JEDDAH, 6 March 2005 — Thursday’s landmark municipal elections in the Eastern Province gave an opportunity to the country’s minority Shiite population to choose their public representatives.

The Eastern Province has a large number of Shiites, estimated at more than 10 percent of the Kingdom’s predominantly Sunni population.

The province elected its municipal representatives after a two-week campaign that was observed by a large number of analysts interested in the religious divide in the region through the Internet and other means of communication.

Forums, sites, chat rooms all witnessed the democratic battle between the two major religious groups in the province. With letters, speeches, invitations and accusations, the followers of each side fought to ensure a place for their representatives in the municipal council in a democratic step that some say may change history.

People living in the poorer suburbs of the region had high hopes that things might change for the better now that they had voted fellow Shiites to power.

AlArabiya.net, the major Internet site of Al-Arabiya news channel, reported that some candidates used imams of mosques and other religious scholars to promote them. The news portal also reported that some even invited prominent religious figures to back them up in their campaign.

In Alsaha Forum, one of the major political forums on the Net that is visited by a large number of Saudi writers, one can see the verbal war going on between the two sides.

Seven candidates backed by Sunni clerics won the second stage of the landmark municipal elections despite the tough electoral battle between the two sides in the province.

Observers were waiting for the final results, which they thought would be in favor of the Shiites, or at least one Shiite elected to every council in view of their demographic distribution.

Yet the results that came out were quite unexpected. Not a single Shiite candidate won a seat in any council, not counting the ones who made it in Qatif and Al-Ahsa regions. In Qatif all five elected candidates — Eisa Al-Mizaal, Nabeeh Al-Ibrahim, Ali Al-Hay, Jaafar Al-Shayeb and Riyad Al-Mustafa — are Shiites. In Al-Ahsa region, five out of the six winners are Shiites, including Salman Hiji, Abdul Raheem Bukhamsain, Hiji Al-Najdi and Abdullah Al-Haleemi.

Shiites were estimated at around 20 percent of the 41,000 registered voters in Dammam.

Some 200,000 Shiites, who live in the Eastern Province, which stretches from the northern borders with Kuwait to the vast Empty Quarter in the south, registered to elect members to fill half the councils across the province, where some 692 candidates contested 58 seats.

The third and final round of voting will take place in the Western regions of Makkah and Madinah as well as Qasim, Tabuk, Hail and Al-Jouf regions and the Northern Border Province on April 21.