http://www.presstv.ir/detail/175872.html

 

 

'Bahrain invasion reveals Saudis' fear'

Wed Apr 20, 2011 6:0PM

Interview with Ralph Schoenman, a political analyst and author of The Hidden History of Zionism

 

 

Saudi-backed regime forces have arrested an unknown number of doctors, nurses and medical staff in Ibn-Sina and al-Razi medical centers in Bahrain.

Opposition and human rights groups believe the Bahraini government is arresting doctors who are suspected of having taken part in anti-regime protests.

Press TV interviewed Ralph Schoenman the author of The Hidden History of Zionism, regarding the protests in Bahrain and why the regime has stepped up the crackdown on the anti-government protesters.

What follows is the text of the interview:

Press TV I would like to get you opinion regarding the arrests of medical personal. What is the [Bahraini] regime is going to achieve here?

Schoenman From the beginning of the uprising, the regime has targeted the medical personal, the hospitals, the medical centers, the ambulances, the surgeons, the physicians, the nurses; anyone associated with medical care because of the nature of the repression: the use of nerve gas, the use of chemicals, the brutality with which people have been tortured and the evidence that this represents to the bodies and the patients and the treatment and the medical documentation of what has occurred. For example, nine doctors have confirmed the use of nerve gas and the chemical properties appropriate to it and had been administering atropine to the victims.

I should point out that most recently I had a communication from the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights which is based in the US, in Washington and in Boston, Massachusetts and has launched an international campaign in defense of doctors in Bahrain and they have sent an investigation team and they have met with the physicians and their family members.

A large number of people have disappeared, physicians, doctors, anesthesiologists and it is not only the doctors themselves, many instances the doctors are married to the physicians or women in the medical profession. I just had an email from one of them, “I am scared these days more than before, I am afraid my children will be alone, my husband has been taken there is no one left to take care of them and this is a nightmare.” That is a daily experience or problem for the physicians. The investigative work of Physicians for Human Rights is very important now and it is, as I mentioned, an international campaign that has been joined in by the Amnesty International and by many human rights organizations internationally.

Press TV Is it too little too late for a negotiated settlement, considering the variables on the ground, given the fact that it has escalated into something that is beyond the control of the al-Khalifa dynasty and House of Saud that are persecuting the civilians right now?

Schoenman I want to make it clear that what is taking place in Bahrain under the al-Khalifa regime is not new. It has been exacerbated and escalated by the brutal Saudi Special Forces' invasion. But we must bear in mind that the force on the ground is the Fifth Fleet, it is the staging ground for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the center for intelligence operations of the US in the region and it is the locus of the torture apparatus established by the British, going back to 40 years ago when Britain was the colonial power and continuing right up to the current moment.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has moved 42 billion dollars into Swiss banks, an indication of their apprehension about their ultimate fate. The truth of the matter is that these country-selling regimes are the creations of the US because of the arms that are provided, [it is] the military and political power of the imperialism that sustains these regimes. It is not a question of an Islamic revolution in Bahrain. The dominant slogan of the people was “Not Shia, not Sunni but Bahraini,” and the secular movement is in lockstep, in united front, with the Shia and Sunni people who are asking for democracy not for a theocratic outcome. On the contrary, what they ask for is a democratic control and an end to this exploitative ruthlessly repressive and ultimately corrupt dictatorship.

The expression of what it represents is the prime minister's statement that the “Shia are like the Persian rug, the more you walk on them, the better they become. I would like to mention that Women without Borders has been documenting the beating and the torture and detention of people in Bahrain, notably women. [Some] women who have died, 30 were documented [to die] under the torture in detention. The torture that is inflicted on not just the women but all those detained is unspeakably brutal.

These Wahabi Saudi forces which have leveled the Shia villages across Bahrain have been particularly targeting mosques; they have been destroying mosques as old as 800 years. It is a cultural assault, it is at level of ethnic cleansing it is everything to do with the nature of the imperial rule there is no outcome for those who woe the US that would be satisfactory other than the current subjugation of the population because the people have their will.

They will not maintain their country's staging ground for this kind of repression waged against the people of the region and the theft of their resources and the commandeering of their oil and all of their natural wealth. Imperialism needs such regimes and this genocidal repression in Bahrain is an expression of the woe that the imperialism has imposed on the people from Libya to Egypt to Bahrain to Yemen ... in every county.

