Angry Throngs at a Funeral in Saudi Arabia Rattle Kingdom

Angry Throngs at a Funeral in Saudi Arabia
Reuters – By KAREEM FAHIM – 10 July, 2012

CAIRO — Thousands of people attended a funeral in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for a man killed during protests in a restive region of the country’s Eastern Province, a show of popular anger that came amid fears of a renewed crackdown on dissent.

Activists said the man, Muhammed el-Filfil, had been protesting the shooting and arrest on Sunday by government security forces of a prominent Shiite cleric in the Qatif region. Mr. Filfil was one of at least two people killed when security forces fired live ammunition at the protesters in the village of Awamiya, the activists said. A government official denied that any such clash had occurred.

The oil-rich Eastern Province, the stronghold of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, has long been a focal point of anger at the rigidly conservative Sunni monarchy, and for Shiite complaints about a policy of entrenched, official discrimination.

Over the last year and a half, fearing the spread of the Arab uprisings, the government, using a mix of money and arms, moved forcefully to quell the discontent in places like Qatif. Jafer al-Shayeb, a member of Qatif’s municipal council, said despite offers of development from the government, “There have been no solutions to the major issues that people are complaining about.”

The unrest has persisted, fueled by detentions of dissidents and growing calls for political freedoms and civil rights. At least nine people have been killed since February 2011 in bouts of violence that seem to occur every few months, according to human-rights activists.

The latest clashes came after the arrest of the cleric, Sheik Nimr al-Nimr, who was known as a protest leader and a fierce critic of the royal family. There were conflicting accounts about how he was injured, with the government asserting that he was shot during an exchange of gunfire as he resisted arrest. Mr. Nimr’s brother told Reuters the cleric was detained while driving from a farm to his house.

In a short video said to show Mr. Nimr immediately after his arrest, he is lying in the back seat of a car, with blood on his white robe and a uniformed man holding his head. The government said Mr. Nimr had been charged with “sedition.”

During the large protests in Awamiya after the arrest, Mr. Filfil and another man, Akbar el-Shakhoury, were fatally shot during clashes with security officers, according to Waleed Sulais, a human-rights activist in Qatif. Mr. Sulais said that the government was often quick to resort to live ammunition and said that in addition to the deaths over the last year and a half, at least 35 protesters had been injured by gunfire in the same period.

In a statement to Reuters on Monday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said the number of protesters on Sunday was “limited” and “there was no security confrontation whatsoever.”

Mr. Shayeb, the Qatif council member, said that the unrest had come after months of relative calm in the region.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo. …source