Bahrain Hunger Striker At Risk of Death
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Imprisoned Bahraini human rights activist Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja turned 51 yesterday, April 5. A former�protection co-ordinator with Frontline, an NGO which supports human rights defenders, Al-Khawaja�has been on a hunger strike for 58 days to protest a sentence of life in prison. After he was arrested last year in April, Al-Khawaja was convicted in June by a special security court for seeking to overthrow Bahrain’s king for his role in the pro-democratic protests last spring. His lawyer,�Mohammed Al-Jishi, says that Al-Khawaja’s health deteriorated sharply on Friday; Al-Khawaja has lost 22 pounds and has been moved to a hospital clinic and is being fed intravenously.
On Thursday, his daughter and human rights activist Zainab Al-Khawaja was arrested during a protest for him and transferred to a prison on Friday morning. Police claim that she “attacked a public official,” says�Al Jazeera.
Al-Khawaja Tortured In Prison
Al-Khawaja’s family says that he is case number eight in an account of abuse described by detainees in a report released in November by the�Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI). The Bahraini government formed the commission after international pressure to investigate �the unrest and the abuse of protesters and detainees. �Al-Khawaja was beaten at the time of his arrest on April 8 and underwent surgery on his jaw afterwards. Eight days later, abuse resumed: Al-Khawaja was beaten on the soles of his feet and sodomized with a stick. According to the BICI report, he went on a hunger strike on February 8 at that time to stop the torture and protest his imprisonment.
Amnesty International says that Al-Khawaja was convicted in June “under duress” and that there was no evidence presented to show that he had committed or approved acts of violence.
The BICI report also says that some detainees died while being tortured and the Bahraini government has acknowledged this. A National Commission created by King Hamed ibn Isa Khalifa says that Bahrain has started to retrain its security forces and detention facilities. Activists contend that the National Commission’s report is “self-congratulatory” and that�beatings and other brutalities, torture and imprisonment of political prisoners have continued.
Al-Khawaja was one of seven opposition leaders sentenced to life in prison last year for his part in the Shia-led uprising against Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy. Shi’ite Muslims comprise the majority of Bahrain’s population and have long described discrimination for government and military positions.
Bahrain is a U.S. ally and houses the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Almost Daily Protests in Bahrain
Thousands marched in support of al-Khawaja on Friday. Police fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters who marched carrying Al-Khawaja’s picture while shouting “freedom or martyrdom.” According to�Al Jazeera, Sheikh Issa Qassim, Bahrain’s most senior Shia cleric, had said in a speech before the rally that, should Al-Khawaja die in custody, things could “get out of control.”
Bahrainis have also been protesting almost daily against the Formula One Grand Prix race that is to be held on April 20-22. Back in October of 2011, a�Formula One Grand Prix race was cancelled due to �opposition from teams.�
Previous Care2 Coverage
Bahrain King Praises Progress As Beatings, Torture Continue
A Tense Bahrain Awaits Anniversary of Uprising (Video)
US Wants Investigation: Bahraini Activist Beaten, Hospitalized
Read more: abdulhadi alkhawaja, bahrain, human-rights, hunger strike, middle east, mideast, mideast-protests, pearl roundabout, regional conflict, torture, zainab alkhawaja
Photo of Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja on the 57th day of his hunger strike via angry arabiya
4 comments
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3:08AM PDT on Apr 7, 2012The King is not really changing things is he. He talks the words to his Western minions and then does as he wants.
Kindness and amicable takes effort cruelty is easy,
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Saturday, 7 April 2012
Bahrain Hunger Striker At Risk of Death by Kristina Chew April 6, 2012 6:52 pm
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Harlech Castle - Current times and prices
Men of Harlech’. The nation’s unofficial anthem, loved by rugby fans and regimental bands alike, is said to describe the longest siege in British history (1461-1468) which took place here during the War of the Roses. Edward’s tried and tested ‘walls within walls’ model was put together in super-fast time between 1283 and 1295 by an army of nearly a thousand skilled craftsmen and labourers.
Edward liked to use only the best masons from Savoy and England’s finest carpenters and blacksmiths. At the time this was one of the cheapest of Edward’s castles. A snip at a mere £8,190.
The structure, overseen by Master of the King’s Works, James of St George, boasts two rings of walls and towers, with an immensely strong east gatehouse. It was impregnable from almost every angle. Its secret weapon was a 200-foot (61m) long stairway which still leads from the castle to the cliff base.
Access via the stairway to the sea and crucial supplies kept the castle’s besieged inhabitants fed and watered. When it was first built, a channel would have connected the castle and the sea. You could have sailed a boat up to the moat. Seven hundred years later, the sea has receded and you could say the castle appears almost stranded, waiting for the tide to turn once more.
Harlech is one of eight sites chosen by Cadw as a hub for community projects in support of the Cultural Olympiad celebrations in Wales.
Friday, 6 April 2012
Easter lilies could kill your cat 8:29 AM Friday Apr 6, 2012
Easter lilies could kill your cat. Photo / Thinkstock
Easter lilies may add a touch of seasonal flair to your holiday weekend - but they could also kill your cat. New Zealand Herald
Massey University veterinary researcher Kathleen Parton, an expert on toxicology in animals, has warned cat owners that lilies, popular over Easter, were potentially deadly to felines.
The toxic lilies of the Lilium and Hemerocallis genus included the Easter, Christmas and Stargazer varieties, she said.
"Cats have a tendency to eat the flowers or leaves of these lilies. But they're very poisonous and cats can then develop acute renal failure very quickly," Dr Parton said.
Even brushing past a flower could be dangerous because pollen could rub off on the cat's fur and then be eaten.
"Drinking the water the plant is in can also lead to poisoning," she said.
Owners who suspect their cat has been poisoned should seek help from a vet straight away, with the first 18 hours being critical.
"Without treatment the cat will begin to drink a lot of water, indicating kidney failure, and die within a few days," Dr Parton said.
"Early signs of poisoning include vomiting, not eating and depression, which appear within a few hours of eating the lily.''
Dr Parton said lilies should be kept away from cats entirely if possible.
- APNZ
Exposed: The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin's Killer Go Free
Exposed: The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin's Killer Go Free
Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/HO, Martin Family Photos)
Editor's Note: This article was first published by RepublicReport.org.
It’s been widely reported today that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy corporate front group that unites state lawmakers with corporations to pass state laws favorable to corporate interests, helped pass the law that might allow Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, to escape prosecution. Florida’s “Stand Your Ground,” the law that might help Zimmerman to claim self-defense (despite evidence to the contrary) is just one of many state laws that is nearly identical to ALEC’s model Castle Doctrine Act. The Florida senator who introduced the law, Durell Peadon, was also a member of ALEC. The law passed in 2005.
About the Author
Suzanne Merkelson
Also by the Author
Thanks to pressure over "Stand Your Ground" laws, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have dropped their ALEC memberships.
Related Topics
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, 98 percent of ALEC’s revenues come from corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations. Each member pays annual fees of between $7,000 and $25,000. ALEC is also supplemented by direct grants. We don’t know all the details about all of ALEC’s funders and members. Here’s a partial list of what we do know about the corporations and foundations who helped fund the group that drafted the law that keeps Trayvon Martin’s killer free — and put more guns on our streets:
ALEC received $1.4 million in grants from ExxonMobil from 1998-2009.
It has also received grants from two Koch family-backed foundations: Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation.
ALEC has received grant money from the billionaire conservative and American Spectator publisher Richard Mellon Scaife‘s Allegheny Foundation and the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation.
ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board members include executives from Bayer Corp., GlaxoSmithKline, Centerpoint360, Reynolds American, Wal-Mart Stores, Johnson & Johnson, PhRMA, American Bail Coalition, Kraft Foods, Inc., Pfizer Inc., DIAGEO, AT&T, Reed Elsevier, Inc., Peabody Energy, UPS, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC, Altria Client Services, ExxonMobil, Salt River Project, and State Farm Insurance Co. Coca Cola also recently had an executive on ALEC’s board.
Take Action:
Tell AT&T to Stop Funding ALECAccording to reporting by my colleague, Lee Fang, ALEC’s 38th Annual Meeting was funded by corporations including BP, Takeda Pharmaceutical, Allergan, Altria, Bayer, Chevron, Peabody, Shell, UnitedHealthcare, Visa, FedEx, Louisiana Seafood, UPS, Amazon.com, Chesapeake Energy, ConocoPhillips, Dow, Gulf States Toyota, International Paper, TimeWarner, Wellpoint, HP, Lilly, Merck, USAA, and Walgreens (the full list available here).
The first item in ALEC’s mission statement is:
… to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America’s state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public.
Individual liberty is one thing when it comes to protecting your home or your children. It’s quite another when it means gunning down a teenager armed only with Skittles in his father’s neighborhood. ALEC is the same group behind laws that harm workers, health, and safety, and behind the “Voter ID” law that makes it harder for low-income people, communities of color, the disabled and elderly, and others to vote. Now we know ALEC wrote the law that might let Trayvon Martin’s killer walk free. How much longer will the large corporations behind ALEC harm the communities in which they do business by funding the group’s reckless agenda?
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Corby decision could be made in months Thursday, April 05, 2012 » 06:28pm
Schapelle Corby may learn before the end of the year whether she has been granted clemency, but authorities have confirmed she is likely to face at least another two years in prison even if given early release.
The 34-year-old's bid for freedom has received a boost with a crucial report from Indonesia's Justice and Human Rights Ministry recommending that she be granted clemency on humanitarian grounds.
Corby, from the Gold Coast, was jailed for 20 years in 2004 for attempting to smuggle 4.1kg of marijuana into Bali in a bodyboard bag.
The clemency application, lodged about two years ago, must still be approved by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
It is believed the report from the Justice and Human Rights Ministry is in line with an opinion from a Supreme Court judge who recommended to the president's office in July 2010 that Corby's sentence be halved.
But senior officials in Jakarta have confirmed that while the Justice Ministry's final report is now with the president, a decision is likely to be months away.
An official also confirmed that if Corby was given clemency, any cut to her prison term would only apply to her original 20-year sentence, meaning the two years in remissions she has already received would not be taken into account.
'It's the president's prerogative to decide whether to grant or reject the clemency request, but with this, humanitarian considerations are being taken into account,' a senior official close to the case said.
'For the calculation, it's up to the prison authorities to set the date of when she's to be released.'
If Corby is granted clemency and a sentence cut of 10 years, she would be eligible for release in 2014 at the earliest.
http://bigpondnews.com/articles/TopStories/2012/04/05/Corby_decision_could_be...
In Haiti, Global Failures on a Cholera Epidemic Tuesday, 03 April 2012 15:05 By Deborah Sontag, The New York Times News Service | Report
Mirebalais, Haiti - Jean Salgadeau Pelette, handsome when medicated and groomed, often roamed this central Haitian town in a disheveled state, wild-eyed and naked. He was a familiar figure here, the lanky scion of a prominent family who suffered from a mental illness.
On Oct. 16, 2010, Mr. Pelette, 38, woke at dawn in his solitary room behind a bric-a-brac shop off the town square. As was his habit, he loped down the hill to the Latem River for his bath, passing the beauty shop, the pharmacy and the funeral home where his body would soon be prepared for burial.
The river would have been busy that morning, with bathers, laundresses and schoolchildren brushing their teeth. Nobody thought of its flowing waters, downstream from a United Nations peacekeeping base, as toxic.
When Mr. Pelette was found lying by the bank a few hours later, he was so weak from a sudden, violent stomach illness that he had to be carried back to his room. It did not immediately occur to his relatives to rush him to the hospital.
"At that time, the word 'cholera' didn't yet exist," said one of his brothers, Malherbe Pelette. "We didn't know he was in mortal danger. But by 4 that afternoon, my brother was dead. He was the first victim, or so they say."
In the 17 months since Mr. Pelette was buried in the trash-strewn graveyard here, cholera has killed more than 7,050 Haitians and sickened more than 531,000, or 5 percent of the population. Lightning fast and virulent, it spread from here through every Haitian state, erupting into the world's largest cholera epidemic despite a huge international mobilization still dealing with the effects of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.
The world rallied to confront cholera, too, but the mission was muddled by the United Nations' apparent role in igniting the epidemic and its unwillingness to acknowledge it. Epidemiologic and microbiologic evidence strongly suggests that United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal imported cholera to Haiti, contaminated the river tributary next to their base through a faulty sanitation system and caused a second disaster.
"It was like throwing a lighted match into a gasoline-filled room," said Dr. Paul S. Keim, a microbial geneticist whose laboratory determined that the Haitian and Nepalese cholera strains were virtually identical.
And, as the deaths and continuing caseload indicate, the world's response to this preventable, treatable scourge has proved inadequate. Cholera, never before recorded in Haiti, stayed one step ahead of the authorities as they shifted gears from the earthquake recovery. While eventually effective in reducing the fatality rate, the response was slow to get fully under way, conservative and insufficiently sustained.
"In the future, historians will look back and say, 'Wow, that's unfortunate,' " said Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, a nongovernmental organization that provides health care for the poor. "This unfolded right under the noses of all those NGOs. And they will ask, 'Why didn't they try harder? Why didn't they throw the kitchen sink at cholera in Haiti?' "
While the world has dedicated $230 million so far to combating the unexpected epidemic, the United Nations is now pleading for an additional $53.9 million just to get the vulnerable displaced population through the rainy months ahead.
At the same time, Haitian cholera victims are seeking compensation from the United Nations, pressing it to accept responsibility. Early on, protests against the United Nations hindered the construction of treatment centers and the delivery of lifesaving supplies. Now distrust of some cholera programs lingers, and the issue has strained the peacekeepers' relationship with the Haitians they are protecting in an eight-year-old mission to stabilize the politically volatile nation. So, too, have unrelated allegations that they engaged in criminally abusive behavior.
"In telling the truth, the U.N. could have gained the trust of the population and facilitated the fight against cholera," said Dr. Renaud Piarroux, who led an early investigation into the outbreak. "But that was bungled."
The United Nations maintains that an independent panel of experts determined the evidence implicating its troops to be inconclusive.
Questioned for this article, though, those same experts said that Dr. Keim's work, conducted after their own, provides "irrefutable molecular evidence" that Haiti's cholera came from Nepal, in the words of G. Balakrish Nair, an Indian microbiologist.
"When you take the circumstantial evidence in our report and all that has come out since, the story now I think is stronger: the most likely scenario is that the cholera began with someone at the Minustah base," said another expert, Daniele Lantagne, an American engineer, using the French acronym for the United Nations mission.
Even so, Anthony Banbury, a United Nations assistant secretary general, said last week, "We don't think the cholera outbreak is attributable to any single factor."
Many health officials consider the cholera response "pretty remarkable," as John Vertefeuille, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's director in Haiti, said.
A sky-high initial fatality rate of over 9 percent has declined to 1.3 percent (less than 1 percent is considered a well-managed epidemic). And the most recent statistics show new cases dropping to 120 daily.
