Bahraini Opposition Calls for Renewed Action After BICI
The POMED Wire – November 10 – by Todd

According to the Bahrain Freedom Movement website, the 14th February Youth have called for a rejuvenation of popular protests on November 23, the day the BICI report will be released. The website also asserts that many pilgrims returning from Saudi Arabia have been arrested on suspicion of taking part in anti-regime chanting in Mecca. Meanwhile, Ashwaq al-Maqabi, a 17-year-old Bahraini girl who was being treated for complications related to sickle cell anemia, was rearrested in Salmaniyya hospital and returned to prison. She was originally convicted for taking part in a protest at Bahrain’s City Center, and Bahrain’s Ministry of Information tweeted that “after the end of treatment according to [al-Maqabi’s] doctor she was taken to female prison to serve her sentence & she is under health supervision.”

Additionally, Eli Lake examines the assertion that Bahrain’s primary opposition party, al-Wefaq, is a “pawn of Iran,” saying that Jasim Husain, a leading opposition figure in Bahrain, “does not look like a pawn of Iran’s mullahs… [and] doesn’t sound like a pawn of Iran’s mullahs either. “ …source

Having Their Say: Women Protesters Emerge as a Force in the Arab Spring
Published November 08, 2011 in Arabic Knowledge@Wharton

Mary Hope Schwoebel, senior program officer at the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton that Western observers need to withhold judgment about election results following the Arab Spring, and focus on supporting the development of women’s rights in those countries. “You need to have secular feminists and you need to have Islamic feminists,” Schwoebel says. “Women of all persuasions need to put aside their differences long enough to identify and advocate for their common interests in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.”

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: How have women played a role in the Arab Spring?

Mary Hope Schwoebel: First and foremost, they’ve been out in the forefront as demonstrators, as protesters. They’ve come out in unprecedented numbers in Tahrir Square [in Egypt] and in Change Square in Yemen. And of course, on the negative side, it was a policewoman who set the whole thing off in Tunisia. A street vendor being harassed by female police member in Tunisia reportedly triggered the Arab Spring. She slapped him several times on his face in front of his friends. The police had harassed him repeatedly for his business. He was so humiliated that he immolated himself. He went to Tunis and set himself on fire, just out of frustration because he wasn’t able to maintain his livelihood due to police harassment.

In Algeria, there was an interesting story about protesters comprised of feminists. They were feminist independence leaders from back in the day when Algeria was fighting against France. They were older, highly respected women. Oddly enough, they were arrested by female police officers, who beat them and then failed to protect them from male police officers who began sexually molesting and harassing them. Women haven’t always been angels, but women have played a significant role in the Arab Spring.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: How important have women been? Would the Arab Spring have happened without women?

Schwoebel: Their participation in Egypt and Yemen has been key in the democracy movements, even the simple symbolism of their participation alone, was significant. It was a woman in Yemen, Tawakkol Karman, a human rights activist [a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize this year], who is credited for starting the Yemeni uprising.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Do female protesters have a greater burden, not only demanding rights for citizens of their country but also rights as women in their country? …more

Arab Spring revolution at the Arab League
By Jon Leyne – BBC News – 13 Novemeber, 2011

For years the Arab League has been seen as a cosy club of Arab autocrats and dictators.

Ministerial meeting followed summit followed emergency summit, all having no apparent impact on the lives of ordinary Arabs in this troubled region.

But the Arab League headquarters are barely a couple of hundred metres from Tahrir Square, in central Cairo.

And the effect of the protests there, which unseated former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, are still echoing round the marbled halls of the League.

In March the League voted in support of a no-fly zone over Libya. The move led directly to a UN resolution and subsequent Nato intervention. Without the Arab League vote, that would not have been possible.

Now in an almost equally dramatic step, the League has voted to suspend Syria from its work in response to the continuing violence in the country.

That means one of the standard-bearers of Arab nationalism, the Syrian Arab Republic, is now excluded from the body committed to Arab unity.

Members of the Syrian opposition – just the sort of activists whom the Arab League members happily ignored or repressed for years – are being invited to Arab League headquarters, for the League to help them co-ordinate their efforts.

All of this is being pushed forward not by the traditional Arab leader, Egypt, but by tiny Qatar, whose prime minister is chairman of the ministerial committee dealing with Syria.

The hard line towards Syria emanating from the Qatari capital, Doha, is almost equalled by the tough stand from neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

The diplomatic map of the Middle East is being redrawn almost as quickly as governments and regimes are falling. …more

Bahrain: suspects say had contact with Iran
DUBAI – Sun Nov 13, 2011

(Reuters) – Members of a cell arrested before they could carry out planned attacks on Bahrain’s Interior Ministry and the Saudi Arabian embassy had been in contact with Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Bahrain’s state news agency BNA reported on Sunday.

Bahrain said on Saturday that the suspects, four of them Bahrainis detained in neighboring Qatar, had also planned to attack a causeway joining Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. The suspects’ interrogation led to the arrest of a fifth member of the group in Bahrain, BNA reported.

