Press Release: Bahrain Executes Three Men

Press Release: Bahrain Executes Three Men

Press Release: Bahrain Executes Three Men

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued on 15 January 2017 by Reprieve]

Three men were executed by firing squad in Bahrain this morning (15th) according to the Attorney General. The three men executed were Ali Al-Singace (21), Abbas Al-Samea (27) and Sami Mushaima (42).

Commenting, Maya Foa, a director of international human rights group Reprieve, said:

It is nothing short of an outrage – and a disgraceful breach of international law – that Bahrain has gone ahead with these executions. The death sentences handed to Ali, Sami and Abbas were based on ‘confessions’ extracted through torture, and the trial an utter sham. . . .

It would be shameful if the UK continued to support Bahrain’s security apparatus and Ministry of Interior in the face of such terrible abuses. The British Government must urgently review its close relations with the Kingdom, and make clear that it condemns these appalling crimes. . . .

The execution of these torture victims was made possible by various actors in Bahrain’s criminal justice system, and the UK is providing assistance to all of them. In the last four years, the UK government has paid more than 5 million pounds to train Bahraini police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards in the death row prison where these men were held, and a supposedly ‘independent’ torture watchdog which declared one of these men was lying about his torture allegations without ever conducting a medical examination.

The three men are the first people executed in Bahrain since 2010, and the first Bahrainis executed since 1996.

The execution came less than a week after Bahrain’s highest court upheld their death sentence on Monday 9 January 2017.

There are now concerns about two other men on Bahrain’s death row who are also at imminent risk of execution, Mohammed Ramadan and Husain Moosa. Both say they were tortured into providing false confessions at the same police station as the three men who were executed today.

Torture

The executions went ahead despite serious concerns that their convictions were based on evidence obtained under torture.

A UN Special Rapporteur, Dr Agnes Callamard, has called them “extrajudicial killings.”

During his police interrogation, Mr Mushaima was beaten, electrocuted and sexually assaulted. Although he was illiterate, he was forced to sign a document that he could not read.

Mr al-Samea, a school teacher, was also tortured during his interrogation, including electric shocks to his genitals and suspending him from the ceiling. He was sentenced to death even though his school provided an alibi letter.

The third man, Ali al-Singace, was just a teenager when he was convicted in absentia. His mother says he was also tortured into making a false confession after police arrested him.

Their families were summoned to Bahrain’s Jau prison on Saturday for their final visit, although jail authorities refused to tell them that this was what was happening. They describe being surrounded by over 50 police officers and heightened security procedures at Jau.

UK Complicity

The UK Foreign Office has spent over £5 million in aid money on reforming Bahrain’s human rights record since protests swept the Gulf kingdom in 2011.

However, Reprieve has evidence that this aid program failed to protect the three men from torture and execution, and actually contributed to their abuse.

Documents obtained by Reprieve, and reported in the Observer today, reveal that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons helped plan inspections of custody facilities in Bahrain, including the CID station where all three men were tortured (both before and after the inspection.) The six-page inspection report failed to mention their allegations of torture.

Bahrain’s police has received repeated training from the UK’s College of Policing, which refuses to publish full details about its work.

Hundreds of prison guards at the death row jail where the executed men were detained have been trained by a Stormont-owned body, Northern Ireland Co-operation Overseas (NI-CO).

NI-CO also trained two oversight institutions in Bahrain, an Ombudsman and a Special Investigations Unit, which rejected Mr al-Samea’s torture complaint without conducting a proper investigation. 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412