It is a question for international class struggles, struggle of the oppressed, struggle of the dispossessed, the democratic content of this struggle is to remove a corrupt oligarchy located in its center, in the US, but well-expressed by the barbaric regimes in Manama and the Saudi invading forces.

There are uprising across the Saudi Arabia right now, in Riyadh in Jeddah... There are not hundreds but thousands of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia. This regime is trying to face its own uprising and the expression of that fear is the invasion of Bahrain, because the people of Bahrain and their aspirations for democratic control are a mortal threat to the survival of the corrupt Saudi monarchy itself, hand in glove with its client regime in al-Khalifa's brutal control in Manama.

Press TV We do know that the United Nations Security Council is to convene to discuss the satiation in Yemen. Do you think Bahrain will be next?

Schoenman No. the Security Council is composed of countries that are largely subordinate to the United Sates and certainly have the same class structure, they do not need three months to find out what every journalist who is present in the region knows.

Zeinab Al-Saffar, the Lebanese journalist and a correspondent with the Irish Time, have been documenting the most atrocious atrocities and the relentless torture of those who have been detained including the evisceration of young people. Children who were wounded and were in hospitals were taken away by the security forces and then opened up and their organs removed and then sewn up again and given back to their families without their organs. This has been documented in numerous cases and it is a crime against humanity.

Zeinab Al-Saffar, who has close ties with many citizens in Bahrain, described in an interview a woman in her 30s who died from bullet wounds to her neck; three women who were pregnant were taken and been tortured. 600 have disappeared; the youngest was under 12 years of age and died in prison. Prominent businessmen including the members of the opposition have been taken.

This brutality is across the board, this torture, this kidnapping and the most unspeakable crimes. The Fifth Fleet is less than a mile away, it is actually more like half of a mile away where these atrocities are occurring, US troops are on the ground. Keep in mind please that the Saudis are deploying F16s, Cobra helicopters in their raids on Shia villages, the armament, the ammunition, the nerve gas; these are American weapons, the Fifth Fleet is there.

Do you seriously imagine that the US and those who are suburbanites to it in the Security Council are lacking knowledge? On the contrary, they are fully complicit, they are overseeing this operation and they are responsible for it and they must be held fully accountable before any international adjudication of the war crimes inflicted on this suffering population who are at the moment are world soldiers for justice.

Press TV You have been in close touch with activists and other medical personal as well on the ground in Bahrain throughout. What do you think is the fate of all these medical personal, human right activists, protesters in general who have been detained or have just disappeared off the streets of Bahrain?

Schoenman We fear for them because the regime has been so absolutely barbaric in its torture, savage torture. Some people have been tortured for as many as nine days before dying. We don't have information about those who are being held. It is a measure of the barbarity of the regime that it is able to maintain this violence and now treat the people in the way that they have. Every person involved in the medical profession in Bahrain is at risk. It is enough to treat someone who has been injured or wounded or even fatally shot or attacked by the security forces of the state. For those people who are administrating this help, they themselves become targeted by the regime.

I should point out that there have been general strikes by the general federation of the trade unions in Bahrain supported by the international trade union movement, 370 trade federations. I myself have been involved with an international union in the US and building mass demonstrations in the US and resolutions of support for the workers in Bahrain.

There is an international movement or struggle. The fundamental reality is this: The US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is himself a war criminal; he was indicted for his role in Iran-Contra, which was a corrupt scheme to exchange cocaine for weapons for the counter- revolutionaries in Nicaragua and also to extract many from Iran and to profit from that. He lied before congress under oath. He was the tool of not only Ronald Wilson Reagan and Bush and now he acts for President Obama. There is no break in the continuity of this pattern of corruption because it is a class rule in the US and the fundamental character of imperialism and its agenda.

The people in Bahrain are but the continuing victim of this and the struggle that has been mentioned. Armed struggle yes, people have the right to self-defense. Thomas Jefferson said, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without a revolution because the blood of tyrants is democracy's natural manure.”He said that on behalf of the American Revolution; people around the world are entitled to the same rights and same self-defense.

MN/PKH