Christopher Davidson - After the Sheikhs - The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies

The roots of the UAE’s most serious Arab Spring challenges and the current opposition movement date back to summer 2009 when a number of activists, including university students and bloggers, launched a discussion website entitled www.uaehewar.net. Soon visited by thousands of UAE-based internet users, and featuring hundreds of posts — almost all in Arabic, and almost all by bona fide UAE nationals — the site quickly gained a reputation as being the best place to put forward grievances, challenge the authorities, and discuss the country’s future. Within weeks, very lively debates were taking place on many issues including the growing personal wealth of the ruling families and the sustainability of some of the UAE’s overseas investments and prestige projects. By January 2010 the website’s most controversial debate was gathering pace, with thousands of users reading posts about the acquittal of an Abu Dhabi ruling family member who had been accused of torture and sodomy. [930] 134. The Guardian , 10 January 2010. Most of the posts stated the concerns of UAE nationals over the application of the rule of law to the ruling families and the broader impact of the verdict on the UAE’s international reputation. Within days UAE-based visitors to the site were no longer able to gain access it, being greeted with a peculiar ‘server problem’ message appearing when they tried. Moreover, one of the state-backed telecommunications companies [931] 135. Referring to Etisalat. asked website owners to identify themselves to help solve ‘technical issues’.

Unable to block the website outside the UAE, www.uaehewar.net survived well into 2011, with mirror sites being used to allow UAE-based users to keep accessing its contents. Discussions included the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, the lack of a proper UAE parliament, and the shortcomings of the UAE’s rulers. The website’s most accessed thread was entitled ‘The Paradoxes of Muhammad bin Zayed’s Policies’, referring to the Abu Dhabi crown prince. [932] 136. See Davidson, Christopher M., ‘The Strange Case of the UAE’s WWW.UAEHEWAR.NET’, Current Intelligence blog, 15 November 2010. Emboldened by Mubarak’s fall and the Bahrain demonstrations, in March 2011 the website’s founders along with many other activists began circulating petitions which were eventually forwarded to the ruler of Abu Dhabi. [933] 137. Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. One of these, signed by 130 intellectuals, demanded a fully elected parliament and universal suffrage, and asked that the UAE worked towards becoming a constitutional monarchy that was committed to human rights and other basic principles. One signatory, Nasser bin Ghayth — a prominent UAE academic and an adjunct lecturer at the Sorbonne’s Abu Dhabi campus — had also blogged about the Gulf monarchies’ stance on the Arab Spring, and the strategy of distributing wealth in order to achieve political acquiescence. He stated that ‘they [the Gulf monarchies] have announced benefits and handouts assuming their citizens are not like other Arabs or other human beings, who see freedom as a need no less significant than other physical needs’, before moving on to explain ‘…they use the carrot, offering abundance. But this only delays change and reform, which will still come sooner or later…. No amount of security — or rather intimidation by security forces — or wealth, handouts, or foreign support is capable of ensuring the stability of an unjust ruler’. [934] 138. Foreign Policy , 14 April 2011.

Signing the petitions as institutional actors, four of the UAE’s civil society organisations — the associations for jurists, teachers, national heritage professionals, and university faculty — added their weight to the demands and soon after published their own joint statement. In this they argued that ‘civil society in the UAE considers that the time has come to ensure the right of political participation of every citizen, with direct elections for a council with full federal oversight and legislative powers’ and lamented ‘the lack of involvement of citizens to choose their representatives, decades after the establishment of the state’. [935] 139. Sourced from the blog of Ahmad Mansour Al-Shehhi, 6 April 2011. In parallel to these developments, there were also examples in early 2011 of growing informal opposition activity, with an extensive Reuters report revealing that students planned to upload videos onto YouTube and Facebook regarding the need for political reform, and to meet in secret to discuss democracy and how the country’s oil wealth should be spent. Referring to the economic benefits received courtesy of her nationality, but explaining how this was no longer sufficient, one student interviewee stated ‘I’m well off. I don’t need a revolution because I’m hungry. I want my freedoms, my dignity’. Having provided the journalist with an alias, she explained this was because of her ‘fear of pursuit by security forces’. Meanwhile, other students complained of their rulers, stating that ‘times have changed, they need to change their mentality… they act like we’re kids. We’re conscious, educated people’, while others focused on economic mismanagement, arguing that ‘young people can’t get jobs. We have bad hospitals … and this is a wealthy country’. Some also referred to the inevitability of the Arab Spring impacting on the UAE, explaining that ‘… it’s like wave. If the whole world is changing and this wave is coming and taking everyone with it, well, it’s somehow going to cross this place as well’. [936] 140. Reuters, 11 May 2011.

