Category Archives: Human Right

Bahrain, GCC, Human Right

Trafficking in Bahrain: Forcing Foreign Laborers to Demonstrate for Regime…….

 

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“Some Bangladeshi expatriates in Bahrain say they have been forced to take part in pro-government rallies. They have told the BBC that their enforced participation has provoked retaliatory attacks from the country’s majority Shia population. A Bangladeshi community leader said that two expatriate workers had been killed on Tuesday and shops owned by Bangladeshis were attacked. The authorities in Bahrain have not commented on the claims. There are 100,000 Bangladeshi expatriate workers in Bahrain, more than 300,000 Indian expatriate workers, 60,000 Pakistanis and about 30,000 Nepalis. India and Nepal both say that their citizens are safe, but advised them to keep a low profile…………”

Only a minority of the citizens of Bahrain support the regime now. To get enough people, enough bodies to demonstrate for the regime, to show on television and on You Tube, they need to tap the huge pool of foreign laborers. They need to coerce Asian and other laborers to go out and look excited abut the al-Khalifa shaikhs, a tough act. It is almost a type of human trafficking, to add to that other type of trafficking.
They already depend on Asian mercenaries (as well as some from Jordana and Syria and other Arab states) to control Manama. Now they have resorted to exploiting the Asian “civilians” for propaganda purposes, putting them in harm’s way.

Cheers
mhg


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Apartheid, Arab Counterrevoltion, Human Right, Persian-American Gulf, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, US Foreign Policy

Saudi Regime: Free Speech as a form of Terrorism, a New Fifth Column…..

 

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Rasid website reports that the Saudi regime has accused an outspoken Shi’a cleric of terrorism for speaking against injustice and repression. Shaikh Hassan al-Saffar had openly questioned how a regime that ‘condemns killing protesters in other countries allows the killing of protesters at home’. Saudi regime spokesmen have again accused the protesters and civil rights advocates in Qatif (Eastern Province) of being pawns of foreign powers. (Charging protesters and opponents of the Wahhabi regime of being Iranian pawns is a standard refrain of some Gulf despots and of the pro-Saudi Wahhabi faux-liberal media and regime academics along the Gulf). The Saudi regime media have often spoken of a “fifth column”, referring to Shi’as who are demanding their rights as citizens on their own ancestral land of the Eastern Province.
The Saudis, in fact, have their own strong “fifth column” all along the Persian-American Gulf: it consists of the Salafis who are loyal to the al-Saud clan and their Wahhabi shaikhs more than to any other entity. Most of the Saudi oil is extracted from the Shi’a area but they are the last to benefit from it.

I wonder if the Saudis can convince the Obama administration to add free speech to the list of acts of terrorism. That new definition of terrorism would only include free speech in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE, almost exclusively.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab League, Arab Revolutions, Human Right, Syria, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Bashar al-Assad on Ending the Violence (in Syria)………..

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“Russia’s foreign minister said after Damascus talks on Tuesday that President Bashar al-Assad was “fully committed” to ending the bloodshed in Syria even as regime tanks pounded the central city of Homs for a fourth straight day. Sergei Lavrov said he had had a “very useful” meeting with Assad and that Moscow was eager to work towards a solution based on an Arab League plan that it had previously criticised. “We (Russia) confirmed our readiness to act for a rapid solution to the crisis based on the plan put forward by the Arab League,” said Lavrov, adding that Syria was also ready see an enlarged Arab League mission in the country, Russian news agencies said……”

Of course Assad is committed to ending the violence. The problem is that he seems to want to end it his own way: by killing off the opposition. That would end the violence, but if the opposition refuses to be killed off, then it goes on. Qaddafi also tried to end the violence by finishing off the opposition, but NATO would not allow him. The al-Khalifa regime in Bahrain is doing the same, but on a smaller scale mainly because the people are protesting peacefully. The Western powers liberated Libya from its dictator, just as earlier they had liberated Iraq from its dictator. Syrian opposition and impotent Arab potentates want the West to intervene again militarily and change the regime in Damascus. They were check-mated by the Russian and Chinese vetoes at the UN in their efforts to do a repeat of Libya in Syria.
Will they still do it in Syria in this election year? It will certainly be a tougher nut to crack given that the regime is organized and well-armed (they can do some damage to NATO warplanes and tanks). Besides, Assad still has some regional and international allies (Iran, Russia, China, Lebanon, a few others).
Will they do it? Ich weiss nicht.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Revolutions, Cairo, Egypt, GCC, Human Right, Iran, Latin America, US Foreign Policy

IRI, NDI, and Selective Democracy in Targeted Places: Tegucigalpa to Cairo and Manama……….

