With the grand prix coming up this weekend, she told us, many activists had
been rounded up in the past few days. One of her colleagues, a 19-year-old
student, told us he had slept in three different houses over the past three
nights after the police had come looking for him.
In Al Dair, the police kept their distance and everyone headed off after an
hour or so to answer the call for evening prayer.
One man, who was wearing a red Ferrari polo shirt, approached us. “I love F1,”
he said. “But not over our blood. They are forcing it on us.”
I had heard much the same thing from my taxi driver after landing in Bahrain
yesterday. On our way into town, which, as we were assured it would be by
Bahrain’s authorities, was ghostlike, he gave me his thoughts on Sunday’s
race. “I have two emotions,” he said. “One is that I am proud to have such a
big event in Bahrain. But the other part of me feels shame. You will be
welcome here because you are guests in my country but you will be racing
over blood this weekend.”
Asked if the race was not vital to the economy, he insisted that the average
Bahraini would see little of the $400-500 million which the Bahrain GP
organisers estimate it generates. “The government and their supporters own
all these buildings,” he said, sweeping his hand in a wide arc to indicate
the smart hotels of the diplomatic quarter.
Back in Al Dair, the man in the Ferrari shirt invited us to his house for
supper but we declined, heading instead to Diraz, a village west of Manama
where a group of 100 or so youths had organised a march. We watched from a
nearby rooftop as explosions lit up the night sky. Reports reached us of
larger-scale clashes in Sitra, and a car bomb in Manama itself.
Bahrain’s authorities have been at pains to reassure the F1 community that
safety will not be an issue this week. Given the enormous security presence
at the circuit, it is unlikely to be. But that has not entirely dispelled
misgivings within F1’s 1,500-strong travelling army, who are marching into a
highly politicised event.
The FIA and Ecclestone insist the race has nothing to do with politics.
Countless posters about town bearing the slogan ‘UniF1ed: One Nation in
Celebration’ suggest otherwise.
Human rights groups say reforms promised by Bahrain’s rulers in the wake of
last autumn’s damning independent report amount to window dressing. Our
19-year-old guide was of the same opinion. “There is still torture, still
discrimination,” he said. “Everything we fought for on Feb 14 last year.
It’s still just the same.”