Bahraini doctors jailed over peaceful protests
Medics arrested before dawn after court rejects appeals relating to support for democracy and care of wounded
The masked men threw a black cloth bag over his head and led him from his wife and children to an interrogation room at Bahrain International Airport in March 2011.
Dr. Ghassan Dhaif didn’t know what was happening. The men, he said in a first-hand account published on the Doctors in Chains website, beat him in the face, chest and legs. He screamed for them to stop. “I asked them about reason for detention and they replied, ‘You will know when you die,’ ” he wrote. “I was screaming from pain and I kept shouting ‘I will die,’ but they showed no mercy.”
Dhaif and at least four other medics were arrested on Tuesday after a Bahraini court rejected their appeal to overturn a court decision that would send them to jail for crimes that they say they have never committed.
The medics were part of a group of 20 doctors and nurses who worked at Salmaniya Medical Complex in the Bahraini capital of Manama during the Arab uprising against the kingdom’s ruling Sunni dynasty in February 2011.
Many of the medics endured five months of torture for their alleged role in protests that culminated with convictions in September last year.
The nine medics who appealed the convictions were released soon after the verdict and earlier this year their sentences were reduced, in some cases from 15 years to five years.
However, the court decided Monday they wouldn’t escape jail time, leading to an international outcry.
In the hours after their arrests, international human rights groups lashed out at the Bahraini government, specifically King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifah, and demanded the doctors be released.
The fact the medics were arrested shows the Bahraini government isn’t committed to delivering “true justice for victims of human rights violations,” said Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s deputy pro- gram director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“They have been jailed solely for peacefully exercising their legitimate rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly and therefore they should be immediately and unconditionally released.”
In a speech last November to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, set up months after the protests to offer recommendations to prevent a reoccurrence in the future, King Hamad said his government would amend laws to give more protection to “the valuable right of free speech” and to expand the definition of torture to put Bahraini laws “in full conformity with international human rights standards.”
However, rights groups say the arrest of the medics proves the government isn’t ready to move for- ward with protecting human rights. In pre-dawn raids, at least five of nine medics who appealed the convictions were taken back into custody after being out on bail since September 2011 fighting the decision. Amnesty International wrote on its website that a sixth medic had been arrested. The Associated Press reports two medics are on the run. The sentences they face range from six months to five years. Two others of the nine, pharmacist Ahmed Almushatat and nurse Hassan Matooq, have been in prison serving two- and three-year sentences, respectively, since 2011. Ahmed Sameer Alhaddad, spokesperson for European Bahraini Organization for Human Rights, told the Star the medics were doing their “first duty” as doctors by helping injured protesters, and the government has done little to improve the human rights situation in the Middle Eastern country. “The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, the official panel which studied last year’s uprisings, rejected many of the government’s claims, as no evidence showed that any of them used or advocated violence,” Alhaddad wrote in an email. The arrest of the doctors is a systematic attack on the health-care system in Bahrain, according to a statement issued by the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights. “How long will it take for the Bahraini regime to recognize that its stated commitment to true justice and political reform rings hollow as long as it continues to imprison medical professionals who were simply carrying out their ethical duties to treat all injured people?” Richard Sollom wrote.