The Bahraini government continues its crackdown on opposition protesters, with demonstrations repressed and scores of dissidents held behind bars. Were joined by Maryam Alkhawaja, a leading Bahraini human rights activist. Her family has been highly critical of the U.S.-backed monarchy, and they have paid a heavy price. Maryams father, human rights attorney Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, is serving a life sentence in prison. He has already spent two years in jail. Her sister, Zainab Alkhawaja, is also imprisoned. A close friend of the family, Nabeel Rajab, is also in jail. Rajab had been the head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. “There has hardly been any real accountability of the Bahraini government of the human rights violations that have been going on in Bahrain for more than two years now,” says Alkhawaja, who is now the acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
Maryam Alkhawaja talking:
the civil rights movement in Bahrain is one of the oldest in the region. It started back in the 1920s. And almost every single 10 years since the 1920s, weve seen some form of uprising happening in Bahrain. And despite that, the regime in Bahrain, the government in Bahrain, has been able to put down these protests almost every time they happened in the past. Of course, when people came out in 2011 demanding a new constitution, demanding that the king deliver on the promises that he made in 2001, they werent demanding the stepping down of the entire monarchy. They were just demanding reforms. It was after the government decided to use excessive force, to start killing people on the streets, that the demand changed of the protesters on the streets. And so, this is a bit of the background of whats happening.
But I think the other thing thats very important is the role that is played from the outside forces. Bahrain is geopolitically very important. And I always like to call it the “inconvenient revolution.” Where else in the Middle East and North Africa region have you seen a foreign military step into another country and help the government put down a popular uprising? You know, how would it be ever acceptable in the international context, for example, to see France and Germany step into the U.K. to put up a popular uprising?
Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the form of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, troops. And not only that, to take this a step further, that the United States administration came out and justified the entrance of these troops into Bahrain to help the government, to me, you know, is something that I cannot even begin to fathom. How can, in an international context, we ever justify the presence of foreign troops in a country to put down a popular uprising? So, just looking at the geopolitical situation and seeing how the international response to the human rights situation in Bahrain has been, the lack of any kind of real accountability, really gets you to understand how geopolitics plays a role in Bahrain.
What weve seen is the use of excessive force. Just pastlast February, we saw two youth being killed by being shot directly by police forces. And we continue to see this. The methods used of excessive force, arbitrary arrests, house raids in the middle of night, targeting of children, continues almost on a daily basis in Bahrain.
– source democracynow.org
Maryam Alkhawaja, acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and co-director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights. Her father, prominent human rights activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, and sister Zainab Alkhawaja are in prison in Bahrain.