Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain's Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents Against Civilians

[Bahraini women flee tear gas in February 2011. Photo by Al Jazeera English via Flickr] [Bahraini women flee tear gas in February 2011. Photo by Al Jazeera English via Flickr]

Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain's Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents Against Civilians

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Physicians for Human Rights on 1 August 2012.] 

Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain`s Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents Against Civilians 

The Bahrain government’s indiscriminate use of tear gas as a weapon has resulted in the maiming, blinding, and even killing of civilian protesters and must stop at once while the government reassesses its use, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) declares in a report issued today.

“So-called tear gas, often considered a crowd-control method with no lasting harmful effects, can cause permanent injuries, miscarriages, birth defects, and even fatalities as used by Bahrain’s security forces,” says PHR Deputy Director Richard Sollom, the report’s lead author. “Those tactics include firing tear gas canisters directly at civilians or into their cars, houses, or other closed spaces where toxic effects are greatly exacerbated.”

Sollom is in Washington, DC, to urge Congress to continue to ban the export of tear gas to Bahrain and to withhold military assistance to that country until it improves its record on human rights.

In testimony prepared for delivery today to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Sollom notes that in the course of three visits to Bahrain in the past 18 months to investigate human rights violations he had hoped to see such violations diminish, even as the regime grappled with continuing protests. “Instead,” he reports, “I find a government fixated on rhetoric rather than results.”

Sollom and co-author Holly Atkinson, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and former president of PHR, interviewed more than 100 Bahraini citizens during their April investigation, including victims of civil rights violations, corroborating witnesses, civil society leaders, and government officials. Their 60-page report—Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain’s Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents Against Civilians—documents their findings, based on physical examinations and medical records. Among them:

  • A teenage boy was struck in his left eye by a tear gas canister fired at close range, which fractured his eye socket and ruptured his eyeball, leaving him blind in that eye.
  • A 27-year-old bystander suffered a fractured skull and intracranial bleeding when struck in the head with a tear gas canister.
  • A physiotherapist started wheezing, felt short of breath, and had difficulty speaking for two weeks after exposure to tear gas.
  • Several women who had miscarried reported that their doctors said they had noticed a significant rise in miscarriages in neighborhoods where tear gas was used frequently.
  • An asthmatic man routinely exposed to tear gas died in the hospital of acute respiratory failure after exposure to yet another tear gas explosion.

PHR first documented the deleterious long-term health effects of tear gas 25 years ago, when South Korea’s use of the gas against civilian protesters caused toxic pulmonary damage and death. Though many long-term health consequences of such toxic chemical agents remain unknown, it is clear that the Bahraini security forces are wielding them as weapons not just to disperse crowds but to wound, harm, harass, and intimidate the largely Shi’a neighborhoods that are home to many protesters, in violation of UN protocols for the use of force. Similar tactics have been used in other countries recently, the report notes, including Egypt, Greece, Honduras, Israel, Libya, Turkey, and Uganda.

“This timely and incisive investigative report provides evidence that government forces, this time in Bahrain, have once again used the shield of a relatively innocuously named weapon to maim, sicken, and in some cases kill innocent civilians,” comments Howard Hu, MD MPH, who directs the Dalla Lana School of Health at the University of Toronto and is a medical expert on toxic chemical agents and a former board member of PHR.  “The misuse of such weapons must be fully investigated and curbed if such oppressive practices and unnecessary suffering and deaths are to be avoided in the future.”

PHR has previously investigated and protested the militarization of Bahrain’s health-care system, including the arrest, torture, and imprisonment of medical workers who treated injured protesters, and the systematic interrogation of protesters who sought treatment at Salmaniya Hospital in Manama—all in violation of principles of medical neutrality.

Now, PHR is calling on Bahrain’s government to immediately end all attacks on civilians and to suspend its use of tear gas while it conducts an impartial investigation of tear gas misuse and holds accountable those who have used the gas in excessive or improper ways. In addition, PHR is asking that Bahrain’s government disclose information about the toxic chemical agents used by its security forces, and that it permit scientists and health professionals to study the effects of tear gas use in that country.

PHR is also seeking the creation of an international group of health professionals, public health experts, lawyers, and law enforcement officials to draft guiding principles on the use of all toxic chemical agents, and to determine whether certain such agents (including tear gas) now considered nonlethal should be reclassified under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

“It is increasingly evident that tear gas has effects far more severe than commonly understood,” Sollom observes. “The tears it produces are not limited to those caused by temporary stinging of the eyes, but flow also from people who receive long-lasting injuries and trauma from its indiscriminate use, and from friends and relatives of tear gas victims left blind, wounded, or dead. The world must consider whether it is appropriate to use such toxic chemical agents at all against unarmed civilian populations.”

[Click here to download the full report.] 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes
      Long Form Podcast(Episodes 7, 8, & 9) Upcoming Guests:Mandy TurnerHala RharritHatem Bazian Hosts:Mouin RabbaniBassam Haddad   Watch Here:Youtube.com/JadaliyyaX.com/Jadaliyya There can be

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