WEG legacy: the Bahrain tent

Lex goes berserk for Mideast horsey dictatorships

Lexingtonians—and eventing horse fans the world over—will be happy to know that Bahrain has been in the news recently. A small island country located in the Persian Gulf not far from the western banks of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain is a major supporter of the horse industry that our city hopes to attract.

The island kingdom, which since the 1800s has been ruled by the Al Khalifa royal family, was the only nation to sponsor a tent at last fall’s failed World Equestrian Games. In addition, Sheikh Khalid bin Adbulla Al Khalifa, the fifth son of Bahrain ruler King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, was one of the “government leaders” cited by the Herald-Leader who planned to be in attendance at the Games (“Security for WEG will be tight,” Sept 5, 2010). As president of the Bahrain Royal Equestrian and Endurance Federation—a position he achieved at age 20 in 2009 upon graduation from England’s Sandhurst Royal Military Academy—Sheikh Khalid presumably traveled to Lexington to compete as a member of the Bahrain Royal Team, which he has been a part of since age 11, serving as Vice-President from age 14 until his recent promotion to President, and to represent his country’s sports interests.

Four months after having a sizable WEG Lexington presence, Bahrain has experienced a recent up-tick in democracy as its citizens have caught the Egyptian demonstration bug. Politically, Bahrainis demand that the ruling Sunni Muslim Al-Khalifa family relinquish its 200 year stranglehold on power as heads of an absolute monarchy. Bahraini democracy advocates have also called for economic reform in a nation where Shiite Muslims, which comprise about 70% of the population, are regularly, the New York Times reports, “discriminated against in jobs, housing and education.”

Our local rag, the Herald-Leader, has done a bang-up job keeping area readers informed about our Bahraini democratic compatriots. Updates on the country have appeared on both the front page and the editorial page. The paper has reported, for example, on the 200,000 strong protest of February 25—“staggering numbers,” it noted, “for a population of just 500,000.” The protesters marched “in two huge, roaring crowds from the south and from the west, converging at Pearl Square, which has become the center of the call for change.”

The Bahrain uprising has also been featured on the editorial pages, in the guise of a February 20 Nicholas Kristof column titled “Brutal crackdown shocking response in wealthy nation,” in which the syndicated columnist called for the ouster of King Hamad. After noting that the “pro-democracy movement has bubbled for decades in Bahrain,” Kristof proceeded to describe the ruling family’s response to demands for economic and political change: attacks on “peaceful, unarmed demonstrators” with rubber bullets, tear gas and shotgun pellets; execution style murders of civilian protesters; and targeted police beatings of doctors and ambulance drivers who arrived to treat the many civilians injured by the attacks.

Not reported in the H-L, Bahrain initially served as a base of operations for other ruling monarchies—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates—to convene and present a unified message against the Mideast uprisings. Writing in the Bangalore paper The Deccan Herald, Michael Jansen reported that the meeting was intended “to demonstrate solidarity, urge the kingdom’s hereditary rulers to take a firm line against protesters, and warn their own subjects not to follow the bad example of the Bahrainis.”

“There is little doubt,” Jansen concluded, “that Saudi Arabia, the heavyweight of the Arabian Peninsula, convened this gathering with the aim of preventing people’s power from spreading to other countries in this strategic oil-rich region.”

The recent Herald-Leader coverage stands in stark contrast to the paper’s previous coverage of Bahrain, last October during the WEG. With what it claimed were the eyes of the world watching, the paper told a very different story of the rich Gulf country, and of the other obscenely wealthy Mideast royal family rulers traveling here to compete in, and enjoy, the Games.

On October 7, across from an article reviewing the triumphant success of actor John Lithgow’s one-man show “Stories by Heart,” the H-L gave above-the-fold space to cover the wonders of the Bahrain tent, set up to sell the country as “an open, progressive place for business development” (“Kingdom comes to park: Bahrain spreads the word—and freebies—to advertise itself”).

The article began by stating the obvious: no WEGers visiting the tent knew anything about the country, but they mightily enjoyed the expensive gifts given out for free to visitors passing through.

The article did note, obliquely, that the progressive, business-friendly country did have a history of discrimination against Jews. But it also allowed Bahraini spokesperson Farra Duff, a marketing officer for Bahrain’s economic development board, to quickly dismiss the claim by noting that things are “different than what you see in the media.”

Different indeed. Since the country is home to a huge U.S. naval base that allows us to stage our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Yemen, there is a good bet that more than one Jewish family resides in the area, the number of Jews living in Bahrain cited by Duff. And since the Herald-Leader chose not to follow its journalistic duty of informing area readers about the country, future events have also shown that Bahrain is, in fact, very different from what we have read in our local media: it’s essentially a dictator country.

We noted just after WEG’s closing ceremonies that our local media did an astoundingly poor job of covering the Games. We wrote that coverage had turned into boosterism, and that this made us all the poorer. At the time, our critique was mainly leveled at the incomplete assessment of the massive city funding and energies that went into pulling off the little-watched Games.

But Lexingtonians, as it turns out, also lost out on other coverage. When city leaders got behind WEG, they did so on the grounds that horsey events would be an economic boon to the region. They never told us, nor did our media care to inform us, that the economic course they chose would require us to party with, and cheer on, the same obscenely wealthy families who, along with their benefactors in the U.S. government, have been the major source of unrest in the Mideast.

The roll of WEG participating countries reads like a roll call for undemocratic Mideast oligarchies. Egypt? Participated. Bahrain? Paid Pearse for a tent to sell WEGers on its progressive national benevolence. United Arab Emirates? Quatar? Jordan? Saudi Arabia? Check, check, an Equine Federation presidential check, and you betcha!

Lexington was a ruling Tunisian horse family away from scoring the elusive Pick 7 of Mideast dictator nations coming to our fair city, and not a fucking word was wasted on that fact. But hey, Bahrain does give out some killer free treats. It’s so…progressive. What a great sport our city leaders have chosen to spend our money supporting.