LONDON -- Bahrain produces little news of interest to the rest of the world, but now something remarkable has happened there. On Feb. 14, Emir Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa declared that Bahrain will henceforth be a democracy where he will reign only as a constitutional monarch. If he keeps his promise, Bahrain will be the first genuine democracy in the Arab world apart from the longstanding exception of Lebanon -- which has one of the most spectacularly corrupt political systems on the planet.
There are lots of sham democracies in the Arab world run by military men, like Egypt and Algeria, and some monarchies where there is a facade of democracy, like Jordan and Morocco, but many Arab countries don't even bother to pretend. They are just absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia. There is no other region of the world where democracy is so startlingly absent. But Hamad seems to be serious.
"We are keen to resume democratic life as soon as possible for the glory of Bahrain, its prosperity and development," said the emir, who wishes to be known as the king from now on. "Resume" is a sore point, since the limited democracy that once existed in Bahrain was shut down by Hamad's predecessor almost 30 years ago. Repression grew steadily until it peaked in the 1990s in a brutal crackdown against the Shiite underclass in Bahrain, who were demanding an end to discrimination in favor of the Sunni minority. Since Hamad came to the throne in 1999, however, things have actually been different.