Others, though, believe the bar for success was set too low and more lives could have been saved. Some critics bemoan weak disease surveillance and case-tracking, others inadequate water distribution and latrine building, and still others what they see as a penny-pinching reluctance to use antibiotics and cholera vaccine.
Also, some think cholera could have been stymied, even eradicated, last winter during the dry season after the first wave. Instead, it flared with the rains even as aid groups shuttered or reduced operations. And now, after another winter without an aggressive prevention and eradication effort, the health authorities fear a reprise.
"I think it's going to be another bad year for cholera," said Dr. John Carroll, an Illinois doctor who works in Haiti.
A Rapid Death
Here in the epicenter of the epidemic, all signage relates to life in the time of cholera. Surrounding the town square are heart-adorned posters that say, "Living with cholera: Always wash your hands with clean water and soap." Banners slung across the streets, in contrast, bear skulls and crossbones: "Justice and reparations for all victims of the Minustah cholera."
Inside City Hall, the deputy mayor, crisply dressed in a chambray shirt and slacks, described how he personally buried 27 bodies for fear that workers would not take precautions, how he nearly lost two of his own children to cholera and how he seethed every time Nepalese troops entered his offices.
"They were in my face every day, and the feeling inside me got stronger and stronger," said Ocxama Moise, the deputy mayor. "A few months ago, I even considered killing a soldier or two to see what would happen. I shared the idea with some friends, and they said, 'Don't. You're an official.' But it's only a matter of time before the population finds a way to get justice."
After the earthquake, when Haitians were living amid cadaver-filled ruins in the sprawling Port-au-Prince area, international health officials were concerned that infectious diseases would rip through the tent camps.
Well before the earthquake, Haiti was fertile ground for a disease that spreads primarily through fecal contamination of water: in 2008, only 12 percent of the population had access to piped, treated water, and only 17 percent to "improved sanitation," which includes the simplest pit latrines. Haitians' latrine access actually declined, from 24 percent in 1990.
"For decades we as partners have failed to ensure safe water and sanitation is provided to every resident of Haiti," said Dr. Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization.
But Haiti had escaped the cholera that raged through Latin America in the 1990s, and even the cholera that struck the Caribbean in the 19th century. It appeared "extremely unlikely" that cholera would present itself, a C.D.C. post-earthquake brief said.
"The risk of cholera introduction to Haiti is low," it said, noting relief workers were "likely to have access to adequate hygiene and sanitation facilities within Haiti, such that any cholera organisms they import would be safely contained."
Seven months later, that assumption would be challenged.
On Oct. 8, 2010, hundreds of Nepalese troops began arriving in Haiti after a cholera outbreak in their homeland, where cholera is endemic; the country weathers outbreaks well, with that one causing nine deaths.
Cholera also affects individuals differently; many infected develop no symptoms or only mild or moderate diarrhea.
Falling violently ill in October 2010, Mr. Pelette was not one of the lucky ones. Severe cholera causes profuse watery diarrhea, often accompanied by vomiting. Treatment is straightforward: replacing lost fluids and electrolytes, orally or intravenously. But those like Mr. Pelette who get no treatment can become so dehydrated that they go into shock and swiftly die.
Nobody knows for sure, but people here believe that Mr. Pelette was the first Haitian to die of cholera, and, though he was not named, he was presented as the "first case" in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in January.
Some details in that widely cited article, like Mr. Pelette's age and date of death, did not match those on his death certificate, obtained by The New York Times. Also, Mr. Pelette does not offer an example of untreated mental illness, as the article contended; he had received care at a hospital for chronic mental diseases, his brother said.
"When he took his pills, he was calm," Malherbe Pelette said, speaking on the porch of his sundry store. "He would come here every day, stand at the door waiting for a soda or cookies, and give a fist bump to everybody who came in. Sometimes, he showed up completely naked. He had a terrible speech impediment, and when he was agitated, it was really hard to understand him.
"Still, my friend, I cried when he died — a lot, a lot."
Enter the Epidemic
A couple of hours after Mr. Pelette died from what the family priest proclaimed to be a poison of some sort, Rosemond Laurimé, 21, a "small businessman" in his family's description, got sick in nearby Meille.
In Haiti, small businesses are minuscule, selling mangos or charcoal today to survive tomorrow. Mr. Laurimé peddled soap at a stand outside the Nepalese base, which sits on the banks of a fly-specked stream that flows into the Latem and then into Haiti's longest river, the Artibonite.
Around 6 p.m. on Oct. 16, when he returned to his shack near the base, he was clutching his stomach. Soon, doubled over from violent diarrhea and vomiting, he begged for help.
His grandmother, 70-year-old Marie-Jean Ulysse, did her best, finally summoning a moto-taxi at daybreak to take Mr. Laurimé to the hospital in Mirebalais, run by a Cuban medical brigade.
By the time he got there, it was too late: "His body had lost all its water," Ms. Ulysse said.
On Oct. 17, Mr. Laurimé became the first to die of cholera at a hospital in Haiti. The next day the Cuban doctors, who had seen five dozen cases of acute diarrhea in preceding days, notified the Haitian Health Ministry that something was terribly wrong.
Mr. Laurimé's grandmother also fell ill and, hovering near death, witnessed the frightening explosion of the epidemic as she lay absorbing fluids intravenously on a hospital cot. She saw a chain of sick prisoners stripped of clothing and handcuffed one to the next. She watched an endless parade of patients carried in, bodies carried out.
"I said to my children, 'Please do your best to take me home because I don't want to end up in the big hole where they're dumping all those bodies,' " she said.
While she is fine now, Mr. Laurimé's mother is not. Yverose Fleury wears a cloth binding her midsection in an effort to contain her sorrow. She said neighbors had ripped up her son's photograph because she keened over it incessantly.
"Nothing is the same with us after the cholera," she said. "My husband is weak and cannot work, my remaining son has a mass on his neck, my little daughter can't hold down food, and I am sick in the head."
From Meille, the epidemic coursed through the Artibonite River valley, landing with a thump 46 miles northwest, and downstream, in the coastal St. Marc area. On Oct. 19, three children died in rapid succession in a classroom in the rice fields. On Oct. 20, the St. Nicholas Hospital was overrun.
Patients sprawled on every surface, doubled and tripled up on beds, in the halls, in the courtyard and even on the sidewalk outside. By nightfall, there were 404. Forty-four died.
"At that moment, I felt like I didn't want to live any longer myself," said Dr. Yfto Mayette, the hospital director. "It was so sudden and so brutal."
On Oct. 21, as a brass band accompanied Mr. Pelette's white coffin to the cemetery, the national laboratory completed its analysis of the bacteria.
At 11 that night, Dr. Jordan W. Tappero of the C.D.C. got a call in Atlanta from the laboratory's director: "Jordan," he said, "It's positive."
Louise C. Ivers, Haiti mission chief for Partners in Health, had just arrived in Boston for a meeting. "My first thought was, 'You can't be serious.' Everyone was exhausted."
In Port-au-Prince, Jocelyne Pierre-Louis, a senior Haitian health official, had steeled herself. "We were in a way waiting for the other shoe to drop," she said. "We had barely picked ourselves up after the earthquake when the cholera fell on us."
Dr. Pierre-Louis reported to the large tent that replaced her collapsed office after the earthquake. Dr. Ivers took the next plane back, and Dr. Tappero flew in, too, with the first of 119 C.D.C. employees who would deploy to Haiti.
