As al Khalifa repression grows more widespread and indiscriminate, relief group stops work in Bahrain

Relief Group Stops Work in Bahrain After Raid
By RICK GLADSTONE – Published: August 5, 2011 – NYT

Bahrain, the tiny but strategically important Persian Gulf monarchy that has sought for months to suppress an Arab Spring-inspired uprising, is engaged in a heated dispute with one of the world’s foremost medical relief organizations, which has stopped working there after accusing Bahraini security forces of raiding its premises last week.

The accusation by the organization, Doctors Without Borders, has been challenged by Bahrain’s Health Ministry. But the sensitivities surrounding the dispute over the July 28 raid speak to what human rights activists call a particularly odious aspect of the Bahraini protests: the government’s systematic effort to deny medical services to wounded protesters — partly by jailing or intimidating the doctors, nurses and paramedics who have tried to treat them.

Many medical workers in Bahrain are often too frightened to help protesters, activists say, and the wounded themselves are often too frightened to seek help, fearing they will be arrested.

At the height of the protests, led by the kingdom’s Shiite majority, seeking more rights from the Sunni monarchy, security forces commandeered the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital. Dozens of doctors and nurses who treated protesters were arrested.

In a report last month, Human Rights Watch said the crackdown included “attacks on health care providers; denial of medical access to protesters injured by security forces; the siege of hospitals and health centers; and the detention, ill-treatment, torture and prosecution of medics and patients with protest-related injuries.”

It called the attacks “part of an official policy of retribution against Bahrainis who supported pro-democracy protests.”

Doctors Without Borders had become one of the few remaining resources to treat protesters hurt in confrontations with the police and security forces.

In a statement on Wednesday condemning the raid on its offices in the capital city, Manama, the group said that since the street protests started six months ago, it had treated almost 200 “injured and ill patients who did not seek care in health facilities because they feared being arrested.”

The statement also said the group’s doctors had “seen patients in villages across the country who have refused urgently needed hospitalization due to the high risk of arrest, and others who were severely beaten in jail.” …more