THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Reporting From The Arab Spring Front – A Conversation with May Ying Welsh. Part 2 of 3 – Pearl Roundabout, Bahrain
THE PUBLIC INTEREST brings Welsh to AAIFF’11 for a conversation with Vinit Parmar, Professor of Film Studies and Production at Brooklyn College and the U.S. premiere of Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark. Welsh remaining in Pearl Roundabout in Manama Bahrain after the government banned foreign journalists, documented the civil uprising and subsequent government crackdown collaborating with local activists. Welsh recently received the prestigious 2011 Polk George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Most recently Al-Jazeera’s Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark was chosen as the 2012 RFK Journalism Award Grand Prize winner by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Executive Producer Jon Blair accepted the award on behalf of himself, writer and director May Ying Welsh, and field producer Hassan Mahfood at a ceremony held at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC.
Vinit Parmar: If we can make the transition from a 23-minute film to a 51-minute film. Is that it?
May Ying Welsh: It’s the latest film.
VP: shouting in the dark traces Bahrain’s democracy movement from it’s early days of euphoria and hope through the roller coaster ups and downs of the struggle between the people and the regime to the final brutal crushing of the protesters by a government that claims its own citizens are a foreign threat, and a regional superpower determined to exterminate the Arab revolt at its doorstep. Social media is turned against the people to identify the protesters for arrest. World powers look the other way as the regime takes its vengeance. Let’s watch the clip, and we will have a plenty to talk about.
Watch clip
VP: It’s tough stuff. So it’s clear for a filmmaker or a storyteller, conflict is the inherent way we tell stories. It’s easy for us to find the conflict here because it’s in your face but let’s just step back for a bit–when you were given the assignment of Bahrain, you didn’t want to go.
MYW: Yeah, I didn’t want to go because revolution was breaking out all over the Arab world. Egypt had just happened, Tunisia had just happened and Bahrain was the next one in the horizon. Yemen was about to go off and Libya was about to go off and I had my heart set on Yemen—I wanted to go to Yemen. A desperate news editor called me at 10 o’clock at night asking me to please go to Bahrain. I tried really hard to get out of it because I was like, it’s the unglamorous revolution. It’s a half-an-hour plane ride away from Qatar, it’s a tiny country of half-a-million citizens, this is not gonna be the cool revolution to be on. I thought it wasn’t going to be that exciting so I tried hard to really resist. But he said I have to go, it’s actually not really a choice. So I got on the plane and went to help the correspondent who was already there–we snuck into the country; Bahrain was not allowing any journalists in to cover this revolution. That first night we saw the people shouting, “As-Sha’ab yureed isqaat an-Nithaam”, which means, “the people want to bring down the regime,” it’s the famous phrase of the Arab revolutions. Somebody had brought an RV truck to Pearl Roundabout and they slowly drove it into the crowd. I was on top of the RV with my camera and I suddenly realized, when I looked out in the crowd, there were no other cameras there. There were a lot of people with their mobile phones but there were no broadcasters there; no live trucks, there was nothing. We were the only people there and it was a gigantic crowd. If you consider that Bahrain has a half-a-million citizens, this was like seeing Tahrir Square at its height in Cairo, relative to its population–my mind was just blown. As far back as I could see, I saw fists pumping in the back: “As-Sha’ab yureed isqaat an-Nithaam!” And as I lifted my camera to film them, the entire Roundabout turned to face my camera and chant into my camera because it was the only camera there. And I felt, I suddenly have a huge responsibility towards these people — I have to make sure their voices are heard. I began to feel a sense of dread and betrayal on their behalf because what kind of revolution is this huge and nobody is here? Where are the channels of the world? Why is it just me and my little camera, not even a big broadcast camera? Why are we the only people here? And I started worrying for them, without knowing the politics of it, without understanding why nobody else was there yet. I already felt something was wrong. These people are putting everything on the line–they could be tortured, they could be jailed for having come out so bravely and called for the end of this dictatorship and nobody is here to pass that along. I suddenly understood that whether I wanted one or not, I was going to have a relationship with this revolution and with Bahrain.
