Yagoob’s Dome

Today some 30,000 Bahrainis will receive the first batch of this year’s ‘Inflation Fund’ under its new name ‘Financial Support’. Notice the usage of the word ‘first’ , the second, third batches etc will come in the coming months.

Now to some readers, it may not sound so problematic…Well it is

Firstly, there are only roughly half a million Bahrainis in Bahrain, and we have a thingie called the Central Informatics Organization (CIO) who are basically Bahrain’s Big Brother, where every significant piece of information about a Bahraini citizen is supposedly saved in a huge huge database. Over recent years, the CIO have been bumbling about with projects like the ‘Smart’ dumb card (how to get it and how that you can’t use it anywhere at ALL), e-goverment portal which is kinda OK but still undynamic and rigid.

But enough of their daft projects

Last year, the CIO and the Ministry of Social Affairs organized the first Inflation Fund campaign, where they opened registration centres around the country, and made all the poor and old people stand in long queues and basically beg for the handout. During that campaign they gained the financial information of tens of thousands of Bahraini families.

The thing with collecting such a incredibly enormous amount of information, one would think in this age where information is King, they would of saved that information and reused it for at least a year or two before asking citizens to update the information through conventional means, by mail and/or online.

Instead, CIO and MoSA for this year’s handout decided to do the whole registration thing all over again as if nothing happened, and being the techie savvy people they want to be, they launched a website for people to sign in and add in their information..and who are the people who should sign in this website?

That’s kind of daft, isn’t it? But that’s not all my friends,

Now I’m still an employee of MoE and I tick all the boxes that makes me eligible for this year’s Financial Support, so I decided to register online and fill in any missing details (bank details most likely) . So I log on using my CPR No. and my name pops up

Straightforward procedure, So far so good

Then I fill in some information, which sector do I work in, if I’m married or not, etc.. (All information which should be already saved into the CIO database) and press Submit.

Then another form pops up and the first question is..

Are you a Bahraini citizen?

Like WTF, does the CIO only know my name? Where the hell is the rest of my information? Are they keeping on servers to say ‘Oooooh we use combu6ars’?  Yet, I continued and filled in the rest of that idiotic form and press Submit.

FAIL! I managed to send my info again the next day, and it went through miraculously! It turns out that I now need to wait to see if I am ELIGIBLE or not and they will apparently send me an email to say if I am or not…

Now, why wouldn’t they already know if I was eligible or not, now with the CIO receiving every single piece of information about me from my date of birth to blood type to where I work and how much I make. Wouldn’t one semi complicated query find out who is eligible or not???

Now being in Japan as a legal alien, I also am eligible for a one time Japanese government handout of 12,000 Yen (about BD50). The procedure was so achingly simple and straightforward it almost made me cry.

I received a letter in the mail in the middle of May saying that I am eligible for the handout. With that letter was a form with all my information (name, address, age and visa status) and asked me if it was correct. Everything was fine and up-to-date, so I flipped to the second page which was about how I could receive the handout, I could do so by cash, mail cheque or transfer straight to my bank account. I wrote down my bank details and copied my Alien Registration Card and bank passbookas proof of my identity and of my bank account’s existence, put all these documents into the accompanied postage paid envelope and posted it in the beginning of June.

I received the 12,000 Yen yesterday in my bank account without any hassle whatsoever.

This is in a city with a population of 2.2 million people, four times more people than Bahrain, and yet they are sure of every single piece of information they have and work accordingly.

Why can’t we be like that, collect accurate information and work according to it to make our lives easier?

I sometimes wonder if it’s a matter of mistrust between our government and us Bahrainis, do they think that we will all ‘fake’ our information in order to get a measly BD600 for a whole year, and that they have to check and re-check the information to see if we’re lying and if we’re not lying they’ll mess up the information [Ar] anyways..

Scrolling through yesterday’s Alwasat newspaper, I came across this shocking piece of news concerning the latest government scholarships for this year’s secondary school graduates.

Just a quick background on how things are done,

Every year more and more Bahraini teenagers graduate from secondary schools around Bahrain, and as you would expect, the more students graduate, the more honour students graduate. Every end of  school year, the Ministry of Education announces the scholarships plan, which to many new graduates (those of 95% or higher GPA) is the holy grail and what everyone aspires to. To many of Bahrain’s political societies and average Mohammed on the street, it’s a sign of what the govenment plans for the country’s future and is always a playground of controversy (unfair distrubution of scholarships, sectarian discrimination,etc..) but that is for another day..

