After the Day of Rage, the months of repression

This article was published in Spiked Online 19 April 2011

The leader of the Bahrain Freedom Movement tells spiked that the situation in his country is grim. But is Western intervention the solution?

Dr Saeed Shehabi, leader of the London-based Bahrain Freedom Movement, is quick to get to the point. ‘The situation in Bahrain is very grim at the moment’, he tells me within seconds of our meeting. It’s a pretty accurate assessment.

Since the government of Bahrain declared a state of emergency on 14 March, the situation for Bahrain’s half-a-million semi-citizens has indeed been very grim. Up until then, of course, the situation had been tense but, at times, optimistic. And with good reason. The thousands of protesters who had been gathered in Pearl Square since the Day of Rage on 14 February, demanding the political reform of an apparently democratic but essentially monarchic regime, had seen off the government’s tentative attempts to ‘restore order’. Yes, the regime’s security services had shot and killed people during those first few weeks, but the protesters had remained, defiant, in and around Pearl Square. And they remained so in the knowledge that similar shows of popular discontent had recently brought an end to similarly autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.