Getting Detained and Gassed – Bahrain Freedom Movement

15/12/2011 – 12:19 p | Hits: 555

Nothing like getting pulled into a police car to glimpse, through a haze of tear gas, hints of a police state. The royal family in this American ally of Bahrain deserves immense credit for turning a desert island in the Persian Gulf into a modern banking center.

The rulers have educated Bahrainis, built a large English-speaking middle class, empowered women and fostered such moderation that the ambassador to Washington is a woman from Bahrain’s tiny Jewish community.

Yet our pals here also represent a brutal, family-run dictatorship, and few countries crushed the Arab Spring so decisively as Bahrain. The regime helpfully displayed this darker side a few days ago when riot police attacked the video journalist accompanying me and detained both of us.

We had tagged along to watch the small protests and clashes that continue to bubble up almost every evening in the villages of Bahrain. The pattern is invariably the same. A small group begins shouting “Down with Hamad,” the king, and begins winding through the streets, with men and women running from their homes to join in.

One clash began when young men hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police (protesters hugely undermine their cause when they do this). Later in the evening, in another village, a different group of marchers remained peaceful and held their arms out to show police that they were unarmed. But then one young man reached down and hurled a rock at the police officers — who immediately fired a barrage of tear gas grenades and charged at us.

I ran.

The Times video journalist with me, Adam B. Ellick, stood his ground to record the scene. Policemen ran at him and — as Ellick shouted that he was an American journalist — one officer roughed him up and clubbed the camera, breaking part of it. If that’s what they do to a Western journalist, you can imagine what would happen if they were to catch a kid with a rock.

Then the police pulled Ellick to a police car and stuffed him inside. He telephoned me, so I staggered through the tear gas to see if I could extricate him.

So much for my persuasive powers: The police promptly detained me as well. They wedged me in the back seat of a different police car but treated me courteously. The detention turned out to be a fascinating “embed,” because the police freely shared their venomous hatred of the protesters and their delusional view that they are all paid by Iran.

After about 30 minutes, a senior policeman arrived, asked us a few questions and then freed us. A few hours later came a classic touch of Bahrain propaganda: The government announced that we hadn’t been detained but had “sought police protection.”

That was a flat lie, and it was a reminder to be wary of Bahrain assurances as the country claims to be turning a new leaf. In fairness, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has shown some genuine signs of conciliation. He commissioned a blunt outside report into torture and other abuses. He pledged to put torturers on trial. He is again giving visas to journalists.

Yet the basic dynamic has not changed. One family still controls an entire country: Important positions almost all go to members of the royal family, who are Sunni Muslims. Shiites are the majority but amount to second-class citizens who are mostly kept out of the security services, in a system reminiscent of apartheid.

Maybe more reforms are in the works, but the government’s conciliation program so far seems to me to be mostly a public relations exercise. If the regime were serious about reform, a basic step would be to replace the prime minister, Sheik Khalifa, a hard-liner who has been in office for 40 years.

In many ways, the repression continues. I reconnected on this visit with a distinguished orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ali Alekri, whom I had met in February as he was tending to his cousin whom the riot police had beaten into unconsciousness.

Dr. Alekri has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on a collection of political charges, presumably as punishment for telling outsiders about deaths and injuries in the crackdown. He is free pending his appeal, and he filled me in:

In March, police burst into the operating theater as he was conducting surgery and dragged him out. They spent the next month torturing him, he said, twice trying to rape him to get him to confess to plots against the government. The torture left Dr. Alekri with broken ribs and a ruptured eardrum.

If this repression were unfolding in Iran or Syria, the White House would thunder with indignation. When it is our pals who behave this way, it is even more essential that we speak out.