Page 108 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat
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the oil fields, were halted by the police. We made the men get out and
found that every one of them was armed with an iron bar or a hammer or
some sort of instrument, with which, they said, they would defend them
selves against the Shias. We removed their ‘arms’ and let the buses go on
at ten-minute intervals to prevent a large number of men arriving together.
My next port of call was Muharraq, where I found crowds of Sunnis
in the streets waiting for any Shias who might appear. While I was Twenty
dispersing the crowd with a few policemen I got a message that there was
trouble in Arad, an isolated little Shia village on Muharraq island. I
The practice of politics in die East may be defined by one
arrived to find that my two brother judges, Shaikh Daij and Shaikh Ali
word—dissimulation.
bin Ahmed, with some police, had got there first. A mob of young Arabs
Benjamin Disraeli. 1804-1881
had attacked the village, beaten and stoned many of the people and
injured two or three men with a shotgun. A number of men had been
arrested, though most of them got away into the date-gardens when they hnplME telephone rang stridently. I picked it up. A voice said, in Arabic,
sighted the police in the distance. The sun had set by the time I got back ‘Take care, Bclgrave, the/ arc planning to shoot you.’ ‘Nonsense,’
to Manama, but I sent for some of the leading Sunnis and Shias and -L I said, ‘don’t be silly. Who arc you?’ The man at the other end
arranged with them that they should go out in pairs, one Sunni and one rang off.
Shia, to the villages to calm the people. This plan worked well and within It was 1954, a year of continual political unrest, strikes, demonstrations
a day or two conditions had returned more or less to normal. and disturbances starting with sectarian quarrels which gave place to
During the rest of the year there was an uneasy truce between Shias agitation directed against the Government. Bahrain had become a very
and Sunnis. The situation was not improved by the happenings in Saudi different place to what it was when I had first known it. I was working
Arabia. The old King, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, was dying and the Amir of at night, in my upstairs office, as anyone who passed the house could see,
Hasa, Saud ibn Jiluwi, was ill in hospital so the Aramco workers took this for the lighted windows were visible from the main road beyond the
opportunity to go on strike. Large numbers of Bahrain Arabs who garden. It was not possible to trace the call, the telephones were now
worked in Saudi Arabia came back to Bahrain full of talk of strikes automatic, so I never discovered whether the warning was genuine or
and labour demands. However, when the strike leaders were arrested intended to alarm me. It succeeded in annoying me for I disliked being
and taken to Riaydh, the capital, the strike collapsed and the Bahrain disturbed when I was working late in my office.
Arabs went back to their jobs on the mainland. During the spring the feeling between Sunnis and Shias was intensi
The remaining days of Muharram and the month of Safar, which fied. Every case in court in which people of the two sects were involved
follows Muharram, passed off quietly. During Safar some of the Shia became a test case and the party who lost asserted that the court favoured
Bahama perform a play in secret, which no Sunnis are allowed to witness. his opponent’s sect. The fact that both sides complained indicated that
It is a lewd affair but rather amusing and once or twice I managed to see it. the court was impartial. A Sunni had an argument with a Shia in the
At the end of Safar I saw the usual picturesque ceremony in the Shia market. The Shia flit the Sunni, who subsequently died. Medical evidence
villages, when bands of women and children go from house to house with showed that the Sunni suffered from a disease which contributed to his
blazing torches, going in and out of each room, ‘burning out the month death, but there was great indignation among the Sunnis, because the
of Safar’. On another evening the children in the towns and villages near Shia was let off with what they considered a light sentence. Three Arabs
the sea come down to the shore at sunset carrying tins and dishes on which who were involved in an attack on a Shia village were deported for a year.
they have grown com, which is several inches high. They place the tins This punishment was considered inadequate by the Shias. The tense
carefully in the sea and they stand on the shore singing and clapping their situation made my work in the court very difficult.
hands as the little green islands float slowly away over the water. In January I had a pleasant change when I accompanied Shaikh Sulman
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