By SOUAD MEKHENNET and RICK GLADSTONE
MANAMA, Bahrain — The Sunni monarchy has been hoping that the Formula OneGrand Prix, its showcase annual event, would restore Bahrain’s stature as a stable Persian Gulf kingdom, blighted after months of antigovernment protests by the Shiite majority that led to the cancellation of the race last year.
Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. While Bahraini officials vow that the Grand Prix will be held as planned on Sunday, Shiite opposition groups and rights organizations have denounced the race as a public relations stunt that has sought to mask what they call the monarchy’s failures to address causes of political discontent here.
Clashes between protesters and the police, which never really went away during 14 months of unrest, have intensified in the week leading up to the race, which opposition groups have called the “days of rage.” Cartoons ridiculing Bahrain’s crown prince and Bernie Ecclestone, the British leader of the Formula One race organization, have been scrawled on the walls of Shiite suburbs and villages, including one depicting them co-piloting a race car with tear gas bellowing from the tailpipes.
Bahraini officials and race organizers have reacted defensively, asserting the government is addressing the Shiite grievances. They have denounced news coverage of the protests, calling them isolated incidents, and barred some foreign journalists sent to cover the race, apparently fearing that they would report on the demonstrations. Security checkpoints and roadblocks line the route to the track; visitors pass through metal detectors and must surrender all liquids as if at an airport check-in.
On Friday, tens of thousands of men, women and children took to the streets carrying signs that read “Hear Our Voices” and “Down With the Government.” They did not call for cancellation of the race, but it was one of the biggest displays of defiance yet to the ruling members of Bahrain’s Khalifa family, undercutting their portrayal of Formula One’s return as a reaffirmation of their legitimacy and an event that would unite the country.
“It’s definitely backfired on them,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch in New York, said in a telephone interview. “It seems like their main focus is managing this as a P.R. exercise, but it’s impossible to repress the reality, which is that there is a great simmering discontent.”
Richard Sollom, a deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights in Boston, which released a study this week documenting the indiscriminate use of tear gas by Bahraini riot police officers, said the protests and negative publicity surrounding the Formula One race’s renaissance “has really thrown them for a loop.”
His group issued a statement on Friday calling for the governing body of Formula One to hold a public briefing conducted by rights advocates. “Drivers and the media should know the current political situation in Bahrain and the international media covering the event should have the ability to freely engage and cover the issues surrounding the Formula One race,” it said.
In a more aggressive punctuation of the point, the activist group Anonymous hacked the official Formula One Web site for a few hours on Friday. Visitors to the site encountered a message castigating Bahrain’s government and the racing organization and urging people to oppose the race. “The Formula One racing authority was well aware of the Human Rights situation in Bahrain and still chose to contribute to the regime’s oppression of civilians and will be punished,” the message read.
The Bahrain government contends it has taken significant steps to address what some officials have acknowledged is the brutality of security forces in dealing with protesters. An independent panel, led by M. Cherif Bassiouni, a respected United Nations human rights lawyer, documented torture and other abuses and has recommended measures to stop them.
“None can expect that we can implement all the recommendations made by Mr. Bassiouni in one day,” the minister of justice, Khalid bin Ali al-Khalifa, said Friday in response to the persistent Shiite anger here.
Officials have also characterized some protesters as provocatively violent, throwing homemade bombs at riot police officers who responded with tear gas. A British-based racing team, Force India, was caught in a firebombing episode between protesters and the police on Wednesday, and two team members left the country, British news media reported.
Surrounded by reporters and television cameras at the Grand Prix track, Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa insisted on Friday that the race would proceed. “I think canceling the race just empowers extremists,” he said.
Many protesters marching on Friday said they were happy that the race was going ahead because the publicity had helped their cause. “This is not against the Formula One,” said a 35-year-old taxicab driver named Ali who held his son on his left arm. “We just want the government to give us our rights.”
The Bahrain Shiite community’s most prominent cleric, Ayatollah Issa Qassim, exhorted people to protest on Friday, but his sermon did not call for a boycott of the race. “The people want to be free like others in the world and have their rights,” he told worshipers at his mosque in Diraz, a village in the Manama suburbs. They shouted back in a chorus, “We will never be slaves!”
The Obama administration has been subdued regarding the repression of protesters in Bahrain, home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet that patrols the Persian Gulf. The administration’s approach has not gone unnoticed by rights activists or the authorities in Iran, which has portrayed the gentle American treatment of the Khalifa monarchy as part of a broader effort to align with other Sunni Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s state-run news media prominently reported on the Bahrain protests on Friday. The top article on the Islamic Republic News Agency’s English-language Web site was an interview with Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who said the best way to resolve the protests is “ending the crackdown on the Bahraini people and caring about people’s demands.”
Ms. Whitson of Human Rights Watch said the Obama administration’s failure to be more assertive with Bahrain’s monarchy reflected what she called “a fairly simple but unfortunate formula: a stable ally that serves a role in the larger regional conflict that the United States has decided it has with Iran.”
Asked on Friday in Washington about the Bahrain repression and protests, Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, reiterated the administration’s position that it condemns all forms of violence. “These are unproductive, unhelpful acts in building the kind of meaningful trust and reconciliation that is needed in Bahrain, and we’re calling for, again, Bahraini government respect for universal human rights and demonstrators’ restraint in ensuring that they are peaceful,” she told reporters at the daily news briefing.
Asked if the race should be canceled, she said, “That’s obviously a decision for the Bahraini government to make.”
Souad Mekhennet reported from Manama, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Brad Spurgeon contributed reporting from Manama.
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