"It was a herculean effort at the time, people working 18, 20 hours a day, trying their best to make a difference," Dr. Tappero said.
There was much to do, from treating patients to treating water, from importing personnel to training Haitians, from distributing supplies to distributing basic disease and hygiene information.
But there were also fundamental decisions to be made, and nobody was firmly in charge. International health officials deferred to the Haitians — "our partners" — but in reality held the purse strings and know-how. This led to an often awkward collaboration, colored by Haitians' resentment that cholera had been imported in the first place.
It did not help that the initial projection used by international officials for planning purposes — 200,000 cases in six months — was an underestimate. There would be that many cases in three months' time, with a daily death toll of more than 100 by mid-December.
As the epidemic took off, the players who operated outside the "health cluster," a consortium of humanitarian groups, were able to react most nimbly.
At first, Doctors Without Borders and the Cuban medical brigades, both self-financed, handled the overwhelming majority of cases. "We felt quite lonely at the beginning," said Yann Libessart, spokesman for Doctors Without Borders. "It made no sense. Everybody was in Haiti. It was the biggest density of humanitarian actors in the world, and we two organizations were dealing with 80 percent of the cholera."
Gaëtan Drossart, mission chief for Doctors Without Borders-Belgium, said the health cluster had good intentions, "but there's a lot of meetings and a lot of blah blah blah." He said other groups were limited by agreements with donors to working in the earthquake zone and could not redeploy quickly.
Also, everybody initially worried most about the epidemic's arrival in Port-au-Prince. But Haiti's meager health care resources have always been concentrated in the capital, and after the earthquake humanitarian personnel and supplies were, too. That would eventually increase the cholera survival odds in Port-au-Prince, which would have a 0.7 percent fatality rate compared with 4.5 percent in the southeast.
But it took several deadly weeks for the disease to forcefully strike the capital, where rehydration solutions were warehoused; water, latrines and medical professionals were more plentiful; and organizations had had time to set up proper treatment centers.
Proper treatment centers maintain rigorous infection control to keep from becoming cholera contamination centers: chlorine sprayers to disinfect shoes, hand-washing stations, cots with holes and buckets underneath, disposal systems for waste and bodies.
None of this was in place at the start. Doctors Without Borders sent a team to the St. Marc hospital. "It was really, really awful," Mr. Drossart said. "There were an enormous number of cases, it was totally disorganized, the cholera patients were not isolated, and they were not being treated correctly."
Even four months later, that hospital did not have cholera cots; patients defecated in bed or risked a potentially fatal drop in blood pressure by getting up, United Nations investigators found.
"Hospital staff reported walking on feces in cholera units," they added.
Understaffed hospitals sometimes discharged patients too soon, sending them home to their deaths. They deputized relatives as caretakers although many patients arrived so dehydrated that they needed intravenous lines and nurses to watch over them. Pregnant women were a particular challenge.
"Our greatest heartbreak is that while the women survived, we only saved one pregnancy," said Ian Rawson, managing director of Albert Schweitzer Hospital in central Haiti.
Truth vs. 'The Blame Game'
Within a week of the outbreak, officials in Mirebalais were pointing fingers at the United Nations base, and United Nations officials were trying to stifle what they portrayed as rumors. The struggle began between those who thought that determining the epidemic's origin was important and those who lamented "the blame game."
At first, the United Nations said the base's handling of its waste met international standards — that it used sealed septic tanks, which were regularly emptied by a Haitian contractor, with the waste buried in a proper landfill.
But on Oct. 27, Al Jazeera filmed peacekeepers with shovels "working furiously to contain what looks like a sewage spill." Latrines appeared to be emptying black liquid directly into the river, a reporter said, and the air smelled foul with excrement.
That same day, The Associated Press observed an overflowing septic tank at the base and discovered the landfill to be open pits in a residential area uphill from the community's bathing stream.
Even four months later, the United Nations' own experts, examining the base's supposedly improved sanitation, discovered haphazard piping with "significant potential for cross-contamination" between toilets and showers.
They also noted the "potential for feces to enter and flow from the drainage canal running through the camp directly" into the tributary. Contaminants would have been distributed throughout the river delta in two or three days — a timeline consistent with epidemiological evidence tracing the cholera trail, the experts said.
Before long, hundreds of Haitians were marching on the base, with demonstrations spreading to Port-au-Prince and riots developing in Cap Haitien.
Edmond Mulet, then head of the United Nations stabilization mission, complained that it was "really unfair to accuse the U.N. for bringing cholera into Haiti." United Nations officials believed that agitators were taking advantage of the issue to sow unrest before November elections. But many Haitians were genuinely incensed — and fearful. Some wanted an explanation, others a scapegoat. Voodoo priests were being lynched for their supposed role in bringing the curse of cholera on Haiti, the government said.
In early November, the C.D.C. said that Haitian cholera samples matched strains commonly found in South Asia.
Dr. Piarroux, an infectious diseases specialist and parasitologist from Marseilles, arrived to lead a three-week French-Haitian investigation. He and his colleagues built a database of cases, identified geographic clusters and mapped the epidemic's movement.
His conclusion: the only explanation for an outbreak of South Asian-style cholera in a rural area of Haiti home to a Nepalese Army base with a faulty sanitation system had to be infected soldiers on the base itself.
In early December, Dr. Piarroux's mission report was posted on the Web site of the newspaper Le Monde. Eventually his findings would be peer-reviewed and published in the C.D.C.'s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.
But at that point, he said, he was considered "a renegade and a mythomaniac." A leading medical journal, The Lancet, rejected his study after publishing an editorial that said, "Although interest in how the outbreak originated may be a matter of scientific curiosity for the future, apportioning blame for the outbreak now is neither fair to people working to improve a dire situation, nor helpful in combating the disease."
Nonetheless, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, announced an independent panel "to get to the bottom of this and find answers the people of Haiti deserve."
Money and Lives
From the start, financial concerns colored the response to the epidemic, which had killed more than 3,600 Haitians by the first anniversary of the earthquake. It was partly a question of getting money flowing. Some donors hesitated, given the plodding pace of the earthquake reconstruction; others had to wait for a new budgetary year. Some institutions had time-consuming grant or contracting processes.
It was also a question of philosophy.
Some health officials wanted to use the least expensive prevention and treatment strategies and to marshal resources for the long battle ahead.
Others wanted to employ every available weapon at once, from free drinking water and antibiotics to aggressive case-tracking, mass vaccination, and water and sewer system building.
If that meant spending more upfront, so be it, they said. A year after the earthquake, many organizations were sitting on donations that remained unspent. The American Red Cross, for one, still had nearly half of the $479 million it had raised; it would ultimately dedicate $18 million directly to cholera prevention and treatment. Doctors Without Borders would spend $45 million.
Dr. Farmer of Partners in Health, who calls himself "a maximalist," said he wanted "health equity" — for the developed world to respond to cholera in Haiti as it would at home.
His organization initially requested potable water be trucked into the Haitian heartland so that a traumatized population would not have to filter and treat its water. Purification tablets were delivered instead because it was considered cheaper and simpler, he said.
"There was a fetishization of the simple," Dr. Farmer said. "But there's nothing simple about the introduction of a new pathogen or stopping its spread in a water-insecure place. There's nothing cheap about it, either."
Dr. Farmer said he kept thinking about the many water stations at the New York City Marathon: "That's for a sport, for heaven's sake. You're telling me the giant humanitarian aid machine can't do that in an epidemic?"
Mark Henderson, a Unicef official, said water trucking was done inside the town of St. Marc. "I don't know if it would have been logistically possible to send a water truck to every village in the Artibonite," he said. "And I'm not sure it would have yielded better results than getting water, which is available locally, and applying chlorine."
