[Below is the latest from Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Bahrain.]
Since mid-March 2011 Bahrain has been carrying out a punitive and vindictive campaign of violent repression against its own citizens. This fierce repression has been characterized by widespread arbitrary arrests, credible allegations of torture and ill-treatment, apparently coerced televised “confessions,” unfair trials, and attacks on healthcare professionals and injured protesters, as well as politically-motivated mass dismissals of workers from jobs and students from university.
As western allies of Bahrain avert their eyes because of diplomatic convenience and deference to Saudi Arabia, there appears to be almost total impunity for serious human rights violations, such as extrajudicial killings and torture.
In mid-March Bahraini troops and riot police, backed by armed forces from Saudi Arabia, violently brought an end to several weeks of mostly peaceful pro-democracy and anti-government street protests. Since then authorities have carried out an unrelenting campaign of judicial and administrative retribution against demonstrators, opposition leaders, peaceful critics, and rights activists. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa declared an end to martial law on June 1, and some of the more than a thousand people arrested have been released. But hundreds of others remain in incommunicado detention and face unfair trials before special military courts, mostly on patently political charges rather than criminal offenses. The authorities have done little to address credible allegations of torture during interrogations.
The number of people killed in Bahrain may not compare to what we see in neighboring Arab states such as Syria, Yemen, and Libya – since mid-February, about 30 protest-related deaths and hundreds of injuries, some of them serious – but relative to Bahrain’s population of about 525,000 nationals (and some 500,000 expatriate workers and their families), it is substantial, and greater than the casualties resulting from five years of protracted unrest in the 1990s. As in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, and Egypt before President Mubarak was forced from power, Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family has been carrying out a systematic and comprehensive crackdown to punish and intimidate government critics and to end dissent root and branch.
Bahrain’s major western allies – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – have pointed to a “national dialogue” due to begin in early July as the way out of the present crisis. But the ruling family has stacked the deck in a way that unfortunately makes a resolution highly unlikely. In place of Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the original proponent of the dialogue, King Hamad has appointed the speaker of the parliament, a proponent of the government crackdown, to convene and direct it.
Leading opposition figures essential to any successful dialogue have been sentenced to prison or are facing special military court trials simply for participating in peaceful demonstrations and criticizing the government, and even legally-recognized opposition parties have been completely marginalized. Al Wifaq, Wa`ad, and Democratic Minbar, three opposition societies that, combined, received over 55 percent of the popular vote in the October 2010 election, have reportedly each received five invitations out of a total of 297. Together, these three groups with a clear electoral mandate would make up just five percent of the participants in the dialogue – if all choose to participate.
Clearly, if Bahrain’s western allies expect the dialogue to resolve the country’s deep political crisis, they need to insist now – and not after the dialogue has failed – that Bahrain end its rampant human rights violations, release everyone arrested solely for exercising their rights to free expression and peaceful assembly, and investigate serious crimes and prosecute everyone implicated, including officials responsible for unlawful killings and abuses in detention.
Much more promising than the national dialogue, as proposed, is King Hamad’s announcement on June 29 of an independent investigative commission headed by M. Cherif Bassiouni and including four other internationally-recognized human rights experts, among them Nigel Rodley, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. According to “Royal Order No. 28 of 2011,” the commission’s mandate is to investigate “the events occurring in Bahrain February/March 2011, and any consequences arising out of the aforementioned events.”
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[Click here to download the full HRW report.]