Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): The meeting chaired by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa immediately upon his arrival from a foreign tour was not surprising, but the joint meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet) and Supreme Defense Council added a security dimension to the event.

Formally, the meeting was held (as was expected) after oil supplies in the Gulf were targeted (oil tankers in the port of Fujairah and oil pipelines in Saudi Arabia), and Bahrain was expected to take precautionary measures to protect oil facilities.

However, what is more important are the messages that the King sneaked between the lines of his speech published by the state Bahrain News Agency, stating that the time for reconciliation has not come yet.

By his speech delivered at the Sakhir Palace, the King blocked the way for Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman to reach any agreement, even if in shape rather than substance, with Sayed Abdullah Al-Guraifi to calm and cool the situation.

The King's speech also implied that the order to reinstate the nationality of 551 citizens was not the result of political endeavors, as some had expected. It was rather an attempt to calm the United Nations and prominent human rights organizations who sharply criticized Bahrain after the revocation of the citizenships of 138 Bahrainis in an unfair mock trial.

Meanwhile, the king participated in the attack that was launched against Sayed Al-Ghuraifi without naming him when he stressed adherence to national principles and "renunciation of the exploitation of extremist religious platforms and sympathy for [perpetrators of] terrorist acts and the spread of division and strife among members of society as well as not expressing positions that should be made against threats or interventions in the country's internal affairs and statements offensive to the security and stability of Bahrain."

But most importantly, the King painted Al-Ghuraifi's efforts as having a security dimension: "Any attempt to provoke sedition, division or any departure from national principles will be faced firmly," adding that the Kingdom "is ready and has every ability to deal with what threatens its security and stability and all its capabilities."

Here, the King is saying in a tacit manner that bringing the issue of "political demands" up again is unacceptable. The regime thinks that it was able to step over the political demands of the opposition after the arrests of its leaders, the last of which Sheikh Ali Salman, and the siege that was imposed on the most significant religious Shiite authority in the country, Sheikh Isa Qassim), in addition to severe repression, which put about 5,000 citizens behind bars.

The regimes sees that it now has full control over the situation, no movements on the ground, no marches, no seminars, no political opposition, and no voices locally, expressing the political demands of the opposition, as the prominent figures either were imprisoned or left the country, and the ones who are still in Bahrain and not imprisoned have stopped their political work and activity after the closure of Al-Wefaq and Wa'ad societies.

The King rejoices that he managed to contain the political movement with his machine of suppression, but that cost Bahrain its sovereignty that it has sold to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for dinars with which it would be able to pay the salaries of its employees, and then when it was pressured even more financially, it encouraged employees to join the "voluntary retirement" program to save a few dinars to be invested in its armored vehicles, troops and its malwares that attempt to hack social media accounts and phones of activists.

He has turned the country into a barren land, a country that is living off of the breadcrumbs of its rich neighbors, in exchange for its absolute adherence to their political positions. He has also turned the Bahraini people, both Sunni and Shiite alike, into frustrated citizens full of resentment and anger, and rendered the country's future a time bomb waiting to explode.

Arabic Version