Bahrain (and Beyond) Opinion: Does Sayed Hashim's Death Matter?

Ali Shaikh and Sayed HashimSayed Hashim is so young that it is difficult to estimate his age looking at pictures --- he could be 12 or 13, although activists confirm that he is 16.

This is not why you are reading about him, however. Sayed Hashim is the lead in a story about Bahrain because he will not make it to 17. Like too many other Bahrainis, he is now the victim of an uprising that continues to shake the tiny island nation but does not seem to cause a ripple in the capitals of Western nations.  

His last moments as he lay motionless on a street in Sitra, shot in the head with a tear gas canister --- a supposed "non-lethal weapon" --- blood slowly exiting his nose and the left side of his head, are captured on film. As his eyelids open one last time, you can see the frustration in the protesters around him. One tries to fan him, another tries to check his heartbeat. Still others keep circling around him, as if this would pull his soul back into his body. 

They failed. We are left with those final filmed images and the only on-line photograph: it is a picture with his 14-year-old friend Ali Shaikh, who was killed in September. 

If these circumstances of Hashim's death are tragic, they are easy to explain. He is just another case of a person being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What he and his friends seek --- justice, democracy, equal rights - could disrupt the oil supply from Bahrain and create disturbances throughout the Persian Gulf. The implications of what a 16-year-old wanted could have been significant for cities from New York to London to Beijing to Tokyo.

People die across the Middle East and North Africa every day at the hands of security forces. The killing in Syria continues. Egypt's current rulers erase lives on a weekly basis in the name of stability. Yemen's people march in peace, and sometimes die in those marches, only to hear from the world talk that the only thing that matters in their country is Al Qa'eda.

These deaths may stir the world a bit. They may spark condemnations, statements, and outpouring of sympathies from seats of power like the White House and 10 Downing Street. However, it was also foreseeable from the moment of his passing that Hashim will not be the subject of the condolences. Bahrain's regime can rely on governments, allied through oil and military bases, to forego sustained attention to rights, hoping the protests die down so they won't have to listen to the persistent demands of activists.

You could line the streets of Manama with the bodies of Ali Sheikh, Sayed Hashim, and others (how many others?), and the Crown Prince would still get a tour of Washington, meeting President Obama, as he did in June. The Foreign Minister would still be welcomed in the "Treaty Room" by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as he was in October. Bahrain is a stark reminder that we still live in a world where obtaining respect for our rights as human beings is still dependent on how markets will be affected if those rights are acknowledged.

That is how Sayed Hashim exited the world in 2011. That is how we enter it in 2012.