Your kingdom for our rights: Reborn Bahrain

The 400,000 citizens of Bahrain, a prosperous island emirate in the middle of the Gulf, cannot believe their luck. Their country, a mere few months ago one of the more efficiently oppressive of Arab states, has leapt to being the most liberal. The tale goes like this. For a quarter of a century, the island stifled under the harsh rule of a weak emir and his wily brother, the chief vizier. When the emir's son came to power in 1999, it was assumed that he would be as weak as his father. But the new emir scrapped censorship, emptied the prisons, publicly embraced his father's foes, invited exiles to come home, and issued a national charter to turn the country into a European-style constitutional monarchy.