By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

At least, the oppressed people of Palestine have millions of sympathizers and advocates worldwide for their cause, whether amongst fellow Arabs and Muslims, or amongst non-Arabs and non-Muslims, but there is an equally oppressed nation of Arab Muslims whose worsening human rights situation is totally neglected.
Pick up a newspaper, tune in to radio broadcasts, switch on the TV for the latest occurrences, keep abreast of events through the Internet, and drop into a popular café or a hookah joint anywhere in the Muslim world, the most burning issue is the plight of the Palestinians, including how badly they have been backstabbed by the rich Persian Gulf sheikhdoms whose pastime these days is dancing with Israel.
We should highlight the atrocities of the illegal Zionist entity, its imprisonment of even underage children, its mistreatment of inmates including those on hunger strike, its brutal attacks on peaceful protestors, its eviction of whole families from their homes, and its wanton killing of Palestinians, but we should not ignore a similar situation prevailing in Bahrain, where the regime brutalizes the people.
For the past ten years since the savage suppression of their peaceful protests by the Aal-e Khalifa minority regime, the people of Bahrain have not known any respite from oppression, while the world and even fellow Muslims look the other way.
Why this step-motherly treatment of the natives of this Persian Gulf island state, many of whom are regularly deprived of citizenship after imprisonment and torture and then expelled?
What has happed to human rights and where is Islamic conscience?
None of those officials of Muslim countries who at least pay lip service (but without any action) to the cause of the oppressed Palestinians, turn a blind eye to the sufferings of the Bahraini people.
This indifference towards an entire nation has emboldened the Aal-e Khalifa regime to intensify its atrocities against the Bahrainis while shamelessly dallying with the Zionist oppressors of the Palestinian people.
Palestinian prisoner Miqdad al-Qawasmi has become a household name and his pictures are all over the place for his 100-day plus hunger strike in an Israeli prison, but how many people know the more or less similar condition of Abdul-Hadi al-Khwaja, who is on hunger strike in Bahrain and subjected to unabated torture by his jailors?
News comes from London where his daughter Zainab lives in forced exile that the 60-year old prominent human rights defender and the former president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, who is languishing in a dungeon in Manama for the past ten years, has been banned from receiving calls from family members, two years after all visits to him were cut off.
Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, has called for the release of al-Khwaja, but her calls have been unheeded in the tiny stateless that hosts the US 5th Fleet and holds the car racing grand prix with much fanfare to deflect attention from its crimes against humanity.
Al-Khwaja has been serving a life sentence in prison for peacefully defending the rights of others, and as Lawlor has confirmed: “He’s been given an unfair trial and details of his torture have been corroborated by an independent commission of inquiry.”
His is not the lone case, and according to reports thousands of Bahraini citizens, including women and teenagers, are being tortured in the prisons, where at least 51 people have been sentenced to death without trial for demanding democracy in their homeland.
The few observers who monitor the worsening human rights situation in Bahrain point out that mass trials have become commonplace, with a record 167 people sentenced in a single day in February 2019, while hundreds of activists have seen their citizenship stripped by the kingdom, with an estimated 300 currently denaturalised.
It is time to wake up from slumber and rally to the support of the oppressed Bahraini nation whose prominent political and religious leaders are either in prison (e.g. Hassan Mushaima, Abdul-Jalil Singace, Sheikh Ali Salman, etc.) or expelled to other countries such as the senior most Friday Prayer Leader of Manama, Sheikh Isa Qassim.