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“The IRI is an international arm of the US Republican party, so anyone with the stomach to watch the Republican presidential debates might doubt whether this would be a “democracy-promotion” organization. But a look at some of their recent adventures is enough to set the record straight: in 2004, the IRI played a major role in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Haiti. In 2002, the head of the IRI publicly celebrated the short-lived military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Venezuela. The IRI was also working with organizations and individuals that were involved in the coup. In 2005, the IRI was involved in an effort to promote changes in Brazil’s electoral laws that would weaken the governing Workers party of then President Lula da Silva. Most recently, in 2009, there was a military coup against the democratically elected government of Honduras. The Obama administration did everything it could to help the coup succeed, and supported “elections” in November of 2009 to legitimize the coup government. The rest of the world – including even the Organization of American States (OAS), under pressure from South American democracies – refused to send observers. This was because of the political repression during the campaign period: police violence, raiding of independent media, and the forced exile of political opponents – including the country’s democratically elected president. But the IRI and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) – its Democratic party-linked counterpart – went there to legitimate the “election”……….The IRI and NDI are core grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy…………...”

I bet there are no offices for either IRI or NDI in places like Amman (Jordan), Manama (Bahrain), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Abu Dhabi (UAE), or Tehran (Iran), and all for the same reasons.
You’d think the Saudi and Emirati and Bahraini potentates, with whom some Western (American and British) leaders profess a communality of values (?), would welcome these democracy-advocating groups. Otherwise, what are those hundred billion dollar weapons deals for, except to make sure democracy survives in these places? Yet all this tells me that now there is much more freedom in Egypt than in those places (any democracy is more than none). More than there was in Tegucigalpa (Honduras) when they went to Honduras allegdly to rubber-stamp the coup d’etat.
All this does not justify these Americans being held by Egyptian authorities and tried. There has been no ‘crime’. I believe they ought to be freed: there should be no restrictions on advocacy in either Cairo or Tehran or Riyadh.
Cheers
mhg


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France, Gulf states, Human Right, Syria, United Nations International Organizations, US Foreign Policy

True Lies in New York: Syrian Hypocrisy Prizes at the UN ………..

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Watched the UN Security Council “debate” on the Syria resolution. A lot of hypocrisy and grandstanding on both sides:

  • No doubt the Syrian regime is killing many people, most likely not as many as the “opposition” claims and reporters like Anderson Cooper immediately accept and repeat. The number of 260 killed for today is most likely exaggerated.
  • (There I just said it: the Syrian opposition lies as the regime lies; no thunder, no lightening has struck me yet. Not yet).
  • First hypocrisy prize goes to the French ambassador. He waxed nostalgic and sad and shocked about the Hama massacre some thirty years ago, about those responsible. A reporter asked the Frenchy why one of the Assads responsible for Hama massacre 1980(1?) has been living free in France even as he talked bout it. His stupid response: “We are a hospitable country”, and a quick exit.
  • Second hypocrisy prize goes to U.S. ambassador Susan Rice, who said with a straight face that the United States government stands with the people of Syria as they seek freedom and democracy. The same U .S. administration that supports the repression in Bahrain and supplies the regime with tear gas and guns and armored vehicles for crowd control. She did not comment on the Saudi regime, which is as repressive, and would kill as many people if need be to stay in power.
  • Third hypocrisy prize goes to the British ambassador waxing indignant about repression in Syria and countries that enable it. Even while his own government has been supporting repression and killings and arrests by the Bahrain regime.

  • The Mother of all Hypocrisy prizes goes to the Arab League, which represents some of the most despotic regressive corrupt regimes on earth. Yet it goes to the UN with a resolution to deal only with the repression in Syria: not in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, etc, none of whose people chooses its regime. The Syrian ambassador made a silly remark about Saudi women not being allowed to attend football (soccer) games while their regime talks about human rights. He was right on that point.


One American academic suggested that maybe now (after the Russian and Chinese vetoes) the Arab League should think of intervening a la NATO in Kosovo. I tweeted my favorite retort: that the Arab League, especially on the military side, can’t organize a piss-up in a brewery (as some Americans would say) let alone a military campaign.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, GCC, Human Right, UAE, Weapons deals

Disgruntled Bins of a Feather: UAE in the Footsteps of Bahrain?………….

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“But it has tolerated little dissent during the regional upheaval, trying and sentencing at least five pro-reform activists and stripping the citizenship of another seven last year on charges that they represent a threat to state security. It also disbanded the elected boards of two of the UAE’s most prominent civil society groups, Human Rights Watch said. “Unfortunately, we saw last year that the United Arab Emirates decided to suppress freedom of expression in the country by harassing and trying a number of activists, and by attempting to limit freedom of association in the country,” HRW’S deputy Middle East head Nadim Houry told the conference. Subsequently a group of men dressed in traditional Emirati clothing burst into the conference and demanded it end because Human Rights Watch did not have a permit to host such an event. Attendees heard the men identify themselves as officials of the Ministry of Economy. They flashed an identification card, HRW researcher Samer Muscati, one of the conference’s organizers, told Reuters, but they could not see it long enough to determine who had issued it. “We speculate that these guys are not who they claim to be. They seem to be state security, not from the Ministry of Economy,” he said. Officials of the UAE Interior Ministry and the Dubai government’s press office declined to comment on the identity of the men…………..”

