December was not the best month for Bahrain. The tiny island nation was the center of 745 protests, 183 arrests and 207 home raids during the month, according to a report released last week by the country’s Liberties and Human Rights Department in al-Wefaq Society, a human rights body monitoring unrest in the country that is also affiliated with the political opposition.
Sayed Hadi al-Musawi, who heads the group, also said there had been 17 cases of torture. He said 400 of the protests had been “repressed by Bahrain security forces, causing injuries to protesters and suffocation among inhabitants inside homes as a collective punishment.”
According to the neutral Bahrain Center for Human Rights, though restrictive laws are already on the books in Bahrain and used by the authorities to criminalize freedom of expression, much harsher punishments were proposed and approved by the government. They allow police to crackdown on what is arbitrarily interpreted as “insulting the King.” The new law allows for long prison sentences that could reach up to seven years and significant financial fines.
‘We are the Giant’
Maryam Al-Khawaja, currently in exile from Bahrain in the U.S., is the acting president for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. Her father, Abdelhadi Al-Khawaja has been in a Bahraini jail since 2011. Her uncle and sister are also being held in prison at this time.
A documentary is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this week called, “We are the Giant,” directed by Greg Barker, who is a former war-correspondent-turned-filmmaker who has worked in more than 50 countries across six continents. His previous films include “Ghosts of Rwanda;” “Sergio,” which won the documentary editing award at Sundance in 2009; “Koran by Heart;” and “MANHUNT,” which premiered at Sundance last year and went on to win a Primetime Emmy Award.
“We are the Giant” follows several people in Bahrain, Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. The two individuals Barker chose for Bahrain are Maryam and her sister Zainab. She said she is not affiliated with any of the opposition or political groups.
“I think that if the regime is serious at all about a dialogue then they need to take trust-building steps, like releasing all political prisoners and ending the daily crackdown, and include the opposition leaders who are imprisoned,” Al-Khawaja, 26, told MintPress on Friday from Park City, Utah, during her U.S. visit. “To have a successful dialogue the regime needs to create an environment in which a dialogue can actually succeed, which is not the case at the moment.”
She maintains the human rights situation is deteriorating
“We continue to document systematic torture, enforced disappearances, house raids by masked men in civilian clothes, [the] systematic use of sectarianism as a tool, attacks on all forms of protests — the list is very long,” she said.
Foreign governments are ignoring events in Bahrain, she claims, because it “is an inconvenient revolution, due to geopolitical and economic interest the West has with the Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies.
“Governments that claim to hold human rights and democracy as cornerstones of their foreign policy turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the human rights situation (in Bahrain) because of economic and short-sighted security interests.”
How it all began
When the Arab Spring broke out in the early months of 2011, the media rushed to have representatives on the ground covering the protests and demonstrations across a multi-country swathe. One of those very much on the media radar then was Bahrain.
But the Bahraini government quickly moved to crush the protests, which were being held in Manama, the capital, at the city’s main intersection known as Pearl Roundabout. The protesters were mainly from the country’s Shi’ite majority, who wanted greater political freedom and equality.
On the night of Feb. 17, the minority Sunni government moved in. Now known in Bahrain as Bloody Thursday, the pre-dawn raid killed four and injured hundreds more. But the protesters were emboldened by the bloodshed. After a month of a staged sit-in at the roundabout, the government called for help from its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council allies and by mid March, 1,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and 500 troops from the United Arab Emirates arrived in Bahrain to quell the protests.
The Bahrain Emir — Prince Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa — declared martial law for three months. The protests built momentum after the end of the martial law period and over the course of the next year, scores were killed in lower-level demonstrations. State police carried out crackdowns in neighborhoods known to safeguard protest leaders.
However, according to Human Rights Watch, “an independent commission of inquiry, appointed by the king, concluded in 2011 that security forces had used excessive force against peaceful protesters during demonstrations and had arbitrarily arrested, detained, tortured, ill-treated, and denied them fair trials.”
The report went on to state that authorities did look into officials using torture, but protest leaders remain behind bars and no high-ranking officials have been held responsible for abuses.
There were sporadic reports by mainstream media of events unfolding in Bahrain in 2012 and 2013, but reporting on those events has proven difficult due to the restrictions placed on international and local journalists on issues relating to dissent. Information coming out of the country has fallen on the shoulders of human rights activists and other civilian actors.
In the Liberties and Human Rights Department December report, one example of mistreatment by police detailed how a 15-year-old boy was arrested in a raid carried out at his friend’s house, as “protests were taking place in the area.” The boy reported that he was threatened with a gun and taken to a nearby farm where “he was severely beaten in his private parts, neck and face. He was also threatened that cigarettes would be burnt out on his body before a policeman bit his ear.”
Yet, protests persist. On Thursday, the U.S. State Department warned about a Friday march scheduled by the opposition in Manama. It’s the third warning of 2014, with the previous two being issued on Jan. 4 and Jan. 2, both of them with warnings of violence.
The monarchy meets with the opposition
Though tensions have been high, Bahrain’s monarchy met with the main opposition leader on Wednesday in an effort to end the unrest that has shaken the country for roughly three years.
Prince Salman Al-Khalifa held talks with the main opposition chief, Sheikh Ali Salman, for the first time since the demonstrations began in 2011. Named first deputy prime minister last year, Salman al-Khalifa has been the force for negotiations between the two sides and is perceived to be leading a more reformist line in the ruling family.
“The meeting was especially frank and very transparent,” the opposition group, Al Wefaq said in a statement, according to a news report.
The talks were suspended previously, which raised jitters in the country about the fate of the reconciliatory process. Repeated rounds of political talks have failed to significantly close the rifts between the two sides, and the opposition is demanding amnesty for what they claim are more than 3,000 political prisoners held in Bahraini prisons.
The most recent reconciliation talks were suspended after the head of al-Wefaq was banned from traveling abroad, forcing the government to call off the dialogue.
The Shia majority are demanding a constitutional monarchy with a government chosen from within an elected parliament.
Teargas Shipments
In October, Human Rights Watch, headquartered in Geneva, said that Bahraini security forces had “repeatedly used tear gas disproportionately and sometimes unlawfully in suppressing anti-government demonstrations” since 2011 and that it was trying to buy more than a million more canisters of tear gas.
As reported by Bahrain Watch, the shipments were due to come from South Korea, but because of international pressure, “South Korea’s Defence Acquisition Program Administration denied two requests to export tear gas to Bahrain due to the “unstable politics in the country [Bahrain], people’s death due to tear gas and complaints from human rights groups.”
South Korea joins other countries including the U.S. and the U.K., who have already stopped tear gas exports to Bahrain due to human rights concerns. Since 2011, at least 39 deaths in Bahrain have been linked to misuse of tear gas, according to data compiled by Physicians for Human Rights.
No police officer or other government official in Bahrain has been held accountable for these or any other abuses due to the systematic misuse of tear gas, despite serious concerns raised by the U.N. Human Rights Council, in which well-documented accounts described the Bahraini government’s use of tear gas as “excessive.”