A Year of Protest in Bahrain Ends as It Began, in Clouds of Tear Gas

By Robert Mackey
Video posted online by opposition activists in Bahrain on Monday is said to show tear gas fired at a protest march in the capital, Manama.

As The Associated Press reports, the police in Bahrain fired tear gas and stun grenades at thousands of protesters on Monday, blocking a march to the former site of the Lulu Roundabout, or Pearl Square, in Manama, the capital.

At the height of the pro-democracy demonstrations that began on Feb. 14 last year, protesters camped beneath the Pearl Monument in the center of the traffic circle for two days, before they were evicted in a deadly police raid. The monument was later pulled down by the government, to deny the opposition a rallying point, but protesters have vowed to reoccupy the area as the first anniversary of their protest movement approaches.

On Sunday, one activist, Sayed Mohamed, surreptitiously recorded video of the security in and around the area where the Pearl Monument used to stand.

According to The A.P., on Monday, “Some protesters hurled firebombs and rocks after the security forces fired tear gas.”

A protester ran for cover during clashes in Manama on Monday. European Pressphoto AgencyA protester ran for cover during clashes in Manama on Monday.

Raw video posted online by opposition activists showed that the marchers expected to be met with gas and wore masks or wrapped their faces in cloths as they approached the thousands of officers blocking their path. Nabeel Rajab, a prominent human rights activist, was among the marchers and one clip showed him, wearing a tan sweater, putting on a gas mask as he flashed the V-for-victory sign with his fingers.

Mr. Mohamed uploaded a series of clips to TwitVid that appeared to show protesters retreating as the gas got intense, and throwing rocks at the police.

Some of the raw video recorded by activists during the clashes included graphic images of badly wounded protesters, including at least one who was said to have been struck in the head by a tear gas shell.

Another video clip showed a young man who was photographed standing in front of a line of police officers blocking the road, being hastily evacuated after suffering a bloody head wound.

The police crackdown on Monday comes one day after the arrest of Zainab Alkhawaja, a prominent activist who documents the protest movement on her Angry Arabiya Twitter feed. Ms. Alkhawaja’s arrest on Sunday was caught on video. The brief clip showed her being taken into custody after shouting “Down With Hamad!” in reference to Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa as she was surrounded by officers.

In an interview with Der Spiegel published on Monday, Bahrain’s king told the German magazine, “I regret the events of last year,” but he also insisted: “There are no ‘political prisoners’ as such in Bahrain. People are not arrested because they express their views, we only have criminals.”

Ms. Alkhawaja is the daughter of a leading rights activist, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, who was sentenced to life in prison last year, and recently began a hunger strike in prison. In a Skype interview with The Lede in December, Ms. Alkhawaja described her determination to continue calling for change in Bahrain no matter what the personal cost.

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, founded by her father, Ms. Alkhawaja has been ordered to spend a week in jail.

Bahrain recently denied requests for visas from several journalists, including Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, who was in the country during the initial crackdown last year. However, some international human rights activists were able to enter the country ahead of the protest movement’s anniversary.

Over the weekend, two of those activists, Radhika Sainath and Huwaida Arraf, were detained by the authorities and deported. Bahrain’s state news agency released video of Ms. Arraf, a Palestinian-American and a leader of the Gaza flotilla movement, being arrested after she refused to surrender her passport to a police officer in Manama on Saturday.

As Ms. Sainath explained last week in a blog post, she and Ms. Arraf were in Bahrain as part of a project called Witness Bahrain, which aims to moderate the behavior of the kingdom’s police officers by sending international human rights observers to demonstrations. In an interview with Democracy Now on Monday, Ms. Arraf said that they did not announce the monitoring project until the activists were in Bahrain, but alerted the authorities on Friday, hoping that their presence would lessen the violence of any crackdown on dissent in the days leading up to the anniversary.

Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now, noted in the interview that Bahrain’s police force is now being advised by John Timoney, a former Miami and Philadelphia police chief, whose officers were accused of using excessive force in both cities to break up protests. Last month, Mr. Timoney described his work in Bahrain to NPR. Speaking to Robert Siegel of NPR, Mr. Timoney claimed that unauthorized protests were barred in Bahrain in part because of traffic concerns. On Monday, Bahrain’s interior ministry posted a series of messages on Twitter characterizing the clashes with demonstrators mainly in terms of their effect on traffic flow.