16-Year-Old Protester Killed as Bahrain Uprising Turns 2

It's hard to believe that a year ago, I was in Bahrain. I haven't had time or strength to write anything about that, but wanted to share this update from the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. It's so sad that one year later, people are still being killed by the regime in their freedom struggle. Yet inspiring that they continue to rise unabated. When people say, "Well, no wonder the Occupy/Decolonize movement died down, look at how violently it was repressed," I can't help thinking of the Bahrainis. According to the NYT blog, at least 88 people have been killed since the beginning of the uprising two years ago today. Bahrain's population is roughly equivalent to that of the city of San Francisco. What if 88 Occupy protesters had been killed? And our government continues to arm to Bahraini monarchy. All I can say to my Bahraini friends is, I continue to be amazed and inspired by you all.

February 14 Summary Anniversary of an Uprising

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights Releases below a summary report of the first major day of protests to mark the second anniversary of the pro-democracy movement. At the time of writing, major protests are still ongoing through the night in Bahrain. European arms are assisting in the brutal repression that already claimed the life of one young, unarmed and peaceful protester today. Date: 14 February 2013 (Bahrain) – The human rights situation is rapidly deteriorating in Bahrain on the second anniversary of the pro-democracy movement. Security forces in full riot gear have swarmed the streets with armored vehicles and helicopters; many streets are filled with tear gas. The government’s response has been, throughout the day, wildly out of proportion to the largely peaceful demonstrations. Since the earliest hours of the day around dawn, protesters took to the streets in large numbers, groups of hundreds gathered in all parts of the country, the vast majority of which were peaceful. Protesters have established roadblocks of their own to prevent riot police from driving at high speed into the villages. The security forces used consistently excessive and disproportionate force against protesters across Bahrain throughout the day. Photo: Hussain Al-Jazeeri photos Due to the culture of impunity being practiced by Bahrain authorities and the continued use of excessive force, a 16 year-old protester, Hussain Ali Al-Jazeeri, died this morning as a result of a close-range direct hit from a police officer’s shotgun to his abdominal area which led to sever lung injury & pneumothorax. He was shot while he was peacefully protesting in the area of Daih. There is no evidence that AlJaziri was representing any kind of threat to the policeman who fired on him and killed him. Al-Jazeeri died in the ambulance before reaching the hospital. This video shows the medic who was trying to rescue Al-Jaziri in the ambulance ( http://youtu.be/76dYQPj5Sbw ). The Bahraini riot police continue to use the birdshots against the peaceful protests in Bahrain even after 2 years, during which dozens were killed with shotgun, including the first man who was killed on Feb 14, 2011, Ali Mushiama. Photo : Above : Shotgun Injuries, Below: Extensive use of Teargas Dozens of injuries were documented today, including tear gas suffocation, shotgun pellet injuries, fractures and bruises. The number of shotgun pellets injuries have rapidly increased today. Many of those injuries were in vital areas of the body including the face and chest. Photo : A protestor getting arrested. The Bahrain authorities arbitrarily arrested a number of peaceful protesters during the day. In an attempt to prevent information on human rights abuses from spreading; agency photojournalists Mazen Mahdi (DPA), Hassan Jamali (FP) and Mohammed Al-Shaikh (AP) were arrested this morning while they were covering the protests despite the fact that they have valid ID; they were released several hours later without any explanation of why they were arrested. Due to the fact that there are many protests organized during the night and in the coming days, the BCHR fears that the escalation of the violations will continue. The security forces continued the widespread use of pellet shotguns, despite the fatality that occurred this morning. The birdshot canisters, which were found on site where AlJaziri was killed today, are from Cyprus Victory Starlight cartridges. In other areas, Italian manufactured weapon (Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun) and German-owned South African Tear Gas canisters were spotted as being used against protesters. The BCHR also calls on the United States, the United Kingdom, the UN and all other allies and international institutions to put pressure on the Government of Bahrain to stop its use of excessive force in response to the continued peaceful protests, and to consider a meaningful solution to resolve the persistent political issues of instability in the country. The BCHR calls on the European Governments and other ally Governments to Bahrain to stop supplying the government of Bahrain with arms that are used against peaceful protesters, which cause severe injury and death among them. Read more in BCHR two-year anniversary report: Deaths and Detentions: Documenting Human Rights Abuses During the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://bahrainrights.hopto.org/en/node/5644

Love the Struggle

I have had no time to blog this week.  And I am a little in a funk.  But today I am in the middle of a really boring job at work, so I turned on Living Room with Kris Welch at noon on KPFA, and say what you want about Kris, she is a true feminist, and she sometimes has really great feminist guests on her show.  So she has this woman on, named Merle Hoffman.  Never heard of her, which probably says more about me than about her.  But she is awesome.  She is the founder of Choices Women’s Medical Center, editor in chief of On the Issues magazine and the author of a new book, Intimate Wars:  The Life and Times of the Woman who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom .  Now right off the bat, that title makes my hair stand on end.  I don’t know whether she chose the title; I’ve heard that non-celebrity authors don’t usually get to pick their own titles.  If she did, that’s a big problem, because no one woman brought abortion from the back alley to the board room.  Her bio says she is President and CEO of Choices, and I don’t tend to love Presidents or CEOs.  If I knew Ms. Hoffman, I might not think so highly of her.

