This week, Amnesty International called on Bahraini authorities to release all "prisoners of conscience" ahead of the appeals of nine medical workers and human rights activist Nabeel Rajab. In light of the ongoing developments in Bahrain, here is a rundown of relevant events, activists, groups, and places that have been featured on Mosaic in recent months.

The Arab Spring swept Bahrain in March 2011 with a series of demonstrations calling for greater political freedoms and more equality for the Shia Muslim minority. The government brutally suppressed the movement, resulting in the deaths of two protestors during rallies on February 14. The protestors' funerals led to an occupation of Manama's iconic Pearl Roundabout, which was destroyed by Bahraini security forces in a deadly raid on February 17. This sparked an uprising that is still underway, with the goal of bringing down King Hamad's regime.

The disheartening lack of change in the status quo since then has been attributed to multiple factors, notably neighboring Saudi Arabia's support of the regime, but also the overwhelming international silence on the issue. Global attention has been drawn away from Bahrain to similar uprisings in the region, and a media blackout, coupled with a crackdown on social media activists by Bahraini regime forces, keeps Bahrain's troubles out of the spotlight.

Activists

Nabeel Rajab: He is the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), and was arrested multiple times this April during protests against the Bahrain Grand Prix. Al Jazeera English has called him the "unofficial leader of the February 14 Movement." In early July, he was re-arrested shortly after posting anti-regime messages on his Twitter account, @NABEELRAJAB.

Abdulhadi Alkhawaja: He is the co-founder and former president of the BCHR. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2011, and famously underwent a 110-day hunger strike that lasted until May 2012 to protest his sentence and draw international attention to Bahrain.

Zainab and Maryam Alkhawaja: The daughters of Abdulhadi Alkhawaja are prominent rights activists themselves. In May, Zainab was interviewed on Democracy Now! with Mr. Rajab following a recent arrest, and Maryam spoke at the UNHRC during Bahrain's human rights review. They tweet in both Arabic and English, as @AngryArabiya and @MARYAMALKHAWAJA respectively.

Groups

Al-Wefaq: This Shiite group is the largest political party in Bahrain, but is often outvoted by coalition Sunni parties. They, along with the February 14 Movement, have organized numerous demonstrations against the regime, despite a ban on rallies by the Interior Ministry. They are guided by their spiritual leader, Sheikh Issa Qassim.

February 14 Movement: This opposition youth group is led by anonymous social media activists. It was named after the date the popular uprising began, which was also the tenth anniversary of a charter that ended Bahrain's 1990s uprising and returned it to constitutional rule. The group has no set political or religious affiliations, but has organized marches with al-Wefaq.

Al-Khalifa Family: Bahrain's ruling family has managed to hold on to power in the midst of the unrest, with their Saudi-backed security forces repeatedly quelling the uprisings, but there is growing evidence of internal conflict.

Places

Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia: Like 70 percent of Bahrain's population of 1.3 million, Saudi Arabia's largest province consists primarily of Shia Muslims who speak Bahrani Arabic, and most of its 4.2 million people share intimate historical and cultural ties with Bahrainis. Demonstrations in this region have been similarly suppressed by the Saudi military.

Saudi Arabia: On March 2011, Bahraini authorities called on the mostly Saudi Arabian Peninsula Shield Forces to help contain the uprising in their country. This May, Saudi and Bahraini officials proposed incorporating Bahrain into Saudi Arabia to formalize their growing alliance, but the planned move was met with widespread condemnation.

United States: The US has enjoyed a close military relationship with Bahrain since the 1990s, and the US Navy has been stationed in the strategic Gulf country for several decades. This may have something to do with the superpower's silence on the unrest in Bahrain so far, much to the chagrin of rights activists.

Image: Bahraini protestors marching for prisoners of conscience, July 25, 2012: Al-Alam

I arrived in Tunis on January 1, only a few days after a wave of rallies had erupted due to the suicide of an unemployed college graduate, who torched himself after police confiscated his fruit cart, cutting off his only source of income. Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, sold fruit and vegetables without the necessary vendor's permit in the town of Sidi Bouzid, located 160 miles from the country's capital Tunis.

