The Yemeni Jamahariya and the Kingdom of the Two Seas have also been caught by the wildfire of the Jasmine revolution. In Bahrain the Shia 70% of the population has been ruled by the al-Khalifas and Sunni elite for over 200 years. The Sunni police and army of Bahrain are now being boosted by Sunni reinforcements from Pakistan, Yemen, Jordan and Syria. There is no doubt that the Bahraini troubles have a strong element of sectarian violence and this renders the politics of international intervention very different from that in Libya.
The Saudi’s, huge players in the regin, have worries of their own in the Eastern Shia province were there were calls for release of Shia prisoners. The US and West is distracted by the Libyan debacle and they still rely on the Arab support to give that particular action an international dimension. Intervention in the Middle East is further complicated by the fact that the ties with the Sunni leadership are much more intricate than those wrought enthusiastically with Gaddafi once the UN embargo was lifted.
Which leaves the only possible intervenors in the region as Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon – unsurprisingly mainly Shia territories. Iran’s hands are tied in much the same way as America’s in this sense. Any possibility of intervention by Iranian troops will be seen as an attempt to extend its sphere of influence in the region.
Whether it is Libya, Bahrain or Yemen that we are speaking on, it is increasingly evident that international assistance to national uprisings has to be able to withstand the possibility of being linked to “egoistic interest” of the intervenors. Whether it is oil, business or sectarian religious solidarity, no amount of UN resolutions will be able to mollify the realpolitik behind the reasons of one government’s intervention.
Another important issue that is being revisited on an international level is the question of the respect of sovereign integrity. We all saw the Libyan emissary briefing the press angrily about Libya’s indignation for foreign interference. The precedent being set here relates to whether the international community is prepared to sit back any longer and watch an elite in country X mistreat, kill and torture its own nationals – simply for the sake of “respecting territorial integrity”.
The lessons handed down to us in previous centuries combined with the increased levels of the values of the common heritage of human rights and the immediacy with which information about violations of such rights reaches the world will play a huge role in defining the new rules of the international scenario. Will Woodrow Wilson’s dream come true a century too late?
