Letter to Shaikh Hamad Al Khalifa Regarding the Sentencing and Detention Conditions of Bahraini Activist Nabeel Rajab

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Aug 6, 2017 Bahrain
Letter to Shaikh Hamad Al Khalifa Regarding the Sentencing and Detention Conditions of Bahraini Activist Nabeel Rajab

Letter to Shaikh Hamad Al Khalifa Regarding the Sentencing and Detention Conditions of Bahraini Activist Nabeel Rajab

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Middle East Studies Association on 26 July 2017 in response to its decision to Bahrain`s detention of the prominent human rights lawyer, Nabeel Rajab.]

Shaikh Hamad bin ‘Issa Al Khalifa
Office of His Majesty the King
P.O. Box 555
Rifa’a Palace, al-Manama, Bahrain
Fax: +973 1766 4587

Your Majesty,

We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to condemn the sentencing of the prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab to two years’ imprisonment, as well as the conditions of his detention. Our Committee has written to you about Mr. Rajab on two previous occasions – 16 June and 5 December 2016 – to register our deep concern at his continued incarceration over charges from the multiple cases against him, and at the apparent political motivations behind the broader suppression of freedom of expression and thought in your country. In the current letter, we wish to express our dismay at Mr. Rajab’s conviction for disseminating rumors and spreading false news, in addition to reports that the conditions of Mr. Rajab’s detention have contributed to a significant deterioration in his health. We urge you to act promptly to address the weaknesses in due process that the cases against Mr. Rajab expose.

MESA was founded in 1966 to support scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

As President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and a founding director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, Nabeel Rajab is one of the most internationally acclaimed human rights advocates in Bahrain and the wider region.  In 2011, MESA presented its Academic Freedom Award in 2011 to Mr. Rajab, who received it on behalf of the faculty, staff, and students at institutions of higher education in Bahrain who had spoken out against abuses of state power during the year. In 2012, Mr. Rajab was a finalist for the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, an international distinction awarded by ten of the world’s leading human rights NGOs. Mr. Rajab’s attempts to hold the state publicly accountable for abuses of power have resulted in repeated periods of incarceration since 2012 and the imposition of a travel ban in 2014 that prevented him from leaving the country. 

Mr. Rajab was arrested in June 2016 after making allegations on social media about torture in Bahraini prisons and in the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. In September 2016, Mr. Rajab’s family reported that he had been moved to solitary confinement after the New York Timespublished an opinion piece by him entitled “Letter from a Bahraini Jail.” After another article, “Berlin et Paris, révisez vos liens avec les monarchies du Golfe,” was published in Le Monde in December 2016, Mr. Rajab’s family reported that Bahraini officials had interrogated him and referred both articles to the Public Prosecutor as possible violations of Article 134 of the penal code, which covers “false or malicious information.”

Although a court in Bahrain ordered his release on bail on 28 December 2016, Mr. Rajab was rearrested immediately over separate interviews he had given on television in 2015 and 2016, and charged with making “false and malicious” statements by criticizing the Bahraini authorities’ refusal to allow journalists and human rights organizations into the country. In April 2017, Human Rights Watch reported that Mr. Rajab underwent an operation to correct a urological/colorectal condition. Just two days after the procedure, and against medical advice, he was taken back to his cell at Manama’s East Riffa police station with an open wound, and was at high risk of infection due to the unsanitary conditions in the cell. On the third day after the operation, Mr. Rajab was transferred to the Public Security Forces Clinic in Qalaa suffering from a range of medical issues that are said to include heart palpitations, a low white blood cell count, and depression.

In addition to the two-year jail term on the charges described above, we note with alarm that Mr. Rajab faces additional charges of “offending a foreign country”’ and “offending national institutions” based on his criticism in March 2015 of the launch of the Saudi-led military operations in Yemen and the conditions that led to the outbreak of a riot at Jaw Prison near Manama that month. These charges carry, respectively, a two- and a three-year prison sentence, under Articles 215 and 216 of Bahrain’s penal code. We consider the sentencing of Mr. Rajab, and the ongoing legal proceedings he still faces, to be part of a systematic campaign to target and silence opposition and human rights voices who seek to hold the Bahraini government to account for its actions. Two opposition political groups – Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society and Wa’ad, the National Democratic Action Society – were dissolved in July 2016 and May 2017 and their leaders imprisoned. Al-Wasat, Bahrain’s only independent newspaper, was closed down in June 2017 for “repeatedly publishing information that sows division in society.”

Your Majesty, we believe that the sentencing of Nabeel Rajab signifies the criminalization of free speech and assembly in Bahrain as well as all forms of political opposition to your government. We call on you and your government to respect the constitutional rights of Bahraini citizens and internationally recognized standards of due process and freedom of expression and association, and we urge you to pardon Mr. Rajab and drop all remaining charges against him and others in similar situations.

Sincerely,

Beth Baron                                                                                 
MESA President                                                                         
Professor, City University of New York                                 

Amy W. Newhall
MESA Executive Director

cc: 

His Excellency Shaikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa
Minister of Justice, Islamic Affairs, and Awqāf 
Fax +973 1753 6343

His Excellency Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa
Minister of Interior
Fax +973 1757 2222

His Excellency Shaikh Khaled Bin Ahmed bin Mohamed Al Khalifa
Minister of Foreign Affairs
contactus@mofa.gov.bh

His Excellency Shaikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Khalifa
Ambassador of Bahrain to the United States
Fax 202 362 2192 
ambsecretary@bahrainembassy.org
Tags
Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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