Page 108 - Records of Bahrain (5) (i)_Neat

96 Records oj Bahrain

5.
9. On the 29th January His Excellency Shaikh Sir Hamad
replied in a letter to the eight petitioners in reasonable terras,
but they affected to disbelieve his good faith and resorted to

organized agitation, and he granted them an interview on tho 31st
January.

10. Either during the course of the agitation or at the inter­
view, the Baharinah leaders pressed their original demands in quite

unreasonable forms and also put forward a number of further demands
of an extravagant nature. They demanded that tho whole personnel
i
of the Committee to draw up the proposed Code should be Baharinah;
that an individual, * Abdul Kerim son of the late Hajji Salman,
should be made head of the Police; that they should have a majority
on the Baladiyahs; that the Majlis al Tujjarah, which forms and an

integral part of the Courts of Justice, should be elected instead
of appointed; and that a third ShiTah Qadhl should be appointed.
They claimed that the Baharinah were not being employed by The
Bahrain Petroleum Company Limited and not enough employed by the

Bahrain Government. They threatened to destroy the bridges on the
road to the Oil Field and to shut up their shops, and one of the
leaders even went so far as to say he would leave the Island (this
is regarded locally as the last word in threats). Though some of

their demands v/ere reasonable, others were extravagant and foolish,
and the leaders showed themselves ignorant, boorish and lacking in
any sense of proportion. His Excellency Shaikh Sir Hamad, who is
usually most peace-loving, was angered by their impertinence of
demeanour and by their wild demands and threats which, he considered

(as v/as indeed true), meant handing over the administration to them,
and rebuked them sternly. The situation was sufficiently uncertain
for His Excellency Shaikh Sir Hamad to send his family to Muharraq
/and
*
Actually the question of training him was under active consider­
ation, but such a demand from a section of the population is
impossible to concede.