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After three years of the unending pro-democracy protests in Bahrain, the BS finds that the systematic silence perpetrated by Western and Arab-sponsored media outlets has played a significant role in concealing the horrendous violations committed by the Al-Khalifa rule against peaceful unarmed protesters.
The BS stresses that the suspicious decision of Western and Arab-sponsored media to follow the Al-Khalifa regime’s lop-sided narrative of the events unfolding in Bahrain makes of those outlets complicit in criminal acts – especially as this decision seems to come in accordance with the media blockade imposed by the Al-Khalifa regime on independent media in the Kingdom.
We also believe that providing the regime with a smoke screen is enabling it to further carry on with its foreign-backed offensive against the Bahraini people and to continue with it daily violence and wholesale collective punishment on its population.
The BS would also like to assert yet a newer time, that the grave human rights violations, the denial of basic human and political rights as well as the denial of fundamental civil liberties are the true components that have birthed the Bahraini struggle.
Furthermore, as we acknowledge and are indeed grateful for the public outspokenness of Catherine Ashton and European Parliamentarians such as Marietje Schaacke and Marian Harkin, we must however express profound disappointment at the continued support that the regime enjoys from the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.
These three powers continue to provide a veritable seal of approval to the Bahraini Regime by impeding the progress of the democratic movement of the Bahraini people.
Knowing that multiple authenticated reports have documented cases where European-made weapons have been used in internal repression in Bahrain; we would like to ask for the complete cessation of all weapon supplies to the Bahraini regime – in part the selling and exporting of teargas, shotguns and pellets – which are paid for in Bahraini blood and are being used against peaceful demonstrators and which have to date harvested the lives of some 150 unarmed Bahraini civilians.
We ask no more of European countries but to respect their own laws and regulations and commit to their own weapons-licensing protocols and their Foreign Assistance Acts which prohibit them from providing arms to a regime which uses those arms to repress its own populace.
We would also like to assert that selling military equipment to the Bahraini government endorses the criminal behavior of the regime’s security forces and reinforces the continuation of human rights abuses.
European human rights activists also beseech their governments to ban high-profile figures involved in human rights abuses and the torture of prisoners in Bahraini jails from travelling to European countries.
Of those high-profile officials we would like to name the Bahraini King’s sons Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa and his brother Khalid in addition to other Government Officials who have been ordering and implementing the aggressive crackdown on peaceful protesters and who are accused of being directly and deliberately involved in acts of torture against peaceful demonstrators – as was stated in the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry.
By refraining from bringing the profitable arms’ trade with Manama to a complete half and refraining from imposing the aforementioned sanctions on the criminal regime in Bahrain and its collaborators; European countries are considered to be enabling and backing the brutal repression of the Bahraini uprising in contradiction to the principles of Human and Democratic rights that have been propagated across the globe and accepted as the cornerstone of democracy here in Europe for centuries now.