One year ago, Arab Spring protests briefly gripped the tiny Gulf country of Bahrain. Just as quickly, however, they were crushed. SPIEGEL spoke with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa about the need for reform, whether democracy is right for his country and what exactly a king does.
It was exactly one year ago, on Feb. 14, 2011, that a few thousand demonstrators gathered in the Bahraini capital of Manama to demand more popular participation and political reform. It was the first sign that the “Arab Spring” was spreading to the Gulf region. From the very beginning of the protests, Bahraini security personnel used violence in their attempts to clear demonstrators from Pearl Square.
On March 15, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa announced a state of emergency. One day earlier, tanks from the Peninsula Shield Force, a kind of rapid reaction force assembled by the six Gulf monarchies, had rolled into Bahrain from Saudi Arabia. In no other place were Arab Spring protests so rapidly and thoroughly crushed as they were in Bahrain. Forty-six people, including police officers and immigrants, died in the demonstrations, five of them as a result of torture. Some 3,000 people were arrested and 700 of them were still behind bars at the end of the year. More than 4,000 people lost their jobs as a result of participating in the demonstrations.