There was also a reluctance to use antibiotics, which can reduce diarrhea, spare suffering and potentially limit the disease's spread.
The Cubans alone, who claimed in a report that without their help "another 1,000 Haitians would have died at Haitian Health Ministry institutions," dispensed antibiotics to all cholera patients and preventively to their relatives.
World health authorities, concerned with cost and drug resistance, initially said antibiotics should be reserved for severe cases. Nearly three months later, the C.D.C. recommended antibiotics for moderate cases, too.
The fiercest disagreement was over vaccination. Again, citing cost as well as limited supplies and logistical challenges, world health officials initially did not endorse it. Some worried aloud that Haitians could get a false sense of security and become lax about hygiene.
Also, one of the two oral vaccines available — Shanchol, the cheaper one — was still under review by the World Health Organization.
But proponents argued that vaccines could save lives and buy time until long-range solutions like water and waste systems were put in place. They called for fast-tracking approval for Shanchol and increasing vaccine production by offering manufacturers purchase commitments. In mid-December, after a C.D.C. analysis indicated that using the available vaccine doses could reduce the caseload by 22,000, the Pan American Health Organization agreed a pilot vaccination project would be useful.
Influenced by arguments against vaccination, though, the Haitian government said no. Choosing a small group to be immunized would inflame tensions, it said; at least 500,000 needed to be vaccinated, said Jean Ronald Cadet, Haiti's vaccination chief. "They brought us cholera, they have to take responsibility for taking care of it," he said.
Delay and Disbelief
In February 2011, nearly four months after the outbreak, the United Nations' independent experts arrived in Haiti.
The secretary general's office wanted them to move quickly but not too quickly; it did not want the findings released until the Nepalese contingent had concluded its six-month rotation, Ms. Lantagne said.
When the experts revealed their findings in May, the secretary general's staff members were surprised, Ms. Lantagne said. Early theories had proposed environmental and climatological explanations for the outbreak. "I believe they fully expected our results to be that there was no possibility cholera was imported into Haiti," she said.
Instead, the panel said not only that the cholera had come from South Asia but that it originated in the tributary behind the Nepalese base.
Yet the United Nations experts noted that "the introduction of this cholera strain as a result of environmental contamination with feces could not have been the source of such an outbreak without simultaneous water and sanitation and health care system deficiencies."
And they diplomatically concluded that the epidemic was "not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual."
The panel had examined the Nepalese base's infirmary logs and found no reports of severe diarrhea in September or October of 2010. Many took that to mean that the soldiers were probably unwitting, asymptomatic carriers of cholera. But Dr. Piarroux did not think that asymptomatic carriers would have shed enough bacteria to have caused such a sudden, marked contamination of the river. He believed that many soldiers must have had diarrhea — even if it was only mild or moderate diarrhea that, being military men, they did not report to the infirmary.
Testing the soldiers would have been the only way to learn the truth, Dr. Piarroux said. But Haitian health officials were not permitted onto the base to examine the soldiers.
After the United Nations panel dispersed, Danish and American scientists collaborated to scrutinize the Haiti-Nepal connection using the most comprehensive type of bacterial genetic analysis — whole-genome sequence typing.
Dr. Rene S. Hendriksen of Denmark persuaded the Nepalese to provide samples from their outbreak. Dr. Keim's Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona sequenced the DNA, comparing it with Haitian samples already sequenced by the C.D.C.
The Haitian and Nepalese strains were virtually identical — a conclusion the Nepalese were reluctant to accept. "They were trying to fish around for whether our analysis was properly conducted," Dr. Hendriksen said. "But finally they gave up simply because our data was valid. We agreed we would balance the paper and not get into the blame game."
Citing this study and other evidence, a legal claim was submitted to the United Nations in November on behalf of Haiti's cholera victims.
Anticipating compensation, thousands flooded treatment centers seeking medical certificates attesting to their cholera. Doctors Without Borders set up a special unit to process the requests, and has asked the United Nations to clarify whether a legal proceeding is even moving forward.
The victims' lawyers have asked the United Nations to establish a commission to hear the claim. Mr. Banbury of the United Nations said the claim is "under serious review by the legal affairs department."
"The U.N.'s choice is simple," the lawyers wrote in a legal article. "It can rise to the occasion and demonstrate that the rule of law protects the rights of poor Haitians against one of the world's most powerful institutions, or it can shrink from the challenge and demonstrate that once again in Haiti, 'might makes right.' "
A Breather, and Then Disaster
It is tempting now, when reported cholera cases are at a low, for Haitians to relax their guard and for health officials to take a breather.
"We are no longer 24/7 cholera," Dr. Pierre-Louis said. The same thing happened last year. Then the rains hit, and Port-au-Prince, like other places, experienced more cases — 24,000 — during a 42-day period than at the epidemic's start. It was a scramble to deal with the surge; many grants had expired, emergency workers had gone home, and treatment centers were closed.
"We had supplies and structures prepositioned, but it wasn't simple," said Mr. Drossart of Doctors Without Borders. "We couldn't keep mobilizing staff for Haiti. There are other things going on in the world."
Dr. Vertefeuille of the C.D.C. said a key focus now was making the response sustainable without a large international presence. But the government health system, weak and underfinanced, will be hard-pressed to assume greater responsibility.
Dr. Vertefeuille also said cholera was likely to persist in Haiti absent the development of water and sanitation systems, the cost of which has been estimated at $800 million to $1.1 billion.
A singular achievement was the opening of Haiti's first wastewater treatment site last fall. But humanitarian groups fret that short-term water and sanitation solutions are not being pursued aggressively, and that tent camps have lost the free water and, in some cases, the latrine services that gave them a buffer against cholera.
Many also express keen frustration that the dry season is not being used for aggressive case tracking — chasing the disease into pockets where it flares, investigating and chlorinating the water source, and mobilizing the community.
"You can't wait with your arms crossed until the rain falls again," Dr. Piarroux said. "You have to go after these areas like firemen trying to extinguish every last burning ember of a forest fire."
Those who now find the official response sluggish — "daily" epidemic surveillance is posted after a delay of weeks — point to what happened recently in Pestel in southwest Haiti.
On Dec. 10, a severely dehydrated man showed up at the cholera treatment unit. The man was too far gone to be resuscitated, said Dr. Seneque Philippe, the physician in charge.
Dr. Philippe's cholera unit had been inactive because the government had not paid the staff's salaries. He was not ready for another outbreak.
Within two weeks, however, Dr. Philippe believed that he was in the midst of one. People were dying during the long journey down from the rugged mountains to his coastal hospital.
He said that he alerted Health Ministry officials on Dec. 24, and that they were unresponsive. So he contacted an American missionary who had been working in Pestel for decades. She, in turn, tapped into an Internet network of health professionals involved in Haiti and gathered volunteers, supplies and money to pay Dr. Philippe's nurses.
They arrived Jan. 10 to find the cholera treatment unit overflowing. Most patients were coming from the mountains, so the volunteers, bolstered by other recruits, set up remote treatment tents. They also conducted a door-to-door census in the villages. Including treatment records, too, they calculated 278 suspected cholera cases and 62 deaths in December and January, with most deaths occurring before the ad-hoc group of foreigners arrived.
In Port-au-Prince, Dr. Pierre-Louis of the Health Ministry maintained that the reported outbreak in Pestel had been a "false alarm," with only 65 cases and three deaths. She said that "the local doctor" had rebutted the larger numbers.
