Bahrain shuts down as troops arrive
(UKPA) – 13 minutes ago
Bahrain’s capital Manama is in a state of lockdown with roads blocked by police after a Saudi-led military force arrived to help quell the uprising against the ruling monarch.
Many parts of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, were nearly deserted on Tuesday, with most shops and schools closed as police barricades halted traffic on key roads in an apparent attempt to limit the movement of demonstrators.
Thousands of protesters held their ground in Manama’s Pearl Square, the symbolic centre of their revolt, but opposition leaders have not yet announced their next move.
The sending of more than 1,000 troops from Gulf allies highlighted the regional worries about a possible spillover from Bahrain, where a majority Shiite population has led a month of protests against the Western-backed Sunni dynasty.
Other Gulf leaders fear that concessions by Bahrain’s rulers could fuel more protests against their own regimes, which have already confronted pro-reform cries in Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
There is also concern fears that gains by Bahrain’s Shiite Muslims could offer a window for Shiite power Iran to expand its influence on the Arab side of the Gulf.
Iran has stepped into the row, with its foreign ministry denouncing the presence of foreign troops in Bahrain as “unacceptable” and predicting it would complicate the kingdom’s political crisis.
Bahraini opposition groups also have strongly condemned the military move, calling it an occupation that pushes Bahrain dangerously close to a state of “undeclared war.”
The United States – which relies on Bahrain as a pillar of its military framework in the Gulf – has urged Americans to avoid travel to Bahrain due to “the potential for ongoing political and civil unrest” and has advised its citizens to consider leaving the island.
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Here’s hoping that both Saudi Arabia and Israel as we know them end up getting wiped off the map after this wave of unrest. (That doesn’t mean wiping out their populations, it means wiping out their fake-ass “house of Saud”/”nation state of the Jewish people” status).
I don’t think nation-states are a good model to organise human society anyway, but as long as they exist, let them be representative of all of their citizens, not one royal family or one ethnic/religious group.
Regardless of your feelings about Libya – it’s a no-brainer that there will be no intervention and only very muted condemnation from the west when Saudi, Bahrain or any of the rest of their bosom buddies massacre protesters to a greater extent than they are already doing. Not to even mention Israel.
Despite being a scion of the white ruling class turned patrician “defender of the people/environment”, George Monbiot is 100% on point here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/15/no-call-for-reform-saudi-oil
“Saudi Arabia, for the time being, is playing its cards right!?!” The Bahraini intervention has certainly reinforced Saudi Arabia’s image as a ruthless dictatorship. That would seem to play rather nicely into Iran’s message of illegitimate Arab rulers indifferent to the unemployment and daily humiliation of their own people. Certainly the twin messages of bad Iran and oil security play nicely into Washington’s tin ears. But that won’t help win the support of people across the Arab world. If the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are remotely successful, Saudi Arabia’s stifling people at home and in the Gulf will only become more painfully obvious and increasingly develop into a festering sore.