Bahrain Demolishes Protester Monument
The New York Times reports:
MANAMA, Bahrain — Bahrain on Friday tore down the protest movement’s defining monument, the pearl at the center of Pearl Square, a symbolic strike that carried a sense of finality. The official news agency described the razing as a facelift.
“We did it to remove a bad memory,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said at a news conference. “The whole thing caused our society to be polarized. We don’t want a monument to a bad memory.”
The destruction of the monument was part of a chain of events that, in a matter of days, turned Bahrain from a symbol of hopeful pro-democratic protest into one of violent repression.
On Friday, the family of Ahmed Farhan, 30, who was killed on Tuesday by security forces in Sitra, an activist Shiite village south of the capital, received the body of their son, with its shotgun pellet wounds to the back and a gaping hole in the skull. The family had been trying to bring him home to Sitra and bury him there, but permission had been withheld.
In Bahrain, the Arab spring turned to winter in less than a week. Martial law was declared on Tuesday. It is now illegal to hold rallies. Tanks remain outside the central hospital and Saudi troops are here as back-up.
Still, on Friday the Farhan family buried their son and, despite the ban on protests and gatherings, some 5,000 people helped them do it. Sitra, once an island, is now linked to the mainland by landfill and causeway. It turned into a sea of raised fists and tearful wailing, piety and political indignation, the core of what has been driving the Bahraini protests since mid-February.
The Farhan family is poor, like many in this village and like many of the 70 percent of the country that is Shiite. Ahmed Farhan, who never married, lived with his family in a ramshackle structure around a courtyard, having lost his job as a fisherman some years ago after harbor construction made fishing impossible. He was taking part in a protest demonstration when he was killed.
The battle to turn this kingdom into a democracy has also been a battle of class and ethnicity — poor majority Shiites against the Sunni elite and royal family. It is also an international struggle, with Saudi Arabia on one side, Iran on the other.
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