At the time, Tunisians had been protesting for a couple of weeks over poor living conditions, high unemployment, government corruption and repression. Three people had been killed in the protests by the time of my arrival. The atmosphere was tense, public protests were rare in Tunisia where dissent was usually repressed; however, no one I spoke to in Tunis believed then that these demonstrations would lead to the ouster of President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali who eventually fled the country to Saudi Arabia after ruling Tunisia for 23 years.

The Jasmine Revolution, as it is dubbed now, was not televised on Tunisia's main television station, Tunisie7, nor did it make headlines in the local press, but the news spread like wildfire on Facebook, YouTube, mobile phone, and to a lesser extent on Twitter (most of the tweets were from outside Tunisia).

Prior to my arrival to Tunis, I had spent the past five weeks in the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories debating social media, its impact on youth, and its relationship with journalism in the Arab world with my interlocutors.

It is very easy, but over-simplistic and naive to decide on a social media interpretation for the Jasmine Revolution, as we have been witnessing by many bloggers and self-appointed Middle East experts, many of whom neither speak Arabic nor have spent an extended period of time in the Middle East. They desperately want to convince us that Tunisians needed an external technological Western invention in order to succeed. A Twitter revolution of some sorts, as they previously labeled the Iranian Velvet Revolution, as though Arab masses were not capable on their own of saying "enough is enough."

Certainly social media was used as a communication tool for Tunisians to air their frustrations with the economy, unemployment, censorship, and corruption. But many factors lead to its success, such as a well organized trade unions movement, and the most potent weapon in the Arab world, the youth.

Population ageing is widespread across the world, but most Arab countries have been experiencing a youth explosion. More than one third of them are now unemployed. Tunisia is a bit different since it is one of the few Arab countries that opted for a family planning policy initiated during the rule of its first president, Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia, however, has also adopted a development plan with a focus on higher education, leaving a large number of young college graduates unemployed.

When I was driving around in Tunis, posters of President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali were sprinkled throughout the city with the slogan, "Together We Meet Challenges," a slogan meant to tout his plan of development by focusing on job creation, increasing revenue and enhancing Tunisia's positioning and influence on the regional and international scales. This obviously has failed, leaving a country of over- educated youth, many of whom are unemployed or doing menial jobs. Mohammed Bouazizi was the catalyst for their revolution.

Today, millions of Arab youth are disenchanted with politics and live a dramatic rupture with the state. Restrictions on freedom of expression, though improving in several countries, dominate the mass media in the Arab world. Social media has in many instances opened the door for them not only to share ideas, but also to take action. We've seen a vivid example of this during the Jeddah floods when the Saudi government tried to suppress the news about the devastation caused by nature due to poor infrastructure in the Arab world's richest country, but the news quickly spread on Facebook and the internet by concerned young Saudis. We've witnessed a bread revolution in Egypt, also driven by high unemployment and poverty; again initially transmitted to the outside world by young bloggers before it became international headlines.

Throughout history, when social discontent can no longer be contained, people have taken to the street to demand change. Having the most rudimentary technology, or none at all have not prevented these movements, a case in point being hand printed pamphlets distributed prior to the French Revolution, Gandhi's ability to inspire and mobilize through the exponential power of word of mouth, and the leaflets and tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speeches that were smuggled into the country prior to the Iranian Revolution.

Mohammed Bouazizi's self immolation was the expression not only of his despair, but that of youth throughout Tunisia ready to explode. Although they are an educated tech-savvy generation who were able to use social media as a tool, the underlying force was not a byproduct of this and the current situation would have come to pass with or without it.

Crediting social media with these revolutions however, trivializes them and does a disservice to the deep rooted issues that cause them.

