The Bahraini regime has announced today that it intends to charge as many as 50 medical workers, including dozens of doctors, with “promoting efforts to bring down the government” and general charges of being involved in an “anti-state conspiracy.”
The Justice Ministry confirmed the charges included efforts to “create sedition within the kingdom” by providing medical treatment to protesters wounded in the regime’s crackdown. The doctors will be charged in the same secretive military court which sentenced four protesters to death last week.
Some of the doctors also face charges for reporting on the killings in the international media, and sending medicine out to wounded protesters who were unable to reach the hospital. The Bahraini state media insisted that the doctors “violated all humanitarian, religious, ethnical and genuine citizenship values and norms” in treating dissidents.
Bahrain has come under considerable international criticism for its crackdowns against hospitals in the lead up to the declaration of martial law. Most of Manama’s major hospitals were blocked off from accepting the public early on in the protests, while a number of smaller, Shi’ite neighborhood clinics have also been raided since.
I suppose the glitterati are getting their treatments abroad. Could be the next kidney transplant for the gentlemen may be of somewhat lower quality than usual.
So where are the "humanitarian" air strikes to stop all this?
Attacking health care workers has been routine among the Israelis who famously bombed ambulances and hospitals. The US in Iraq mounted a systematic campaign to destroy Iraq's medical infrastructure and many Iraqi physicians were murdered by US backed thugs in order to cleanse the country of its educated talent. The brutality of attacking physicians and nurses shows the real face of empire and its local studges – brutality against the educated, caring, principled cream of Bahraini society for treating the wounded shows just how the US and its puppets view us – no matter how brilliant, how cultured, how talented, how dedicated, how principled – we are dust to the Titans. Bless these physicians for following their hearts and responsibility to the wounded!
How low can the Champions of Human Rights sink as they watch these antics of "their loyal allies"in Bahrain and DO NOTHING?
Yet they were so quick to bomb Libya.
Shame on you America, France, Britain and the rest of the lapdogs in NATO!!!!!
Gadhafi is a saint compared to the rulers of Bahrain, and for that matter all of our dear friends in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and other emirates. These are absolute monarchs allowing no form of expression, and ruling brutally with secret police. In Bahrain, OPEN genocide is under way, and all is quiet from the HUMANITARIAN WEST. What a debacle! Here a ruler rules with an iron fist over the majority that happens to be of a different religion than the ruling class. Even though the rulers are less then 20% of population, they alone can be employed in military, government, police. Now, not even doctors and nurses are safe. I remember a protestor in Bahrain on Al-Jazeera saying that anyone whose face can be recognized on TV will face death.
Bless the doctors and nurses. They are the faces of humanity in increasingly ugly, selfish, self-serving and inhuman world.