They are all the same, really. If they feel threatened by dissent, the Bin Technocrat Bin Zayed al-Nahayan act no different from the slimy Bin Technocrat al-Khalifa potentates of Bahrain. No different from the Bin Technocrat al-Saud princes. They crack down and arrest and gas and imprison and torture and, if they have to, they kill.
Why else do you think they are buying all these American JDAM bunker-busters? Did you thing it was to attack China or Iran or North Korea? No, it is to bunker-bust the shopping malls if they are ever taken over by irate citizens. Correct that: there are only about 12% or so in the UAE who are citizens” They can’t possibly fill a shopping mall. Only the citizens are entitled to feel disgruntled, if done silently. Citizens are allowed to be disgruntled silently only, but the almost 88% who are temporary foreign laborers are not allowed to be disgruntled even silently.
It is not clear how they monitor and prevent silent disgruntlement. They can’t just send their flunkies with ID’s to stop it. These security goons aren’t smart enough to tell who is disgruntled and who is not, especially when nobody is supposed to smile in public anyway.
Maybe the potentates have purchased some new equipment from the helpful Western government (possibly the eager British) or North Korea for that.
Cheers
mhg


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GCC, Human Right, Middle East Women, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Women 100

Gulf of Taliban: Lawlessness and Misogyny in the UAE and Other Wild Places …………

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“The case of a woman who is facing deportation for reporting an attempted rape while being intoxicated in the United Arab Emirates highlights the ongoing struggle for women to have justice when faced with sexual violence in the ultra-wealthy Gulf country. According to reports, when the 26-year-old Kyrgyz woman arrived at a local police station following a taxi driver attempting to rape her, police officers told her she would face charges of drinking alcohol. Instead of acquiescing to the officers threats, she insisted on filing charges against the taxi driver for attempted rape………. “In November last year, two Saudi Arabian men were sentenced to two months in prison for “having sex with a minor” during a New Year’s holiday in the United Arab Emirates. According to local reports, both men were convicted of having consensual sex with a minor, despite the 15-year-old girl’s claims that she was forced to have sex with them in a hotel room. She is to be deported as part of her crime, court officials said……… In early October, two Pakistani men were charged with raping a Filipina waitress. Activists say they are unlikely to face harsh sentences and that the woman will be the one who faces the worst penalty………”

There are many other such cases in the UAE. Rape is reported routinely in the local newspapers. As are the “strange” Taliban-style sentences that focus on the female victims as guilty.
The treatment of victims as suspects is a purely local thing, but it is also common in other ‘nominally’ Muslim countries, like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remember the Qatif girl in Saudi Arabia who was initially punished while her male rapists were barely touched about two years ago? Then there are many cases in Pakistan where women who dare file rape complaints (a rarity) are sentenced to stoning or life in prison for adultery. The guilty males are usually left alone. There was a case once when the woman filed a rape case while the rapist denied it. She was considered to have confessed to adultery (by filing a complaint) and sentenced for adultery, but not the man who denied the charge.
By some twisted local logic in the UAE, a woman who files a rape complaint is sometimes seen by some as exposing her “dirty” laundry. Then there is the local costume in the region of identifying certain single foreign women as being of “easy virtue” or even hookers. Especially if these single foreign women are from certain foreign (Asian) or Arab countries, like those mentioned in this item.  Anyway, this phenomenon is becoming common in the United Arab Emirates, especially in Abu Dhabi and ‘cosmopolitan’ Dubai.
Cheers
mhg


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Bahrain, Culture, GCC, Human Right, Saudi Arabia, WTF

Love and Marriage and Repression in Abu Dhabi and the GCC…….

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“The UAE nationals have been advised not to marry foreign women due to social, legal and financial complications which arise following such marriages, said a renowned lawyer. Speaking at the Noor Dubai Radio, CEO of Bin Haider Advocates & Legal Consultants in the UAE, said a large number of cases are pending before the courts due to such marriages. He pointed out that the young men marry foreign women not to make family but to get rich. But if the husband’s income gets depleted, the foreign wives create problems which lead to court cases……… He said a decree by His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, fixed it at Dh50,000 which applies only in case of marriages with the Emirati women. While the marriages of UAE nationals with foreign women will be subject to what was agreed upon in the marriage contract with regard to alimony………….”