But Dr. Philippe, the local doctor, while saying he is "personally aware of only about 15 deaths," said he knew of 300 cases — a significant outbreak.
"I felt abandoned to handle the problem myself," he said.
Farther north, one effort to use the dry season to establish a bulwark against the disease was running into other problems.
Late last fall, the new government of President Michel Martelly had authorized a vaccination campaign. It was to start small, immunizing 50,000 residents of a Port-au-Prince slum and 50,000 rural residents in the St. Marc area.
The organizers, wishing they could have begun a year earlier and more broadly, were nonetheless relieved to have secured the new administration's cooperation; it helped that Shanchol, the cheaper vaccine at $1.85 a dose, had been approved.
The organizers — Partners in Health and the Haitian group Gheskio — were also pleased to be starting well before the rains; the vaccine, considered nearly 70 percent effective, is administered in two doses two weeks apart and takes another week to take effect.
In February, Djencia Augustin, 25, a petite, vivacious law student, was racing from mud hut to mud hut in the rice fields of Bocozel to register residents. She wore a T-shirt with a wordy slogan — "We are fighting cholera with Shanchol vaccine without forgetting the other principals of hygiene" — and, in the shade of breadfruit trees, gathered barefoot villagers in threadbare clothing around her as she recorded their information on a computer tablet.
"Some people think cholera is not in our country anymore," Ms. Augustin told them. "That's not true. Cholera will come to visit when the rains arrive, so you need to be prepared."
Bocozel seemed eager. Chavan Dorcelus, 58, said: "It's a real bonus for us. Plus it's free, and it can't hurt."
Told that pregnant women were ineligible, Fada Joseph, 24, patted her belly. "That's not really fair. I'm very scared of cholera," she said. "And if I got an abortion, would that help?"
But in mid-March, radio reports characterized the project as an experiment on Haitian guinea pigs. With $370,000 of vaccine sitting in coolers, a government bioethics committee took up the issue. The campaign appeared in peril. Dr. Farmer said last Thursday, however, that the Haitian health minister had just promised him that she would resolve the issue in the coming week.
'Would Have Burned It Down'
In Meille, the walled gate at the United Nations base is freshly painted now with the insignia of Uruguayan peacekeepers. The Nepalese are gone.
The mission itself is reducing its forces nationwide. Nepal's troop strength is being cut by two-thirds, more than any other country's. United Nations officials said that this was unrelated to tensions over cholera.
But people here think otherwise: "If they hadn't left, we would have burned it down," Deputy Mayor Moise said of the base.
In February, an Uruguayan advance guard was there, removing latrines and generally "sanitizing the operation so previous problems do not repeat themselves," as one soldier said.
Across the street, the open pits where the base's waste used to be deposited were fenced. "They stopped dumping the foreigners' poo there after the cholera," said Ludner Jean-Louis, a farmer, his two cows tied to trees.
Mr. Jean-Louis, who had survived the disease himself, added, "I don't guess you can be mad at Minustah for the cholera. Only for the poo."
Behind the base, the stream where the epidemic began bustles with life now as it did before the outbreak; many who live and work beside it have no other access to free water.
Recently, just behind the base's barbed-wire periphery, Dieula Sénéchal squatted with her skirt hiked up, scrubbing exuberantly colored clothes while a naked 6-year-old girl, Magalie Louis, defecated by the bank, gnawed on a stalk of sugarcane and then splashed into the water to brush her teeth.
Approaching with a machete on his way to hack some cane, her gap-toothed father, Légénord Louis, said Magalie had contracted cholera late last year but after four days of "special IVs" was restored to health. He knew the river water was probably not safe, he said, but, while they brushed their teeth in it, they did not swallow.
For drinking water, Mr. Louis said, his family relies on a local well. But he lives from hand to mouth and cannot afford water purification tablets; the free supply he got in 2010 ran out long ago. So he gambles.
"If you make it to the hospital," he said, "you survive the cholera."
André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8298-in-haiti-global-failures-on-a-cholera-epi...
Abdulhadi Alkhawaja From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Abdulhadi Alkhawaja | |
|---|---|
 Abdulhadi Alkhawaja taking part in a pro-democracy protest in February 2011 | |
| Born | Abdulhadi Abdulla Hubail Alkhawaja 1 January 1962 (age 50) Bahrain |
| Residence | Kingdom of Bahrain |
| Ethnicity | Bahrani |
| Occupation | Human rights defender |
| Years active | 1979–present |
| Religion | Islam (Shia) |
| Children | Maryam and Zainab |
| Website | |
| http://www.bahrainrights.org/ | |
Abdulhadi Abdulla Hubail Alkhawaja (Arabic: عبد الهادي عبد الله حبيل الخواجة) is one of the most prominent Bahraini-Dane human rights activists. He is former president[1] and co-founder[2] of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), a nonprofit non-governmental organisation which works to promote human rights in Bahrain.[3] He has held a number of positions and played various roles in regional and international human rights organizations.
Until February 2011 Abdulhadi Alkhawaja was the Middle East and North Africa Protection Coordinator with Front Line Defenders – the International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.[4][5][6] He is also a member of the International Advisory Network in the Business and Human Rights Resource Center chaired by Mary Robinson,[2][7] former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.[8]
Alkhawaja is a member of the Advisory Board of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies[8][9] and also an expert adviser for and member of the coordinating committee of The Arab Group for Monitoring Media Performance monitoring the media in Bahrain and six other Arab countries.[8][10] Alkhawaja was part of Amnesty international’s fact finding mission in Iraq.[8] He has been a researcher and project consultant for Amnesty international and other international organizations.[8] His human rights campaigning activities have been acknowledged by the International Conference of Human Rights Defenders in Dublin and he was named by the Arab Program for Human Rights Defenders as its Regional Activist of 2005.[8]
In 2011 Abdulhadi Alkhawaja was arrested and tried as part of a campaign of repression by the Bahraini authorities following pro-democracy protests in the Bahraini uprising. Fears for his life were expressed following allegations of torture and sexual assault in detention.[11] Alkhawaja was eventually sentenced on 22 June 2011, along with eight other activists, to life imprisonment.[12] On 8 February 2012, he started an open-ended hunger strike until "freedom or death" protesting continuing detentions in Bahrain. As of 3 April 2012, Alkhawaja had been on hunger strike for 54 days.
Contents[hide] |
[edit]Early life
After finishing high school in Bahrain in 1977, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja traveled to the UK to continue his further education. In 1979, he took part in student activities in London in reaction to demonstrations and arrests in Bahrain. Many students abroad, including Alkhawaja, were denied renewal of their passports and asked to return home. In the summer of 1980, after fellow students had been detained and interrogated under torture for their activities in London and his family’s house had been ransacked and searched, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, fearing detention if he went back to Bahrain, decided to remain abroad.[8]
[edit]Civil and human rights activism in exile
In 1981 the Bahrain authorities staged a crackdown on government opponents, claiming to have uncovered a coup attempt by the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. Hundreds of civilians, mostly students, including minors, were detained and tortured. Seventy-three (73) detainees were tried by the notorious State Security Court (now abolished) on charges of membership of an illegal organization and attempting to use violence and given sentences of 7–25 years imprisonment.[8]
Until 1989, Alkhawaja was a member of the Islamic Front and consequently an active member of the Committee to Defend Political Prisoners in Bahrain (CDPPB). During the 1980s and 1990s the Islamic Front was one of four main opposition groups operating in exile. (After 2002, the group operated in Bahrain as a registered political group under a new name, The Islamic Action Society (AMAL). Some members of the Islamic Front have been appointed to high ranking positions in Bahrain.) CDPPB was active in Damascus, London, Paris, and Geneva, working mainly on cases of arbitrary detention, torture, unfair trial, deprivation of nationality and coercive deportation, including the case of the 73 political prisoners.[8]
In 1991, Alkhawaja was granted political asylum in Denmark. Following his resignation from the CDPPB and the Islamic Front in 1992, he and other Bahrainis living in exile in the Scandinavian countries and the UK founded the Bahrain Human Rights Organization (BHRO), based in Denmark.[8]
During the period 1992–2001 BHRO gained respect for persistent, professional, and non-partisan activities at international level which contributed to the political changes that took place in Bahrain when the new ruler came to power in 1999. Alkhawaja became head of the BHRO,[13] prior to returning to Bahrain in 2001 following a general amnesty.[8]
[edit]Civil and human rights activism in Bahrain
[edit]Return to Bahrain
After 12 years in exile, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja returned to Bahrain in 1999 following wide ranging political reforms by the Bahraini government that allowed independent human rights groups to operate in Bahrain. Alkhawaja became one of the main founders and director of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), which was officially registered in June 2002.
