Gates Visits Bahrain
The New York Times reports:
As security forces and pro-government vigilantes beat back protesters here, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived Friday on an unannounced visit to offer American support to the royal family and prod the king and the crown prince toward talks with protesters demanding more democracy.
His visit took place against a backdrop of large and continuing protests across numerous Arab capitals on Friday, with neither repression nor government concessions stemming the tide of anger and demands for change.
The region’s protests were for the most part peaceful, although there were scattered reports of injuries.
Here in this tiny Persian Gulf kingdom, security forces firing what protesters said were rubber bullets and pro-government Sunni vigilantes wielding sticks and swords beat back a rump group of several hundred protesters who were among the tens of thousands of Shiite demonstrators who were planning to march toward a particularly sensitive area: the Royal Court in Riffa, the preferred residential neighborhood for the ruling family and the Sunni Muslim elite. Its manicured lawns and wide streets contrast sharply with the narrow alleyways and raw cinder-block houses where many of the majority Shiite Muslims live.
The Interior Ministry issued a statement before the march warning that security forces would deploy in force to prevent it, given the “level of sectarian tension that threatens Bahrain’s social fabric.” Afterward, it issued another statement saying it had fired just eight tear gas canisters to repulse a rump force of marchers.
The protesters told a different story, saying they had been met with stones and clouds of tear gas. The Ministry of Health issued a statement saying 32 people were treated for injuries, mostly bruises or tear gas inhalation, at the Salmaniya Medical Complex, with an unspecified number treated elsewhere.
In his Friday sermon, Sheik Isa Qassim, the most senior Shiite cleric, said the king was falsely depicting the demand for basic rights as a rift between sects.
“Our demands are political ones, and have nothing to do with demands for a sect or segment of society,” he said at Friday Prayer, according to an English translation distributed afterward. “We are demanding democracy.”
In Saudi Arabia, the monarchy deployed a huge police presence to stop any protests from coalescing outside mosques, the sites of the weekly collective prayers that have helped fuel major protests throughout the region since the Arab uprising began in December. The Libyan government used the same tactic in Tripoli.
The region’s biggest mass of demonstrators turned out in Sana, the capital of Yemen, with about 100,000 participating in a sit-in to demand that President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down.
Two were killed in Tunisia and more than 20 were wounded in protests in a Tunisian mining town, but the issues seemed to be economic, not political.
Antigovernment rallies of varying sizes occurred in Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait.
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