“You don’t believe in reforms?” I asked. …“We’ve been hearing about reforms since the days of our ancestors.”

Women Join Bahrain’s Uprising
By Jen Marlowe, The Progressive – November 2012

A woman I call m strode down the main road of her village in a burqa, with a large red and white Bahraini flag wrapped around her shoulders, fluttering vigorously in the breeze. She carried a poster, which she allowed me to look at. It had four small plastic dolls glued to the surface. One doll, wrapped in a white shroud, lay inside a small yellow box. Two other dolls had black hoods covering their heads and faces. One of the hooded dolls hung from its feet. The other’s arms were bound behind its back. The fourth plastic doll was imprisoned behind strips of black tape and was next to some rubber bullets and a small plastic cylinder.

“They kill our children,” she explained, referring to the kingdom’s security forces. “They suffocate them. They use all kinds of weapons.” Her hand swept over the rubber bullets and the cylinder, which represented a tear gas canister. The bound and hooded dolls in stress positions didn’t require much interpretation, but she emphasized how commonly both male and female youth are tortured in Bahrain’s prisons.

Then M. flipped the poster over, revealing three black cutout figures hanging from nooses with paper bags over their heads. “We won’t accept anything but a death sentence,” was written in Arabic in black marker across the top. The effigies were identified with signs on their torsos: Salman, Khalifa, and Hamad, the crown prince, prime minister, and king of Bahrain, respectively.

“Hang them,” she insisted.

I had arrived in Bahrain five days earlier through Witness Bahrain, an initiative comprised of international observers reporting on the human rights abuses that the Bahraini regime has committed since many of its citizens began protesting eighteen months ago.

On February 14, 2011, inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, a group of anonymous youth put out a call to gather at the Pearl Roundabout monument in Bahrain’s capital city of Manama. Protesters were largely calling for political reforms, with a focus on instituting a constitutional monarchy and challenging the discrimination that the Shi’a majority faces at the hands of the Sunni monarchy.

The regime responded with violence, killing one protester. The demonstrations swelled, and the security forces responded with more violence. Demonstrators took over, were violently expelled from, and then returned to Pearl Roundabout, camping there until 1,500 troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates entered Bahrain, shoring up the Bahraini regime with the tacit support of Washington. The Pearl Roundabout monument, an iconic symbol of the uprising, was cleared of demonstrators and destroyed. King Hamad declared a state of emergency. All who had been involved in the demonstrations were targeted. There were mass dismissals from government jobs, thousands imprisoned, and hundreds of cases of severe torture and dozens of deaths.

Today, the uprising is characterized by near-daily demonstrations in villages all over Bahrain, where mainly nonviolent protesters are met with a barrage of tear gas and bird shot. House raids and arrests occur nightly.

It was at one such protest that I met M. Her hardliner sentiment seems to be growing more common. As young boys tipped over garbage dumpsters and dragged palm-tree logs and chunks of concrete to the middle of the road, trying to thwart riot police from entering the village, another woman told me vehemently that the only solution for Bahrain was overthrowing the ruling al-Khalifa family.

“You don’t believe in reforms?” I asked.

The woman made a dismissive motion with her head. “We’ve been hearing about reforms since the days of our ancestors.”

The protest began then, with call-and-response chanting:

“Oh, Prisoners of the country . . .”

“Your heads are not bowed!”

“Despite the increasing hardship…”

“Your heads are not bowed!”

Women, waving Bahraini flags and marching behind the men, made up approximately 50 percent of the demonstration. When tear gas canisters and bird shot ripped through the crowd, the women ducked inside the nearest houses, but as soon as the riot police retreated, the women slipped their shoes back on and went back to the village center to resume their protest.

“Women are the prominent partner in the Pearl Revolution,” Jihan Kazerooni, a member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and vice president of the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-Violence Organization, told me the next day as she poured two cups of sugary, milky tea. “They take part in each single event happening. You can find them protesting. You can find them as doctors and nurses treating protesters. You can find them doing the documentation. They are human rights activists, photographers, lawyers. The women are the power and the strength of our revolution.” …more