Some of the suspects had confessed that “the group was set up abroad … to carry out terror operations in Bahrain … and was in coordination with the military overseas, including the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij (militia),” BNA quoted a Bahraini prosecution spokesman as saying.

Activists among Bahrain’s Shi’ite Muslim majority began a series of mainly peaceful demonstrations in the capital in February, pushing for more political freedoms and better living conditions, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings across the Arab world.

The country’s Sunni rulers, helped by Saudi security forces, crushed the demonstrators, who they said had been supported by predominantly Shi’ite Iran. Tehran has denied involvement in the unrest in Bahrain, a U.S. ally which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

Last month U.S. authorities said they had broken up a plot by two men linked to Iran’s security agencies to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. One of the two was arrested in the United States last month and the other was believed to be in Iran.

Iran has denied the allegations.

(Reporting by Firouz Sedarat, editing by Tim Pearce) …source

Upcoming Event – Bahrain Lobby of Parliament
Posted on November 9, 2011 by admin

Bahrain Lobby of Parliament
6-8pm, Monday, November 14th
Committee Room 1 ,
Houses of Lords

Help campaign for Bahrain by lobbying your MP as part of the Justice for Three campaign.
Write to your elected representative and ask them to attend the public Meeting at House of Lords, chaired by Lord Nazir Ahmed.
To discuss the case of the Three Bahraini protesters sentenced to death and other human rights issues in Bahrain.
The meeting will also host speakers from Human rights organizations, the defendant lawyer, member of the defendant family and member of the Bahrain Center for Human rights

About Justice for Bahrain
Founded in March 2011 following the Bahraini Revolution of 14 Feb 2011. It was set up by a group of individuals of different cultural and professional backgrounds, who with the help of many volunteers eventually prospered into a leading and very active campaign. We are a cross-party organisation campaigning for justice, fundamental human rights and freedom in Bahrain and in other parts of the Middle East. We are an independent organisation based in the. …more

Bahraini activists: Seeking refuge in a storm
Many opponents of the island nation’s ruling family fear retribution and are claiming asylum in Europe.
by D. Parvaz – 12 Nov 2011 – AlJazeera

For a while, it seemed like there might be havens in the Arab world for political activists, especially in countries where there was either no uprising to start with, or where populist revolutions seemed to have succeeded, as in Tunisia and Egypt.

But things have not been that simple. Tunisia denied visas to 11 Palestinians wanting to attend a bloggers’ conference there in October, while Syrians have been harassed and even kidnapped in Lebanon. And now, Bahraini activists, including those who contributed to the Egyptian revolution, say they don’t necessarily feel safe there.

And just as Lebanon’s close ties with Syria are causing problems for Syrian activists there, Bahrainis worry that Egypt’s historically strong ties with Bahrain might lead to problems for them.

“You know, in Egypt and all Arab countries, police can catch you and give you to Bahrain,” Falah Ahmed Rabeea, a Bahraini activist, told Al Jazeera.

“The Egyptian police might give them our names or our information to Bahrain – maybe they were watching me, I don’t know. I did not feel safe.”

This unease has its roots in the relationships between Arab states and their leaders, in this case Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, and Egypt’s deposed President, Hosni Mubarak. Although Mubarak is no longer in power, Egypt’s ruling military has strong ties to his regime. The Bahraini ruler even visited Mubarak at the World Medical Centre in Cairo, where he is under medical care.

“This is frightening every human rights defender in the Arab world – how will they be treated in Egypt?”

– Nabeel Rajab, president of Bahrain Center for Human Rights

These close ties are also evident in how and where embattled leaders seek asylum at the end of their rule.

Before his fall, Mubarak was rumoured to have gone to Bahrain (among other places); Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for Tunisia’s deposed President Zine Abedine Ben Ali and Reuters on Monday quoted Jeffrey Feltman, the US assistant secretary of state, as saying that some Arab leaders (he declined to name names) would welcome Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Egyptian government has in the past denied entry to Bahraini activists and blocked human rights websites set up by Bahraini activist groups. The UAE also has a record of suddenly deporting hundreds of Shia families,”without receiving an explanation or an opportunity to appeal the decision”, according to rights group Human Rights Watch.

It seems possible that a form of pan-Arabism, on a civilian scale, will ultimately prevail, but for now, no one is really breathing easy.

Murtadha, a Bahraini activist who fled to the UK via Dubai in April, said that he did not feel the same emigrating to any other Arab country (with the possible exception of Oman, he stipulated).

“Because what do you expect from Dubai or Saudi?” said Murtadha, who wished to be identified by only his first name.

“If they [Bahraini authorities] want me, they’re going to put me back on a plane and send me back to Bahrain.”

Murtadha has been told by a family member that Bahraini authorities are now looking for him.

The 28-year-old aircraft engineer has a history with law enforcement that goes back as far as 1995, when he was arrested at the age of 12 for writing anti-state graffiti on walls. They kept him for three days, beat him and threatened to rape him if he didn’t say that Iranian agents had put him up to the graffiti. …more