Saudi Arabia Feature: A Growing Rebellion? (Hill)

A protest in Qatif, 9 February

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Saudis are protesting. They’ve been protesting for over a year. Their numbers are growing. And there’s no sign of them stopping.

It’s all happening in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, home to most of the Kingdom’s Shia minority, and 90 per cent of its oil. Seven people have been shot dead by Saudi security forces since October 2011, two in the past month alone. The Saudi Interior Ministry says these deaths resulted from gun battles between protesters and police. But in all amateur videos that show protesters being shot, there is no evidence that protesters were shooting back.

There have been remarkable scenes of rebellion. One photograph, taken on February 10 this year, shows a young man hurling an effigy of Crown Prince Nayef at a row of armoured anti-riot tanks.

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Bahrain Feature: The Sustained Strength of the February 14th Movement (Jones/Shehabi)

Writing for Foreign Policy, Toby Jones and Ala'a Shehabi outline the methods and the achievements of the February 14th movement in Bahrain. In a week where the escalating repression of protests saw the death of a 16-year old boy, Sayed Hashim, at the hands of the security forces, Jones and Shehabi are perhaps too light in their critique of violence sanctioned by the government. Similarly, the authors possibly invest too much faith in the potential of the regime to reform, given its steadfast refusal across 2011 to countenance any real structural changes.

That aside, the article gives a vital depiction of a opposition movement which has retained --- indeed, developed --- strength and solidarity across 11 often unforgiving months. Significant, too, is the article's appearance in Foreign Policy, a central forum for the opinion makers in Washington. Indeed, it is enough to make one wonder whether Saqer Al Khalifa, the media attaché to Bahrain's Embassy in the US, who worked so tirelessly last year to spread the Kingdom's message, is falling out of favour in 2012....

Bahrain's revolutionaries
Toby Jones and Ala'a Shehabi, Foreign Policy

Bahrain's February 14th movement has become a symbol of resistance and fortitude...and the most powerful political force in Bahrain today. This confederation of loosely organized networks, named after the date of the beginning of Bahrain's revolution, is faceless, secretive, and anonymous. Its tens of thousands of supporters have abandoned the failed leadership of the country's better established, but listless, political opposition. They have suffered the most and have weathered the worst that the regime has so far meted out.

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Bahrain Analysis: A Revolution Paused (Kerr/Jones)

An uncertain calm has settled over the small island kingdom of Bahrain. The wave of peaceful pro-democracy protests from February 14-17 culminated in bloodshed, including the brutal murder of seven activists, some of whom were asleep in tents, by the armed forces. On orders from above, the army withdrew from the roundabout on the outskirts of the capital of Manama where the protests have been centered, and since shortly after the seven deaths it has observed calls for restraint. Thousands of jubilant protesters seized the moment to reoccupy the roundabout, the now infamous Pearl Circle. In commemoration of the dead, the demonstrators have renamed it Martyrs’ Circle. 

The mood in the circle is buoyant, even carnivalesque. It is also dead serious, for the thousands of encamped demonstrators demand nothing short of fundamental change to the kingdom’s autocratic political order.

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