Video report see http://youtu.be/BRocAFVaCjY
My introductory remarks:
This press conference is being held to
mark the fourth anniversary of the Saudi military intervention to help put down
the uprising against the al-Khalifa autocracy that began in February 2011.
Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian feminist who
lived in Saudi Arabia for six years between the ages of 7 and 15, condemns the
hypocrisy of world leaders who flocked to pay their respects after the Saudi
King Abdullah died in January. The Independent on Sunday reported her as saying
“I am horrified by the moral ambiguity
that develops when a dictator dies”.
She says that Saudi Arabia is a “black
hole of misogyny” that operates a system of “gender apartheid”, and that human
rights abuses in the kingdom are ignored because of oil and because they spend
billions of dollars on weapons.
She argues that if you want to cosy up
to an ally, to do a business deal or to sell them weapons, say you will turn a
blind eye to women’s rights and you will get what you want.
Saudi Arabia, unlike Bahrain, is listed
as a Country of Concern by the Foreign Office. Their report is said to have
been updated in January 2015, but the text refers entirely to events that
happened in 2013 such as the expulsion of 150,000 unregistered migrant workers.
There is no mention, for example, of the sentence of 10,000 lashes, a fine of
$266,000, and ten years imprisonment passed on the writer Rauf Badawi in May
2014 for an article he published criticising the Saudi clerical establishment on
his Free Saudi Liberals website.
Amnesty International reports that in
2014, the government severely restricted freedoms of expression, association
and assembly, and cracked down on dissent, arresting and imprisoning critics,
including human rights defenders. Many received unfair trials before courts
that failed to respect due process, including a special anti-terrorism court
that handed down death sentences. New legislation effectively equated criticism
of the government and other peaceful activities with terrorism. The authorities
clamped down on online activism and intimidated activists and family members
who reported human rights violations. Discrimination against the Shi’a minority
remained entrenched; some Shi’a activists were sentenced to death and scores
received lengthy prison terms. Torture of detainees was reportedly common;
courts convicted defendants on the basis of torture-tainted “confessions” and
sentenced others to flogging. Women faced discrimination in law and practice,
and were inadequately protected against sexual and other violence despite a new
law criminalizing domestic violence. The authorities continued to detain and
summarily expel thousands of foreign migrants, returning some to countries
where they were at risk of serious human rights abuses.
Cornell
University’s death penalty database records that the Saudis executed at least
87 people in 2014, and so far this year at least another 39.
Not a word
of all this appears on the FCO website.
US
Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Saudi Arabia a week ago, but the US,
like Britain, has been largely silent about executions and other gross and
persistent human rights violations carried out by the Saudi autocrats.
Mr Kerry
wasn’t in Riyadh to discuss human rights, but to reassure Prince Saud al-Faisal, the world’s
longest serving foreign
minister and son of the late King Faisal that the US administration “was not pursuing a
broader rapprochement with Iran that could come at the expense of its Arab
rivals. “ (now where have we heard of a similar case of a record-breaking
minister closely related to a monarch ).
It must be apparent, though, to Mr Kerry and Prince Saud that
Iranian intervention in the military operation to clear the Daesh out of
Tikrit, and later probably out of Mosul as well, helps enormously to accelerate
the eradication of the terrorists from Iraq and Syria, and hence to eliminate
the attraction of the so-called ‘caliphate’ to jihadists from all over the
world, as well as its medium term threat to the whole region.
Returning to the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, the intention
is clearly to help fellow hereditary autocrats to counter and extinguish the
popular uprising that began four years ago and continues today. The al-Khalifas
have no doubt learned some lessons from their Saudi big brothers about how to
deal with bloggers, human rights defenders and peaceful opponents like Nabeel
Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and holder of awards
from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Silbury Fund and
Index on Censorship.. His appeal against a six month prison sentence for
“denigrating government institutions” is being heard this coming Sunday, and he
is facing a new charge of ‘inciting hatred against the regime’, which carries a
three year prison sentence. These legal attacks on freedom of expression may
well have been inspired by the Saudis, who enacted a law in February 2014
equating acts deemed to “undermine” or
“destabilize” the state or society could
with terrorism.
Nabeel’s
plight, as well as the charges against Maryam and Zainab al –Khawaja, are
ignored in the FCO Report mentioned earlier, and incidentally, we should note that
as International Women’s Day was celebrated earlier this week, the Bahrain
Center for Human Rights highlights the cases of 6 women activists out of the
300 who have been arrested, imprisoned, and
tortured on false charges ranging from misuse of social media to harbouring
fugitives to plotting terrorist attacks. We might
suggest to the International Bar Association that they undertake a comparison
of the laws criminalising the right to criticise the monarch or the government
in Gulf states.
Saudi
Arabia’s ideology includes the doctrine that Wahabi Islam should have a
monopoly of religious life in the kingdom, so Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism,
Sikhism, Buddhism and every other world religion is prohibited. But since they can’t get rid of the one in
five of their population who are Shia, they can only do their best to
discourage and discriminate against their Shia subjects. The close alliance
with Bahrain is based on that principle. Yesterday a new report on
discrimination against the Shia in Bahrain was published by a consortium of
human rights NGOs detailing the legal actions against Shia religious groups;
the destruction of their mosques, and violence against their clergy.
Because
the population of Bahrain is much smaller, however, its rulers think the
problem can be solved by demographic engineering. Immigration of Sunnis from
Jordan, Yemen and Pakistan is encouraged and the immigrants are given citizenship,
housing and jobs, frequently in the security forces. Shia citizens are excluded
from the public services, denied the rights of freedom of expression and
assembly, subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture, extrajudicial execution and
deprivation of citizenship, all under the protection of the Saudi armed forces.
This is
not treated as a violation of the UN Charter, Article 2(4) of which prohibits
states from using the “threat or use of force against
the territorial integrity or political independence of
any state”, because Bahrain is deemed to have invited the
Saudis in. The Charter doesn’t envisage the situation that exists here, where
the inviting state is governed illegitimately by an autocracy that is opposed
by two thirds of the people. Nor is there anything in the UN’s Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights which prohibits he demographic engineering being
practised by the al-Khalifas. We can only say from a distance what would be
treated as a serious criminal offence if we could say it in Manama, that the
political and military link with Saudi Arabia is profoundly inimical to the
freedom of the people of Bahrain, but ultimately, the freedom and democracy we
hoped for in the Arab spring will prevail.
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