Alkhawaja was also one of the founders of the Bahrain Unemployment Committee, described as sharing a "similar confrontational strategy" with the Center.[13] Many of the Committee's members are involved in the Centre or the Haq Movement, including Abdul Wahhab Hussain.[14]
Since his return Alkhawaja has been subjected to detention, unfair trial, and physical assaults as a result of his human rights activities. Well-documented physical assaults against him in March 2002 and June/July/September 2005 were not investigated despite pledges by UN bodies and international NGO’s.[8]
[edit]First arrest
On 25 September 2004 the BCHR was closed down and Alkhawaja was arrested[8] a day after publicly criticizing the Prime Minister and the Bahraini regime for corruption and human rights abuses,[15][16] using language which "the authorities easily construed as incitement of hatred".[13] Throughout the two months that he spent in prison while on trial, his supporters held widespread protests, both inside Bahrain and abroad. On the morning of 21 November, the court sentenced Alkhawaja to one year in prison, but later in the day it was announced that he had been given a Royal Pardon by the King and was released. The BCHR is still banned by the government, but has remained very active.[17]
[edit]Unemployment protest crackdown
On 15 July 2005, police sought to prevent a peaceful demonstration by the Committee for the Unemployed against the government's management of the unemployment situation and the state budget for 2005–2006. The authorities had reportedly been informed about the demonstration a week earlier. While protesters were still assembling, the security forces charged and violently dispersed the demonstration. A total of 32 people said to have required hospital treatment, including Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, Nabeel Rajab and labor rights activist Abbas al-`Umran.[18][19][20]
[edit]Second arrest
On 2 February 2007, Alkhawaja was arrested again by the Bahraini authorities along with the Secretary General of the Bahraini Haq Movement pro-democracy organisation Hassan Mushaima and a third activist, Shaker Abdul-Hussein.[21] Alkhawaja was charged with offences including "promoting change to the political system through illegitimate means"[22] and "an intention to change the governing system of the country, circulating false information, insulting the king and inciting hatred against the regime".[23] The arrests were followed by public disturbances. Several hundred supporters who tried to hold a march in Jidhafs, on the outskirts of Manama, to demand the activists' release clashed with authorities.[24] the Haq Movement spokesman Abdul-Jalil Al-Singace reported that Special Forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the demonstrators, who originated from several villages west of the capital. The demonstrators dispersed but later regrouped.[24]
Police blocked roads around the area. Black smoke could be seen rising from the area. Witnesses said the demonstrators set tires and garbage containers on fire.[24]
The Al-Wefaq Society, the largest grouping in the Bahraini Parliament with 17 out of 40 seats, called for an immediate session of the National Assembly, claiming that the arrests threatened the credibility of the reform process. Al-Wefaq chief Sheikh Ali Salman criticized the arrests in his Friday sermon and attacked the authorities for their use of indiscriminate force.[24] After being held and interrogated for 7 hours Alkhawaja, Hassan Mushaima and Shaker Abdul-Hussein were released on bail.[23][25] Mushaima and Alkhawaja said that they believed that their release on bail was a result of the protests and of the strong reaction from opposition groups including the Al-Wefaq society, the country's largest Shia opposition group.[22] During a joint press conference with Alkhawaja, Mushaima said that Al-Wefaq's response had surprised the authorities and affirmed opposition solidarity.[22]
 External videos | |
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 | Abdulhadi Alkhawaja speech (Arabic) in Manama on January 2009 on YouTube |
[edit]Ashura speech
On 6 January 2009, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja was invited to make a speech during Ashura, the annual gathering commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the third historic Imam of Shia. During his speech, Alkhawaja referred openly to significant human rights violations in Bahrain including sectarian discrimination, corruption, plunder of public funds and land, arbitrary arrests, regular use of torture, unjust trials, denial of the rights of assembly and expression and the prosecution of human rights defenders and called for peaceful resistance to abuses by the ruling regime and civil disobedience.[6][26]
On 21 January, the office of the Attorney General ordered Alkhawaja's prosecution against under articles 29(2), 160, 165, and 168(1) of the Penal Code. He was charged with 'propaganda to overthrow or change the political system by force', 'publicly instigating hatred and disrespect against the ruling regime', and 'willfully broadcasting false and malicious news, statements or rumours and spread provocative propaganda related to the internal affairs of the country that could disturb public security and cause damage to the public interest'.[6] On 9 February, he was not allowed to leave Bahrain for a visit to Iraq on behalf of Front Line.[6][27]
[edit]Threats and harassment
Abdulhadi Alkhawaja has been the subject of ongoing harassment including physical attacks and smear campaigns in the media.
On 19 September 2007, Alkhawaja was the principal target of a defamation campaign by the Bahraini Authorities aimed at discrediting the BCHR. He was accused of being connected with acts of violence in Bahrain during the 1980s and 1990s, of sympathizing with Iran and of coordinating with neo-conservatives in the United States. (The Bahraini authorities have a history of defaming activists who report on or publicly criticize high ranking officials and official policies, particularly when western media and international human rights organizations are involved. Allegations are published in the national public media to which activists are refused access to defend themselves.)[28]
On 9 February 2010, Alkhawaja was removed from a Turkish Airlines flight at Bahrain International Airport as he was about to leave for Istanbul to attend a human rights conference. Following a subsequent alleged altercation with an airport official he was arrested and charged with “insulting” the official. Front Line believes that Alkhawaja has been targeted solely as a result of his legitimate work in the defence of human rights.[29]
Since 10 March 2011, messages have been circulated via SMS and social networking sites calling for Alkhawaja, Mohammed Al-Maskati and Naji Fateel to be killed because of their involvement in explicitly peaceful protests calling for democratic and human rights reforms in Bahrain.[4][30]
[edit]Involvement in the 2011 Bahraini uprising
,_Ali_Abdulemam_(middle)_and_Abdulhadi_Alkhawaja_(right)_in_a_pro-democracy_march_on_23_February.jpg)
In the early days of the Arab Spring Revolutions of 2011, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja led peaceful pro-democracy protests across the country and organised peaceful awareness-raising and human rights education activities for protesters.[31]
In the period following attacks by Bahraini troops on protesters on 14 February, the Bahraini authorities allowed the protesters to continue a "festival-like" event at the Pearl Roundabout where a variety of groups came and shared their views. The Crown Prince promised a dialogue. Following a visit to Bahrain by Robert Gates, Defense Secretary of the United States, to discuss the situation.[32]
| External videos | |
|---|---|
| Abdulhadi Alkhawaja speech (Arabic) in Pearl roundabout on 27 February onYouTube |
After protesters entered the Financial Harbour, an area filled with financial exchanges and banks on 13 March, the government began a violent crackdown in retaliation. A few days later Hasan Mushaima and six other opposition activists were arrested.[33]
[edit]Arrest
On 9 April Alkhawaja was arrested. His daughter reported how up to 20 armed and masked policemen broke into their apartment in the middle of the night and attacked her father. They dragged him downstairs by the neck, leaving a trail of blood from injuries inflicted by five officers who refused to stop beating him despite his claims that he was unable to breathe. He was taken away unconscious.[31] Alkhawaja's two sons-in-law were detained as well. Mohammed Al-Maskati, President of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights (BYHRS), who had been monitoring human rights violations during the protests and was present in the house, was severely beaten during the raid but not arrested.[31][34][35] Alkhawaja's daughter, Zainab Alkhawaja, was assaulted when she attempted to intervene. The women present in the house were locked in a room and prevented from leaving. The family were not told where Alkhawaja had been taken or what he was accused of.[36][37]
[edit]Torture
Sadly, all security apparatus in the Arab world have one thing in common - namely persecuting the thinkers and virtuous people based on their activism and work defending the rights of others. Among those is Abdulhadi, due to his defence of human rights activists.
