MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of jubilant protesters surged back into the symbolic heart of Bahrain on Saturday as the government withdrew its security forces, calling for calm after days of violent crackdowns.
It was a remarkable turn after a week of protests that had shifted by the hour between joy and fear, euphoric surges of people power followed by bloody military crackdowns, as the monarchy struggled to calibrate a response to an uprising whose counterparts have toppled other governments in the region.
“All Bahrain is happy today,” said Jasim al-Haiki, 24, as he cheered the crowds in the central Pearl Square, aflutter with Bahraini flags. “These are Bahrainis. They do what they say they will do!”
The shift in this tiny Persian Gulf nation, a strategic American ally, was at least a temporary victory for the Shiite protesters, who had rejected a call to negotiate from Bahrain’s Sunni monarch until the authorities pulled the military off the streets.
But the events here were being watched with trepidation across the region, where an extraordinary few weeks of antigovernment protests have ricocheted from northwest Africa to the Middle East.
In Bahrain, the day started out with a lull, as both sides appeared to have been rattled by the violence of the past week in which at least seven people were killed. The leaders of the major opposition parties called off the protests for Saturday, telling the public to stay home in an effort to lower the temperature.
But in what appeared to be a measure of who controls the movement now, the people ignored their ostensible leaders. Marchers set out from villages and the city center and by midday converged on Pearl Square.
The police met them with tear gas and rubber bullets. Young men collapsed in the road and others ran for cover, but people kept coming.
The police fired again. Then the government blinked, perhaps sensing that the only way to calm a spiral of violence that claimed more lives with each passing day was to cede the square to the protesters.
The police left so suddenly and so completely that it took a minute for the protesters, still rubbing the tear gas out of their eyes, to realize they once again controlled the square.
By early evening, tens of thousands of people were pouring into the square, waving flags, some dropping to the ground to pray, and others shouting congratulations to each other. Marching past pools of blood on the road, they savored a moment of bittersweet jubilation, a mix of disbelief and sheer joy that they had prevailed, tempered with sadness for those who had been killed.
“Of course we are happy,” said Hassan al-Freidi, 53, after joining the great sea of people that kept growing into the night. “But I want to tell you: not yet. Today we’re mourning and honoring our martyrs; it is about joy and mourning. But it’ll only be about joy when we get our rights. And I know this day will come. Bullets do not scare us.”
The protesters won the battle Saturday, although it was still not clear where it would all lead. The government had relinquished the square before, on Wednesday, only to return with a deadly assault Thursday. On Friday, the army opened fire on a group of about 1,000 peaceful demonstrators trying to walk into the square. The varying responses appeared to reflect an inner turmoil within the government as it grapples with the uprising.
The confrontation Friday, with the Bahrain Defense Forces firing on Bahraini citizens, seemed to be the shock that forced a change in the government’s approach.
On Saturday, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the king’s son and deputy commander of the military, ordered troops to leave the square.
“I stress, once more, that our duty is to preserve security and stability, to ensure that there is no discord and that the situation does not worsen,” he said in a statement on Bahrain’s national news agency.
But if the killings had softened the government’s posture, they hardened the mood of the protesters.
The withdrawal of forces from Pearl Square had been the opposition’s precondition for negotiations, but by Saturday the line appeared to have shifted. A movement that began as a call for immediate democratic reform seemed set on nothing less than the removal of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, or at least, his uncle, the prime minister.
The longstanding root of the tension here is the sectarian divide, a Sunni royal family ruling over a Shiite majority. For years, the Shiites have complained of discrimination in housing, employment, education and governance.
That rift makes Bahrain, an archipelago about the size of Fort Worth, Texas, a potential regional powder keg. The contest for influence in the Middle East has pitted largely Sunni Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States, against largely Shiite Iran. A critical Saudi ally in that struggle was President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was ousted by a popular revolt this month, leaving Egypt’s future leadership and loyalties an open question.
Moreover, Bahrain sits just off Saudi Arabia’s east coast, connected by a bridge to the mainland. On the Saudi side lies Eastern Province, an oil-rich region with a Shiite majority that has an affinity for its fellow Shiites in Bahrain and no great love for Riyadh.
To the north, Kuwait too has a Sunni monarchy and a restive Shiite population. The big fear among Sunni governments is that Bahrain, once part of Persia, could become another Iran, where the Islamic revolution of 1979 produced a bellicose Shiite theocracy.
But the Shiite protesters here insist their revolt is secular and democratic.
“If I die today and later, because of us, it becomes a constitutional monarchy, I will have died helping my children,” Fadel Abdul Ali, 31, said Saturday as he helped make flag for the demonstrators. “I am not afraid to die.”
About the Author
