Manama (Taz) — The Shiite believer Abdul Rasul Hujairi was a devout man. Whenever his work permitted, he went to the mosque in his home village. And that is just what he did last Saturday afternoon around half past four. It was the last time his wife Kafia Mubarak saw him alive. "When he still hadn't come home by nine clock, I called him twice," she says. The first call lasted only briefly. "The second time he simply hung up." A day later Hujairi was dead.
Dozens of persons have disappeared since last week, when in the capital Manama the symbol of the protest movement, Pearl Square, was cleared by force. The Shiite Wefaq party, which won 18 out of 40 seats in the parliamentary elections last October, has compiled a list of 95 individuals who are missing. At least some of the missing persons are apparently in government custody.
Foreign medical personnel confirmed accounts of relatives who said soldiers had come to the hospitals and carted wounded people away. Of the patients admitted to Salmaniya Hospital, charges are being weighed against 22 of them, a government spokeswoman has now conceded. According to her, twelve patients have been transferred to military hospitals.
"He was beaten to death by Sunnis loyal to the king"
What happened in those hours between Hujairi's disappearance and the finding of his body? That's unclear, as are the exact circumstances of his death. After prayer an acquaintance supposedly asked him to repair his satellite receiver, says a cousin of Hujairi. The acquaintance then drove the two of them to Awali, a few kilometers away. The trail leads no further. His brother called the police and did a systematic search of the neighborhood — with no success. On Sunday passers-by discovered the 38-year-old's corpse on a footpath outside Awali. The interior ministry has ordered an investigation. But the family is already certain of who the perpetrators were. A brother of Hujairi says that Sunnis loyal to the king "beat him to death."
Since the unrest of recent weeks, on the surface it appears that calm has returned to Bahrain. "The calm of a cemetery," says one foreign observer. A state of emergency is in effect; armored vehicles are stationed at key intersections. Security forces pursue the opposition with grim severity, particularly at night, when parts of the country are under curfew. Opponents of the government report raids, arrests, and threatening phone calls. Since security forces seized control of Salmaniya Hospital, the country's largest clinic, Shiite caregivers say they are afraid to come to work.
On the Sunni side, accusations against Shiites are no less serious. A Sunni doctor says that at Salmaniya Hospital, regime opponents were refusing to treat Sunni patients. "The government had to put a stop to the fuss," he says. Rumors circulate about attacks on Sunnis. State-controlled media are full of reports about Shiite gangs, who allegedly beat workers from South Asia so severely they had to be hospitalized, ran over a policeman, and killed a taxi driver.
Theocracy as in Iran?
What started out in mid-February as peaceful protest of a youth movement starved for democracy has since then dug a deep chasm between Shiites and Sunnis. Friendships that had lasted many years have been spoiled, business relationships are suffering, neither side trusts the other anymore. The atmosphere is tense.
"I don't recognize my country anymore," says a Sunni businessman who prefers to remain anonymous. "We'd already had a number of Shiite rebellions. But things never went so far that our living together peacefully was endangered." Like many Sunnis, he is of the opinion that the youth movement went too far in calling for the Sunni monarchy to be abolished. "We need reforms, no question about that," he says. "But these people want a theocracy like in Iran." The king therefore had no other choice but to deploy the military.
Many Sunnis paint a bleak picture of ending up as serfs under Iranian ayatollahs. In European diplomatic circles such accusations are viewed as overblown. In reality, the aim of most Shiites — who constitute the majority in the small island nation, yet never make it into the upper ranks of the security forces or the corridors of power — is an end to discrimination. They demand a constitutional monarchy modelled after Great Britain's. However, the ruling family's hard line has lent momentum to those who demand an end to the monarchy itself.
Among diplomats, the hope is that tempers will subside and both sides will find a way out of the impasse. At the moment it looks like that is precisely what won't be happening. The moderate opposition declines to participate in talks while staring into the muzzles of rifles in the hands of troops from neighboring countries.
Since mid-February the conflict has cost the lives of at least 20 victims on both sides. The Shiites are currently getting around a ban on gatherings by turning funerals into protest rallies. "They want to make Bahrain into a second Karbala," says the brother of the murder victim Hujairi. "We will not permit that." The battle of Karbala in the year 680, where Imam Hussein was defeated by a numerically stronger Sunni force, is for Shiites the prototypical example of Sunni oppression. But it is also a symbol of the right and duty to rebel.