Stained Glass Transparency: Bahrain's Latest Obfuscation of International Human Rights Accountability

Stained Glass Transparency: Bahrain's Latest Obfuscation of International Human Rights Accountability

Stained Glass Transparency: Bahrain's Latest Obfuscation of International Human Rights Accountability

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a report written by Andrea Gittleman, JD and Alex Lee on 25 April 2013 in response to the Bahraini regime canceling the planned visit of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.] 

Bahrain has again indefinitely postponed a visit by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, the latest in a series of attempts to deter human rights observers from scrutinizing the kingdom’s dismal human records record. The government told the rapporteur, Juan Méndez, that his visit could be “immensely damaging” to the Bahrain National Dialogue, an initiative that should welcome such a visit if it truly seeks to promote reform. This disappointing development follows the recent release of the US State Department’s report that criticized Bahrain for its ongoing human rights violations.

The State Department cited local and international NGO reports, including those from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) that documented torture and other forms of ill treatment on the part of Bahraini security forces, as well as the government’s crackdown on human rights defenders. These practices have continued and show no signs of stopping nearly eighteen months after a government-commissioned report documented systematic use of torture and abuse against detainees. While Bahrain is desperately trying to present a sense of normalcy – such as by hosting the Formula One Grand Prix earlier this week – its failure to correct its human rights record only demonstrates the dire need for an independent investigation.

Bahrain’s decision to cancel Méndez’s visit, which was scheduled for next month, is of great concern. The government must put an end to its policy of shutting out independent investigators. Researchers at international human rights organizations, including PHR, have been denied entry despite repeated attempts to investigate ongoing abuse. When PHR has been able to conduct research in the country, we have found evidence of systematic violations against peaceful protesters and those who stand up for them.

Last year, PHR released a report on the Bahraini authorities’ indiscriminate use of toxic chemical agents against civilians. PHR highlighted many of the subjects also included in the State Department’s report, such as law enforcement officials’ failure to minimize harm against protesters. Because the government has still not held a single high-level official accountable for instituting a policy and culture of brutality against its own citizens, we remain skeptical of Bahrain’s claims that its human rights record has improved. The same people are still in power, the same policies are still in place, and the “National Dialogue” has served as a convenient veneer for the Bahraini government while crackdowns against protesters continue.

While PHR welcomed last month’s acquittal of twenty-one of twenty-three medics accused of misdemeanors, we remain cautious about progress in a place where acquittals of human rights activists have recently been overturned. Moreover, human rights violations continue to be perpetrated in an environment increasingly hostile to external observation, a movement hidden in the shadow of the doctors’ acquittal. Bahrain’s Parliament is considering a draft law that would essentially erase the ability of NGOs to operate independently by requiring government approval of any NGO activities within its borders. Human rights defenders, including medical professionals who were harassed, arrested, convicted, and sentenced just for aiding protesters or exercising their basic rights, have not yet received any reparation. Many still languish in prison.

With the cancellation of Méndez’s visit and other significant limitations on independent NGO activity, Bahrain is at great risk of becoming a stained glass state, projecting an image that is pretty to look at, but masking the atrocities taking place within. Without independent investigations needed to shine a light on the internal situation, any human rights accomplishments made through the current process will be brief and insincere at best.

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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