Demotix/Ammar Bin Yasser. All rights reserved.After a warm meeting with Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, before the Thanksgiving holiday, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry informally endorsed the line of the repressive government. Highlighting its role as a “contributing partner” to joint counterterrorism efforts, Secretary Kerry waved away longstanding concerns over Bahrain’s lack of human rights reforms, praising government efforts to “bring people together to reduce the sectarian divisions,” which have supposedly made internal politics irreconcilable.
In fronting sectarian divisions, Kerry has lent credence to the convenient narrative that Bahrain’s ongoing crisis is reducible to a simple Sunni-Shia struggle, with overtones of Iranian interference and a regional cold war.
This narrative is convenient because the truth, that Bahrain’s ongoing failure to enact human rights reforms and foster political reconciliation renders it a counterterrorism liability, makes for cold meetings and curt press statements. That Iran can exercise influence within Bahrain—a claim most fervently trumpeted in government-backed newspapers—results from the violent tactics the authorities utilized to suppress the mass protests of early 2011 and quash any peaceful dissent since.
