Bahrain 1st-Hand: The Café Where Lattes Have an Extra Shot of Tear Gas (Ellick)

Bahraini security forces fire tear gas outside Costa Coffee on 15 December

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On 15 December, as security forces blanketed Bahrain with tear gas, we noted an incident where the canisters had doused a café in toxic smoke. A reporter, Lauren Bohn, who sent messages by Twitter, and photojournalist Adam Ellick were inside. So was an EA correspondent, who sent us a running account of the incident.

Now Ellick has used the episode to write a story for The New York Times of dissent, defiance, and a decent cup of coffee amidst the security forces:

The police cars were lined up across the street, staking out a hub of subversive activity. Their focus was not some underworld hangout, but a coffee shop, Costa Coffee, in a shopping mall.

There was tension in the air when, suddenly, the suspects stood up, six women, and what did they do? They smiled and posed for pictures.

The police fired their weapons, tear gas and sound bombs, and the women rushed inside, frightened, a bit, exhilarated, a bit, and very well rehearsed.

“Thank you. Thank you,” the women and dozens of other customers crowding the patio chanted sarcastically as they rushed inside. The cafe’s security guard promptly sealed the doors with tape. The person making the coffee, who had worn a kaffiyeh scarf to protect against the fumes, offered trays of lemon slices and jugs of milk, which ease the burn of tear gas. Some patrons recorded the episode on video, and posted about the event live on Twitter.

And then it was over, just like that. The doors were opened, and in 20 minutes the patio was once again crowded.

“The cake’s just spicy now,” said Fatima Abbas, as she and her two daughters plugged their noses with napkins and continued sharing a slice of blueberry cheesecake. “We’re used to the flavor.”

Bahrain is the tiny island nation where the United States bases the Navy’s Fifth Fleet and where a royal family and its allies have brutally crushed a pro-democracy uprising. The island is governed by a Sunni family, the Khalifas, with ties not only to Washington, but also to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The country is majority Shiite, a religious sect that complains it has been systematically marginalized and discriminated against in jobs, education and governance in Bahrain. When the Arab Spring broke out, the Shiites, with some Sunni allies, took to the streets in huge numbers, demanding fair elections for Parliament and a true constitutional democracy.

The repression has hardly let up ever since, even as the kingdom says it is instituting reforms. And with no place to legally organize, this coffee shop has become an unlikely gathering place for human rights activists and opposition leaders. Indeed, the manager says business has recently increased by 50 percent.

“We disappeared because we had never seen tanks and bullets,” said Ala’a Shehabi, 31, an economics lecturer who avoided the cafe until recently. “But now we have removed the cape of fear and come into the public once again.”

The assembled have grown accustomed to sipping lattes with gingerbread syrup, a drop of marshmallow and a less desirable side serving of tear gas. But even this patient lot has its limits, and when the riot police fired a second time, and the familiar burn of tear gas struck, tempers boiled over.

“For how long are we going to be patient, patient, patient?” shouted Fatan, a young woman draped in a Bahraini flag who was afraid to give her last name.

“We’re tired of tolerating, tolerating. They kill, and we tolerate. More deaths, and we tolerate. They hit, and we tolerate. Our heart is melting into ash.”

The uprising here began in February when many thousands of Bahrainis camped at the iconic Pearl Square demanding democracy. That initial burst of enthusiasm came to a sudden halt when Bahrain unleashed its security forces, some firing live ammunition, targeting protesters with widespread arrests and torture, according to a government-commissioned report.

For its part, the government has chided these protesters as anti-Bahraini, and blamed them for disturbing the peaceful majority who “are fed up and just want to go back to some normalcy,” said Abdul-Aziz bin Mubarak al-Khalifa, an official in the information affairs department, and like most top officials, also a member of the royal family.

“Their message is ‘our way or the highway,’ ” he said.

Terrified of repercussions, the opposition dispersed. But in the past few months, Costa Coffee has emerged as a relative safe haven of dissent. So now, instead of the mass protests once held in the street, the opposition has been partly reduced to a smattering of activists nestled in the corner of a shopping mall that plays Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

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