State Department Democracy Fellow gets little backing from State Department

As Bahrain’s Abuses Grow, U.S. Stays on Sidelines
by Marian Wang
ProPublica, May 9, 2011, 1:10 p.m

[excerpt]

State Department Democracy Fellow gets little backing from State Department

In February, we noted that when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her first visit to Bahrain in December, she was asked a little-noticed question [7] about Bahrain’s decline in the areas of democracy and human rights. The question, from then-Bahraini parliament member Matar Ibrahim Matar, was upstaged in the U.S. media by another question about whether Clinton would run again for president.

Matar was upstaged again last week [8] when news of his arrest—by armed, masked men—was buried by news of Osama bin Laden’s death. In an opinion column in the Washington Post, freelance writer Michael Bronner and Rutgers Law School dean John Farmer Jr. noted that Matar in fact received training on how to organize and advance the cause of democracy as part of a State Department fellowship [9]:

In 2008, he traveled here under the State Department’s Leaders for Democracy Fellowship Program [10], the flagship of President George W. Bush’s Middle East Partnership Initiative. The program seeks to impart practical organizing tools and a deeper understanding of democracy to emerging civic leaders.

In a meeting with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Matar raised his views about representative democracy in Bahrain and his concern that Washington has given the kingdom’s ruling family a pass in exchange for hosting the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet’s large base that supports the war in Afghanistan. After the program ended, Matar returned home and focused on getting elected to Bahrain’s parliament.

Matar—along with several other politicians from the moderate, mainly Shia opposition party—recently resigned from the Bahraini parliament in protest. …more