Bahrain police shoot 17-year-old protester dead in new wave of Shia unrest
Police in Bahrain shot dead a teenage protester as fresh unrest swept the island kingdom 19 months after Shia protesters first took to the streets early in the Arab Spring.
Bahraini villagers shout anti-government slogans toward riot police who were cordoning off the site where the youth was killed. Photo: Hasan Jamali/AP
By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent
7:02PM BST 29 Sep 2012
As so often in Bahrain, the circumstances surrounding the death of Ali Hussein al-Ni'ma were fiercely contested. Opposition activists said that the 17-year-old schoolboy died in the early hours of Saturday after police opened fire with buckshot on a peaceful demonstration in the Shia village of Sadad.
"The teenager sustained severe injuries and was left to bleed to death in police custody," the Shia opposition party al-Wefaq claimed in a statement. But the interior ministry claimed that Ni'ma was part of a large group that attacked a police patrol with firebombs and iron bars, leaving officers no choice but to respond with force.
"The police responded using only necessary and proportionate force to restore order," it said. The turmoil in Bahrain has been overshadowed by the much deadlier crisis in Syria, but in some ways the two countries are a mirror image of each other.
Syria's uprising has been spearheaded by Sunnis seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam. But in Bahrain it is the long-marginalised Shia majority that has turned on its Sunni rulers, the Al Khalifa royal family.
The international reaction to the two uprisings, the only significant insurrections in the Arab world yet to overthrow incumbent rulers, could not be more different. While Western leaders have demanded Mr Assad's resignation and openly supported his opponents, their criticism of Bahrain's leaders has been far more muted.
Detractors accuse the West of behaving cynically because Bahrain houses an American naval base and is an important ally against Iran, whose Shia leadership sympathises with the protesters. The accusations may be true, but the response of Bahrain's rulers to the uprising has undoubtedly been less vengeful than in Syria.
King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has promised reforms in the wake of an independent commission of enquiry that - unusually for the Arab world - heavily criticised the government's response to the protests. Since the bloody opening stages of the uprising, when police reinforced by Saudi troops opened fire on unarmed protesters in the capital Manama, protests in Shia villages around the city have mostly been tolerated.
Demonstrators, segregated into male and female columns, have held weekly marches and one staged on Friday, hours before Ni'ma was killed in a separate incident, passed off unmolested by the police. While most protesters have been peaceful, however, small groups on the fringes of the uprising have regularly taken to launching hit-and-run firebomb attacks on police vehicles.
More than 700 policemen have been injured since the protests first erupted in February last year, according to the government. The protest movement has lost sympathy as a result.
Even so, the regime stands accused of being more repressive and violent than it portrays itself to be.
Buckshot is increasingly being used against protesters, activists say, and Ni'ma was at least the second minor to be killed this way since the Formula One Grand Prix was controversially staged in the kingdom last April. More than 60 people have been killed since the uprising started, according to Amnesty International.
Rather than answer opposition grievances, the regime has embarked on a strategy to contain the uprising, allowing protests to continue largely invisibly in Shia villages but ensuring they never reach the capital, the activists complain.
Nor, they say, has there been much sign of the promised reforms. Instead, the most prominent protest leader, Nabeel Rajab, was jailed for three years last month on charges of leading unsanctioned demonstrations.
Dozens of other activists, including women, remain behind bars, some of them serving life sentences - evidence, the protesters say, that the regime is more committed to its own survival than to instituting genuine democracy in the kingdom.
