NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT (BAHRAIN)

organization advocating political reform in bahrain.

Following a general strike in Bahrain in the summer of 1954, liberal reformers from both the Shiʿite and Sunni communities organized a Higher Executive Committee (HEC) to press demands for an elected popular assembly, an appellate court, and the right to form trade unions. Protracted negotiations between the ruler, Shaykh Sulman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, and the HEC led to the official recognition of a Committee of National Unity in return for the HEC's agreement to stop calling for a parliament. Radical activists based in the industrial labor force responded by forming a succession of clandestine organizations, which called for more fundamental changes in Bahrain's political and economic structure.

Out of these groupings in the late 1960s emerged the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf, from which the Popular Front in Bahrain split off in 1974. More militant workers then formed the National Liberation Front (Bahrain) to press for the creation of a nonexploitative, egalitarian social order. Police cracked down on the organization after the National Assembly was dissolved in 1975. The National Liberation Front (Bahrain) was subsequently overshadowed by Bahrain's heterogeneous Islamist movement, although it continued to enjoy support among young professionals and intellectuals unsympathetic to the Islamists.

see also bahrain; national democratic front for the liberation of oman and the arab gulf.

Bibliography

Halliday, Fred. Arabia without Sultans. Baltimore, MD, and Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1974.

Lawson, Fred H. Bahrain: The Modernization of Autocracy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989.

fred h. lawson

National Liberation Front (NLF) A South Vietnamese resistance movement formed in December 1960 at a secret location, sponsored by the Communist Party of North Vietnam. Based upon the organizational and operational experience of the Vietminh, its primary aim was the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, and beyond this the unification of all Vietnam under the banner of ‘freedom and democracy’ (effectively under Communist rule). It came to encompass millions of members at grass-roots level, absorbing Communists in the south. It developed a complex power structure linked with its Communist sponsors in Hanoi. Its members rapidly infiltrated all of society, villages, and towns, and into Saigon itself. A foreign relations committee established links with all Communist countries and several neutral ones, sending representatives to the UN and in 1968 to the Paris Peace Conference (Paris Peace Accords). It provided a gener ous pool for recruitment for its military wing, the Liberation Army, or Vietcong. It was merged with its North Vietnamese counterpart, the Fatherland Front, upon unification in 1975.

National Liberation Front the Communist-dominated nationalist organization formally established in December 1960 and also known as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Mat Tran Dan Toc Giai Phong). It sought to overthrow the pro-Western government of the Republic of (South) Vietnam and unite North and South Vietnam under Communist rule. Nominally led by non-Communist southerners, the National Liberation Front was for all practical purposes an arm of the Communist Lao Dong Party and the government of the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam. The National Liberation Front was disbanded following the Communist take-over of South Vietnam in 1975.