The potentates on the Gulf love to meddle in such private matters as marriage. The Bahrain royals are an exception for being less intrusive: they are too busy gassing, beating, and shooting their people (or throwing them in prison or handing them to imported Jordanian or Iraqi Ba’athist torturers). The Saudi princes don’t allow their ‘normal’ citizens to marry foreigners without government approval. It is seriously frowned upon. One can get fined heavily if one marries a foreign woman (or even a man) without royal approval. We are talking tens of thousands of Rials. But there is some hope: the man can always appeal to the king for an exemption (I hear he has a soft heart for true love, especially in cases of multiple polygamy). Besides, for true love there are always the Turkish novellas: I hear even the royals are attached to them.
The potentates of the UAE have been tightening the screws, really no pun intended here. (Really it is the al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi that boss the others around). They have been trying to ‘regulate’ marriages and block citizens from marrying foreigners (mostly UAE men marrying foreign chicks). Other GCC states have also grappled with this issue; at least one regime has been threatening to form a government commission to look into these cases. This is one thing the GCC potentates can agree on: unify their marriage standards and laws. While at it, they may revisit the polygamy issue: the potentates and their Salafi shaikhs are experts on that (talking marriage here).
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Human Right, Muslims, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, WTF

Middle East Worst Four for Freedom and Civil Liberties: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan……….

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“A total of 26 countries registered net declines in 2011, and only 12 showed overall improvement, marking the sixth consecutive year in which countries with declines outnumbered those with improvements. While the Middle East and North Africa experienced the most significant gains—concentrated largely in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—it also suffered the most declines, with a list of worsening countries that includes Bahrain, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Syria and Saudi Arabia, two countries at the forefront of the violent reaction to the Arab Spring, fell from already low positions to the survey’s worst-possible ratings…….Worst of the Worst: Of the 48 countries designated as Not Free, nine have been given the survey’s lowest possible rating of 7 for both political rights and civil liberties: Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan………”

Always the majority of the worst in Freedom House ratings are Arab and/or Muslim countries. The worst declines were in the Middle East. Of the last ones up there, the worst of the worst, seven of the nine are Muslim states, and four of those worst are Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan). We all knew that most these states were not sweethearts, but the worst of the worst? The Worst-est? Way down there with North Korea? And they all start with S? Which deserves a resounding: WTF!
Cheers
mhg


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Culture, GCC, Human Right, Middle East Women, religious police, Salafi, Saudi Arabia

Saudi King Orders: a Gentler Religious Police, Witchcraft and St. Valentine’s, Chopped Lamb Heads……….

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“A long, long time ago…….. On graduation day
You handed me your book …… I signed this way:

Roses are red, my love……  Violets are blue. 
Sugar is sweet, my love……. But not as sweet as you.


Roses are red, my love…….  Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet, my love……  But luck may
god bless you…..” Bobby Vinton


“The newly appointed general president of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Haia) Sheikh Abdullatif Al-Asheikh said Thursday that Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah had ordered him and his fellow colleagues to be lenient when dealing with people and to show good will and respect to them. “The king gave me these clear orders when I went to greet him after my appointment,” he told local daily Al-Eqtisadiah in an interview. Al-Asheikh said King Abdullah advised him to always have a fear of Allah when tackling religious issues concerning the public and to treat citizens and foreigners with respect and leniency………….”

So the Wahhabi religious cops (Commission for Protection of Vice) are ordered by the king to be respectful and lenient as they harass people for trying to, or pretending to, have fun. (Actually having fun is very hard in the Kingdom and that is why almost anyone who can do so flies, drives, swims, walks, rides a donkey, or hitches a ride out of the Wahhabi utopia). I am puzzled by this, and I have a few questions:

  • Why do they need an order from the king? Doesn’t the kingdom have rules and laws and by-laws regulating how people are to be treated by the regime and its secret police and enforcers? Like almost every other country outside North Korea?
  • And what about people who talk politics and vanish in the prison cells of the regime? When will the “king’s” mercy touch them? 
  • Does this also mean that people who dabble in sorcery and magic, as well as people who deal with them, will not have their heads chopped off in a public square just before the Friday lunch? 
  • Does this mean the religious cops will not entrap people into offering or buying magic and sorcery with the goal of getting them sentenced to have their heads chopped off in a public square just before the Friday lunch? Just before the spectators head back home for a lunch of lamb and rice? [I don’t think Saudis eat bacha or pacha (boiled spiced sheep’s head) like we do in the Gulf and Iraq and Iran].
  • Is all this, as I suspect, a ploy to open the door for the unthinkable, the legalization of red roses next February? Maybe on this St. Valentine’s Day red roses and heart-shaped balloons will be allowed in the shops. Maybe the religious cops (the Haia) will be encouraged by the king to buy red roses for each other, for their wives, for all their multiple wives, even the very first ones who may be long in the tooth. Anything is possible.

Cheers
mhg


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