The New Phase of Sectarian-Biological Reprisal in Bahrain

BY SONDOSS AL ASAAD

While scores of governments have evacuated their nationals from Iran, more than two thousand Bahraini citizens are stuck there due to the Coronavirus outbreak, while the government abandons the least of its ethical, national and humanitarian duties.

Deputy Secretary-General of Bahrain's largest opposition bloc Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Hussein Al-Daihi, said via Twitter that while the regime promises to organize the Formula1 ''in an exciting way,'' and which would be attended by hundreds of nationalities despite the certain danger of the Corona outbreak, it prevents thousands of citizens from returning to their homeland for purely political reasons.

Al-Daihi went on to say, "The Bahraini regime is putting the entire people, including all sects and groups, at-risk in order to achieve its private gains,'' noting that this regime does not miss an opportunity to retaliate against the opposition instead of embracing its own citizens.

Meanwhile, the Bahrain Forum for Human Rights (BFHR) monitored 470 media cases of inciting hatred against Bahrain's Shiite citizens with COVID-19; both on social media and the official press, to the extent that they blatantly violated the citizens' right to life, liberty, dignity and citizenship. The BFHR noted that while Bahrain's Cyber ​​Crime Directorate, the Public Prosecution and the judicial authorities do not hesitate to pursue political and human rights activists, they do not take any action against those involved in spreading hate messages against citizens for political reasons.

The BFHR listed some of the hate messages against patients infected with Coronavirus after their return from Iran. These include, among others, calling for executing the patients infected with Coronavirus and cremating of their bodies; revoking their nationalities; arresting them on charges of threatening national security and quarantining them in Shiites' religious centers. Besides, patients with Coronavirus have been dubbed as "garbage, Magi, Iranian spies, Safavids, backward Shiites, grave worshipers, spy and terrorism sheep used as biological weapons, people of infidelity, immorality, debauchery and impurity, sectarian traitors, mut'ah marriage, etc."

Bahrain's Cyber Crime Directorate has not taken any action against the accounts or the persons inciting hate speeches, which the BFHR, said would contribute into ripping apart the social fabric and reinforce the fact that the authorities manipulate the Coronavirus as means of pressuring citizens based on their religious or political affiliations, noting that international human rights law prohibits ''any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.''

SONDOSS AL ASAAD

Sondoss is a Lebanese freelance journalist and translator; based in Beirut, Lebanon. Al Asaad writes on issues of the Arabs and Muslims world, with a special focus on the situation in Yemen and Bahrain.