It wasn’t his job to explain politics, he said. He was just an intelligence official.
Online, I found an NPR piece reporting that Chalabi was supporting and advising the Bahraini opposition. The piece suggested that Chalabi was interested in Bahrain because it could become part of a “Shiite crescent” that included Iran and postwar Iraq. But Chalabi said that accusing him of sectarian aims was like “accusing Martin Luther King of being a racist. Is he a racist? He stood up for the rights of the blacks because they were oppressed as blacks. These people are oppressed as Shia. So when they stand up for their rights, it is not sectarianism, it is because they are oppressed as Shia.”
But the focus right now was on al-Khawaja out of concern that he would die from his hunger strike. Through an intermediary, I requested an interview with his daughter Zainab. My meeting with her took place upstairs in the mall that housed the Costa Coffee Shop. The shopping center was owned by a prominent Shia supporter of the opposition, and on this day it was nearly empty; it had been a site of violent clashes and had lost business as a result. Zainab, then twenty-eight years old, was very articulate, but I had the distinct feeling she’d memorized her lines.
The conversation began cordially. She told me the same thing she’d told all the other media outlets about her father’s situation. One could get the impression he might die at any minute.
I had watched many of the interviews she and her sister had given on networks such as CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera English. It sounded as if they were standing up for “peaceful protest” and nonviolent resistance, but they never denounced the protesters’ violence, either in interviews or online.
In fact, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights didn’t talk at all about how the protesters had assaulted Asian expatriates, or about the Sunni students from the University of Bahrain who had been attacked by demonstrators with iron sticks and had lain in pools of blood while others were still beating them, as had been documented in the Bassiouni report.
“Why is it that I don’t read anything about those cases on your website?” I asked. Zainab called the violence “a reaction.”
“We don’t want peace over freedom,” she told me. “We will choose freedom over peace. We will go on with our fight for self-determination and democracy. But if things continue the way they are, I expect the situation to become more violent.”
“Are you calling for people to stop attacking police and to stop throwing stones and Molotov cocktails?”
“No, I will not stand against the victims’ reaction. It really amazes me when people ask if I will condemn it. I will not.” In a way, she reminded me of the ex-rapper Cuspert, who had also said that he was on the side of the underdog. Like him, she seemed to have taken that argument too far, to a point where she believed that only her views were legitimate.
I asked if she had any affiliation with Hezbollah or Chalabi, and if her father had told her about any military training he had received in Iran. She said she had never heard him talk about that; she believed this was something the government was saying about him.
Der Spiegel ’s policy on publishing a Q-and-A was that the interviewee had to authorize the transcript. I hated this rule. It ran counter to the principles I had learned working for the Washington Post and the New York Times, where this is not done. The rule at those papers was simply to record the interview. If the subject wanted, she could bring a recorder of her own, and if she had complaints, she could use her recording to support them.
When Zainab al-Khawaja saw the transcript, she called me. She said she felt I had tricked her. It was clearly not the kind of interview she had expected. But since it was exactly what she’d said, I didn’t understand her surprise.
“It’s my job to be critical of all sides,” I told her. “I’m not an activist.”
She asked what would happen if she objected to the interview. I told her that this was a decision for the editors, but that, for my part, I found it difficult to understand how someone who spent so much time promoting human rights and press freedom would now support what seemed like censorship to me.
She said she would get back to me.
My editor was also upset by the interview. He said it lacked empathy. “Her father is dying, and we are putting her in the hot seat,” he told me. He decided to cut the interview severely. I sent Zainab the edited version, and she approved it.
Shortly thereafter, another story ran that drew the family’s ire. The government had granted Frank Gardner, a veteran BBC Middle East correspondent, exclusive access to Abdulhadi al-Khawaja while he was in prison. Like everyone else, Gardner thought al-Khawaja was dying based on the interviews his family had been giving. On May 1, 2012, Gardner reported that he had visited al-Khawaja in the hospital.
“We went into the hospital room expecting to see a man at death’s door, lying hooked up to drips,” Gardner wrote to me recently in an email. “Instead Mr. al-Khawaja sprang up from doing his prayers and greeted us wearing a tracksuit. He seemed lively and alert, and we conducted a five-minute verbal interview before the Bahraini authorities closed it down and told us to leave.”
Although al-Khawaja was thin, Gardner recalled, he “was clearly not at death’s door, this was only a partial hunger strike. In fact, when the minders weren’t looking, one of the hospital staff showed us a photo on his phone of Mr. al-Khawaja tucking into a sizable meal in his room.”
Gardner’s story contradicted the story that the family had been telling. Al-Khawaja’s wife was especially furious. “She took to social media to accuse us of spouting whatever story the Bahraini authorities told us to write,” Gardner recalled, noting that he had interviewed the wife and included her views in his story. “I found it depressing,” he went on, “that a woman who we had devoted some considerable time to interviewing, letting her get her viewpoint across uninterrupted,” should be so angry when things didn’t go her way and, he said, “we didn’t perpetuate a false myth.”
I would get the answers to some of my questions about Iran’s involvement in Bahrain more than two years later, when I was invited on a brief trip to Iran under the auspices of the Koerber Foundation, a German NGO whose work focuses on international dialogue for social change. The trip involved several days of roundtable discussions with Iranian officials. One night, we were invited to dinner at the German ambassador’s residence, a beautiful villa with an amazing garden.