Dismantling Civil Society in Bahrain

Like a vise which first grips its object and then slowly, deliberately and
inexorably crushes it, the al-Khalifa regime has done similarly to civil society
in Bahrain. It did not stop when peaceful, pro-democracy, reform protests erupted
in 2011 and were violently put down by government forces aided by an invasion
of Saudi troops in March of that year. Indeed, the vise continues to close and
relentlessly so.

Nationalities have been revoked, mosques razed, citizens deported, human rights
activists imprisoned on flimsy charges of insulting the monarchy at the least
or plotting its overthrow at worst, and the most perfunctory of dialogues with
the opposition abandoned. By smothering the figures and institutions who dare
challenge the authority of the ruling dynasty in the most benign of fashions
– a tweet, waving the country’s flag, tearing up a photo or merely questioning
the tenure of the world’s longest serving prime minister – the Bahraini regime
and its Gulf allies would like to believe monarchical rule has been preserved.
Such desperate measures however, only speak to its precarity.

The stalwart activist Zainab al-Khawaja was given a sentence of three years
and one month in Dec. 2014 for (again) tearing up a picture of King Hamad. She
refused to be separated from her infant son whom she took with her to prison.
Al-Khawaja has just been released
on “humanitarian” grounds after serving 15 months in jail.

bahrain-protest

Her father though, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, remains imprisoned serving a life
sentence on trumped-up charges of attempting to topple the government. While
authorities may have set Zainab al-Khawaja free, they simultaneously doubled
the sentence of Sheikh Ali Salman, head of al-Wefaq, an opposition political
party. Initially given a term of four years incarceration for alleged incitement
against the regime, it was increased to nine
years on appeal. The unflinching President of the Bahrain Center for
Human Rights (BCHR) and founding Director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights
Nabeel Rajab, remains banned from leaving the country despite the need to secure
medical treatment for his wife.

Busy highlighting the nation’s cordial relations with the United Kingdom and
United States, the latter of which headquarters its Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the
capital Manama, the Western media has largely ignored the plight of Bahrain’s
ordinary citizens. The arrest and torture of disabled youth has now been documented
by the BCHR. Indeed, for more than a decade, the Center has meticulously chronicled
the dismantling of Bahrain’s civil society in all its forms by the al-Khalifa
regime.

Most recently, with the passage of a law preventing any religious figure from
joining political societies or engaging in political activities, the BCHR issued
a statement condemning, “… the Bahraini…

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