Boy, there are a lot of great photos
of Flo to choose from.
This one courtesy Racialicious

But she just said something that I find so profound in this moment, when I’m having a lot of frustration because I feel like I keep spinning wheels and not getting very far.  She was quoting Flo Kennedy, who was apparently a friend of hers (which makes me think I might like her after all), and she said Kennedy told her, “You have to learn to love the struggle.”  And she said people ask her how she keeps going, when she never wins, and she said, “I love the struggle.”  Wow, that is just the most profound thing I have heard in ages.  I used to love the struggle.  I used to feel excited about the political work I was doing, whether it was a confrontational direct action or a five-hour meeting.  Now I tend to approach it all with a feeling of dread, of worrying that it’s not going to come off, or that it’s going to go horribly wrong, that I’ll let people down or let myself down, that no one wants to work with me, or I don’t want to work with them, that I’m trying to do things I’m not suited for or don’t have time to do things as well as I am capable of doing them.  I have petty resentments, and hate myself for them.

In the end I’m nearly always glad I did whatever it was, whether it came off or not, because ultimately I know what I’m doing is right.  I mean, the other day I interviewed a woman I met in Bahrain, Zainab al Khawaja, who was recently in prison for a week after an action.  She was lucky to be released after a week; she could be doing a life sentence for no more than that, like her father, Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, who is currently on the 21st day of a hunger strike.  I didn’t ask Zainab if she felt like it was worth it to go to jail for a week just for sitting down near Pearl Roundabout.  I know some of her friends were not that happy about it, felt like she could be more useful outside.  But I’m pretty sure she feels like whatever happens will be okay, as long as it’s for the struggle, because I think she loves the struggle.

A guy in my writing group, who is not political at all, just made a snide comment about one of my blogs, saying that it only reinforced his sense of the futility of going somewhere for a week and getting deported.  It’s funny because I don’t have that feeling about the experience at all.  It’s not like I think I made this huge difference by doing it, but clearly I made more than if I hadn’t, because now not only I but everyone I know is thinking about Bahrain, which we were not doing a month ago.  So if I never do another thing about Bahrain (which is certainly not my plan) I will still think it was worth it.  And I also loved it and was not asking myself questions about whether what I was doing was right.  I just did what came along and knew it would work out for the best.  But here, I have so many choices that it’s easy to look at other people and think they seem so much more confident about their paths than I feel.

This is the first day of International Women’s Day month, and the commitment I'm making is to do whatever will help me regain that love for the struggle.

Here's a little thing I did last week that I did not want to do, but ended up feeling really good about.

Bahrain, We Hardly Knew Ye

It just began, and now it is over.  Yesterday morning, I was sitting in a café in Manama, Bahrain, working on a blog called “Bahrain: First Impressions.”  Now I am sitting at home in Oakland, trying to process what happened.

On February 14, I woke after only a couple hours’ sleep and couldn’t go back to sleep.  I was trembling with excitement and tension.  #Feb14, the anniversary of the start of the ongoing revolution in Bahrain, was to be the Day of Return to Pearl (Lulu) Roundabout, the huge vacant lot in the center of Manama where protesters camped out for a month last year, until March 16, when 1,000 troops from across the bridge in Saudi Arabia and 500 police from the United Arab Emirates joined thousands of mercenaries working for the Bahraini police in evacuating the camp, destroying the monument at the center of the Roundabout, killing at least 6 and injuring hundreds.  Since then, at least 60 people have died in the ongoing revolution.


Read the story of my arrest and deportation from Bahrain on the Witness Bahrain blog.

Read the BBC account of what happened on the anniversary.

Two Fellow Activists Deported

No sooner did the Bahraini government find out we were here than they launched a full-scale effort to whisk us out of the country prior to the planned massive demonstrations on February 14, the one-year anniversary of what the Shia majority here call their ongoing revolution.

I've been working at breakneck speed, going to protests day and night, meeting with local activists, coming home and cutting video late into the night.

And that was before two of my fellow Witness Bahrain team members were arrested at yesterday's demonstration, which was entirely nonviolent (from the side of the protesters), even after police attacked with tear gas and sound grenades.  The crowd was small because all roads into the center of Manama, the capital city, were blocked by heavy police presence, and even many of the alleyways were guarded by lines of police.  But people were resolute in their determination to hold the planned march.  When police grabbed one young man out of the crowd, women surged forward to grab him back.  Huwaida, a Palestinian American well-known for her fearlessness in confronting the Israeli occupiers, ran forward, camera in hand, and demanded to know why this young man was being taken.  When police challenged her right to film and tried to take her camera, she walked away quickly, but the police ran after her and eventually she was surrounded by a group of heavily armed riot police.



Women crowded around to protect her, attempting to hold onto her while the police tried to push them away.  Local activists remarked that the brutality was far less than it would have been if we were not there, but it was brutal enough for me.  I filmed the confrontation, which ended with Huwaida being thrown into a van while police tossed sound bomb after sound bomb directly at the people.

