MANAMA (Middle East Eye) – Moosa Satrawi was 22 when the Grand Prix came to his home.
At the time, he barely noticed. The arrival, in 2004, of the motorsport in the island kingdom of Bahrain, the smallest country in the Persian Gulf, was being trumpeted by politicians and the ruling royal family.
But Satrawi, who holds a diploma in industrial rigging, had more pressing concerns. After three months, he had been made redundant from his job at the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) as migrant workers, mainly from India and Nepal, were shipped in to replace locals.
Satrawi and some other workers who had been laid off started protesting in front of the royal palace. They held signs that read: “We are Bahraini and we don’t have a job”; and: “We are Bahraini and we are looking for a job.”
One day, the protesters saw a convoy of large vehicles heading in the direction of Sakhir, the site of the $150mn circuit that was set to host the inaugural Grand Prix. Preparations were being made. The race was taking place that weekend.
“The police came and they hid us,” Satrawi told Middle East Eye. “They said that they wanted to talk to us about our situation, that the authorities wanted to help us, and that we could discuss what was happening.”
The protesters went with the police, out of sight of the palace and the main road leading to the track.
“It was just a way of moving us so that we wouldn’t be seen by journalists and people going to the Grand Prix,” Satrawi said.
At various points, Satrawi told MEE, key Bahraini leaders including General Khalifa al-Fadhala came to tell the protesters that they wanted to talk to them, and that they would work things out.
But the promise of a fair hearing never materialized. As well as protesting unemployment, Satrawi is part of Bahrain’s Shia majority, which has suffered waves of repression in a country ruled for over two centuries by the Al Khalifa family.
One night in March 2005, at around midnight, five cars arrived at Satrawi’s house. Security forces took the young Bahraini, bundled him into one of the vehicles, and moved him to what he describes as a “hidden place”.
“They beat me and said that if we continued to protest they would go after my wife and family. They took my clothes off and sexually assaulted me,” he told MEE, preferring not to share further details of the assault.
Satrawi was left lying in the street, dependent on strangers to drive him home, where his distraught wife saw the blood on his clothes.
The next year, with another Bahrain Grand Prix on the horizon, Satrawi and his fellow protesters organized demonstrations to try and get some attention for their cause, which by now had broadened into a movement calling for dignity and an end to political repression in Bahrain.
Saturday’s Bahrain Grand Prix marks the 20th anniversary of the inaugural race. For the country’s rulers, it is a time for “special celebrations to mark Bahrain’s landmark 20th anniversary in motorsport”.
For pro-democracy activists from Bahrain, including the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), the race is testament to a “troubling 20-year legacy of sportswashing in Bahrain”.
Sayed Alwadaei, Bird’s advocacy director, attended the first Bahrain Grand Prix, getting in with a free ticket the authorities handed out to all school and university students because they wanted to make sure there was a substantial crowd.
“The government made a big deal about it,” he told MEE. “I went but we didn’t understand what was going on. We could just hear lots of very noisy cars.”
Today, Alwadaei, who is one of the most prominent Bahraini activists in the world, says that “what hurts the most is when F1 makes truly astonishing false claims that it is a force for good”.