VP: So it was dangerous being on that RV as well?
MYW: Well, I wouldn’t say it was dangerous. I was worried at all times about being deported from the country, because we were there illegally. We were there as tourists because Bahrain is–a U.S. puppet. If you look at a map of Bahrain you’ll see that it’s right across a teeny strip of water from the world’s most important oil export terminal in Saudi Arabia. By safe guarding the oil flow from Saudi Arabia, it’s a really essential relationship for the United States. It’s a pillar of our national security to keep that relationship.
VP: You were talking about how you were staying on this RV and people were telling you to come down.
MYW: The correspondent with me was telling me to come down. I’m always thinking, I’m a filmmaker, I always want to film as much as possible and also felt a sense of responsibility for these people. I wanted to film everything they did. I wanted to film them with the wide shot, I wanted to shoot a close-up; I wanted to get down to the ground with them. You know, I wanted to show every single last aspect of it. You know the pressure of the news: the correspondent with me James Bays, was just shouting at me for at least 10 minutes: “May, come down from there, we have to file, we have to file!” That is always the tension with news which requires you to hurry and finish and get the stuff out there. And I’m having another priority, I don’t wanna leave.
VP: At what point did you realize you have to make a film out of this? At what point did it become a one-hour?
MYW: I realized it was a film very early on and got approval for it from Paul Eedle Al Jazeera’s head of programs, but we thought it would be a short film—like a 23-minute film just about Bahrain. When Saudi Arabia crossed the causeway and invaded Bahrain–and they were invited by the Khalifas – to help crush the democracy movement I realized that it was a huge film. The regional powers of the GCC and Qatar, a member of the GCC– which owns Al Jazeera– participated in this crushing of the democracy movement. When the government arrested the doctors and nurses of Salmaniya Hospital who had helped treat the injured protesters infuriating the government, which considered these people traitors and outlaws who did not deserve medical treatment. When the army and security forces started to beat and torture the protesters who were patients inside the hospital—a total massive violation of the Geneva Conventions. At that point, I said, this is a film.
VP: Give us an understanding of when you arrived in Bahrain? When did you realize the GCC was coming, give us some sort of time scan.
MYW: I was there for a month or something like that. We were all bored with the story because everyday the protestors were just out on the streets marching–it just seemed to be in a holding pattern. The Bahraini people were asking for the same thing over and over again, there was no movement on any front that we could see. At some point, we just kind of got bored with the story and in Doha they got bored of the story so they called us back. I had been back in Doha for maybe three or four hours, when I started receiving SMS messages on my phone from Bahrainis saying ‘you picked the wrong day to leave.’ They told me Saudis were coming over the causeway but this was something I couldn’t prove because there were no pictures anywhere, there was no news. There were just rumors, people saying they saw tanks coming over the causeway. That’s all there was.
VP: Who were sending you these messages?
MYW: People I had filmed. At that point, without any confirmation, it was serious enough. I had heard rumors going around for weeks, that the Saudis will never let this movement continue. Because the oil fields of Saudi Arabia are in the Eastern part of the country–this is a Shia area not a Sunni area–so if Bahrain is rising up, not only are they fellow Shias, they’re actually related by blood–they’re from the same tribes and the same clans. So if Bahrain rises up, the chances are very high that Eastern Saudi Arabia will also rise up and that the Saudi government was not going to allow. That’s something you could argue America wouldn’t allow–the destabilization of the world’s oil supply by people who many believe would be close to Iran. I completely deny, based on my personal interactions, that most of them want an Iranian theocracy. If they were to have democracy in Bahrain, I think they would opt to have a secular state, that would be inclusive of Sunnis and Shias because there is a large population of Sunnis, you can’t ignore them. And because they want national reconciliation, they wanna move forward. It’s not about vindictively punishing a portion of the population, people want to end a dictatorship. They want democracy. The regime used the fear of an Iranian style theocracy to turn Sunnis against the revolution not only within Bahrain but within the whole region. But a lot of Sunnis didn’t buy it because they saw the same tactics used by Hosni Mubarak, a lot of people didn’t believe it.