Abdulhadi Alkhawaja has been held in detention in Bahrain since 9 April and has reportedly been subjected to physical and sexual torture. He required a 4 hour operation in a military hospital following injuries to his head.[11][31][39] Nabeel Rajab, current president of Bahrain Centre for Human Rights reported that Alkhawaja’s jawbones had been smashed and he had four fractures in his face; he was due to undergo a mandibular bone graft (using bone from his skull).[1]
At a hearing on 16 May the Judges refused to listen to his complaints of an attempted rape and again refused to order an investigation into torture.[40] According to representatives of Alkhawaja's family who were able to speak with him briefly he was only able to resist the attempt by four men to rape him by banging his already damaged head against a concrete floor.[11] He's referred to as "Case No. 8." in the BICI report.[41]
[edit]Trial and imprisonment
On 20 April 2011, Abdulhadi Al Khawaja was allowed to make a one-minute phone call to his wife. He informed her that he was supposed to appear before the Military Court at 8.00 am on 21 April. Before this call, Alkhawaja’s daughter had received a call from the military asking her to bring clothes for him. When his lawyers presented themselves before the Military Court, they were advised that the hearing was not going to take place that day. They were given no further information and were not allowed access to their client.[31][42]
Eventually on 8 May, Alkhawaja was put on trial by a military court with 20 other Bahrainis on charges of "organizing and managing a terrorist organisation”, “attempt to overthrow the Government by force and in liaison with a terrorist organisation working for a foreign country” and the “collection of money for a terrorist group”.[31][37] The group, which included other noted Bahraini human rights campaigners including Hasan Mushaima and Abduljalil al-Singace, clerics and members of political opposition groups, were tried under emergency legislation introduced following the protest demonstrations in February and March. With the exception of one Sunni, Ibrahim Sharif, all were members of Bahrain's majority Shiacommunity.
On 19 June, Abdulhadi wrote a letter (in Arabic) from prison about his health situation.[43] (read translated letter)
On 22 June 2011, Alkhawaja and eight others were sentenced to life imprisonment.[12][31][44][45] Zainab Alkhawaja, who attended the trial, "tweeted" that after the sentence was read, her father raised his fist and shouted “We shall continue on the path of peaceful resistance!”, before being bustled out of the court room.[31][46][47] Alkhawaja's appeal is due to be heard on 11 September, when it will take place before an ordinary criminal court, rather than a military court.[48]
[edit]Hunger strike
For the first time in Bahrain, Alkhawaja started an open-ended hunger strike starting on 8 February 2012 until "freedom or death" protesting continuing detentions. As of 15 March, he had lost more than 14kg, had problems talking and "could not stand up, even to perform his prayers," his daughter Maryam said. He was taken to hospital several times where doctors failed to administer him an IV line due to his veins' weak conditions, his family said. According to his wife, Alkhawja spends most of his time laying down, needs hot water to keep his body's normal temperature and gets exhausted after 10-15 minutes of exposure to Sun light. As his health conditions kept declining, Alkhawaja refused medical examinations and threatened to stop drinking water. His deteriorating condition was confirmed by Danish diplomats who have made several visits to the prison he's held in. "Abdulhadi thinks there is no legal reason to keep him in jail," His lawyer, al-Jishi said who also filed a last chance appeal. "He won't stop until they release him, or he will die inside," he added.[49][41][38]
The government didn't allow independent activist examine Alkhawaja and has remained silent about his case. They claimed his condition was stable and medical care is being provided. They also said Alkhawaja wasn't on a real hunger strike, because he was taking glucose and "other liquids".[49]
[edit]International Response
The trials and sentences have been criticised by governments and human rights organisations as unfair and politically-motivated.[40][44][50][51] The spokesperson for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said that there were serious concerns that the due process rights of the defendants, many of them well-known human rights defenders, had not been respected and the trials appeared to bear the marks of political persecution. The Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR) called for an immediate cessation of trials of civilians in the Court of National Safety and the immediate release of all peaceful demonstrators arrested in the context of the February protest movement. The OHCHR had received "worrying" reports about the way up to 1,000 people reportedly remaining in detention were being treated and called on the Government to conduct an urgent independent investigation into allegations that four individuals had died in detention due to injuries resulting from severe torture.[52]
The UK Foreign Office, noting that Ibrahim Sharif was a prominent moderate opposition politician who had been a constructive participant in Bahraini politics, expressed concern at the trial of civilians under martial law by tribunals chaired by a military judge, as well as reports of abuse in detention, lack of access to legal counsel and coerced confessions.[12]
Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa programme director, Malcolm Smart, described the trials as patently unfair, emphasising inadequate investigation of claims of torture and the use of false confessions as evidence.[12] Summing up the situation situation he said that
| “ | These trials and convictions represent yet further evidence of the extent to which the rights to freedom of speech and assembly are now being denied in Bahrain. These 15 activists appear to have been sentenced to jail terms for doing no more than exercizing their legitimate right to demonstrate against the government. If this is correct and they have been convicted solely because of their peaceful anti-government activities, they are prisoners of conscience who should be released immediately and unconditionally. The manner in which these trials were conducted – with civilian defendants brought before a secretive military court from which international observers have been barred is highly alarming. It is indicative of the diminishing space for human rights in Bahrain right now.[51] | ” |
On 30 March 2012, the organization officially designated Alkhawaja a prisoner of conscience and demanded his immediate release.[53]
Amid his hunger strike, the Danish foreign minister met with Bahrain's foreign minister in March 2012 and called for Alkhawaja's immediate release.[49] Front Line Defenders launched a campaign demanding his immediate release.[54] Sahrawi organisations including human rights defender Aminatou Haidar expressed their solidarity and support.[38] More than fifty human rights organization appealed to King of Bahrain to release Alkhawaja.[55]
[edit]See also
- Bahrain Centre for Human Rights
- 2011 Bahraini uprising
- 1990s Uprising in Bahrain
- Torture in Bahrain
- Islamic Action Society
- Nabeel Rajab
- Bobby Sands, of the 1981 Irish hunger strike
- Hana Shalabi
- Khader Adnan
- Maikel Nabil Sanad
[edit]References
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