A total of 14 people, including 11 security personnel, were injured in riots last Thursday and Friday in Awamiya city in the Eastern Region, which is where most of the Saudi oilfields are located.
News reports said police fired in the air to disperse demonstrators who had surrounded a local police station to demand the release of two prisoners. In the melee that followed, some rioters on motorcycles opened machinegun fire and threw Molotov cocktails at the police, the reports said.
In the wake of such violence involving a Shiite region, it didn’t take long for the Saudi Kingdom’s Interior Ministry to blame the unrest on “a foreign country,” an unmistakable allusion to Iran.
Shiite protests are routinely blamed on the Islamic Republic. But along with the official line coming from the Kingdom, a variety of political analysts and researchers in the Arab states have chimed in to echo the same sentiments.
“Iran is trying to export its problems to avenge what happened in Bahrain, and reduce pressures on Syria,” said Anwar Eshki, director of the Saudi-based Middle East Institute for Strategic Studies.
There is “concrete evidence of Iran’s involvement” in the Saudi unrests, including “telephone calls from Tehran that were intercepted by Saudi authorities,” said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. That was the one assertion of direct evidence of Iranian involvement.
Saudi Interior Ministry Spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansur at-Turki downplayed the unrest, however. He was quoted by Bloomberg as saying, “I don’t expect this to be repeated; it was an isolated incident.”
The Shia prayer leader in the village where the rioting erupted, Shaikh Nimr Nimr, appealed for calm and told his congregants not to use gunfire. The Saudi government “depends on bullets … and killing and imprisonment,” he said. “We must depend on the roar of the word, on the words of justice.”
The protestors chanted “Down with Muhammad bin Fahd,” the governor of the Eastern Province and son of the late King Fahd, according to a video Iran’s Fars news agency said it had seen.
Iran has officially remained silent, pointedly not denying involvement.
After the revolution and until the mid-90s, the Islamic Republic funded and fomented Shia subversive groups. But in the mid-90s, when Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani was president, the United States said Iran ceased funding subversion.
According to the US State Department’s human rights reports, Saudi Arabia’s two million Shiites face “significant political, economic, legal and religious discrimination condoned by the government.”
In one modest reform, Saudi Arabia last week announced that women may now vote in municipal elections—the only elections allowed in the Kingdom.
In the neighboring kingdom of Bahrain, the courts have been dishing out sentences against Shia dissidents protesting for greater rights.
The courts issued 33 sentences last Thursday, bringing the total number of convictions related to the anti-regime protests to 110, according to the Associated Press. Bahraini lawyer Mohsen al-Alawi said the sentences ranged from 1 to 15 years.
Hundreds of protestors have been arrested and many have been tried in “security courts” that afford fewer protections for the defendants. However, the Bahraini authorities have promised to shift the remaining cases to civilian courts.
Among those sentenced by the security courts thus far are 20 medical doctors, whose convictions for allegedly supporting anti-regime elements sparked international condemnation. Bucking under international pressure, Bahrain has ordered a retrial of the doctors. It is unclear if their new trials will be under civilian courts.