Bahrain stuck in quagmire of Western loyalty to a irreparable regime

Bahrain’s still stuck
By Jane Kinninmont – 15 August, 2012 – Foreign Policy

Yesterday, Bahrain postponed verdicts in the controversial trial of 13 high-profile opposition leaders until September 4. Their legal battle may be receiving little media attention, but it reveals much about the uncertain political scene in the strategically important country. Bahrain’s government has not managed to use last year’s famous inquiry by M. Cherif Bassiouni’s commission to draw a line under the events of 2011. As a result, the public remains polarized, though more on political than on sectarian grounds, while the protest movement has survived the detention of key leaders. Meanwhile, the root causes of the uprising remain unaddressed, in the absence of a process of political dialogue and negotiation.

Bahrain’s royally commissioned inquiry into last year’s unrest, commonly known as the Bassiouni report, was intended to be the basis for a national consensus on the causes of and the events during the uprising, as well as making recommendations for human rights reforms. Optimists — in the government, the opposition, and among Bahrain’s Western allies — hoped it could help kick start a much-needed process of dialogue and negotiation between the government and political factions. The report was praised internationally as groundbreaking and progressive, and far more forward leaning than expected.

But despite public relations efforts by the Bahraini government, its recommendations have not been fully implemented. Various practices criticized in the report — from nighttime house raids to imprisonment for offenses involving political expression — are recurring. Promises to hold torturers accountable have resulted in just three policemen being convicted. Opposition groups estimate there are around 1,400 political prisoners while the government says there are none. According to estimates from al-Wefaq, the main opposition group, in July alone 240 people were arrested and 100 injured with birdshot and rubber bullets. The group’s secretary-general, Sheikh Ali Salman, was wounded with birdshot when taking part in a small demonstration outside his house in June.

Meanwhile, the frustrated opposition shows signs of further radicalization. A small but increasing minority of protesters lob Molotov cocktails and iron rods at security forces and police stations and are looking for new ways to improvise weapons. While the mainstream opposition leaders routinely condemn violence, a rising number of voices online are seeking to justify violence as “self-defense” or “resistance.” This in turn encourages a vocal pro-government constituency to applaud the arrests of activists, seeing them all as complicit, even when they are arrested for tweets or for protesting without a permit.

The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report remains a vital reference point, and is a rare source of leverage for those within Bahrain’s bureaucracy who are trying to push reforms. But there is little traction for such efforts given that almost all of the senior decision makers who oversaw last year’s crackdown have retained their posts. There remain differences within the royal family, the Al Khalifa, over whether to make concessions to the opposition and how to handle any process of dialogue. Such divides manifest in mixed messages, as was seen earlier this year in the case of one of the 13 imprisoned opposition leaders, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a dual Danish-Bahraini national, who was then on hunger strike. Danish officials at Bahrain’s Universal Periodic Review at the U.N. Human Rights Council said that they had reached an agreement in mid-March for al-Khawaja to leave Bahrain for medical treatment in Denmark, but this was never implemented.

The 13 men in court this week had been convicted in a military court last year of crimes that included plotting to overthrow the government by force, as well as inciting hatred of the regime, insulting the army, and fomenting sectarianism. Several, including al-Khawaja, received life sentences. All the defendants assert their innocence and have described extensive torture in custody. The Bassiouni inquiry was highly critical of the behavior of security forces, including both “systemic” and “systematic” use of torture. It recommended that civilian courts review all convictions by military courts that had not respected basic fair-trial principles, such as the inadmissibility of “confessions” extracted through torture. Six months after the inquiry report, after international attention increasingly focused on al-Khawaja’s hunger strike, it was eventually announced that the opposition leaders would have this right. However, their lawyers say the court is still using tortured “confessions” as evidence. …more