The authorities’ reaction to the petition and the civil society organisations’ demands took many UAE nationals by surprise, as most had not expected a heavy-handed response. In early April 2011 five men — later referred to collectively as the ‘UAE Five’—were taken from their homes, seemingly as a random sample from among the signatories. Bin Ghayth was one of these, along with Ahmed Mansour Al-Shehhi, a founder of www.uaehewar.net. The latter claimed he had been offered a well-paid position in Pakistan by his state-backed employer only a week before. Having refused to leave the UAE, stating that ‘…if they think I’m going to back off, they’re mistaken. As long as I have the ability, I will continue my efforts’, [937] 141. Reuters, 8 April 2011. Al-Shehhi was then reportedly arrested by ten officers — only two of whom were in uniform — and his passport and computer seized. In his final tweets that evening he had predicted his arrest, suspecting the police would plant something in his car, and then detailed their attempts to call him down to the street from his apartment. [938] 142. Foreign Policy , 14 April 2011. Held in custody without explanation, the authorities appeared unsure how to explain the UAE Five’s disappearance to the broader population. Early indications were that they would be charged with some sort of illegal possession, with reports circulating in the state-backed media that bottles of whiskey had been discovered in Al-Shehhi’s apartment. [939] 143. CNN , 13 April 2011.

As a further response to the petition the authorities also moved to weaken the civil society organisations involved by dismissing their elected board members and replacing them with government-appointed individuals. A group of loyalist lawyers then began preparing a counter petition and a ‘statement of allegiance’ to demonstrate the profession’s supposed commitment to the regime, with their spokesperson stating that ‘we, the lawyers, call upon all citizens to deny activists’ allegations denouncing our government. We ourselves are united in refuting these false claims, and remain fully loyal to His Highness President Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan… and all other crown princes and rulers’. Moreover, their statement also claimed that ‘…activists who try to incite others against the government are therefore creating unnecessary civil unrest and attempting to destabilise the country’. [940] 144. Gulf News , 29 May 2011. Although the lawyers were careful not to refer specifically to the political prisoners, stating that ‘this is not directed at the detained people, as the independent judiciary in the UAE classifies everyone innocent until proven guilty’ there was nonetheless little doubt that the government attempted to manipulate the trial of the UAE Five. In particular, loyalist rallies outside the court buildings were staged while relatives of the accused were harassed upon entering and leaving the buildings. Most interestingly, the authorities also attempted to influence public opinion by encouraging a number of tribal leaders to denounce the men and even file law suits on behalf of tribes that felt the activism had ‘offended the state and nation’. The state-backed media, however, provided details of only one such tribal meeting and resulting denouncement [941] 145. Gulf News , 29 April 2011 —an Abu Dhabi-based tribe which includes one of the ruler’s key advisors among its senior members and which for historic reasons has been extremely loyal to the ruling family. [942] 146. In 1968 over half of the Zaab (Al-Zaabi) tribe, most of whom resided on the Jazirah al-Hamra near to Ra’s al-Khaimah decamped en masse and moved to Abu Dhabi island, where the ruler had promised them prime plots of land. Davidson (2009), chapter 3. Interestingly, a senior member of Al-Shehhi’s tribe — the Shihuh — was reluctant to condemn him, being quoted as saying ‘we still do not know the nature of the accusations directed against Ahmad Al-Shehhi as of yet, nor if he has been officially charged… thus, how are we expected to denounce him before any official accusation takes place?’ [943] 147. Gulf News , 29 April 2011.