From Bahrain, a Two-Sentence Description of Authoritarian Evil — In Memoriam, Mahmoud Makki Abutaki and the Other Fallen

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 February 2011

 

 

Than this, no more need be said

 

In regard to the political unrest in the monarchy of Bahrain, New York Times reporters Michael Slackman and Nadim Audi recorded two sentences that capture the inhumanity of political evil and its perversion of the law enforcement function:

 

But for those who were in Pearl Square in the early morning hours, when the police opened fired without warning on thousands who were sleeping there, it was a day of shock and disbelief. Many of the hundreds taken to the hospital were wounded by shotgun blasts, doctors said, their bodies speckled with pellets or bruised by rubber bullets or police clubs.

 

In the morning, there were three bodies already stretched out on metal tables in the morgue at Salmaniya Medical Complex: Ali Mansour Ahmed Khudair, 53, dead, with 91 pellets pulled from his chest and side; Isa Abd Hassan, 55, dead, his head split in half; Mahmoud Makki Abutaki, 22, dead, 200 pellets of birdshot pulled from his chest and arms.

 

In the bloodstained morgue, Ahmed Abutaki, 29, held his younger brother’s cold hand, stroking his arm and tearfully recalling the last time they spoke Wednesday night.

 

“He said, ‘This is my chance, to have a say, so that maybe our country will do something for us,”’ he recalled of his brother’s decision to camp out in Pearl Square.

 

“My country did do something; it killed him.”

 

© 2011 Michael Slackman, Bahrain Army in Charge After Police Shoot Protesters, New York Times (17 February 2011) (paragraph split, italics added)

 

 

 

Another description of events in Bahrain

Nicholas Kristof, Brutal Crackdown in Moderate Bahrain, New York Times (17 February 2011)

 

Mr. Kristof concludes, “when a king opens fire on his people, he no longer deserves to be ruler.”

 

 

 

You will not find me among those who support the American Presidency’s historically continual self-interested nurturing of dictators and totalitarian states

 

Bahrain is home to the United States’ Fifth Fleet.  We have self-interested reasons not to encourage unrest there.

 

But — if Americans will not willingly endure the geopolitical discomforts that other peoples’ freedom may cause us, who are we?

 

What claim to comparative political nobility will we continue to hold?

 

One would like to think that the Fifth Fleet’s appearance anywhere signifies thoughts of an expanded freedom, not a tightened oppression.