Brutality catches up to faltering regime as Medical ethics conference quits doctor absuing Regime

Major medical ethics conference is cancelled in the troubled kingdom

Bahrain hit by doctors’ desertion
Robert Fisk – 24 March, 2013 – Pacific Free Press

Bahrain’s already tarnished reputation for human rights will receive a body blow today with the cancellation of a major conference on medical ethics in the tiny island monarchy, and the resignation of the Irish director of Bahrain’s principal medical school.

At least 20 civilians were killed by government forces – opposition leaders say the figures is four times as great – in the failed uprising by the majority Shia Muslim community against the minority Sunni-led government of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa two years ago. Security forces stormed hospitals in the kingdom and tortured patients in medical care, tearing apart the hitherto non-sectarian health service. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) – which trained many of the doctors later arrested by the regime – was bitterly criticised after the violence for not condemning government brutality.

But Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) will today announce its decision to cancel next month’s international meeting – in which medical and human rights experts were to speak for two days on “medical ethics and dilemmas in situations of political discord or violence” – while Professor Tom Collins, president of the Medical University of Bahrain, will tell his 1,100 students and 240 staff at lunchtime that he is resigning in protest at the cancellation. The university is run by the RCSI and was co-sponsor of the conference with MSF.

At least 40 Bahraini doctors, many of them attached to the RCSI medical university on the island, were arrested and charged after the mini-uprising of 2011 – four are still in prison – although Professor Collins has pleaded for their release. A prestigious roster of speakers was to have included Professor Patrick Roe, the president of RCSI, a consultant general surgeon at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, Anastasia Crickley of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and Baroness Nuala O’Loan, Northern Ireland’s first – and highly controversial – police ombudsman from 2000 to 2007. Many attribute Catholic trust in the new Police Service of Northern Ireland to the work of Lady O’Loan. The organisers were to show a film, Access to the Danger Zone, on MSF doctors in Afghanistan and other wars, narrated by Daniel Day-Lewis …more