8th Nov, 2012 –
It is reasonably easy to state what the political red lines are that a human rights NGO can’t cross. For example, the world would be up in arms if Amnesty International expressed their preference for who should be the next President of the US; or became embroiled in attempts to bring about regime change in Russia; or fielded their own candidates in Spanish Parliamentary elections.
Human rights groups are at their best when they objectively document human rights abuses and impartially seek to hold Governments to account. Few people have a problem with human rights groups going a step further and engaging in demonstrations to promote human rights issues, in order to pressure a Government to live up to its commitments. As citizens we should be grateful to any organization genuinely working to promote human rights.
If this is the case, many will ask why Bahrain has taken legal measures against those labeled as “human rights defenders”; like Nabeel Rajab and Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja; and why an organization like the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) was closed down.
The simple answer is that these figures and a handful of organizations like the BCHR never started out as human rights activists. Rather, they used the human rights tag to further a radical political agenda.
If you are going to be getting into radical political activism, there is much to be said for giving yourself a “human rights” brand. You’ll find that major media outlets and even significant international organizations will listen carefully to what you have to say.
If you name yourselves the “National Front for the Liberation of the Homeland” then the world will probably consider you to be a bunch of Communist militants and ignore you. But if you brand yourselves as a “Centre for Human Rights” who would dare criticize or ignore you?
Perhaps similar thoughts occurred to Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, when his organization, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, failed in its Iran-sponsored coup attempt in the early 1980s and Al-Khawaja was forced into exile in Denmark. When Al-Khawaja was granted amnesty by the King, he and Nabeel Rajab formed the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights in 2002, which continued its activity even after it was shut down for adopting radical political stances.
If we fast-forward to February 2011, the BCHR dropped any pretence to political impartiality and became a major driving force within the opposition.
Al-Khawaja appears on several videos inciting followers to “topple the regime”; rejecting dialogue with the Crown Prince; and even boasting that he is holding out for a Shia Prime Minister.
Nabeel Rajab became the poster boy of the uprising and introduces himself as a human rights defender. However Rajab has tended to be more militant in his views than the mainstream political opposition; rejecting dialogue, calling for the Prime Minister’s downfall and condoning violence as “self defence”. Completely shunning his duties as a human rights defender, Rajab controversially refused to look into an outbreak of attacks against migrant workers in the early months of the uprising.
Since Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja’s incarceration, his daughters Zainab and Maryam have taken up his mantle of political activism dressed up as human rights advocacy. Zainab tends to be the more outspoken: “What we all have in common is that we protest against the regime of this country… If someone is calling for democracy, he is calling for an end of a dictatorship and if this is the will of the people, this could also mean overthrowing the regime.” Whatever your views on what Zainab actually says; these are not the words of a human rights defender.
Does this matter? It does when the words of organizations like the BCHR are taken as an objective situation report of events in a particular country. Earlier this year a senior UN human rights rapporteur spoke out about “tear gas casualties” in Bahrain. It turned out that the UN had got its facts from the organization Physicians for Human Rights, whose sources were almost exclusively the BCHR (its list of alleged casualties were almost identical) as well as Iranian media channels like Al-Alam TV and Press TV.
Although it was impossible to verify in all cases, a substantial number of these tear gas fatalities were elderly people with health complications, some of whom had been in hospital for several weeks before they died. To spell it out: The BCHR had deliberately inflated casualty figures to further their political agenda and win over international sympathy – which they do very effectively, as numerous media outlets quote them uncritically as a human rights organization.
And several other militant “human rights” bodies have followed in the BCHR’s coattails. The most recent seems to be the European-Bahraini Organization for Human Rights which advocates transparently on behalf of the opposition and whose list of Founders features a strange mix of Bahrainis with links to radical politics and names with no links to Bahrain whatsoever.
We’ll not be naïve and call on these groups to change their names: Although the human rights tag is clearly dishonest, these activists believe they are on to a good thing and have successfully used this brand to gain access to the Human Rights Council and other international bodies.
However, we would call on the international media and observers of events in Bahrain to be more discerning concerning militant activists passing themselves off as human rights defenders.
Let’s be clear; we are not against human rights groups which conscientiously address the Bahrain human rights issue and on occasions we have welcomed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty which put the spotlight on important issues.
The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry highlighted a number of serious failings in Bahrain’s human rights record and although the recent session at the Human Rights Council showed that Bahrain had implemented most of the BICI’s recommendations, there is still some way to go.
So it is important that independent and objective human rights bodies continue to scrutinize Bahrain’s record and highlight shortcomings. The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and other organizations operating within the opposition’s umbrella are not independent, not objective, and not even real human rights bodies so we should not be giving them the time of day