Bahrain’s unfathomably paranoid and insane crackdown on Human Rights

Repression in Bahrain
Ghazi Farhan
The Economist

Jun 10th 2011, 14:23 by N.P. | MANAMA

TO APPRECIATE how all-encompassing the dragnet sweeping Bahrain to quash the island’s Arab awakening has been, consider Ghazi Farhan. A dapper 31-year-old property executive, Mr Farhan manages three restaurants and a set of stables. Amid his pictures on Facebook is one of him at a tea party with Prince Charles.

On April 12th, plain-clothes police blindfolded him in his office car park, and took him for interrogation. This, he told his wife, was punctuated by whippings with a damp hose. Two days later, he was locked in “Dry Dock” jail with hundreds of other suspected demonstrators and given sun-tan lotion and told to rest in the sun to heal the scars. He seemed confident he would be out within 60 days—the period the state is allowed to hold suspects without charge. His wife said she did not want to hire a lawyer, for fear that might provoke the authorities. The announcement of the lifting of the State of National Safety, official-speak for emergency law, on June 1st gave all hope of a mass release.

But on May 31st, after 48 days inside and the day before the lifting of martial law, Mr Farhan was accused of “participating in an illegal gathering of more than five persons”, a charge carrying a three-year prison term. Like tens of thousands of others in this small archipelago of 600,000 nationals, he had occasionally stopped by Pearl Roundabout to observe the largest protest in Bahrain’s history. Driven by the blustery winds blowing from North Africa, opposition demands had escalated. Alongside calls for an elected government to replace the current one, largely filled with the ruling family’s princes, were growing cries for the downfall of the Sunni monarchy.

Mr Farhan was not among those protesting. The closest he came to activism, says a foreign observer, was organising charity galas at the Rotary Club. A month before his arrest, he had opened his latest café, Speed, on the racetrack that the crown prince had built for Formula One racing. But in the crackdown that followed, he came under pressure to sell his shares. On Twitter, a self-professed anonymous policeman sent a series of messages with the hashtag Haraqhum (“burn them”) calling for a boycott of another of his cafés where Bahrain’s streetwise go to smoke shishas. …more