This week PM Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa handed out certificates to over 450 of this year’s honour students, those 450 odd students will share 1864 scholarships with their fellow private school Bahraini honour students.

The number of scholarships are impressive but the quality is by far substandard

كشفت خطة البعثا ت والمنح لهذا العام التي اعتمدها وزير التربية والتعليم ماجد النعيمي مؤخراً عن عدم وجود بعثات ومنح للدراسة في جامعات أميركية وأوروبية بخلاف العام الماضي الذي تضمن 32 بعثة توزعت بين أميركا، فرنسا، ماليزيا، سنغافورة، وأستراليا. واقتصرت بعثات العام 2009 على جامعات مملكة البحرين ودول الخليج والمملكة الأردنية الهاشمية وجمهورية مصر العربية فقط.

Alwasat newspaper 24/6/2009

Translation:

This year’s scholarship didn’t include any scholarships to the UK, USA, France, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. The scholarships are instead within Bahrain’s universities, GCC countries, Jordan and Egypt.

Well I’m not knocking these universities as calling them terrible but the inconsistency of the quality of scholarships is terrible and these kids futures are subjected by if the MoE decides they can send them to these good universities or not. But this isn’t the worst or most shocking thing about this year’s scholarship.

في ذلك حاولت «الوسط» الحصول على رد رسمي بشأن ذلك من الوزارة دون جدوى، في الوقت الذي علق فيه النائب عبدالله العالي خلال حديثه لـ «الوسط» يوم أمس (الثلثاء) عن وجود 21 بعثة للإرشاد المدرسي في الأردن في الوقت الذي تتعذر فيه الوزارة بعدم وجود الشواغر لعاطلي الخدمة الاجتماعية.

وأضاف أن خطة البعثات لهذا العام خلت من بعض التخصصات المهمة كهندسة الطيران وصيانة الأجهزة الدقيقة وعلوم البيئة وعلوم الطاقة وتحلية مياه البحر والطب، فضلاً عن العلوم النووية، كما وخلت من بعثات للجامعات العريقة في أميركا وأوروبا لطلبة التعليم الصناعي والعلمي، لافتاً إلى أن بعثاتها للجامعات غير الخليجية ركزت على تخصصات الخزف والنجارة والموسيقى والخزف وحالات قليلة تجاوزت ذلك لتخصص لدراسة الشريعة والتربية والإرشاد.

Translation:

According to MP Abdulla Al-Aali, this year’s scholarships included 21 scholarships to Jordan to study school counselling where at the same time, the MoE have failed to find openings for previous years graduates.
In addition, many other important majors were missing such as aviation engineering, enviromental science, micro-technology, medicine, water technology and energy sciences. At the same time, most of the foriegn scholarships were for artistic majors such as Music, Sculpture, Pottery and Carpentry.

In one point we understand that the MoE wants more honour students to become jobless by paying them to study majors they will not find jobs at neither in the MoE or anywhere else for that matter, plus we see that it doesn’t really care about what the COUNTRY needs. Finally we can see that majors which need more talent and passion than brains are only given to the highest scoring students.

This is absolute hogwash.

Apparently we have a thingie called the Bahrain Economic Vision 2030 [En] [Ar] which envisions that Bahrain needs to give its citizens the best education and training possible in order to increase productivity and build a knowledge based economy. I think the MoE kinda snoozed during those meetings..

And when they snooze..WE LOSE!

Russel Peter\’s \”Louis is Louuuuuuuuse\”

Well the suspension only lasted 12 hours, and the dust has cleared so we can now see the reason for the suspension and how it was lifted so quickly..

The reason for the suspension, making many peoples speculations correct, was Shura MP Ms. Samira Rajab’s article blasting the Iran regime and hinting of Ahmedinajad’s apparent “Jewish” descent.

AAK Newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief Anwar Abdulrahman has stood by the article citing that what Ms. Rajab wrote was true, frank and honest.

