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Regime allows no room for reform in Bahrain: Activist

Saturday, 24 September 2016 11:31 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 24 September 2016 11:31 AM ]

Bahraini men hold placards bearing the portrait of Sheikh Ali Salman, the head of the al-Wefaq movement, during a protest in the village of Zinj, May 29, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

Press TV has conducted an interview with Hazem Salem, a political activist, and Michael Lane, the founder of the American Institute for Foreign Policy, to discuss the Bahraini regime’s crackdown on dissent.

Speaking in the interview on Friday, Salem said, “Suppressing the masses of people means there is no room for reform” in Bahrain.

“The fact is that if a government is banning the civil society, this means it is shutting down everything about politics and about even social cohesion and social stability,” he said. “The government is abusing its power in this way and closing the most prominent representation of the civil society.”

He said the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society — recently dissolved by the Manama regime — had been working within the framework of the civil society but the regime decided that there should be only “absolute suppression and the absolute exercise of power.”

A Bahraini appeals court upheld an earlier decision to dissolve al-Wefaq, the main Shia opposition group in the Persian Gulf country, on Thursday.

In June, a lower Bahraini court had ordered the closure of al-Wefaq’s offices.

“It is astonishing that the United States, which is supposed to be the capital of liberalism in the world, is supporting this repressive regime,” Salem said.

Leading human rights group Amnesty International has strongly denounced the recent court decision to uphold the ban on al-Wefaq.

Lane, for his part, said, “It is now incumbent on the regime to demonstrate very quickly some of the reforms that they’ve promised are going to come.”

Bahrain, a close ally of the US in the Persian Gulf region, has seen a wave of anti-regime protests since mid-February 2011. Scores of people have been killed and hundreds of others wounded or detained amid Manama’s ongoing crackdown on dissent and widespread discrimination against the Shia majority.

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