Ambassador Shaikh Abdul-Aziz of Bahrain

spark that created this unrest?

AA: Well, the unrest if you are talking about the divide between the Sunnis and Shias, that we did not see before, is that the Sunnis now feel that their lives were jeopardized, their security was jeopardized, their kids could not go to schools, hospitals were taken over by the protestors, and schools were invaded by the protestors. Their lives were affected, and they feared for their lives for a good week out of the whole period. It was a very eerie feeling in Bahrain.

Only when security forces came in and started to restore law and order, did they speak out very vocally. They said, “How dare you threaten our livelihood and put us in so much fear?” and so this hatred and anger started spewing out. That is when we started seeing these kinds of vocal attacks between the two communities. We need to step in and think about a long term reconciliatory process.

HSNW: There have been a lot of suggestions that Iran has been sparking this unrest. Do you have any insight into this?

AA: I do not have any evidence and I cannot say that Iran was involved from day one, but they might have been involved from day one with certain factions of the protestors. What we saw in this one month period, even though a large number of them were asking for peaceful demonstrations, a substantial number of them were not. They were asking for regime change, they were asking for achieving their goals by any means.

You see in Iran the foreign minister and members of the Iranian government making statements like, “The government of Bahrain should listen to their protestors and listen to their demands.” A year and a half ago in Iran there was a Green Revolution. What did they do with their protestors? They hung them on gallows on every public street and they are telling us to listen to the protestors.

They are encouraging them to stand up for their rights. The most hardline religious clerics are telling protestors to become martyrs for their cause. You have all the Iranian TV channels spewing hatred and inciting the protestors to achieve their goals by any means – force, violence. You have Hezbollah and Nasrallah speaking out and giving speeches also enflaming the protestors.

This is only the evidence that we can see and we know about. Little do we know about