The Bahraini government “believes they have international immunity, and they’re right.” – Maryam al-Khawaja

Bahrain: Silenced Spring
30 December, 2012 – Stephanie d’Arc Taylor – NOW

More sinister than the macabre dreams the media may inspire in disturbed young men in suburban America has been its relationship with the people and governments of countries that experienced upheavals during the so-called Arab Spring. Mainstream media has largely toed the line drawn by Western governments, in practicing a “triple standard,” as analyst Samer Araabi of the Arab American Institute has said, toward protestors and leaders in the region, depending on the country’s perceived strategic importance.

Thousands of journalists representing news outlets across the world are still falling over each other to cover the revolution in Egypt and the ensuing crises, nearly two years after protesters drove Hosni Mubarak from office, while massive uprisings in Bahrain during the same period, accompanied by grievous and widespread human rights violations at the hands of the police, have been largely ignored even by news agencies in the Arab world.

Can we attribute the grisly crackdowns on Bahraini protesters, as well as the relatively peaceful uprising in Egypt, to the difference in the way mainstream media has covered them? And is the notable dearth of media coverage on Bahrain related to the blind eye that governments in the West are turning toward violence in the strategic island in the Persian Gulf?

Given Egypt’s history of human rights abuses, its revolution should have been much bloodier than it turned out to be. Since Gamal Abdul Nasser’s mass arrests of Muslim Brothers in the 1950s, the prisons, police stations, torture chambers and morgues of Egypt have been filled with Islamists and Leftists alike paying the price for any perceived opposition to the regime. More recently, with the rise of the Internet, people have been arrested and tortured for nothing more than blog posts and Facebook groups.

So when Egyptians took to the streets on January 25, 2011, the media was ready: Reporters from mainstream media outlets, as well as citizen journalists, were on the ground in Cairo, documenting every last detail of the interactions between protesters, politicians, the police and the army. A career could have been launched from a grainy video documenting police brutality. But for a while at least, Mubarak’s regime was still counting on continued material and ideological support from the United States, which is harder to secure when videos of police beatings and reports of torture are constantly surfacing. Because the world was watching, the police may have been instructed to behave themselves.

At the peak of the protests in Egypt, there were approximately one million people in Tahrir Square, about 1 in 80 Egyptians. In Bahrain, the largest protests at Pearl Roundabout in downtown Manama have drawn as many as two out of three citizens. The government has responded with attacks on unarmed protesters with stun grenades, birdshot, rubber bullets and live ammunition, as well as arbitrary long-term imprisonment for health workers and journalists. Widespread torture and even blatant murders on the street have been recorded by bystanders with camera phones and Twitter accounts. These attacks have not only been more brutal, better-documented and more sustained than any in Egypt, the terror they invoke affects the population more completely. Furthermore, according to a 2012 report by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, these abuses “could not have happened without the knowledge of the higher echelons of the command structure.” Despite this plethora of evidence implicating the government, the protests and their grisly outcomes have received “no coverage” in the media, as New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof recently tweeted upon his deportation from the country.

Kristof’s experience illustrates that the mainstream media itself is not entirely to blame for the lack of coverage. Journalists traveling to Bahrain are routinely turned away at customs. Meanwhile, earlier this month, a government-aligned PR firm paid for sex-tape celebrity Kim Kardashian to travel to Bahrain to open a milkshake store franchise and tour the country. Upon arriving, she tweeted “OMG can I move here please?” and threw up peace signs while posing with camels. Islamist activists who turned out to protest her appearance were tear-gassed by the government.

As pop stars brush past waylaid journalists and human rights activists in the customs line at the Manama airport, King al-Khalifa still publicly insists that Bahrain respects “liberties” and “tolerance.” During his speech last Sunday, police were using tear gas and sound bombs to disperse thousands of protesters in surrounding villages. It seems the al-Khalifa regime knows that denial and changing the subject to a celebrity can get it very far indeed in today’s socio-political zeitgeist.

The Bahraini government “believes they have international immunity,” says Maryam al-Khawaja, acting head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, “and they’re right.” Bahrain’s sensitive geographic location, just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, has meant that King al-Khalifa and his family have enjoyed a cozy relationship with the United States in recent years, exchanging cheap weapons for a Bahraini base for the US Navy’s 5th Fleet. Ideological and material support from its Saudi neighbors have provided the Bahraini king an extra measure of protection against criticism from Western governments, which can’t function without a steady stream of cheap Saudi crude. “Saudi oil,” al-Khawaja says, “is more valuable [to the West] than Bahraini lives.” Until world leaders make human rights a priority over their stakes in the global marketplace, we can expect more grim news from the Gulf. That is, if we get any at all.
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