HRF: U.S. Should Clarify Position on Discredited Bahrain National Dialogue
August 1, 2011
Washington, DC – Following this past weekend’s release of the Bahraini National Dialogue’s recommendations to King Hamadbin Isa al-Khalifa, Human Rights First’s Brian Dooley issued the following statement:
“The U.S. government should clarify its position on the discredited Bahraini National Dialogue that failed to address fundamental issues of reform or human rights. Its recommendations have been met with widespread disappointment from human rights activists within the country. It recommends minor reforms to how the parliament of Bahrain operates, and falls far short of tackling fundamental problems of sectarian discrimination and other human rights violations.
“The U.S. government has not disassociated itself from its earlier support for the dialogue despite the main opposition party, Al Wefaq, walking out of the process halfway through. In addition, many of the opposition leaders remained in detention during the national dialogue and the process went forward despite continued arrests, the detention of political and human rights activists, and shooting of unarmed civilians. The dialogue was a discussion between 300 members of Bahraini society that met a few times a week throughout the month of July.
“At the start of the dialogue President Obama described it as ‘an important moment of promise for the people of Bahrain,’ and he commended the Bahraini King for his leadership in initiating the process. This praise baffled many Bahrainis because six weeks earlier President Obama had told the Bahraini government, ‘You can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.’ Bahraini pro-democracy protestors wonder where the U.S. stands now, and it’s time it made its position clear.
“The U.S. government should clarify whether it still believes this discredited process is the way forward for reform in Bahrain. It should also make clear that for any real meaningful discussion to happen, the Bahraini government must stop shooting protesters, stop arresting and detaining people for their peaceful actions, stop targeting medical professionals who treat the injured, and stop firing workers and expelling students who are suspected of pro-democracy sympathies.”
Irish Medical Times: Defending the right to practise
Photo: Irish Delegation with Nabeel Rajab, President of BCHR
27 July 2011
Orthopaedic surgeon Prof Damian McCormack tells Lloyd Mudiwa about his eye-opening experiences while answering distress calls from Irish-trained doctors in Bahrain.
The relationship between a medical trainer and the trainee rarely goes beyond the confines of the healthcare setting, but one trainer went above and beyond the call of duty when his former trainees were apparently “kidnapped”.
Describing his experience as an “eye-opener”, Prof Damian McCormack told Irish Medical Times that he simply heeded the call when some colleagues of two of the doctors from Bahrain whom he had trained contacted him, at some personal risk, in March to tell him that the duo had been arrested. “They asked for help and I helped,” the Orthopaedic Surgeon at Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and the Mater Hospital responded, when asked about the motivation for putting his own life at risk.
Speaking on his return from the Gulf state of Bahrain, Prof McCormack claimed that while some of his colleagues in Dublin expressed concern about the behaviour of the authorities in the Kingdom and sympathy for the doctors arrested, most medical organisations had been unhelpful.
Drumming up support
Prof McCormack alleged: “[I] wrote to several organisations — the Irish Medical Organisation, who were not helpful. I went in twice personally to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, who told me the situation was complicated and that they were making the authorities over there aware of their concerns, but that’s all they were doing. I wrote twice to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; I got no reply. I wrote to the INMO [Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation], who replied immediately by return and issued a press release — and they were the first medical organisation to reply.
“So for the first couple of weeks I wasn’t getting very far,” Prof McCormack commented.
The IMO told IMT last week that it had notified Prof McCormack that it wrote to the Bahraini authorities on foot of communication from the World Medical Association, of which the IMO is a member. “The IMO upholds the right of medical personnel to ‘non-combatant’ status in any conflict zone and insists that prompt due process be available to any personnel detained in the course of their work in all such zones,” a spokesperson said.
While the RCSI last week said it was not commenting on the issue, the College has previously said punishing doctors or nurses for treating patients, irrespective of their background, was completely unacceptable. The RCPI, which went on a fact-finding mission in Bahrain to gather “first-hand, albeit limited” information, said it was supporting calls for justice for doctors arrested in Bahrain.
A human rights activist had forwarded Prof McCormack’s email to numerous other individuals in Ireland, and through that contact the surgeon made contact with Front Line Defenders in Blackrock, whom he described as a “fantastic NGO”.
“They [Front Line] agreed to declare the doctors human rights defenders defending the right to health, which they are, and so they got on board.”
Front Line has taken up the cases of all the arrested doctors, including the Irish-trained doctors, Dr Ali Al Ekr, Dr Basim Dhaif and Dr Ghassan Dhaif, whom the NGO says are currently being subjected to an unfair trial before a military court on unsubstantiated charges. For more than two months after their arrest, the doctors were denied access to their families or lawyers, and there is credible evidence of torture, according to the NGO.
