Popular uprisings escalate in Saudi Arabia

The Saudi police cracked down on a Shiite popular uprising in an area around the city of al-Qatif, injuring several people seriously.Saudi Arabia has until now managed to avoid major uprisings despite the Arab Spring sweeping off some of the most established dictatorial regimes in the Aran world, but the latest incident shows the potential for unrest is still important.Civilians who witnessed the clashes insist the Saudi state is brutally suppressing the protest. "The situation is calm now in the village" of Al-Awamiya in Eastern Saudi Arabia, said Human Rights First Society head Ibrahim al-Mughaiteeb, after 14 people were injured in the police clampdown. At a mosque in the village late on Tuesday, senior cleric Sheikh Nimr Nimr, said Saudi "authorities depend on bullets ... and killing and imprisonment. We must depend on the roar of the word, on the words of justice," Nimr said following two days of clashes between Shiite protesters and security forces. A video posted on YouTube showed demonstrators chanting "Down with Mohammed bin Fahd," the governor of the Eastern Province and son of Saudi Arabia's former ruler, the late King Fahd. Saudi Arabia first witnessed popular uprisings after it sent troops to the neighboring Bahrain to suppress the peaceful protestors in the country. The overwhelming majority of the estimated two million Saudi Shiites live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, neighboring Bahrain, where they complain of discrimination by the government. Security forces have been deployed and checkpoints set up in the Shiite-populated region since March, said Mugaiteeb. Sheikh Nimr accused Saudi authorities of "provoking" the protesters by firing on them with live bullets. Saudi Arabia, which vowed to deal "strictly" with those it branded as "traitors," had condemned the unrest as "blatant interference in its sovereignty." "Those must clearly state whether their loyalty is ... to this country and its (religious) authority," the interior ministry said. Tension in the village boiled over Monday as Saudi police arrested two men, both in their 70s, in a bid to force their fugitive sons, accused of taking part in Shiite-led protests, to surrender, according to a Shiite activist. Unrests escalated after the Kingdom's assistant minister of defense and aviation Prince Khalid bin Sultan told his troops located in the Qatif area they should be ready for all "possibilities". Saudi Arabia has a Shiite minority, which accounts for about 10 per cent of the population, but relationship between the totalitarian regime and the Shiite have for long been tensed and the community has often accused the government of targeting them pretexting links with Iran or questioning their loyalty to the state. In 2009, the US State Department published a human-rights report on Saudi Arabia noting that Shiite face "significant political, economic, legal, social and religious discrimination condoned by the government." In recent months however Shiite protesters, bolstered by the Arab Spring, have staged more protests in the Qatif area with demands ranging from the release of Shiite prisoners to the withdrawal of Saudi forces sent to Bahrain to help quell protests led by members of the Shiite majority. More broadly, Saudi Arabia has also had to face demands for more political and social reforms, with women also demanding for more changes and political space. The Saudi regime has been accusing Iran of interfering in the domestic affairs of other Arab countries, including Bahrain, due to its free stances on the dictatorial regimes' clampdown on popular protests in recent months while Riyadh itself has dispatched troops to Bahrain and Yemen and is killing and suppressing people there.