Tuesday, March 15, 2011

MANAMA: Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain Monday to help put down weeks of protests by the Shiite Muslim majority, a move opponents of the Sunni ruling family called a declaration of war.
Washington has urged Bahrain to use restraint and repeated the call to other Gulf nations Monday but said it does not consider the entry into Bahrain of Saudi security forces an invasion.

Analysts saw the troop movement into Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, as a mark of concern in Saudi Arabia that concessions by the country’s monarchy could inspire the conservative Sunni kingdom’s own Shiite minority.

About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain to protect government facilities, a Saudi official source said, a day after mainly Shiite protesters overran police and blocked roads.
Bahrain said Monday it had asked the Gulf troops for support in line with a GCC defense pact. The United Arab Emirates has said it would also respond to the call.

“The Bahraini government asked us yesterday to look at ways to help them to defuse the tension in Bahrain and we have already sent roughly 500 [police officers],” said UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan.

A European intelligence official said at least one other Gulf country, Oman, was likely to offer a similar gesture of support for the Bahrain monarchy.

Witnesses saw some 150 Saudi armored troop carriers, ambulances, water tankers and jeeps cross into Bahrain via the 25-kilometer causeway and head toward Riffa, home to the royal family and military hospital.
Bahrain TV later showed footage it said was of advance units of the joint regional Peninsula Shield forces that had arrived in Bahrain “due to the unfortunate events that are shaking the security of the kingdom and terrorizing citizens and residents.”

Analysts and diplomats say the largest contingent in any GCC force would come from Saudi Arabia, which is worried about any spillover to restive Shiites in its own Eastern Province, the center of its oil industry.

Bahraini opposition groups including the largest Shiite party Al-Wefaq said the move was an attack on defenseless citizens.
“We consider the entry of any soldier or military machinery into the Kingdom of Bahrain’s air, sea or land territories a blatant occupation,” they said in a statement.

“This real threat about the entry of Saudi and other Gulf forces into Bahrain to confront the defenseless Bahraini people puts the Bahraini people in real danger and threatens them with an undeclared war by armed troops.”
The move came after Bahraini police clashed Sunday with mostly Shiite demonstrators in one of the most violent confrontations since troops killed seven protesters last month.
After trying to push back demonstrators for several hours, police backed off and youths built barricades across the highway to the main financial district of the Gulf banking hub.

Those barricades were still up Monday, with protesters checking cars at the entrance to the Pearl roundabout, the focal point of weeks of protests. On the other side of the same highway, police set up a roadblock preventing any cars moving from the airport toward the financial area.

In areas across Bahrain, vigilantes, some armed with sticks or wearing masks, guarded the entrances to their neighborhoods.
“We will never leave. This is our country,” said Abdullah, a protester, when asked if Saudi troops would stop them. “Why should we be afraid? We are not afraid in our country.”

Bahrain has been gripped by its worst unrest since the 1990s after protesters took to the streets last month, inspired by uprisings that toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. Thousands are still camped out at the Pearl roundabout, having returned since the army cleared out the area last month.
In Washington, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor urged Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries “to show restraint and respect the rights of the people of Bahrain, and to act in a way that supports dialogue instead of undermining it.”

Vietor did not say whether the U.S. supported the move while another White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said that “this is not an invasion of a country.”
The cost of insuring Bahraini sovereign debt against default rose further Monday, approaching 20-month highs after Saudi troops entered Bahrain.
Any intervention by Gulf Arab troops in Bahrain is highly sensitive on the island, where the Shiite majority complains of discrimination by the Sunni royal family.

Most Gulf Arab ruling families are Sunni and intervention might encourage a response from non-Arab Iran. However, a U.S. official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Monday there was no evidence to suggest that Iran was instigating or encouraging unrest among Bahrain’s Shiites.

“The Gulf leaders have tried to legitimize this. They portray it not as intervention in an internal Bahrain dispute, but rather as an action against an external threat,” said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. “Bahrain is the arena for the worries about Iran.”

In Tehran, authorities had no comment on the Gulf force moving into Bahrain. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi called on Bahrain to avoid using “violence and force,” according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency.
In a sign that the opposition and the royals may find an 11th-hour solution, the opposition groups said they had met the crown prince to discuss the mechanism for national dialogue.

Crown Prince Sheikh Salman al-Khalifa offered assurances Sunday that dialogue would address key opposition demands including giving Parliament more power and reforming government and electoral districts.
The Shield Force was created in the 1980s. Military units under a GCC command have been sent to Kuwait, including during the 1991 U.S.-led campaign to oust Saddam Hussein’s force and in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq. The current action marks a significant shift to help a government quell internal unrest.

“It changes the role of the GCC actually,” said Jane Kinninmont, a senior research fellow and Bahrain expert at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “They’ve always had their collective defense [pacts] … The idea of gathering together to protect a government against its own people seems to be quite another thing.”– Reuters, AP