As I was leaving Tunis on January 4, news spread again like wildfire of Mohammed Bouazizi's death at a hospital in the town of Ben Arous. Today, Mohsen Bouterfif died. Mohsen doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire on Thursday after a meeting with the mayor of the small city of Boukhadra who was unable to provide him with a job and housing. Boukhadra is in Algeria.

Article first published on the Huffington Post

For a number of Arab countries, including Bahrain, Jordan, and Egypt, 2010 witnessed yet another round of disappointing parliamentary elections.  

In all three countries, ruling parties faced serious competition from the opposition. However, as elections neared and campaigns heated up, the undermining of opposition parties intensified. The authoritarian regimes' methods ranged from media censorship and mass arrests to violent crackdowns.

On October 23, 2010, Bahrain, the only Gulf state that allows political organizations known as "societies," held its third parliamentary elections. The predominantly Shiite Gulf state, ruled by a Sunni government, managed to pull off a reasonably free but unfair election. Granted, no reports of direct electoral fraud emerged after the election but it was preceded by a crackdown on government critics, a clampdown on the media, the intimidation of opposition members, and arrest of prominent activists.

Undeterred, the Shiite-led Wefaq Party participated and swept 18 of the 40-seat Council of Representatives. But for Bahrain’s Shiite majority that has long complained of discrimination in accessing government jobs and housing, the election did not lead to a change in the political makeup of the government since the members of the upper house, Bahrain’s main legislative body, are directly appointed by the king.

Unlike Bahrain where main opposition group Al-Wefaq and Sunni Islamist groups Al-Asalah and Al-Menbar participated in the elections, Egypt and Jordan’s opposition parties chose to boycott theirs. The hope that elections in those two countries might provide a glimpse into democratization in the Middle East were quickly dashed as the rigging or manipulation of the vote was carefully crafted long before election day. 

On November 9, 2010, Jordan held parliamentary elections that were also perceived as free but unfair. The Jordanian government passed a new electoral law earlier that year that was viewed by the opposition as favoring tribal allegiances at the expense of political and social platforms. This led the Muslim Brotherhood and its political wing, the Islamic Action Front, to boycott the elections citing a “lack of genuine desire for reform” on the part of the government.

As a result, loyalists to Jordan's King Abdullah II and tribal-affiliated candidates won most of the upper and lower house seats. And although the boycott damaged the credibility of the elections, the royal family was able to cling on to power domestically while preserving its democratic image internationally.

On November 28, 2010, Egypt held its parliamentary elections after violently clamping down on the opposition. In the weeks and months leading up to the parliamentary election, the government carried out wide-scale sweeps, targeting members and supporters of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Despite the latter's participation in the first round, it failed to secure any seats, citing vote rigging, fraud and ballot stuffing. 

Both the liberal Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood boycotted the run-off round on December 5, 2010 and with 97 percent control of the People's Assembly, President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party managed to further tighten its grip on power in Egypt.

The electoral farce held in Bahrain, Jordan, and Egypt is part of what has become a familiar political game aimed at diffusing Arab anger and frustration with stagnating and unpopular regimes. Indeed, Arabs are growing tired of meaningless elections that merely offer a facade for change but leave them even more cynical about the possibility of a democratic transition of power.  

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for 2010 classified all three countries as “authoritarian” and the Middle East and North Africa region as the most repressive globally. How much longer will these crumbling regimes be able to quell popular mobilization? And if boycotting campaigns keep on failing to delegitimize these regimes, one has to wonder what opposition parties will do next.

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Seldom does one watch a lead news story on Middle Eastern satellite television that does not offer a steady rotating stream of images of death, destruction, and devastation from places like Gaza, Fallujah, or Kabul. These past few days, however, although the images were familiar, they were from Haiti, and the devastation was not man-made.

