Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa
Hamad bin Isa promised Bahrain a constitutional monarchy, delivered one on his own terms, and called in Saudi tanks when the country asked for the version it had voted for. Bahrain is an archipelago of about a million and a half people off the Saudi coast, the first Gulf state to find oil and the first to run out of it, which is why it became a banking and refining centre instead. It is also the one Gulf monarchy where a Sunni ruling family governs a Shia-majority population, and that arithmetic is the whole of its politics. He succeeded his father in 1999 after a decade of unrest, released prisoners, allowed exiles home, and put a national charter to a referendum in 2001 that passed with more than ninety-eight per cent. The constitution he then issued in 2002 was not what the charter had been understood to promise: it created an appointed upper chamber with power to block the elected one, and he took the title of king. In February 2011 tens of thousands occupied the Pearl Roundabout in Manama demanding that the 2002 constitution be renegotiated. In March, a Saudi-led force crossed the causeway at his government's request, the square was cleared, the monument demolished, and thousands were arrested; an inquiry he himself commissioned documented systematic torture in custody, and few of its recommendations were carried out. What followed was structural rather than episodic. The main opposition societies were dissolved by court order, their leaders imprisoned, and hundreds of people were stripped of Bahraini citizenship - a penalty that turns a critic into a stateless person and is difficult to reverse. Electoral districts were drawn so that the majority elects a minority of seats. The American Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain, which is why the response to 2011 there and the response to Libya the same spring were so different. He normalised relations with Israel in 2020.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bahraini
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
