30 May 2010The Bahrain Center for Human Rights expresses it great concern for the continuous escalation pursued by the security authorities in Bahrain represented in the violence and bloodiness of the authorities in confronting the growing public protests that prevail the Bahraini villages and areas opposing the authority’s policy.                                                                                                                                

30 May 2010The Bahrain Center for Human Rights expresses it great concern for the continuous escalation pursued by the security authorities in Bahrain represented in the violence and bloodiness of the authorities in confronting the growing public protests that prevail the Bahraini villages and areas opposing the authority’s policy.

The BCHR received several complaints from sufferers and victims of this policy, the last which was the young Hasan Ali Darwish (20 years old) suffering severe injuries in the village of Karzakan, last Monday 17 May 2010, due to being shot by the Special Forces live ammo “shotgun” when he was leaving his grandmother’s house and heading towards his house.

The village of Karzakan had witnessed a protest demonstration that led to the intervention of the Special Forces which used live ammo to disperse the protestors. The shooting, which the youth faced, caused a punctured lung which led to internal bleeding.

The 12 splinters he faced have not yet been removed. The local newspapers published a news piece stating that the Public Prosecution ordered the imprisonment of the accused for 30 days in custody.

Two youth from the village of Malkiya suffered from injuries due to firing live ammo “shotgun”[ii][2] at them on Tuesday 13 April 2010, when the youth Abdullah Hasan (18 years old) and Sadiq Ali Abdullah (18 years old) where walking to the baker in the same area, and were startled by the firing of live ammo at them which led to scattered injuries on the bodies of the two youth.

Abdullah Hasan was injured with shotgun splinters on his hand, leg and chest, while Sadiq Ali was injured in the head and other parts of his body. When they turned to the hospital, the security forces were contacted and who interrogated them and kept them under security surveillance, then they were pulled out of hospital by force and taken to prison to face the charge of assembling.

The shotgun fires a bullet that explodes directly after firing it, only to offload dozens of solid balls that get scattered over a wide area in aim of hitting the largest number possible of targets, and this normally leads to the downfall of several wounded amidst the demonstrators.

These solid blocks penetrate the human skin and stop at the bone, and it is difficult to later extract those blocs from the body, as there are still dozens of Bahraini citizens whose bodies suffer from the remains of these metal blocs since the nineties.

It is also difficult to cure or remove these blocs due their small size, and there are many who got killed in the incidents of the nineties due to the indulgence in using this weapon which is intended at hunting small animals and birds.

In another case received by the BCHR which proved the excessive use of force by the Special Forces when dealing with the inhabitants of the Bahraini villages, two students from the Al-Jabriya Industrial School, and they are Mohammed Ammar Ahmed and Sayed Abbas Habib (17 year-olds), were arrested on 14 April.

The bus carrying the students back to their village was driving near the concentration of the Special Forces stationed at the village of Karzakan, and it was filled with the sounds of clapping and singing, which angered the Special Forces and pushed them stop the bus and beat everyone inside and arrest the earlier mentioned students without any legal justification.

Some of the Bahraini village and areas are being besieged with Special Forces for several months, and these forces and the civilian militias belonging to them of foreign individuals brought by the security apparatuses as mercenary forces from several tribes in Syria, Jordan, Yemen or the province of Balochistan in Pakistan.

These forces raid the residents of the Shiite villages and abuse them in a systematic manner, where the villages are stormed and live ammo, rubber bullets and tear gas is used, which leads to the injury of hundreds of people among them elders, women and children.

Several properties, houses and mosques are damaged. The mercenary forces are used to prevent the political seminars and to attack the peaceful protests and demonstrations. The Special Security Forces use armed civilian militias wearing, in some cases, black masks and attack the villages. The description “mercenary” can be applied to these Special Forces that are selected in a structured manner, and from certain countries; to be used security and military wise outside the usual framework of the security and military apparatuses of the country.

These “mercenaries” are granted materialistic and job privileges that the citizens working in the same unit and same jobs do not get. They are given housing, travel tickets and are thrown into political disagreements which they are not a part of, and they are trained in a special manner to raid the villages and humiliate the residents.

The votes of these mercenaries were also used, after actively granting them the Bahraini citizenship, to marginalize the parliamentary elections of 2006, which is a matter that is expected to be repeated in the coming elections. The BCHR believes that targeting the Shiite villages on a regular daily basis by using foreign forces from a Sunni sectarian background, aims at creating sedition between the people of the country of the two sects, and to deepen the differences and sectarian tensions.

This policy was met with utter rejection by the civil society institutions and human rights organizations in Bahrain.In a fourth incident that happened in Sitra area, north of the capital, a car carrying two youth who are Yousif Ahmed Hubail (28 years old) and Hasan Ahmed Hubail (21 years old) – the brothers of one of the wanted – was stopped by civilians in order to arrest them without knowing the reason behind that. When the two youth refused to obey these civilians due to them being unaware of their identities, the civilians severely beat the two youth.

It later turned out that these civilian forces had come to arrest their brother (Hubail), and who was not in the car they were driving.

Yousif Hubail and the Bruises Caused by Beating

On the same day, the two youth submitted a notification to the Sitra district police station; however they were surprised that the nature of categorizing this case changed from them being plaintiffs to defendants, on the charge of attacking security men while carrying out their official duty.The majority of the villages and areas of Bahrain witness rising public tensions, and semi-daily confrontations with the Special Forces.

The demands of the protestors are usually presented in stopping the systematic sectarian discrimination against the Shiite sect, whose pace increased since the arrival of the current King to the throne, and to stop the policy of the political naturalization in aim of changing the demography to manipulate the results of the elections, and to stop the continuous arrests of the people of these villages, and to end the established torture in the Bahraini prisons, and to stop bringing, funding and training foreign mercenary forces. Also, of the reasons for protests is the increase of poverty level among the citizens and the pervading corruption amidst the ruling class and the class surrounding it, and the authority being a party in inflaming sectarian disputes between the Shiites and Sunnis, and marginalizing the role of the Parliament and excelling in humiliating the loyal representatives of people in it.The Bahrain Center for Human Rights recommends:
1. Stop bringing firearms of all kinds, and to refrain from the use of excessive violence against the demonstrators;

2. Stop bringing and exploiting the non-Bahraini mercenaries with a sectarian agenda in the various security apparatuses.

3. Set up an independent commission of inquiry, to investigate the issue of using excessive force, and the illegal exploitation of foreigners, and to bring the ones responsible for it to trial;

4. Initiate an actual dialogue process with the pillars of society to resolve the crisis the country is going through, and to stop resorting to security solutions