Meanwhile, Prof McCormack had contacted several of his local politicians, but the only one to reply was Senator Averil Power, who agreed to help.
He was then invited onto Pat Kenny’s show on RTÉ Radio 1, and subsequently other media. “Pat Kenny, I think, asked me what I wanted to do about the thing and, without really thinking about it I suppose, I said at that stage that I would like to go and see my friends.”
By the time an Irish delegation went a month later, the families of the detained doctors were getting anxious, because they felt that the story was being forgotten about and there was insufficient international media support, Prof McCormack said. He said his colleagues in the Mater and Temple Street kindly covered his shifts during the visit.
He asked Front Line to initially pay for flights and accommodation for their delegation, but gave them personal guarantees that the cost of all of this would be on the medical community in the country.
The orthopaedic consultants in the Mater Group have given €10,000, but while he has also written to all of the orthopaedic consultants in the country asking them to donate €200 each, very few have responded to date, he said, adding that the campaign had cost approximately €70,000 to date, which included a full-page advert in The Irish Times and some UK national newspapers.
Ambassadors
His delegation, including former Minister for Foreign Affairs David Andrews, Marian Harkin MEP, Senator Power, and Prof Eoin O’Brien, managed to meet the Bahraini officials (see IMT July 22,
http://bit.ly/p9NCPF), as well as three ambassadors from Switzerland, Poland and Austria, who were there on similar fact-finding missions. Prof McCormack said: “The ambassadors had only met the Government officials and they had no real insight into the true nature of the torture and human rights abuses, so we had time to relay what we had heard directly from the detainees or their families, which shocked them.”
He also alleged: “We also asked the families of the detained and the released if any of them had been approached by the College of Surgeons or the College of Physicians. The College of Physicians said they went on a fact-finding mission, but they haven’t had any contact with the Irish graduates.
“We also met a girl, a doctor, who worked as a lecturer for three years in the College [of Physicians], who was abducted, tortured and threatened with rape, and so on, and then released on bail for trial. And she had no contact at all with the College. So she was very much involved with the College, she was one of their staff, but her immediate former boss… nobody contacted her. There was no contact, which upsets her greatly.”
Prof McCormack said the team had initially felt uneasy at passport control because the immigration officers took their passports and they were unsure if the officials were going to release them, admit them or detain them.
He said they had also felt unsafe when they were mobbed at a press conference they held in a hotel, especially when they heard that Dr Nabeel Al Ansari, Chairman of the Bahrain Medical Society and a supporter of the Bahraini regime, allegedly photographed the car which brought them to the conference and published the registration number.
“We had just come from the house of a human rights activists and that house had been attacked on several occasions, and he has been beaten up on several occasions… the only reason he has not disappeared is that he is in constant communication via Twitter with the world and everybody knows him.
“But some of his family had brought us back to the hotel, so it was very threatening and very frightening — those last few hours — because we were not sure if we could exit the hotel safely, and it seems they had obviously put out word on the street to intimidate us,” Prof McCormack concluded.
Irish Medical Times
Aljazeera: Pakistani troops aid Bahrain's crackdown
Foundation linked to the Pakistani army has been providing Bahrain thousands of soldiers for its crackdown on protests.
by Mujib Mashal, 30 Jul 2011 Published on aljazeera.net
In March, as a government crackdown on pro-democracy protestors intensified in Bahrain, curious advertisements started appearing in Pakistani media.
"Urgent requirement - manpower for Bahrain National Guard," said one.
"For service in Bahrain National Guard, the following categories of people with previous army and police experience are urgently needed," said another, with "previous experience" and "urgent need" underscored.
The categories included: former army drill instructors, anti-riot instructors, retired military police, and former army cooks.
In the following two months, on the back of visits to Islamabad by senior Saudi and Bahraini officials, sources say at least 2,500 former servicemen were recruited by Bahrainis and brought to Manama, increasing the size of their national guard and riot police by as much as 50 per cent.
"We know that continued airplanes are coming to Bahrain and bringing soldiers from Pakistan," Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera.
"We do not know the exact number, but we know that it is much more than 1,500 or 2,000 people."
Recruited into the special forces, the national guard, and the riot police, the Pakistani citizens are tasked with suppressing Shia protesters that are reportedly demanding equal rights after years of alleged oppression at the hands of the royal family, part of Bahrain's Sunni minority.
