Saudi police open fire on civilians as protests gain momentum
Source: independent
Pro-democracy protests which swept the Arab world
earlier in the year have erupted in eastern Saudi Arabia over the past
three days, with police opening fire with live rounds and many people
injured, opposition activists say.
Saudi Arabia last night confirmed there had been fighting in the region and
that 11 security personnel and three civilians had been injured in al-Qatif,
a large Shia city on the coast of Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province.
The opposition say that 24 men and three women were wounded on Monday night
and taken to al-Qatif hospital.
The Independent has been given exclusive details of how the protests
developed by local activists. They say unrest began on Sunday in
al-Awamiyah, a Shia town of about 25,000 people, when Saudi security forces
arrested a 60-year-old man to force his son – an activist – to give himself
up.
Ahmad Al-Rayah, a spokesman for the Society for Development and Change, which
is based in the area, said that most of the civilians hit were wounded in
heavy firing by the security forces after 8pm on Monday. "A crowd was
throwing stones at a police station and when a local human rights activist
named Fadel al-Mansaf went into the station to talk to them and was arrested,"
he said.
Mr Rayah added that "there have been protests for democracy and civil
rights since February, but in the past the police fired into the air. This
is the first time they have fired live rounds directly into a crowd."
He could not confirm if anybody had been killed.
The Shia of Saudi Arabia, mostly concentrated in the Eastern Province, have
long complained of discrimination against them by the fundamentalist Sunni
Saudi monarchy. The Wahhabi variant of Islam, the dominant faith in Saudi
Arabia, holds Shia to be heretics who are not real Muslims.
The US, as the main ally of Saudi Arabia, is likely to be alarmed by the
spread of pro-democracy protests to the Kingdom and particularly to that
part of it which contains the largest oil reserves in the world. The Saudi
Shia have been angered at the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in
Bahrain since March, with many protesters jailed, tortured or killed,
according Western human rights organisations.
Hamza al-Hassan, an opponent of the Saudi government from Eastern Province
living in Britain, predicted that protests would spread to more cities. "I
am frightened when I see video film of events because most people in this
region have guns brought in over the years from Iraq and Yemen and will use
them [against government security men]," he said. He gave a slightly
different account of the start of the riots in al-Awamiyah, saying that two
elderly men had been arrested by the security forces, one of whom had a
heart attack.
"Since September there has been a huge presence of Saudi security forces
in al-Qatif and all other Shia centres," he said. Al-Qatif was the
scene of similar protests in March, which were swiftly quashed by security
forces.
The Saudi statement alleges that the recent protests were stirred up by an
unnamed foreign power, by which it invariably means Iran. The interior
ministry was quoted on Saudi television as saying that "a foreign
country is trying to undermine national security by inciting strife in
al-Qatif". Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the western Gulf
have traditionally blamed Iran for any unrest by local Shia, but have never
produced any evidence other than to point at sympathetic treatment of the
demonstrations on Iranian television.
The 20 doctors in Bahrain sentenced to up to 15 years in prison last week say
their interrogators tortured them repeatedly to force them to make false
confessions that Iran was behind the protests. The counter-revolution in
Bahrain was heralded by the arrival of a 1,500-strong Saudi-led military
force, which is still there.
Mr Rayah, who flew from Saudi Arabia to Beirut to be free to talk about the
protests, said: "People want a change and a new way of living." He
said that, in particular, they were demanding a constitution and a free
assembly for the Eastern Province. He also wanted the Society for
Development and Change legally registered.
Mr Hassan blamed the protests on the fact "that there has been no
political breakthrough".
"I am from the city of al-Safwa, which is very close to al-Awamiyah, and
there is very high unemployment in both," he said. Some 70 per cent of
the Saudi population is believed to be under 30 and many do not have jobs. "We
were hoping for municipal reforms and regional elections for years but we
got nothing."
He said reforms reported in the Western media were meaningless and that only a
few Saudis had bothered to vote in the most recent local elections because
local councils had no power.
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