Pro-government group attacks doctors and nurses at the University of Bahrain. (Video: itcestudent)
I signed the earliest petitions I found urging a no-fly zone in Libya, understanding that this could only be accomplished through military enforcement, with the strong hope that the Libyans might as soon as possible be protected from being killed and tortured by their current government, with the very weak hope that they can cobble together a government acceptable to them out of the opaque, fragmented, and chaotic groups rebelling against the Quaddafi regime. But I remain deeply disturbed by the ways in which this story, with its combination of movie script moral romanticism and war epic, is being used to suffocate the news from Bahrain.
Read “Is Bahrain Back to Normal?” at Jadaliyya. I had a chance in some airports last week to see the relentless round the clock coverage in play on CNN, with not a word about Bahrain, or Saudi, or Egypt. I don’t see Bahrain in the newspapers–very surprisingly, it seems to be a footnote with Juan Cole. What is happening in Libya must be covered–but we’re missing a political story of great importance in Bahrain, which may have revealed just what the limits of democracy in the Middle East will be, and who the players are who are enforcing those limits, who the silent partners are cooperating with the enforcers. In Bahrain, AL Jazeera, so magnificent in Egypt, ceases investigative reporting. I read that AL Jazeera Arabic is deafeningly silent on Bahrain.
I appreciate that the US will not support peaceful protesters if that compromises its naval bases. I appreciate that the US/Israel/Sunni Gulf monarchies do not want civil rights for Shi’ites or rapprochement between Shi’ites and Sunnis.I have to tell you, though, that I think the attacks on doctors and nurses, clinics, and hospitals treating unarmed and peaceful protestors may have consequences for human rights–not just in the ME–but everywhere–as the 7 April 1933 Nazi Civil Service amendments dismantling the rights of Jewish citizens did for the world. The duty of medical personnel to treat patients impartially, and the right of wounded and sick people to be given apolitical medical care–to be rendered civilian through their wounded condition– is probably the source of our evolving ideas of human rights–the most ancient, the most exemplary, the most protected human right. One of the most moving books I know is Gladys Mouro’s book, An American Nurse Amidst Chaos, 1975-1998 (AUB Press), which tells about the struggles of the AUB hospital staff to treat every patient from every single faction during the Lebanese civil war.
You can see how the hospital, however precariously, kept alive the seed of a civil society through this practice. I think what we’ve seen in Bahrain is a radical destruction and breach of a central civil right–and may very well be the beginning of the end of the very notion of “civilian” in conflicts. It is gravely dangerous for the press not to cover this.
