I told him that this didn’t seem to have worked in Iraq. “Now here, the sectarian divide is getting bigger,” I said. “Don’t people see what is going on in the region, more divisions everywhere?”
A group of men came over to greet my source. When they left, he told me that they were all working as stringers or translators for media outlets.
“Are they activists?” I asked.
“Yes, all supporters of the party and the protests, thank God,” he answered.
“Are they also working with Western media?” I asked.
He nodded.
This was a shrewd move by the opposition, I thought. If the international press relied on stringers or translators who had already chosen a side, it would be easy to lose context.
Our coffees had just arrived when my phone rang. I recognized the number of the prime minister’s media adviser.
I apologized and asked if I could take the call, saying it might be important. The media adviser asked where I was.
“I am at Costa Coffee Shop at … wait a second, what’s this road called again?” I asked my source. He told me the name and I spoke after him.
“Costa Coffee? Boudaya Road? What are you doing there?” the media adviser asked. I could hear sarcasm in his voice.
I understood that this meeting point of opposition figures was known not only to the opposition but to the rest of the country as well.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” the media adviser said. “Do you have a car?”
“Yes. I’ve got my taxi with me.”
“Okay. Come now to the prime minister’s office. But now!”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you say you wanted an interview with him? So come now. Your friends at Costa Coffee will surely wait for you.”
My source began to giggle when he overheard where I was going. “So you are going to the prime minister’s office? I won’t ask specifically who you’re going to see, but are you aware that you are in jeans and sneakers? I can’t wait to read the interview.” He laughed.
I looked down at my clothes. They were covered in dust. I’d just spent hours in the sun in villages with guys who had proudly shown me their Molotov cocktails.
In the car, I searched for whatever perfume, powder, or lip gloss I could find in my backpack. Abu Hussain was absorbed by his own problems. “And what shall I do?” he wailed.
“What do you mean?”
“What shall I do if they arrest you?”
“Arrest me? Why should they arrest me?”
“Well, he is the prime minister, and a very strong man. If you talk to him the way you did with Sheikh Ali or the way you do with me, they might arrest you.”
“Abu Hussain, I think I’ve met more dangerous people than the prime minister.”
Somebody was waiting at the gate for me. Abu Hussain said that he would wait close by and that I should call him when the meeting was over.
The man who accompanied me to the prime minister’s office looked a little surprised when he saw my clothes. The media adviser waited in front of a door with some guards.
I apologized for my appearance. “It’s not like you gave me any chance to get back to the hotel and get dressed,” I told him.
“No worries, we won’t take pictures of this meeting.”
They’d scheduled fifteen minutes for the interview. The prime minister was very self-assured, with a proud, disciplined posture. I’d heard many people attack him, and I expected him to be arrogant and unlikable. Instead, he came across during the interview as serious and not afraid to engage in a tough discussion; he was respectful to me, but less so toward the protesters. He called the demonstrators “terrorists” supported by Iran and spoke about how the shah of Iran had once tried to lay claim to Bahrain. The prime minister himself had met with him and warned about interference. He said that Bahrain’s main problem wasn’t the Sunni-Shia divide, but an Arab-Persian split that had persisted for many years.
“This is all Iran’s interference,” he said, noting that his government had asked the Iranian ambassador to leave Bahrain.
I asked if he thought it was time for him to step down after all these years. His media adviser, seated behind him, blanched. The prime minister said that this was up to the king. “My duty was and remains to protect this country, and I will do this until the last day of my life. Believe me, if my position alone were the reason for the unrest, then I would have already stepped down from my office last year. But this is just a further excuse from the opposition.”
I challenged him about the human rights abuses. He acknowledged that the government had made “mistakes” but said they would all be investigated. When we stood up to say good-bye, the media adviser didn’t look happy. The prime minister, however, told me he’d enjoyed the “challenging debate.”
I didn’t depart with much optimism. The interviews with Ali Salman and the prime minister left the impression that these were two characters who weren’t willing to compromise to find a solution.
At about the time of my interview, news broke that Abdulhadi al-Khawaja was on a hunger strike. Al-Khawaja, one of the presidents of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization, had recently been arrested for calling for the overthrow of the government.
Al-Khawaja has two daughters, Maryam and Zainab, who used social media as a platform for their activism, and they were frequent guests on international TV and radio programs throughout the uprising. The women were dual citizens of Bahrain and Denmark and had studied in the United States on scholarships. They spoke fluent English with American accents. They covered their hair with colored veils, wore jeans, and talked about democracy and human rights. They were ready-made media darlings with a touching narrative and the right cause.
Between trips to Bahrain, I had met with several intelligence sources from Europe and the United States, many of whom believed that al-Khawaja, the hunger striker, and his deputy and other leaders inside the opposition movement had ties to Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, though there wasn’t any clear evidence of direct Iranian involvement in the protests. A European intelligence official also linked Bahraini opposition figures to Ahmad Chalabi, the Shia activist who had helped lead the United States into war with Iraq.
I worried that this information might have been planted. “Is this coming from the Bahrainis? Or any other Arab service?” I asked.
“No, this is our own research,” he said. “Bahrain is becoming a playground for Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
I told him that what he was telling me was contrary to public opinion. “The Bahrain Center for Human Rights has received international awards even in Europe,” I pointed out. “Those people are sitting on the boards of renowned international organizations, and you are saying they have ties to declared terrorist organizations and shady figures? How is this possible?”