VP: That gets us to our next clip. Here, this is the GCC. The GCC is an organization of military…
MYW: No. GCC is like a regional bloc–like an alliance that has a military component.
Play chip
MYW: Almost everybody you saw in that clip was arrested. The doctors were all arrested, including the person who was talking about the retina. He was severely tortured and is in the military hospital right now. And the guy who spoke at the end has been arrested–almost everybody who appeared in this film has been arrested.
VP: And so to understand a little bit about the government’s targeting of Salmaniya Hospital, were they privy to the filmmaking at the time? How did they know that Salmaniya Hospital was the place to be?
MYW: Right from the start when the government started to crush the movement, the casualties ended up in Salmaniya Hospital—even if they had to be taken by private cars. As a journalist, you would go into Salmaniya Hospital to find out what had happened that day, get accurate statistics about how many people were injured, how many people were killed and things like that. The doctors were telling the media what had been done to the people and that really infuriated the regime. At some point in the film, this guy Abdul Ridha got shot in the head by the army. The woman, Dr. Nihad Shirawi, who told us his brain was shattered into pieces– she was accused of killing him and went to jail. The guy with an army bullet in his head died, and the government accused her, a Sunni doctor, of killing him on purpose in order to make the government look bad. She and the neurosurgeon in charge of the case were actually criminally charged with that.
VP: Other doctors were charged with treason, high treason crimes because they were talking to the media and going against anything the government stood for.
MYW: They were accused of all kinds of things that you can’t imagine: killing patients, taking hostages in the hospital, carrying weapons in the hospital; all kinds of crazy charges, which have been dropped, since this film aired. The only charges that are still against the doctors now are charges like lying to the media, giving false information, because the government insists that everything in this film is a complete lie, none of this ever happened and all of this is fabrication.
VP: So we’re in this interesting paradigm, where the government is using its very tool of television, the very thing that exposes them, which is Al Jazeera, and then use that to convince people that they are correct—that the state knows best, and that everything else is a sham. It’s amazing how your camera is the only one who goes against the state basically.
MYW: I mean, there was some media that showed up here and there–BBC came for a little while, CNN came for a little while and ABC came for a little while–everybody came for a few days, but nobody stayed. Nobody came and just stuck with this thing to see this transpire. What we did at Al Jazeera was to stay with the story, to show up early and be the last people to leave.
VP: Well, that also raises a lot of ethical issues because the people that talked to Al Jazeera were targeted. Of course filmmakers never have to take an oath about this, for example, doctors do. The idea is when doctors take the oath, to do no harm, filmmakers of course understand that, do no harm, but there are certain things you couldn’t help.
MYW: A lot of people definitely went to jail because they appeared in our news reports–there’s no doubt about that. After a certain number of people had been arrested people simply began refusing to talk to us. Nobody would talk to us, you would see the silhouettes because nobody at that point was crazy enough to talk to Al Jazeera and show their face. We actually didn’t have that ethical dilemma because people had their own sense of self-preservation. But the ethical dilemma I did face was in post-production because I had been filming people all along before the crackdown. I had people on camera saying “death to Khalifa”, “death to the prime minister” and “down with Hamad”, and they may not have been arrested. If I show them now, is it gonna cause them to be arrested? The reason I felt comfortable showing these people’s faces– first of all, I didn’t show anything very extreme, people saying really extreme stuff, I didn’t use it because of my fear of what could happen to these people after I did. Second of all, I didn’t feel bad for putting people on the air because the regime arrested all the photo journalists in Bahrain and forced them to hand over every single piece of media they had filmed in the Pearl Roundabout. So the regime already had thousands and thousands of images from every imaginable angle of everyone who came to Pearl Roundabout. At that point they were putting images on Facebook, and actually it’s an act of defiance now because they already know who everybody is. So now it’s an act of defiance to say, yeah I was in Pearl Roundabout, what about it? I was asking for democracy, so what? At a certain point, I felt they had these people; they’ve already posted their photos all over the place and tried to humiliate them, so now we’re gonna reclaim this image of a person at the Pearl Roundabout and say yeah, they were there and they were asking for a democracy.
