Bahrain dictatorship kills boy Hussein al-Jaziri

Hussein al-Jaziri from Bahrain

This photo is of Bahraini boy Hussein al-Jaziri, said to be fourteen years old, when he was still alive.

And this horrible photo shows Hussein al-Jaziri, after the Bahraini absolute monarchy killed him.

Bahrain teen killed during protest

2013-02-14 13:00

Manama – A teenage boy was shot dead during clashes with police in a Shi’ite village near Manama on Thursday as hundreds took to the streets to mark the second anniversary of an uprising in the Sunni-ruled kingdom.

“The child Hussein al-Jaziri was martyred after he was wounded by shotgun fire in Dia,” Bahrain’s major Shi’ite opposition bloc Al-Wefaq announced on Twitter.

A source from Al-Wefaq’s media centre reached by telephone confirmed the death to AFP.

The interior ministry said on its Twitter account that “a wounded person who was brought to Al-Salmaniya hospital was pronounced dead and the public prosecution was informed of the incident”. It gave no further details.

Thinking aboout the link between this now dead Bahraini child and South Africa … here is a translation of a famous South African poem from the days of the apartheid regime by poetess Ingrid Jonker. For Hussein al-Jaziri’s family, his friends, and all freedom fighters in Bahrain.

From the All Poetry site:

The child is not dead by Ingrid Jonker

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

Editor notes

The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga

Nelson Mandela read this poem in the original Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994.

Bahrain shouldn’t pay lip service to human rights while violating its citizens’ most basic protections, says activist: here.

Evidence of widespread torture, arrests of dissidents or their presumed supporters (including medical doctors), lengthy prison terms meted out by military courts… To the extent that the ongoing conflict in Bahrain has retained international attention at all, it is these physical manifestations of the government’s moves to impose order, and the sometimes violent reactions they have elicited, that have dominated. But Bahrainis who poured into the streets in their hundreds of thousands during the Arab Awakenings two years ago were ignited by a different class of grievance. Acute economic injustice, or kleptocracy, so central to the uprisings across the region, was no less critical in Bahrain: here.