Is the House of Saud Orchestrating the Atrocities in Bahrain?

America's original Best Friend Forever in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, may be behind the violent repression of Shia dissent in neighbouring Bahrain.  But veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk says it's a move that reeks of desperation by the Sunni run Gulf States.   Reporting from Bahrain, Fisk says the Sunni trump card - armed violence - may be faltering.   Bahrain's Shia majority seem to be losing their fear of their Sunni king and his armed thugs, the police and army.

Rumours burned like petrol in Bahrain yesterday and many medical staff were insisting that up to 60 corpses had been taken from Pearl Square on Thursday morning and that police were seen by crowds loading bodies into three refrigerated trucks. One man showed me a mobile phone snapshot in which the three trucks could be seen clearly, parked behind several army armoured personnel carriers. According to other demonstrators, the vehicles, which bore Saudi registration plates, were later seen on the highway to Saudi Arabia. It is easy to dismiss such ghoulish stories, but I found one man – another male nurse at the hospital who works under the umbrella of the United Nations – who told me that an American colleague, he gave his name as "  Jarrod",   had videotaped the bodies being put into the trucks but was then arrested by the police and had not been seen since.

Why has the royal family of Bahrain allowed its soldiers to open fire at peaceful demonstrators? To turn on Bahraini civilians with live fire within 24 hours of the earlier killings seems like an act of lunacy.

But the heavy hand of Saudi Arabia may not be far away. The Saudis are fearful that the demonstrations in Manama and the towns of Bahrain will light equally provocative fires in the east of their kingdom, where a substantial Shia minority lives around Dhahran and other towns close to the Kuwaiti border. Their desire to see the Shia of Bahrain crushed as quickly as possible was made very clear at Thursday's Gulf summit here, with all the sheikhs and princes agreeing that there would be no Egyptian-style revolution in a kingdom which has a Shia majority of perhaps 70 per cent and a small Sunni minority which includes the royal family.

Yet Egypt's revolution is on everyone's lips in Bahrain. Outside the hospital, they were shouting: "  The people want to topple the minister,"  a slight variation of the chant of the Egyptians who got rid of Mubarak, "  The people want to topple the government."

And many in the crowd said – as the Egyptians said – that they had lost their fear of the authorities, of the police and army.

Washington appears intent on sitting this one out.  Then again the Obama administration didn't really intervene with Mubarak until the Egyptian dictator's fate was pretty much decided.  But Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait aren't Egypt, they're oil states and American self-interest may ultimately eclipse any humanitarian qualms about repression of troublesome Shiites.  As The New York Times reports, Washington has been indifferent to recent complaints of human rights abuses,  "  in a kingdom that is an economic and military hub in the Persian Gulf."

 " In a January 2010 cable, the American Embassy in Bahrain criticized the human rights group Freedom House for downgrading Bahrain’s rating from “partly free” to “not free” in its global survey of political rights and civil liberties. The cable asserted that Freedom House had been successfully lobbied by a radical Shiite movement, known as Haq, which rejects the government’s reform efforts.


Another cable passed along doubts about a Human Rights Watch report that said the police were using torture in interrogations — saying it relied heavily on allegations made by members of the same group — though the embassy did urge the Bahraini authorities to undertake a “timely and credible” investigation.

“The embassy was feeding this happy talk for years,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. “Bahrain was moving on a genuine reform path for several years, but it did a significant U-turn in the last year, and I think the U.S. government was well behind the curve.”