TRYING TO PRESERVE A CULTURAL INHERITANCE

       Can the kingdom reconcile the need for housing withits Bronze Age past By Michael Slackman
       There is a great clash of values taking place in Bahrain, as it has throughout a region where fabulous oil wealth and the intoxicating influence of globalisation have often overwhelmed heritage and tradition.
       The question confronting this small archipelago kingdom in the Persian Gulf is this:Can Bahrain protect the heaviest concentration of graves dating from the Bronze Age found anywhere in the world and still meet the contemporary needs of its people? Can it preserve its past while accommodating its present?
       "People are demanding housing, they want development," said Al-Sayed Abdullah Ala'ali,a member of Parliament."They want everything relevant to their lives today."
       In only a few decades, petrodollars and modernity have seen Arab states in the Persian Gulf experience increasing living standards while eroding practices that have defined identity for generations. Fishing and pearl diving have been replaced by petrochemicals and financial services. English has challenged Arabic as the language of business. Traditional crafts have become novelties. What little architecture of the past existed has often been bulldozed to make way for the glass and steel skylines of the present."It is a struggle between old and new, between cultural identity and recent developments that confront it, between authenticity and modernity," said Ahmad Deyain, a writer and publisher from a regional neighbour, Kuwait.
       Bahrain is a collection of 36 islands in the Persian Gulf, though most of its 730,000 residents live clustered around the capital,Manama. Half a century ago, there were tens of thousands of burial mounds that linked Bahrain's citizens to the islands' ancient past.The graves rolled out under a baking hot sun, most about the height of a car, covered in small jagged slate-grey stones. Bahrainis commonly say there were as many as 300,000.Karim Hendili, a Unesco adviser to the culture minister, said the number was closer to 85,000.
       He said that at most there were about 6,000 left in 35 burial fields. That is a figure everyone seems to agree on. And those remaining sites, he said,"are under severe,severe threat".
       Built from about 2,500BC to 500AD, they offer a window into what Mr Hendili called "a lost civilisation of the Bronze Age". Bahrain is believed to have been the capital of Dilmun,which lay along a trade route linking the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. Most of the graves contain a death chamber shaped like a boot on its side. The body was placed in the foetal position while personal items, ceramic pots, personal seals and knives were stored in the toe. The value of the graves is not,necessarily, in what they contain but in what they tell about the lives, values and funerary practices of an ancient civilisation.
       "There is a saying here:'You cannot give priority to the dead. You must give housing to the living,"' said Mr Hendili, who calls the graves "burial ensembles of Dilmun and Tylos".
       The minister of culture and information,Mai Bint Mohammed al-Khalifa, has been the driving force behind trying to preserve and promote Bahrain's past. She was instrumental in the first World Heritage designation in Bahrain and is working with Mr Hendili to try to have 11 of the 35 remaining burial fields listed as a World Heritage site, too.
       But with graves, she confronts not only the existential push and pull of building versus preservation, but also the challenge of vested interests. In essence, it boils down to this:Bahrain's most disenfranchised have been asked to bear most of the burden of preservation, local officials said, because the rich and connected have often been allowed to build on their lands.
       Even those who support preservation acknowledge that it has made it hard to convince lower-income communities of the value of such graves when they see, right next door,the houses of the rich and connected rise where graves once stood.
       "The problem is, it's a game of interest,"said Yousif al-Bouri, president of the Northern Municipal Council, a body that represents more than 30 villages."There are all these signs that say 'You cannot do this, you cannot do that', and all of a sudden the signs are taken down and the mounds are taken out.These were government lands given to connected people who sold them."
       Mr Bouri represents the village of Bouri,about 16km from the capital. Directly across a modern highway is another village, A'ali,population about 9,000. Both are majority Shiite villages and both are bordered by large fields of graves that remain untouched.
       There are much larger grave sites in A'ali,too, called Royal Tombs, mountains of sand and rock often taller than the two- and threestorey breeze-block homes people live in. It appears that all of the Royal Tombs have been looted, turned to rubbish heaps years ago. The village has grown up around them.
       "The village of A'ali is a unique place in the world where you have the interaction of contemporary life and funerary elements from the Bronze Age," Mr Hendili said. But, he added:"Their protection now is not guaranteed."
       The issue of the graves adds to the perception among Shiites that they are secondclass citizens, discriminated against by the ruling Sunni elite."They say it's historic,and that we can't remove them. But in other places, where there are people with power,they can remove them," said Abbas Hamid Ali, 32, who lives next to one of the Royal Tombs."If we remove them, we can make space for cars," said his neighbour, Ali Hassan,30.
       Mr Hendili and the culture minister, Mr Khalifa, have some support in the villages.But it may just be that the confluence of interests - the rich who want to sell their land, and the poor who need to build on their land - may be the force that prevails,some experts said. Those in favour of preservation say the government's strategy appears to be to do nothing, and hope that the problem will just go away."The government has turned a blind eye to this because of personal interests," said Mr Ala'ali, the member of Parliament. But that, he said, misses the much larger point, that the conflict should never have been defined as either-or. Preservation and advancement are, in fact, dependent on each other, he said.
       "Anyone who has no past," he said,"has no future."