"Our own Shia cannot join the security forces, but the government recruits from abroad," said Rajab.
On the ground in Pakistan, the recruitments were handled by the Fauji Foundation, one of the largest conglomerates in the country with close ties to the Pakistani military. In addition to the Overseas Employment Services, which is tasked with providing job opportunities for retired military personnel, the foundation owns large cereal and gas companies, sugar mills, security firms, as well as hospitals and universities.
The Fauji Foundation did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment.
"Pakistanis, particularly Baluchs, make up a large part of the Bahraini force," said Fahad Desmukh, a former resident of Bahrain who now lives in Pakistan.
"They are extremely visible on the streets - so visible that the protestors were recently responding to the police in Urdu, knowing they did not speak Arabic." [Watch the video of protesters chanting 'police are crazy' in Urdu here.]
A small country of roughly 800,000 people (including about 235,000 non-nationals), Bahrain has a Defence Force of about 12,000 and a National Guard of 1,200, according to the US State Department.
The National Guard, which is in the foreront of the crackdown, seems to have been more than doubled by the recent recruitments of mostly Baluch servicemen.
"What it shows is that the Bahraini government has little trust in its own citizens to conduct security operations," Michael Stephens, a Qatar-based Bahrain specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, told Al Jazeera.
"So they rely on foreign recruits to unquestioningly carry out orders of violently suppressing protests."
While Arab nations have a long history of leaning on Pakistan for military expertise as well as foot soldiers, the recent increase in recruitments come at a tricky time. Pakistan has struggled to quell widespread ethnic violence and a robust insurgency on its own streets.
In the region, too, the country faces tremendous challenges.
"It has certainly put Pakistan in a very awkward position, where it has to balance its relationship with Iran on the one side and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on the other," Stephens said.
Iran, a leading Shia country, has repeatedly denounced the Bahraini government's crackdown on the Shia - while Saudi Arabia has remained Bahrain's closest ally.
Inside Bahrain, the recruitments have brought dangers to the South Asian diaspora, where ill-feeling towards Pakistanis has increased, reportedly because they are seen as the main vehicle in the crackdown.
The influx of Sunni mercenaries has also increased fears that the government might be naturalising the new recruits in its efforts to change the country's Shia-majority demographic.
Importing expertise
Video footage of Bahraini protesters chanting: 'Our police are Pakistani'. Al Jazeera cannot be held responsible for content hosted on third party sites [YouTube]: youtube.com/watch?v=Pjt2AiTu8EE
"In the 1970s and 80s, many Arab countries flushed with oil money bought state of the art equipment, but [the] local population lacked technical skills," said Hamid Hussain, a long time analyst and historian of the Pakistani military.
"A number of Pakistan army and air force personnel were deputed to several countries including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. "
The recruitments varied from a dozen advisors to thousands of trainers and operators of complicated equipment.
The most prominent cases of such partnership was in 1970, when then Brigadier Zia ul Haq helped the Jordanian forces suppress Palestinians in what became known as "Black September".
Zia ul Haq, in one of the interesting paradoxes of the Pakistani military, later became a feared dictator who introduced a swift process of "Islamisation".
Pakistan's security relationship with Saudi Arabia, in particular, has put it at odds with Iran, its neighbour to the west. The two nations have been stuck in a Shia-Sunni rivalry for decades and have battled proxy wars across the region.
During the 1991 Gulf war, much to Saudi Arabia's apparent dismay, Pakistan turned down their request for preemptive help, in case Saddam Hussain launched attacks.
Reviving the relationship since has taken a long time, but when the uprising in Bahrain brought fears of unrest knocking on Saudi doors, the chairman of the Saudi National Security Council, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, made two quiet trips to Pakistan to seek their support in case protests erupted at home.
"Potential need for foreign troops in case protests spiral out of control has forced Saudis to work with current Pakistani civilian government for whom they have nothing but utter contempt," said Hussain.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Reza Gilani told Prince Bandar that his country supported the Saudi stance in the Gulf and the Middle East and would stand by Riyadh for regional peace, according to Pakistani media.
Al Jazeera's Fault Lines examines why the US supports protests in Libya - but not in Bahrain: youtube.com/watch?v=3vSfxI-Kvxo
"The president and prime minister of Pakistan, faced with grim economic situation of the country and army brass uncertain about continued US funding, are delighted at the potential of a cash windfall from Saudi patrons," said Hussain.
Also on Prince Bandar's agenda was gaining Pakistan's support for the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) force that deployed to Bahrain for helping the Kingdom.
The trip was followed by visits from the Bahraini foreign minister