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Bahrain pulled back from "sectarian abyss": FM
[Al Arabiya] Police action was necessary to pull Bahrain back from the "brink of a sectarian abyss," the Gulf Arab state's Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa said on Thursday.Three people were killed and 231 maimed when police attacked anti-government protesters. The festivities came after thousands of overwhelmingly Shi'ite protesters took to Bahrain's streets demanding more say in the running of the kingdom. After riot police had cleared protesters from Pearl square before dawn, soldiers in at least 40 trucks and armored vehicles took control of the road junction demonstrators had tried to turn into a protest base like Cairo's Tahrir Square. The crackdown by the Bahraini authorities appeared designed to snuff out the protests before they could gather momentum, unlike the sustained unrest that unseated Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. The main Shiite bloc Wefaq, which holds 17 of parliament's 40 seats, announced withdrawing from the parliament in protest. "We feel there was a decision to hurt people," MP Ibrahim Mattar said. Abdul Jalil Khalil, who heads Wefaq's bloc in parliament, said his group and six others had demanded that the government resign and make way for a new national unity government. "This is an atrocity," he said of the bloodshed. "Whoever took the decision to attack the protest was aiming to kill." Al-Wefaq, or the Islamic National Accord Association, has said it would not end its boycott until demands are met to transform Bahrain "into a constitutional monarchy where the people would be the main source of power." "The government should be elected by the people who would have the right to hold it accountable," its secretary-general Sheikh Ali Salman said on Wednesday. A 2001 referendum transformed Bahrain from an emirate into a constitutional monarchy and led to elections in 2002 for the first time since parliament was scrapped in 1975. The prime minister is named by the king, while the opposition wants the premier to be elected. Posted by: Fred 2011-02-18 |
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