{"id":4145,"date":"2011-12-06T15:10:10","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T22:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4145"},"modified":"2011-12-06T21:20:36","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T04:20:36","slug":"pomed-notes-%e2%80%9cthe-price-of-freedom-and-democracy-defiant-bahrainis-and-the-arab-spring%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4145","title":{"rendered":"POMED Notes: \u201cThe Price of Freedom and Democracy: Defiant Bahrainis and the Arab Spring\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

POMED Notes: \u201cThe Price of Freedom and Democracy: Defiant Bahrainis and the Arab Spring\u201d<\/strong>
\n02 Dec 2011 – BCHR<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Woodrow Wilson Center hosted an event entitled \u201cThe Price of Freedom and Democracy: Defiant Bahrainis and the Arab Spring.\u201d The event honored Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, with the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award. The panel featured Mr. Rajab, Wafa Ali, a Bahraini journalist and public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, and Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. Jane Harman, the president of the Wilson Center, gave opening remarks, and Christian Ostermann, the Wilson Center\u2019s European Studies director, moderated the event.<\/p>\n

After brief remarks from Harman congratulating Rajab for his efforts, Rajab addressed the audience. He praised the efforts of Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First to draw attention to Bahrain\u2019s ongoing calls for democratic reform, noting that Bahrain\u2019s revolution was \u201cnot a revolution of elites, but of youth.\u201d Rajab called the BICI report \u201cnot perfect, but good,\u201d and criticized the report for not holding royal family members accountable for the human rights violations. He supports the BICI recommendations, calling them a \u201cstarting point for reform,\u201d but said the recommendations will not solve Bahrain\u2019s political crisis. Additionally, he was also highly critical of the many Western nations\u2019 silence when Bahrainis called for help, and he asserted that Al Jazeera\u2019s Arabic station did not give legitimate coverage to the events in Bahrain. \u201cHow long will families rule whole countries?\u201d he asked. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to kill our killers,\u201d Rajab added, implying that he and his allies seek reconciliation rather than revenge.<\/p>\n

Wafa Ali continued the discussion, stating there is a \u201ccrisis of trust\u201d between the al-Khalifa regime and the public. Additionally, Bahrain\u2019s allowing the GCC to intervene in the uprising was a signal to the West that a constitutional monarchy was not an option, she contended. Bahrain is currently in a state of confusion, Ali said, and different views of the country\u2019s future have made compromise difficult between opposing sides. She stressed that Bahrain is in need of reconciliation in order to address the fears of all sides involved. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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POMED Notes: \u201cThe Price of Freedom and Democracy: Defiant Bahrainis and the Arab Spring\u201d 02 Dec 2011 – BCHR On Thursday, the Woodrow Wilson Center hosted an event entitled \u201cThe Price of Freedom and Democracy: Defiant Bahrainis and the Arab Spring.\u201d The event honored Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2156],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}