Radhika was arrested when she tried to find out what had happened to Radhika.  A reporter tweeted last night that the government is looking for me too, hoping to remove all witnesses to their repression of the planned demonstrations on February 14.

Please go to our website (it's blocked in Bahrain -when I try to call it up it says "This web site has been blocked for violating laws and regulations of the Kingdom of Bahrain.") to read reports and see lots more video and also take a moment to sign the petition demanding Obama end US military aid to the Bahraini regime.

Kate in Bahrain: Attack in Samaheej, 2/9/2012

The other day I landed in Bahrain, a tiny island kingdom with a bold and energetic democracy movement we hear very little about.  In fact, the Shia majority call what they have been doing for the last year a revolution.  Please go to www.witnessbahrain.org (after you read my first blog below) and sign up for our email updates.  A lot of people who are much more internet savvy than I are part of this project, and they'll be tweeting and facebooking, so if you're that type of person, please be sure to follow us on twitter, like us on Facebook, retweet and tell all your friends so we amplify the voices of the brave activists here.

The people of Samaheej knew they would be attacked today.  It was the final day of mourning for Ali Issa Abdullah Hayki, who died on Monday from teargas inhalation.  The villagers would march to the cemetery, as custom demands, and the police, who keep a close eye on the Shia village just meters from the airport, would punish the villagers for holding a funeral for someone killed in a protest.

Before the evening was over, a sixteen-year-old girl would have been shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and a boy the same age would be taken away by police.  Villagers, including small children, would be breathing air saturated with tear gas, and the police would be searching house to house for people they suspect of being protest leaders.

Today’s events were not unique in Samaheej.  According to villagers, they experience daily, or nightly, assaults by police and other security forces.

The only difference today is that we were there – four American women from the newly created Witness Bahrain.  We were there to document the abuse faced by this village, like so many others, which refuses to accept second-class citizenship and autocracy.  We are not credentialed journalists, but we are the closest there was at this protest.  Even those in western media who know what is happening in Bahrain have a hard time covering it – numerous prominent reporters have been denied entry to the country in recent weeks.  The best known are Nick Kristof from the New York Times and Kristen Chick of Christian Science Monitor.  Our local hosts have warned us that if we give out our local telephone numbers to journalists, the police will probably track our phones and deport us.  These folks aren’t messing around: even the Israeli government is not that vigilant.

So today we got to the village just in time for the march to the cemetery.  At first it seemed the people’s fears were wrong; the police were nowhere to be found.  The men prayed, the women chanted, men and boys sat quietly around the grave site and mouthed prayers.  Just as everyone had drifted back into the village, we heard the horns announcing that the police were on their way.  I saw young men covering their faces with bandanas or ski masks.  A few swung Molotov cocktails.  Minutes later I heard a series of cracks and saw gas and smoke rising in the distance.

Before long, the air was filled with gas.  I stopped to change the batteries in my little video camera – uselessly, as it turns out since I didn’t really know how to work it – and got separated from the rest of our little group.  I was having trouble breathing, and knew that it would get worse as the gas drifted into the village.  I followed a group of young men – shabab -- down a narrow street and suddenly realized that the entire area was deserted except for me and the shabab and the rapidly advancing police lines.  I was concerned that they would notice me, and maybe decide that this random foreigner with a camera was someone they should worry about.  I headed up into the village, and when I could see again, people of course started inviting me into their homes.  Some were quite insistent, wanting to keep me from harm’s way.  I kept insisting I needed to go back to the demonstration to find my friends.   

  

One woman said if we wanted to come to her house later, we were welcome to come in whether she was home or not; the door would be unlocked.

Eventually I was “adopted” by a man named Ali, who started calling around to find out where the rest of my group had gone.  At one point he led me into a house where a group of women was gathered around a teenage girl who was pressing her sleeve to her lip.  As I tried to figure out what was happening, Ali said something to one of the women and she held out something that looked like a malted milk ball, but was in fact a hard rubber bullet.  It had ricocheted off of a woman’s arm and hit the girl in her lip, which was already swelling.

 

My colleagues on the other side of the village, meanwhile, had made their way onto a roof from which they could watch the police go house to house, banging on doors.  People said they were looking for people to arrest.  If so, they did not find any in houses today, but they did arrest someone.  A 16-year-old named Ali Ibrahim Khalil Quraise, who was standing on the street with a group of younger boys.  Because he was the oldest, the cops took him and said his father should come to the police station to get him.  People were afraid that if they went, they would be taken as well, and the boy would not be released. 

We offered to go to the police station to ask, but the guy who had brought us was sure that if we did, we would be arrested and deported, so instead we came home and got a journalist we know to call the police station to ask why the boy had been arrested and what his status was.  After three tries, she finally got someone who spoke English and didn’t hang up on her.  He told her he could not discuss the arrest because it was a military matter, and gave her a non-working number for the Ministry of Interior media office to call instead.  When she reached the media office, they said she had to email them her question.  As of now – six hours later – she hasn’t received an answer.