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Bahrain’s Activists Tweet up a Protest – Tweet-On!!!

by Courtesy

Even in Custody, Bahrain Activists Use Twitter to Protest
By ROBERT MACKEY

After their arrest during a protest in Bahrain on Wednesday, Zainab Alkhawaja, left, and Sawsan Jawad filed updates to Twitter from a detention center. This photograph was taken and posted online by another activist, Asma Darwish, who was also detained.Asma Darwish, via YfrogZainab Alkhawaja, left, and Sawsan Jawad, two of the three Bahraini activists who used Twitter to document their detention on Wednesday.

Three women who were arrested in Bahrain on Wednesday as they tried to stage a sit-in at a United Nations office turned to Twitter to explain and document their protest, continuing to file updates even after they were taken into custody.

The women, Zainab Alkhawaja, Asma Darwish and Sawsan Jawad, who are all closely related to men who were detained during the recent protests, were finally released at about midnight local time. Throughout their seven hours in captivity, they managed to hold onto their phones and called on their followers on the social network to apply pressure on Bahrain’s government and on the United Nations.

I think the UN might have misunderstood, we wanted the release of political prisoners, not to join them ;)Wed Jun 15 18:52:03 via Twitter for BlackBerry®angry arabiya
angryarabiya

Ms. Alkhawaja, who writes as @AngryArabiya on Twitter, is the daughter of one of Bahrain’s leading human rights activists, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, who is currently on trial in a military court. Her husband, brother-in-law and uncle are also in detention. Ms. Darwish, who writes as @Eagertobefree, is the sister of a photographer who has been detained. Ms. Jawad, who writes as @sparweezj, is also the daughter of a detained human rights activist.

As their Twitter feeds make clear, the protest began on Wednesday afternoon, when the women presented United Nations officials with a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in which they urged the international body to ask Bahrain to release all political prisoners and investigate allegations that detainees have been tortured. (The full text of the letter is embedded at the end of this post.) …more