VP: So did you disclose what you had? You were in the country at the time when they’re cracking down on this. You had control over these tapes, did they come to you?
MYW: First of all, they did start chasing me around Bahrain. When the crackdown got really bad; people were being tortured to death, that’s when the police started chasing me around and that’s when I left the hotel system. The hotel system automatically gives your passport to the interior ministry every week so the ministry knows who’s in the country. So I left the hotel system and began to stay in apartments. The police still managed to find me because they followed journalists using their SIM cards. They trace you; they will see all your phone calls, who you’re meeting with and find out where you are. The police showed up at the reception in the apartment building I was staying in, looking for me and luckily, I wasn’t there. And they said they were gonna come back. People in the reception told me, you have to leave in five minutes. So I left. I took all my stuff and left to an office space, an abandoned office space from someone who was helping me and stayed there with no SIM card in my phone. When I took the SIM card out of my phone, I never had a problem again. So I actually didn’t leave the country with the video–I left the video in the country. I got it all into hard drives—two small hard drives and left the two hard drives in Bahrain. I had someone else go into Bahrain, a white middle-aged man with a British passport, which is like the ultimate, we don’t want to mess with you sir, we’re business-friendly Bahrain. He picked it up from a complex, a dead-drop sort of situation, and dropped it off in Doha for us.
VP: Amazing. So we’re talking about how the government uses all this information they have, to target the protesters. Let’s take a look.
Play clip
MYW: It’s a hell of a regime. They’re not very subtle.
Audience: A lot of PR.
MYW: Yes, a lot of corporate communications. They’re spending $40,000 a month. This was a huge PR disaster for them.
VP: Well particularly because they’re continuing to address this issue, right? They’re continuing to say negative things about the film.
MYW: Right, the Bahraini foreign minister sent out three tweets about this film condemning the film. They sent an official diplomatic letter of protest demanding Al Jazeera immediately remove the film and stop airing it.
VP: And that’s what this August 10th The New York Times article “Al Jazeera Changes Plan to Run Documentary,” is about. Al Jazeera scheduled multiple screenings but under pressure they pulled back. The article was about why they pulled back. And as of now, they have broadcast it eight times.
MYW: They’ve broadcast it a total of six times.
VP: Six times.
MYW: Instead of shutting this film down, we decided to talk about the film. We had a show called THE STREAM, in which people were able to use Twitter and Facebook and all these different social media to talk about the film, let people debate each other about the issues raised in it. We had another show called INSIDE STORY where we hosted a Bahraini government official. (Note: This particular episode of The Stream won a Royal Television Society award in London for innovative news.)
VP: Right.
MYW: We said: look, if you want your point of view on air you have to allow us to come into the country and you have to talk to us–you can’t just keep saying no, no, no. So they finally said yes and they came on our show and they defended themselves.
VP: Parts of this film were put on YouTube.
MYW: The whole film was put on YouTube.
VP: And, lots of hits. In ten days, I believe it was 400,000 hits.
MYW: Which is good for an Al Jazeera program. Usually Al Jazeera programs get like 10,000 hits after six months, maximum you would have like 20,000 or 25,000 hits.
VP: So who’s watching this? Who do you think is watching this?
