Within days of the report's release, Salah al-Bondar was out on a plane and sent to Britain. He's a British citizen. After a few initial stories on the scandal, Bahrain's media were banned from even mentioning the Bondar report. The ban was extended to the Internet, with more than two dozen Web sites blocked by the government.

Despite the pressure, human rights activists are eager to talk about what they see as a systematic effort to deny them equal access to the political process. They say, for instance, that the government is transparently boosting the number of Sunni voters by naturalizing tens of thousands of non-Bahrainis, most of them Sunnis. The government denies the charge. Attiya Ahmed(ph), spokeswoman for the commission overseeing this month's election, says it's simply a case of rewarding people who have lived here and served the country for years.

Ms. ATTIYA AHMED (Election Official): If you look back at the rules and laws of the biggest democracies, like the States, like Britain, then see people given the right to have the citizenship after just a few years of living in that country.

KENYON: To the government's relief, the major Shiite political movements have decided to take part in the elections this time, instead of boycotting as they did four years ago. These Shiite leaders say they don't have much hope of winning significant reforms, but they're worried that if they don't participate, even greater repression will result.

Professor Abdul Jalil al-Singais, head of the al-Haq movement, is not one of those leaders. He's still calling for a boycott. He says after promising a parliament with real legislative powers in 2001, the king and his supporters drafted a constitution that kept most essential powers in his own hands. He calls the current legislature a pseudo-parliament.

Professor ABDUL JALIL AL-SINGAIS (Government Critic): Now we have his full authoritarian regime. They control lands. They control the economy. They control defense. They will use this sort of parliament to produce legislations, such that they codify attack of activists, anybody showing any form of opposition.

KENYON: In a private home in the capital recently, a group of political and civil society leaders met to begin forming a new coalition, cutting across sectarian and political lines, with the sole agenda of forcing the government to break its silence and deal with the allegations leveled by the Bandar report. Officially the government has little to say about the Bandargate affair. Privately Bahraini officials don't deny that payments were made, but they suggest the conspiracy allegations are overblown.

Shortly after the scandal broke, however, the king decreed that the justice ministry would now oversee the November 25th elections, taking that job away from Sheikh Ahmed bin Atayatal al-Halifa(ph), the man named as the financier of the alleged abuses outlined in the Bandar report.

Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Bahrain.

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