A new State Department report on human rights in Bahrain shows that U.S. policy isn’t working.
In early 2011, the government of Bahrain violently cracked down on pro-democracy protesters as uprisings spread across the Middle East. The protests were brutally suppressed, and hundreds of people were arrested. Many were tortured, some to death. The crackdown sparked some pushback in Washington, which has key assets invested in Bahrain, including the 5th Fleet base.
The king of Bahrain eventually commissioned a report to investigate his government’s violent crackdown. It was an encouraging move, suggesting the ruling family might actually be prepared to take responsibility for the abuses of its police and military. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) was formally presented in November 2011.
It was a dramatic moment: I was there at the Sakhir Palace when the report’s chief author, Professor Cherif Bassiouni, listed the abuses that had been committed by the king’s security forces, including the killing of demonstrators, unfair military trials and the torturing of medics who had treated injured protesters. The king pledged to implement the recommendations from the commission’s report and reform the country’s human rights record.
On that day, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed the report, saying “We are deeply concerned about the abuses identified in the report, and urge the Government and all elements of Bahraini society to address them in a prompt and systematic manner.”
Since then, however, the Bahraini regime has largely evaded fulfilling these recommendations, and the human rights situation has gone from bad to worse. Following a confusing State Department decision to lift the ban on arms sales to Bahrain’s military last year, Congress mandated the State Department produce its own report on Bahrain: an assessment of how well Washington’s ally has addressed the BICI recommendations, a crucial yardstick in measuring progress.
Last week, the State Department delivered its analysis to Congress, almost five months late. Although layered in bureaucratic language, the assessment essentially confirms that Bahrain really isn’t meeting its goals. And though State doesn’t say this, its report offers strong evidence that it should reconsider reimposing the arms ban it lifted a year ago.
The State Department’s analysis comes during a sudden increase in repression that raises difficult questions for Washington about its close relationship with the Gulf dictatorship. The administration’s relationship with the authoritarian regime is complicated — Bahrain is a longstanding military partner and a serial abuser of human rights. Although the assessment was billed by State Department spokesperson John Kirby as a “report card on that [BICI] report,” it’s a largely descriptive document that both praises and criticizes Bahrain’s progress on human rights.
In 2013, the State Department reported that Bahrain had fully implemented five of the recommendations, including the establishment of an ombudsman’s office and the payment of compensation to the families of those killed in the unrest. This year’s report, coming five years after the initial BICI report, is a pivotal assessment. Congress needs to know: Is the country actually following through on its promises?
The new assessment credits the Bahraini regime with making progress on some key recommendations, but the report should have been far more critical. For instance, Recommendation 1722 g of the BICI calls for Bahrain to crack down on torture by ensuring that there is an “audiovisual recording of all official interviews with detained persons.” The State Department reports that “the U.S. embassy has observed these cameras” in police stations. But human rights activists and their lawyers have said that interrogations are rarely recorded and never admitted as evidence in trials. Bahraini officials may say they have implemented the recommendation, but this is like claiming to have run the New York Marathon because you’ve bought a new pair of sneakers. Likewise the State Department report declares that Bahrain’s “judicial system is making efforts with help from the UK and the United States to refrain from reliance on confession-based evidence.” Yet torture remains a huge problem in Bahrain, with defendants routinely claiming they have been coerced into making false confessions.
Another key recommendation called for all sentences to be commuted for those jailed for peacefully expressing an opinion. This, says the new assessment with some understatement, has been “narrowly interpreted,” and rightly urges the Bahraini government to review relevant cases with a view to dropping charges. The problem here is that while some — though not all — of those jailed in 2011 for having expressed their views peacefully were released, many more have since been arrested for similar or identical acts, and so technically aren’t covered by the BICI report.
The 2011 report also urged the diversification of Bahrain’s “Sunnis-only” security forces. Failure to properly represent the country’s majority Shia population in the military or police is dangerously myopic and could cause sectarian abuses. But State’s report talks only about token inclusion of Shias in the police, and is silent on the failure to diversify the military, a virtually exclusively Sunni institution that the U.S. administration continues to train, arm and equip.
A year ago this week, State lifted holds on selling arms to Bahrain’s military, citing “meaningful progress on human rights,” but the move has predictably failed, and the situation is starting to slide in a scary direction. In the past three weeks, leading human rights defenders have been targeted, the main opposition group suspended, and a leading cleric stripped of citizenship. On June 16, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned that the latest crackdown, and failure to implement the BICI recommendations, “could contribute to further unrest and violence.” The smallest country in the Middle East, Bahrain sits on the fault line between Saudi Arabia to its west and Iran to its east. The future of the tiny island kingdom is of enormous importance to regional security, as increased instability here will likely spill over into Saudi Arabia and its other Gulf neighbors.
Five years on, Washington’s “softly softly” policy of muted public criticism and encouragement to reform behind closed doors has failed. The country is increasingly polarized and dangerous. The kingdom’s oil-dependent, flailing economy shows little sign of recovery while political unrest continues. The United States can no longer afford its investments, not least the 5th Fleet base, to be in the hands of an increasingly erratic ally.
The new State Department BICI report is more evidence that the ruling family can’t be trusted to keep its word. The time, if there ever was one, for an approach that relies on quiet diplomacy, gentle public admonition and renewed arms sales is over. The administration should tell its repressive ally that there are consequences for dangerous behavior, and start by reimposing a ban on all small arms sales to Bahrain, as proposed in bipartisan legislation in the House and Senate. Without a renewal of the arms ban, Bahrain is likely to continue on this dangerous and ultimately self-defeating path of suffocating all dissent, fueling sectarianism and instability that will continue to have a ripple effect across the region. Washington needs to act quickly and assertively before things get even worse.
Brian Dooley is director of Human Rights Defenders at Human Rights First. Follow him at @dooley_dooley.