الأستاذ أنور عبدالرحمن: لم يسحب وانما حجب.. يوم أمس الأول وأنا في زيارة للخارج ويوجد فارق بيني وبين البحرين 4 ساعات، وفي الرابعة فجرا اتصل بي القائمون على إدارة التحرير وأخبروني أن المسئولين بوزارة الإعلام قرروا إيقاف “أخبار الخليج”، فدار حديث بيني وبين مسئولين في وزارة الإعلام وكذلك معالي الشيخة مي آل خليفة وزيرة الإعلام والثقافة وكان حديثا حضاري لا أننا كنا نعرف السبب وهو نشر مقال بقلم الأستاذة سميرة رجب بشأن إيران وظروف إيران وحقائق إيران ونتائج الفكر الثوري الإيراني..

Akhbar Al-Khaleej 24/6/2009
Translation:

“I was on a visit outside the country where the time difference was four hours, where I recieved a phone call from the editorial staff at 4 a.m (midnight Bahrain time) telling that officials from the Ministry of Culture and Information ordered the suspension of the newspaper. I spoke with those officials and with the Minister Shaikha Mai bint Ibrahim Al-Khalifa in a quiet and civil manner. When then knew that the reason for the suspension was Ms. Samira Rajab’s article about Iran, its situation and the aftermath of its Islamic revolutionary idealogy”.

Now we know how it got suspended, but how did it get back on the shelves so quickly?

قال صاحب السمو الشيخ خليفة بن سلمان آل خليفة رئيس الوزراء على هامش الاحتفال بتكريم المتفوقين أمس: ان مؤازرتنا للصحافة البحرينية في أي شيء تتعرض له واجب.. وواجبنا نحو جريدة “أخبار الخليج” أكبر بمقدار طول دربها الطويل الذي قطعته في خدمة الوطن.
وأضاف سموه: لا يمكن ان نسمح بأن يمس الصحافة والصحفيين أي سوء

Akhbar Al-Khaleej 24/6/2009

Translation:

We must stand by the Bahrain press, and it is my duty to do so, and that is even more so in the case of Akhbar Al-Khaleej because of its long history in Bahrain.

So basically PM Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa lifted the suspension,because AAK is after all his “favourite newspaper” (can’t find the source in AAK archives..Damn!)

and of course, the newspaper doesn’t fail to lavish praise to the PM for this swift lift of the suspension.

سمو الرئيس لا يسعني إلا أن أتوجه باسم كل الزملاء في الجريدة بالشكر الجزيل لسموكم الكريم على وقفتكم الرائعة الى جانب “أخبار الخليج” عندما حُجبت عن قرائها، فمهما نفعل فإننا لن نوفيك حقك.

أفضالكم علينا لن ننساها ما حيينا.. وسنظل نرددها زادا لنا على طريق العطاء للوطن.

Same link as above..

Translation:

“Everyone at AAK newspaper would like to thank you for your gracious support for the newspaper during this suspension, we are forever indebted to you.

We will never forget this for the rest of our lives, and we will carry it with pride as we continue giving to this country”.

Although I am happy that this problem was solved and that the newspaper is back up and running but what disheartens me is the way things are done in Bahrain,

Every problem starts off with an unfair and OTT punishment/obstacle and if you ever want to get ‘justice’ you need to find someone high up and ask for their help or better known as a ‘was6a’ to fix your problem either with a word or a swipe of a pen. After getting what you want, being the good mannered society we are, you have to praise the person who helped you and massage their ego.

We claim that we have laws and that we all abide to them..We claim that we can settle matters with logic and within courtroom walls.. Using our Sharia, our constitution,  our laws and good judges..but the ugly reality is that the only law is survival to the persons with the most ‘Was6a’s!

Will we ever learn? Will we ever break these shackles and actually become a good country?

People around Bahrain, in their homes, in their offices and NOT on Gulf Air flights will notice something missing today..

No Akhbar Al-Kahleej newspaper!

The following was published on the newspaper’s website http://www.aaknews.com and its sister newspaper the English speaking  Gulf Daily News

على ضوء أوامر من السلطات المختصة تم ابلاغها إلى الأستاذ أنور عبدالرحمن رئيس تحرير “أخبار الخليج” بعد منتصف ليلة أمس تقرر وقف صدور جريدة “أخبار الخليج” حتى اشعار آخر لأمور لها علاقة بمخالفة قانون المطبوعات.
وعلى ضوء ما تقدم تم حجب الجريدة عن الصدور ليلة أمس بعد أن كان العدد الذي من المفترض أن يصدر صباح اليوم على وشك الطبع.

