Quieting Dissent, Bahrain Regime bullies its victims of repression with terror and intimidation

Voices in Danger: “They said I shouldn’t report because I was ruining my country’s reputation.”
Helena Williams – 9 September, 2013 – The Independent

Amid the chaos of the 2011 protests in Bahrain, France 24 correspondent Nazeeha Saeed was tortured and humiliated by police – and she’s still awaiting justice.

Nazeeha Saeed expected the phone call from al-Rifaa’a police station in Bahrain’s capital Manama, which asked her to come in for questioning during the early days of the 2011 uprising. What she did not expect, when she arrived on 22 May 2011, was to be taken in to custody, tortured and humiliated by police officers for thirteen hours.

A correspondent for French channels France 24 and Radio Monte Carlo Doualiya, she had been covering the chaos as Shia protesters, unhappy with the ruling of the Sunni Al-Khalifa royal family, clashed with security forces.

“It was a messy time,” she says.

Reports of people being detained, injured and killed were rife, emotions were running high. Journalists had been mistaken for activists and caught up in the crackdown.

She decided not to contact her family, expecting no more than a couple hours’ interrogation before returning home. But she did call France 24, and told them where she was going.

“I was blindfolded and beaten with a hose all over my body. I was harassed, I got electrical shocks – it was humiliating,” she told The Independent.

The beatings on her face, back, shoulders and legs were so severe that she was unable to walk for days.

That was just the beginning. During her ordeal, Nazeeha, who is 32, says she was accused of participating in the protests, lying in her reports and was interrogated about possible links to the Lebanese Shia Hezbollah television station al-Manar and the Iranian Arabic station Al-AlamIranian – serious accusations, as Iran had been accused of fomenting the largely Shia-Muslim majority demonstrations against the Sunni-Muslim ruling family. She vehemently denies these claims.

“They kept saying that I didn’t respect my country, that I’m a traitor,” she says. “They said I shouldn’t report because I was ruining my country’s reputation.

“I would care if it was about the reputation of my country I was ruining, but it was not – it was the police force’s reputation.”

“I didn’t do the things I thought would really upset the government. I just did my job – OK, not the way they would like it, but it’s my job.”

She told The Independent she was forced to sign a confession she was not allowed to read, and she was made to bray like a donkey.

She said that one police officer forced her head into a toilet and flushed it, while another tried to make her drink an unknown liquid.

Somebody in the room said it was urine. Nazeeha refused, so the officer spilled it over her clothes and hair, to which she had an allergic reaction.

I don’t know to this moment what it was,” she says. “Even the medics who examined me later didn’t know what it was.”

“I thought at that moment, ‘I’m not going to get out of this place, ever’. The way they treat you, and when you are locked in a room and blindfolded – you don’t know how long you are going to be there. It was too long for me. I didn’t know I was only there for thirteen hours. I thought it was a few days.”

“Thank God I informed my channel that I was on my way to the police station,” she says. …more