Bahrain And An Interview With Finian Cunningham
By Timothy V. Gatto
06 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
The pro-democracy movement in Bahrain that was met with beatings and outright murder by the Bahraini monarchy has been declared “over, with a return to normalcy” by the government. Continuing with its autocratic ways, they continue to “disappear” people that led to the pro-democracy movement.
Even though the western press covers this as ‘sectarian strife”, the movement has both Shia and Sunni Bahraini’s involved. The “Iranian involvement” hinted at by Barack Obama hasn’t been seen from reports of journalists on the ground in that tiny country that houses the U.S. 5th Fleet.
The promises of a dialogue with the protestors are a “hollow empty restricted dialogue” according to Finian Cunningham, a journalist who is currently in Bahrain. He says that “The opposition will not be welcomed into the dialogue”. Since over 200,000 Bahrainis’ took to the streets to protest strict autocratic rule, out of a nation of only 800,000, that is a third of the country! The west is trying to cast the democracy movement in Bahrain as a sectarian issue between the minority Sunni’s which rule the nation, and the majority Shia. While the movement does have a Shia majority, that is only because 65% of the population are Shia.
Americans should be asking their government what their policies towards democracies and fledgling democratic movements in the Middle East really are. We are practically involved in a full-fledged war in Libya, supporting a movement that we know nothing of. Meanwhile we are carrying out military missions that are quite beyond the scope of what the UN approved (meanwhile Congress wasn’t even consulted, and that is an impeachable offense). The World body gave the U.S. and the other NATO powers no authorization to target Gadhafi family homes or to escalate the violence by launching military missions against the Libyan government troops. We seem to be a nation gone mad with military power.
It seems as if Obama was cut from the same cloth as George W. Bush. When the American people voted for “change”, that wasn’t a plea to change the venue of the latest war. With an economy in shambles and a nation that is on the balls of its ass, should we be spending money trying to remake the world into our image?
Only time will tell.
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