Bahrain | GlobalPost

Since March 17, security forces began targeting nearly everyone associated with the protests. Arbitrary arrests are central to the rights crisis in Bahrain today.

Al Wefaq's secretary-general, Sheik Ali Salman, told a rally on Friday that it would not compromise on demands including the release of political prisoners and a democratic government.

The demonstration in Manama comes two days after authorities lifted martial law, which had been imposed after tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in March.

The king said Bahrain would begin a “comprehensive, serious dialogue, without conditions” in July

The Gulf Cooperation Council, which is kind of like ASEAN but is looking more and more like NATO, is thinking about increasing the number of troops in the group’s joint military force, which is known, rather apocalyptically, as the Peninsula Shield.

The GCC said bolstering the ranks of this shared army would help the countries that belong to it — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar —defend themselves from “external” threats.

Like what? Terrorists. Pirates, maybe?

How about its own people? Will a larger shared military be used to more effectively douse popular uprisings like the one that took place in Bahrain in March?

Just as a protest movement In Bahrain was gaining the kind of momentum that toppled Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak the month before, the Gulf Cooperation Council issued a mandate to send almost 2,000 troops into the tiny little country to protect institutions belonging to Bahrain’s government.

It was a show of force that made its point clearly — The Bahraini people marching in the streets were up against something much larger than its own government.

The speech was timed so that everyone in the Middle East and North Africa could hear it. So what did they think?

MANAMA — Bahrain, which has been a base for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet for more than half a century, has become an outsized flashpoint in Saudi-U.S. relations.

First the US abandoned Mubarak, in the Saudis' eyes. Now, Yemen is staggering under popular revolt and the US is calling for the ouster of yet another friend, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

MANAMA — Bahrain’s protest movement is in tatters. Many of its leaders and activists are imprisoned and its followers, most of them Shiite, subject to harsh repression.

MANAMA — The Sunni-led government’s violent suppression of a once euphoric protest movement appears both pitiless and petty.

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