Access Denied: Bahrain Restricting Entry to Limit International Exposure

[Bahrain Flag. Image from public-domain-image.com] [Bahrain Flag. Image from public-domain-image.com]

Access Denied: Bahrain Restricting Entry to Limit International Exposure

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by Bahrain Watch on 3 January 2013.]

BAHRAIN GOVERNMENT SHUTS OUT THE WORLD
More Than 200 Journalists, Observers, Aid Workers Kept Out Since February 2011


[Manama] Bahrain’s government stands accused of serious and ongoing human rights violations, and has made many commitments to reform. However, the Government is keeping out journalists, members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, politicians, activists, and other outside observers -- precisely the people who can report on the progress of reforms, or lack thereof. This is according to a new project called Access Denied <http://bahrainwatch.org/access/> launched on Thursday by research and activist group Bahrain Watch. The ongoing goal of Access Denied is to shine light on the Government’s policy of keeping people out.

The Access Denied project contains an interactive timeline and database of individuals kept out, an online form to document new such cases, and a report that details the project’s findings in full.

While Bahrain’s government claims to have an “open-door policy,” it has kept out more than 200 individuals in 221 instances since February 14, 2011, with some individuals kept out in more than one instance. This total, based on information in the public domain, includes foreign journalists from at least 22 media organizations, members of at least 17 NGOs, as well as politicians, trade unionists, aid workers, and activists. In November 2011, the Government assured NGOs that they would always be allowed to visit Bahrain, and in January 2012, claimed that it was working to provide greater access to journalists. However, the Government kept out NGOs and journalists significantly more often in 2012 than 2011: in 2012 the Government kept out a journalist in 29 instances, and an NGO member in 32; the numbers for 2011 were 12 and 5 respectively.

Some particularly worrying cases include:
    •    The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez intended to visit Bahrain in March 2012, but authorities requested that he postpone the trip to July. The visit is yet to take place. Meanwhile, reports suggest that detainees are still being tortured.
    •    In March 2012, Médecins Sans Frontières was forced to cease providing medical services and end its presence in Bahrain after the Government refused entry to two staff members, leaving MSF without any personnel in the country. Injured protesters who seek medical attention in hospitals have been subject to arrest, torture, and imprisonment since February 2011.

At the UN Human Rights Council in September 2012, Bahrain agreed to “[allow] foreign media to enter the country and report freely” (UPR 115.148). The Government also promised to “lift all restrictions on movements of foreign journalists and international organizations defending human rights” (UPR 115.156). However, it shortly thereafter refused entry to 23 observers from several trade unions, and a member of FIDH. The latest incidents occurred on December 17 when a New York Times journalist was refused entry, and a Member of the European Parliament was denied a visa.

Methods of keeping people out include: denial of visa, refusal at a port of entry, changing regulations to prohibit planned visits, deportation, and blacklists. Some who gain access to Bahrain are harassed by security forces, have their movements restricted, or are only allowed to attend Government events. For journalists, even possession of a valid media visa is not a guarantee of entry: on 23 November 2012, a German reporter was turned back at the airport after an immigration officer found a human rights report in his luggage.

Denying access to foreign observers puts a greater burden on local organizations that are already stretched thin by Government harassment, reduces impartial coverage of the situation in Bahrain, and limits independent scrutiny of the Government’s supposed reforms.

On 7 December 2012, the Government again claimed an open door policy: Sameera Rajab, the Minister of State for Information Affairs, invited “objective and fair-minded rights watchdogs and media to come to Bahrain and assess the reality”. Such evaluation is precisely what is warranted, however the findings of Access Denied demonstrate that despite repeated invitations and promises to the contrary, the Government’s policy is one of avoiding scrutiny through keeping out observers. “The Bahrain Government has tried to hide its violations of human rights from the world since the start of the popular uprising in February 2011,“ said Bahrain Watch member John Horne. “If the Government really is committed to reform, it must stop using access denial as a tool of repression and start upholding its public commitments to permit outside witnesses.”

Bahrain Watch is a monitoring and advocacy group that seeks to promote effective, accountable, and transparent governance in Bahrain through research and evidence-based activism. 

About Bahrain Watch: http://bahrainwatch.org/about.asp
Contact: john@bahrainwatch.org
Twitter: @bhwatch
 

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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