MANAMA: Bahrain’s concerned authorities informed Akhbar Al Khaleej Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Anwar Abdulrahman late last night that the daily newspaper has been suspended until further notice for reasons related to the Press law.

The suspension order was received a few minutes before the newspaper went to Press.

Mr Abdulrahman was holding negotiations with the concerned authorities over the issue early this morning.

What has led to this ban is not yet known and what’s it connection to the Press law. This comes as another blow to freedom of speech in Bahrain, after seeing a wide spread of web censorship with the aim of ‘a clean web’ which conveniently blocked everything from opposition websites, pornography, gambling, anti Islamic websites, web proxies and Google Translate, it seems that the ever enlongating arm of censorship has hit the mainstream media!

The strangest and most shocking thing about this ban is that it is Akbar Al-Khaleej, a newspaper which is predominately pro-government and most of it stories cover either one of two things.. What’s going on in Muharraq or What PM Shaikh Khalifa is doing…oh and I forgot, about Shaikh Khalifa and his undying love for the people of Muharraq…

So what has this clawless kitten of a newspaper done to ruffle a few feathers in government?? Only time will tell but for now this is a very sad day in Bahrain history and its attempt in becoming a democratic country..

Al-Wasat newspaper must be the only newspaper in Bahrain that writes about every single court case happening in the country, and with Bahrain’s shockingly easy and light punishments, readers can expect to find a couple of jaw-dropping whoppers on a daily basis.

I just want to show a couple of cases from today’s newspaper, similar stories and exact same punishment!

6 أشهر لفتاة تسببت بوفاة طفل وهربت

حكمت المحكمة الصغرى السادسة بحبس متهمة بحرينية من مواليد 1988 تسببت بوفاة الطفل عيسى حسن محمد دسمال لمدة 6 أشهر مع النفاذ.

وقد علمت “الوسط” أن المتهمة كانت تقود السيارة بسرعة 160 كيلو متراً في الساعة وعند مواجهتها بالتهمة المنسوبة إليها اعترفت إلا أنها عللت بأن الطفل المتوفى هو الذي تسبب في الحادث.

وكانت منطقة المعامير شيعت جثمان الطفل عيسى حسن محمد دسمال الذي قضى نحبه إثر اصطدام سيارة به حينما كان يهم بعبور الشارع من جهة مضمار الاستقلال بمدينة عيسى.

Here a young Bahraini lady driving an insane speed of 160km on one of Isa Town’s main roads and hitting a young child crossing the road leading to his unfortunate and untimely death on the scene. Although she confessed that she ran over him but blamed the child as the reason of the accident, not the fact that she was driving 160km in a 80km zone.

Horrible crime..Even uglier excuse…Punishment.. Six months in prison

Second story is quite similar as I said yet with very different protagonists..

6 أشهر لبنغالي تسبب بوفاة مسن بحريني

قضت المحكمة الصغرى السادسة بحبس وافد بنغالي لمدة 6 أشهر مع النفاذ وذلك بعدما تسبب بخطئه في وفاة المجني عليه.

وتشير التفاصيل إلى أن المتهم البنغالي كان يقود مركبته على شارع فرعي في المحرق وهو شارع جمال الدين الأفغاني ولسبب سرعته اصطدم برجل مسن كان يحاول عبور الشارع وقد استطاع المسن قبل الحادث أن يعبر الجزء الأكبر منه.

This time a Bengali man driving on one of Muharraq’s main roads runs over an old man, even though he crossed most of the road at the time of the accident, the driver didn’t have the common sense to slow down, hitting the old man who died later that day.

Horrible accident… No common sense…Punishment… Six months in prison.

Now I don’t know about you but don’t the above stories count for manslaughter? People in sane countries get 6-7 years for manslaughter whilst in our tiny criminal’s paradise we give them a pat on the back and six months in prison (which is actually less time around 4-5 months for reasons I don’t recall at this moment!)

At least it’s good to hear that the law made the two perps ‘equal’ in a court of ‘law’…