Large networks such as Al Jazeera rushed to send their crews to Port-au-Prince, and the vast majority of news satellite networks operating in the region have been competing to update their viewers about the devastation and human agony in this tiny Caribbean country, but à la Middle East ...it had to be about more than just Haiti.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Middle Eastern television networks like their counterparts in the U.S. focused on the rescue efforts and finding survivors. Reporters on the ground struggled to convey the destruction and the magnitude of the catastrophe that inflicted the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. But it only took two days before the images of a devastated Haiti were juxtaposed with those of destruction in Gaza and Iraq.

"These images of Port-au-Prince remind me of Gaza," said a presenter on the Iranian Al Alam TV. The report showed a street in Port-au-Prince with collapsed concrete-block homes, then flashed back to a concrete building in Rafah which was completely destroyed last January by rockets fired from Israeli jets.

Meanwhile, Israeli television stations have been airing daily updates of Israeli humanitarian efforts in Haiti. Images of a five-month-old Haitian baby boy being nursed at an Israeli field hospital in Port-au-Prince were looped endlessly. IBA television aired segments of a report prepared by CNN's Elizabeth Cohen marveling over Israel's quickness in setting up a field hospital.

"It's all propaganda," said an analyst on Nile TV from Cairo. "They're willing to travel ten-thousand kilometers to deliver a baby in Haiti, but won't allow food and medicine to cross 100 meters into Gaza where children are dying...it's all propaganda."

Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV did not waste anytime to show solidarity with the "Haitian Brothers," as the reporter narrated a video package showing Palestinians in Gaza collecting aid for Haiti.

"The residents of Gaza, who are themselves dependent on aid as a result of the Israeli blockade that deprives them of food, medicine and other basic necessities, are willing to donate goods such as milk and blankets to Haiti," the broadcast continued.

Meanwhile, Dubai, which has been recently a subject of criticism for its extravagance while piling up debt pledged to provide immediate assistance to 200,000 children in Haiti through international partners. Dubai TV aired a report showing a plane being loaded with a hundred tons of food and supplies heading to Port-au-Prince, a gift from the Emirate. More on the way, the report promised.

Arab countries, especially the oil-rich ones, have been criticized in Western media for not doing enough to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. In reality, many of these countries have already either pledged or sent their support to the devastated nation. Jordan TV showed a report about Jordanian medics heading to Haiti...but this was not reported on CNN.

On the Lebanese channel, New TV, a commentator criticized the United States for rushing to save lives in Haiti while waging two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the death of more than one million civilians, according to him.

"Oh! The hypocrisy," he lamented.

Article first published on the Huffington Post

Watch the Video

Five years ago when I was working on the documentary Occupied Minds, I got a real taste of what it’s like being a reporter working in a war zone. My crew and I had just finished shooting a segment in the devastated area of Rafah and were heading back to Gaza City, when suddenly, traffic came to a screeching halt.

Two Israeli tanks had blocked off the road while a huge armored Caterpillar bulldozer tore through an orange orchard removing trees and shrubs that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said were being used to provide cover to terrorists. The temperature was over 90 degrees and felt as if it were over 100 degrees in our rented van, which did not have working air conditioning. So, gasping for air, we decided to step outside.

No sooner had we walked a couple of feet outside the van than one of the tanks, without warning, started to fire towards us, literally drawing a line in the sand with bullets just a few feet ahead of us. A bullhorn then ordered us to go back inside the van, which incidentally had the words Press & TV tapped on its side and roof in large red letters. But this did not stop the tank from firing. All I could think that day was what if the machinegun operator had miscalculated? I later learned that our camera man was missing a finger because he had been shot through his camera a year earlier by an Israeli sniper.

This past Friday, Jacky Rowland was reporting from the West Bank village of Bil'in, explaining to viewers about the separation fence and the weekly protests that take place there, when Israeli troops began firing tear gas at the protesters and then directly at her.

The video below shows Rowland, wearing a helmet, exclaiming "We're under attack!" as a tear gas grenade flies past her.
She continues reporting, telling viewers that the Israeli soldiers are "obviously trying to take us off the air."

More on Bil'in.