Bahraini protesters gather at Pearl Roundabout on February 19 / AP
An English instructor living in Manama saw a would-be revolution brutally repressed outside his window, so he tried to document it on video, and that’s when his troubles started
Note: These are short excerpt from the story, read it in full here
We moved to another part of the car park, where I filmed the protesters hurrying away to their cars from the roundabout toward the direction of Dana Mall. The police were chasing them and still firing teargas. A few defiant protesters tried to stand their ground but were overcome by the fumes and eventually retreated. Soon the fumes wafted up to our position and our eyes began to sting, forcing us to return to our apartment.
Bahraini protesters gather at Pearl Roundabout on February 19 / AP
An English instructor living in Manama saw a would-be revolution brutally repressed outside his window, so he tried to document it on video, and that’s when his troubles started
Note: These are short excerpt from the story, read it in full here
We moved to another part of the car park, where I filmed the protesters hurrying away to their cars from the roundabout toward the direction of Dana Mall. The police were chasing them and still firing teargas. A few defiant protesters tried to stand their ground but were overcome by the fumes and eventually retreated. Soon the fumes wafted up to our position and our eyes began to sting, forcing us to return to our apartment. It was my first ever contact with tear gas and I don’t recommend it. Closing and rubbing your eyes has no effect; the only thing to do is seek refuge.
Back in our apartment, as I uploaded the video footage to YouTube, I had to wonder, Why did I do this? Only later did I realize the reason: I was mightily pissed off. I had not expected such actions from a Bahraini government that I had been led to believe was focused on progress, with a vision for the future. The tactics I saw were as is from the communist Europe I had heard about as a kid. It confirmed what I briefly saw on Valentine’s Day: that the security forces looked upon the protesters as something that needed to be subdued as quickly as possible, with little regard for what it took.
“We know everything about you”
One of the men broke away from the police and ran. We watched, helpless, as a policeman raised his shotgun and calmly shot him in the back. The man disappeared behind a tree so we could not see what had happened to him. The whole exercise looked like it was simply an elaborate trap. Remove the army, allow the people back in, and then send in the police to cut them down. Still recording, I began planning to show the world what I had seen, when a man who I had never seen before came up to me and asked me to stop filming. He was well-dressed and held a walkie-talkie. Angered by what I had seen and upset at being told what to do, I told the man that I had ever right to keep filming, using quite a few words beginning with “f”. He appeared shocked by my outburst (as was my wife) and immediately spoke Arabic into his walkie-talkie and hurried away. I took that as my cue to leave and, after a quick look at the roundabout (the police were now leaving, being taunted by the protesters as they did so) we went to the relative safety of our apartment.
My students had warned me about the dangers of being arrested in Bahrain. The police here, they told me, are not like the police in Australia. Now, some even advised me to leave our apartment. But we stayed and, soon, heard men’s voices outside our door followed by a loud knock. Unsure how they had figured out who we were and located us so quickly, I refused to answer the door. I had done nothing wrong (except some swearing) and they could knock all day for all I cared. Eventually it stopped and the voices left our floor. My wife and I were whispering about what we should do when my landlord called. She told me that I was in big trouble and I needed to go and see the security men immediately. She warned, ominously, that Bahraini prisons were not nice places to be.
My wife and I found the walkie-talkie man in the parking garage talking to two other men. I immediately apologized for my outburst earlier, when the largest of the men introduced himself as the “security manager for the apartment complex.” I had never seen any of the three men in the 14 months that I had been living there. The security manager told me that I had put him in a very difficult position by filming the protests because he was under orders from the Bahrain Ministry of Interior (responsible for law enforcement and public safety) not to allow any resident from the apartments to document anything taking place around us. He said that if it was discovered that a lot of filming had taken place he had the right to go through every apartment searching for cameras and inspecting computers — and he did not want to do that. He said the best thing I could do was to delete all the film I had taken. I told him that I had already uploaded it all to YouTube; the walkie-talkie man said, “Oh no.”
The security manager said I needed to assure him that I would stop videotaping. “We know you work for the Polytechnic as an English teacher, we know your CPR [Civil Personal Record] number, we know that is your car over there, we know everything about you,” he said. I knew he was trying to intimidate me; most of this information would have been given to him by my landlady and the guy who operates the boom gate on the car park. But I had no wish to make things any worse and so I agreed to delete my videos and not to take any more.
Looking back, I am now convinced that the three men I spoke to were all connected to the Ministry of Interior. I only ever saw the third member of the trio again after this day. I am sure that my filming was either noticed by the Ministry staff or was referred to them and the men were sent to the apartment towers to put a stop to it.
The walkie-talkie man, at his insistence, accompanied me and my wife back to our apartment and watched as I sat at the dining table and deleted all the video I had downloaded onto my computer and then did the same in front of him with my camcorder. He asked if I had any other film stored anywhere else, to which I said “no” and then I offered to give him my camcorder to prove I would stop filming. He took it and said I could collect it from him, probably in a few weeks. He was polite the whole time and my wife indeed was able to get our camcorder back.
This excerpt is from part 2
Sacked from job because of taking videos and commenting on Facebook
The meeting was direct and to the point. The Ministry of Education knew all about me, knew all about my videos and my comments on Facebook. It turns out that my “friends” had kept copies of my comments and these were presented to me, although none of them could seriously be used to show that I had been critical of the government in any way. I knew that my number was up and there was nothing I could do. To his credit, John Scott had insisted that I not front the other investigative committee as I was the only expat under investigation. I told him that I did not hold him responsible for what was taking place in any way, for which he thanked me. It was also obvious that the Ministry wanted me out immediately (as had happened to the students) but John said he would try to see if he could arrange for me to finish up later. I appreciated this as I needed to assess my students before their classes finished in four weeks. We later agreed that I could finish on 30th June, which would also give me time to sell my car and arrange to pack and send all our belongings to Thailand. I was asked to please stop making any comments at all on Facebook, to which I agreed. I did not want the Polytechnic or anyone from management to get into trouble by anything I did because they had all treated me so well in the past.
I remember walking back to my office with very mixed thoughts. I had been sacked from my job, not because of my teaching ability or for any normal disciplinary reason, but because I had taken videos and made comments on Facebook. I now had to think of my future after June 30th, look for a new job somewhere and tell my wife that we had to leave our beautiful apartment and the life we enjoyed together in Bahrain. On the other hand, I felt a huge sense of relief that I had been freed from having to work for the Bahraini government and that I would no longer have any association with them whatsoever.
This excerpt is from part 4
Read the full story here
