And now, Bahrain’s brutality

The video image says it all.

A man—alone, in the middle of a wide boulevard in the capital city of Manama, repeatedly shouting, “Alahu, Akbar!, Alahu Akbar!”—who suddenly fell on his back, blood profusely oozing from his stomach after a shot was heard on the background, was a graphic summation of state brutality, Bahrain’s excessive response to its citizens’ demand for political rights and freedom.

This was yesterday, a month after Bahrainis chose the streets as platform to air their gripes against a long-entrenched monarchy that does not recognize plurality of public opinion, much less the rights of citizens to exercise their rights to vote and chose their leaders, to speak against the evils of inequality, to fight against social and economic injustice—in short, to fashion their own destiny.

Yesterday, or a few days earlier, I can’t exactly remember now, those rights, which Barack Obama called ‘universal’, were curtailed some more when Bahraini police raided medical facilities—hospital-to-hospital, room-to-room—to exact recrimination against the protesters, in the process denying them the right to health and to life. This after Bahrain’s security forces attacked peaceful gatherings at the Pearl Square, the country’s Taharir Square, firing live ammunition and teargas canisters, and burning the tents where the protesters were holed up.

The ‘conflagration’ that Philippine ambassador to Bahrain Cora Bahjin-Yap warned in a confidential memo a few weeks earlier that might happen had happened. What she failed to read, though, from the political winds was the Bahraini government’s pent-up and boiling contempt for the protesters, and its subsequent demonstration of that contempt by a brute display of state firepower.

The toothpaste can’t be rolled back into the tube once it's out..

Bahrain can no longer tame its beastly instinct. It wanted calm and stability so badly that it also so badly miscalculated the protesters’ ability to deliver to a world community the message that they, the Bahrainis, are being massacred by their own government and responded viciously. Thanks to modern information technology: the image of the man felled by gunfire captured by a handheld phone made it to the CNN newsroom.

What emboldened the Bahraini government to crush by force its protesting citizens is now clear: guilt and fear.

Guilt that the protesters’ could be airing legitimate grievances and fear that, because the protesters could be right, Bahrain could go the same way of Tunisia and Egypt, whose leaders were unceremoniously thrown out of their gilded cages in favor of the people’s long-dreamed of self-determination and political rights.

Bahrain’s security forces may also have been emboldened by the presence of friends and allies. Its patron, neighboring Saudi Arabia, and a fraternal brother-country, the United Arab Emirates, had sent in troops to help.

To help in what? In crushing legitimate dissent? We don’t know, but 1,000 Saudi soldiers and 500 UAE police officers—all armed to the teeth—could only mean one thing. They did not plant their feet on Bahraini soil to plant flowers on the country’s wide boulevards. They were there to serve notice to the protesters that when push comes to shove, they are ready to ramble. In short, they are in Bahrain to intimidate, threaten, deter, whatever.

Then there is the U.S. with its navy's Fifth Fleet, anchored off the Bahraini coast. Well, the Fifth Fleet could serve a purpose as well. It can, when push comes to shove, provide the Bahraini ruler, King Hamad ibn Isa Khalifa and his coterie of princess-wives and princes, as well as cronies, a convenient escape, similar to what the U.S.’s Sikorsky helicopters did to the Marcoses when these hurriedly flew them to Hawaii to escape the Filipino people’s wrath in 1986.

The streets of Bahrain are already soaked in sweat, tears, and blood of its peaceful freedom fighters who are armed only with stones and I-phones. They continue to die in the hands of the security forces. They continue to endure Bahrain’s brutality from which they can’t even hide in hospitals. This are the images clearly streaming in to our living rooms.

What are we to do? Indeed, what should the international community do to avert further bloodshed?

Support the protesters? In what way, when the U.S. itself could only encourage the Bahraini government to exercise “restraint” and “start a conversation”; when the United Nations could only say the brute force which the state security forces had used, and continue to use, to stifle peaceful dissent was “unacceptable” and “illegal”?

Individually, we can do nothing, except to egg on the Bahraini people to have moral courage. But collectively, we can also express our voices and speak against the reprehensible action of the Bahraini government against its people. It has been shown that world opinion, when arrayed against the forces of repression, could sway autocrats and dictators even of the hardest hearts.

Let us hope this applies to King Hamad ibn Isa Khalifa, although, by sanctioning state brutality, he had already proved to the world what kind of Emir he is.