Bahrain job purges linger as protest flashpoint

Bahrain job purges linger as protest flashpoint
AP By BRIAN MURPHY -August 8, 2011

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — One afternoon in May, police in Bahrain led away security guard Mahdi Ali from his job at the Gulf kingdom’s state-controlled aluminum plant. He claims he was blindfolded and beaten so severely that the bruises still have not healed.

His only offense, he insists, is being part of Bahrain’s Shiite majority as it presses for greater rights from Sunni rulers who have Western allies and powerful Gulf neighbors on their side.

The 44-year-old Ali now counts himself among Bahrain’s purged: Hundreds of Shiites — some say thousands — dismissed from jobs or suspended from universities for suspected support for demonstrators.

“My only crime is being Shiite,” said Ali, who claims he has been effectively blacklisted from finding a new job. “I’ve paid for it by being dismissed, arrested, tortured and insulted.”

With Bahrain’s Arab Spring crisis moving into its eighth month, the mass dismissals remain a major point of anger feeding near-daily street clashes on the strategic island — which is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.

The coming weeks could be critical in assessing the chances for any significant reconciliation efforts in Bahrain. The alternative is an increasingly divided and volatile nation where the region’s biggest political narratives intersect: Western security interests, Gulf Arab worries about spillover uprisings and Iran’s ambitions to cast wider Middle East influence.

“Bahrain had these tensions long before the current Arab upheavals. And it may end up as one of the most enduring and most complex dilemmas after the Arab Spring has run its course,” said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies.

Shiites account for about 70 percent of the population of some 525,000 people, but claim they face systematic discrimination by the 200-year-old Sunni dynasty. Bahrain’s rulers, meanwhile, court Western and Sunni Arab backing by raising fears that Shiite power Iran is pulling the strings of the protests as a foothold to undermine other Gulf monarchs and sheiks. …more