Why a hunger strike for Bahrain?
Why Bahrain? is such a good question, and it's a question I asked, and continue to ask myself. After all, when I met Fatima (the wise and lovely organizer of this "event") and first heard about the situation in Bahrain, I would not have been able to locate the country on a map. I live and work in completely different parts of the world, and do not speak the language of Bahrain.
What I can say is that I get personally overwhelmed by political situations that do not seem clear to me. Sometimes getting more information makes the story less clear to me, and sometimes getting information makes the story more clear to me.
The situation in Bahrain falls into the latter category for me, so I was excited by the opportunity presented by this hunger chain to be a part of the information dissemination.
Mark has thoughtfully and eloquently summed up the situation in his post. In short, democracy protests have been going on since February in Bahrain, and the Bahraini monarchy is using tremendous measures to ignore the demands of the movement, which is comprised of politicians from opposition parties, and men and women from different religious sects, all of whom are unified in their call for serious changes in governance.
Since this began and up until today, protesters are being jailed and sentenced with the death penalty, doctors who are treating protesters arrested (and sometimes disappearing), and excessive force measures are being used to quell peaceful protests, such as the use of electric shock in forcing protesters to publicly apologize for their opinion.
So the story seems clear, no? It gets even clearer when you consider the role of the US. There is a pending $53 million arms deal with the Bahraini government, and the US government has its 5th naval fleet stationed in Bahrain. So I like what Mark said: its not involvement or not, we are already involved.
Given this straightforward story, I feel the need to be part of the movement calling attention to the situation, and saying, unequivocally, that we should not be selling arms to a government that is violently repressing its people.
There is no need to allow the US government to act as a moral authority here, when they say they are "delaying" the arms sale for the good of the Bahrainis. We all know the situation with Iran is tense right now, and the US ought not act to please its allies with the motivation of preserving the ability to target Iran from allied soil. And it ought not act with the concern over global oil prices in mind. The US government cannot claim to be a moral authority here, because we have been involved, and we continue to be involved in making life less safe for those living in Bahrain.
This is a time when the US government needs to not filter statements about human rights simply because they are not in our best interest. And it needs to not filter actions about human rights simply because they are not in our best interest.
Though I wish one person's (myself!) hunger strike could change a great deal, the neat part is that it won't.
I agree with Mark about the individual nature of a fast. I too am attracted to the idea of altering my material and physical environment in order focus intently on an issue I would like to ponder. But I am also drawn to the inherent unity of this "event"--as its very premise as a "chain" has made this a collective statement.
The fact that there are people from more than one country involved in this is part of the draw for me. I can be connected to someone in Bahrain, or in Ireland, without touching them with my hand, because we have made a unified choice about altering something as personal as one's own physical nourishment. So what we do to ourselves can potentially have an affect on what we do to each other.
This message sounds like the moral at the end of a children's book, and I think that's why I like it.
I am interested to continue to reflect on this idea as time goes on. Please share thoughts and ideas!
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