Bahrain's Human Rights Crisis

[Bahrain World Trade Towers. Image from Fahad.com] [Bahrain World Trade Towers. Image from Fahad.com]

Bahrain's Human Rights Crisis

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[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.”

. . . 

[Click here to download the full HRW report.]

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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