Activists decry U.S. silence on Bahrain’s crackdown

Activists decry U.S. silence on Bahrain’s crackdown
By WILLIAM DOUGLAS
McClatchy Newspapers

Human rights activists at a congressional hearing Friday implored the Obama administration to publicly and forcefully denounce Bahrain’s violent and abusive crackdown against anti-government protesters.

The only problem was nobody from the administration attended the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing to listen to the pleas. Two top State Department officials – Political Affairs Undersecretary William Burns and Jeffrey Feltman, an assistant secretary in State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs – were invited to testify, but didn’t show up. “I was expecting at least one, possibly two witnesses from the State Department to testify,” said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., the bipartisan commission’s s co-chair. “Regrettably, over the past 72 hours, we were informed that no one in any of the bureaus is available today.” A State Department official said Burns and Feltman were unable to testify because of scheduling conflicts.

Human rights activists complained that the White House has been publicly mum amid reports that Bahrain’s Sunni-led government, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, is waging a violent and bloody crackdown – destroying Shiite mosques, illegally detaining and torturing dissenters, attacking medical personnel to prevent them from treating wounded protestors, abusing women and girls, and expelling journalists from the island nation. Joe Stork, the deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, told the panel that about 1,000 people have been arbitrarily arrested in Bahrain since March, with about 630 still being detained.

“What is most disturbing is the fact that we don’t know where these people are, neither do their family members,” Stork said. “The use of incommunicado detention raises very serious concerns about torture.” …more