MYW: You can see the breakdown of who’s watching on YouTube– they provide these graphs and analysis. We know the vast majority of people watching the film are in the GCC area. They’re coming from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. They are the number one viewers because it’s a taboo subject. Nobody’s been able to know what’s going on in Bahrain because it’s covered up and blacked out, so everybody wants to know. The Bahraini government made a very unwise move by complaining so loudly about this film because they attracted attention to it. It turned into a diplomatic incident between Bahrain and Qatar, wherein everybody after that wanted to know what’s the fuss about? What is this documentary that is destroying relations between Bahrain and Qatar and why is the Bahraini government so upset? That made everybody go and watch the film. So they really made a bad move. They publicized this film like crazy by opposing it.
VP: And Twitter has also been quite effective. People are tweeting about the film.
MYW: The film first aired on Thursday night, August 4th at 11 o’clock at night. It’s Ramadan right now, so that is prime time–when everybody is watching television. After they’ve had their Iftar, they are relaxing and they turn on the TV. They’re going to be staying up until 4am so 11 o’clock is prime time, everybody was watching. Before the film was even over at midnight, Twitter exploded. The hash tags @Bahrain, @Qatar, @GCC, and @shoutinginthedark were insane–they were all about the film. You would read three tweets and you’d see 50 more tweets. It was non-stop. People were either really against it, or really into it–people were calling it a fabrication; people were saying, thank God, the truth finally. This went on like that for 48 hours. Members of the Qatari ruling family were on Twitter as well tweeting things like, please don’t blame me; I didn’t make the documentary, please don’t–I am not the spokesperson for Al Jazeera, please leave me alone.
VP: It was amazing advertising for your film.
MYW: It was. It was really great publicity.
VP: Before we break for questions, I just want to ask a couple of more questions. You made this from shooting this in February or so to the end of April.
MYW: Almost three months, yeah.
VP: And then you edited this 15 days ago, right?
MYW: Yeah, we just finished it.
VP: You just finished it. After this, where are you gonna go from here? And then when you get back to Doha, you will have another assignment, or perhaps, another project.
MYW: Right.
VP: After making this, are you scared of going back?
MYW: Some people are angry at me for this film because they don’t like Shias. They think Shias are infidels. Shias aren’t allowed to rule so how can I possibly make something that supports the idea of Shias having the right to rule anything. But they don’t come right out and say that. They’ll say something along the lines of, “how could you repeat the lie that Shias are the majority in Bahrain? We all know that they’re the minority and your film is full of lies. The Khalifas are good—why are you making them look bad?” It’s really ideological: religious ideology and political ideology– opposition to people who they feel have benefitted from this film. They don’t care whether it is the truth or not.
VP: As long as its in their vision.
MYW: They’re like, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
VP: The way this film has inflamed so much controversy: New York Times writes an article about it, it’s all over the internet, Twitter, it’s going to get about a million YouTube hits by the end of the month–it’s a way to disseminate information. You’ve disseminated on YouTube.
MYW: Right.
VP: It’s the next wave of how to tell stories. If you cannot have a PBS channel, if you cannot air it in one of your standard theatres or a film festival, put it on YouTube. The people are watching it on their iPhones.
MYW: Their Blackberries. The number one way people watched this film was on their mobile device. Somebody sent it to them, and they watched it.
VP: The way to be able to transmit information for social reform is now to handheld devices. Handheld in terms of your camera, your editing–you can edit in transit–and shoot as you go. The world is changing because the medium is changing. And you’re riding this wave with this film. How do you see your work change as a result of this– either dissemination or the way you are making these stories?
MYW: I haven’t thought about that. To me, the most powerful medium is still the television. It might be disseminated by social media, or advertised on social media, but I’m sure the vast majority of the people watched it on TV. Of those who watched it on YouTube, most watched it on a mobile device. But I’m sure if 400,000 people watched it on YouTube, millions of people saw it on television–I’m sure everyone in Bahrain saw this on television.
The Public Interest, Part 3 – Q+A will be posted in two weeks.