I went only for my courses he replied

“I went only for my courses,” he replied.So was there any Islamic Front office in Tehran? Mr al-Arab denied this. “I was hung upside down and beaten with fists by four men,” he says.Sheikh Salih fled Bahrain 13 years ago because he feared arrest – plain-clothes police called at his home three days’ later. He travelled to India, to Saudi Arabia and then to Tehran where he says he studied theology for five years. “I told the pilot that I refused to leave my home, that I didn’t want to go to Damascus,” he said “But he said he would have to take me. Is that allowed under international law? The pilot was British.”Into the room walks Sheikh Abdullah Salih, his baby daughter in his arms. He was first arrested in 1980, he said, for demanding a return to parliamentary democracy.

Mr Moussawi, holding passport number 721773, described how he was forcibly deported to Syria on 30 April 1993 on Gulf Air flight GF 901. The moment he mentions this, the other men produce their own equally worthless passports.One deportee has been given only a laissez-passer, others have discovered that instead of Bahraini nationality, their new identity documents describe them only as “residents”, thus potentially depriving them of citizenship. He was deported in April 1993, with a newly issued Bahraini passport, valid for just one year. But the Jordanian colonel, he is the worst.”Mr Moussawi, described by Amnesty International as a political prisoner after he was jailed in 1988 for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the government, spent five years behind bars. There are a number of people who do the beatings in the al-Qalaa prison and the intelligence headquarters One is called Mohamed Ouweyed, another is Mohamed Hijazi There is a Pakistani who is very hard – Aziz Sugager.

I was tortured in Bahrain, molested by an officer; a Jordanian officer working for Henderson beat my wife in front of me. “I have been imprisoned in Kuwait for my opposition activities and then in Bahrain. He is an immense figure, perhaps 7ft tall, his black leather jacket and military-style camouflage trousers strangely at odds with his almost snow-white hair.”What do you expect me to think of the al-Khalifas?” he asked. Each of them has been imprisoned and deported from the island, on the orders – so they all insist – of Ian Henderson, the British head of Bahrain’s intelligence services.When Sayed Hisham al-Moussawi walks into the apartment, the other men nod gravely. His young wife Khatoun sits beside her husband in a black chador, lowering her eyes as a series of men enter the room with its oil stove and faded furnishings.Many of the men are bearded, most are members of the front and all speak of Sheikh Issa bin Salman al-Khalifa and his government with suppressed fury.

Does it look as if we are supported by Iran?”
Mr al-Arab is the local representative of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, the strongest if not the largest of Bahrain’s opposition groups which was accused – wrongly, according to the Front’s spokesmen – of planting last week’s bomb outside the Diplomat hotel in the Bahraini capital, Manama. He is a diminutive man with a pointed Spanish Armada beard who pushes his key into the front door of a cramped apartment of flaking yellow paint “There – this is my home. “The Bahraini government says we are working with Iran,” Mr al-Arab says as he leads me down an alley beyond the mosque. Beneath the gold and tiled dome of the great mosque, Syrian shopkeepers sell air tickets to Tehran, photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini and President Khamanei of Iran and small golden Shia swords with traditional twin-tipped blades. Abdul Amir al-Arab met me opposite the shrine of Saida Zeinab, the tomb of the Prophet’s granddaughter who was also wife to the Imam Ali, her grave thus a place of pilgrimage for the world’s Shias. It has rained almost ceaselessly in the Northern Province for the past week, causing widespread flooding.But the children played on, oblivious to the skies and the impending political storm which will almost certainly hit their town some time next week..

I believe that the police will see to it that violence does not occur.”Meanwhile, as their school’s future was being decided in Pretoria, dozens of young white boys in khaki shorts and shirts and girls in red skirts and white blouses played in the schoolyard under dark threatening skies. More dramatically, after Judge Spoelstra ordered “all reasonable steps” to protect children against intimidation, threats or wrongful interference, officials said that police might have to be deployed, turning the school into a South African version of Little Rock, Arkansas, where troops had to escort black pupils to a white high school in 1957.The Potgietersrus Town Clerk, Karel Liebenberg, said he was not sure how the parents might react “We don’t want violence. “We saw this as a national case and are pleased that the judgement has come this way,” he said.Authorities expect the first black children to enrol next week But the Potgietersrus story is not over An appeal could be heard in the Constitutional Court. He ordered it to allow the three black children named in the court application and 18 others to participate fully in its activities, and told it to pay the court costs of the black parents.The Education Minister, Sibusiso Bengu, told a news conference he was delighted. They believe they are defending their language, religion and way of life from non-Afrikaans- speaking children, whom they fear might flood in and steal all that they hold dear. The authorities in the Northern Province saw the action as nothing other than thinly disguised racism.The provincial government and 21 black families from the area took the school to the Supreme Court.Yesterday, Judge Tjibbe Spoelstra ruled the school could “not unfairly on the grounds of race, ethnic or social origin, culture, colour or language, refuse to admit any child”. If it were not for the children playing in the yard, the red-brick building could be a prison, or possibly a fort, which is how many of the parents of the 600-odd children prefer to see it.The parents view the school as a bastion of Afrikaner culture.