John Timoney is
the controversial former Miami police chief well known for orchestrating brutal
crackdowns on protests in Miami and Philadelphia -- instances with rampant
police abuse, violence, and blatant disregard for freedom of expression. It
should be of great concern that the Kingdom of Bahrain has brought Timoney and
John Yates, former assistant commissioner of Britain's Metropolitan Police, to
“reform” Bahrain’s security forces.
Since assuming
his new position, Timoney has claimed that Bahrain has been reforming its brutal
police tactics in response to recommendations issued by the Bahrain Independent
Commission of Inquiry. He says there is less tear gas being used and that while
tear gas might be “distasteful,” it’s not really harmful.
I have no idea
what country Chief Timoney is talking about, because it’s certainly not the
Bahrain I saw this past week, a week that marked the one-year anniversary of the
February 14, 2011 uprising.
I was in Bahrain
for five days before being deported for joining a peaceful women’s march. During
my stay, I accompanied local human rights activists to the villages where
protests were raging and police cracking down. Every day, I inhaled a potent
dose of tear gas, and came close to being hit in the head with tear gas
canisters. Every evening I saw the fireworks and smelled the noxious fumes as
hundreds of tear gas canisters were lobbed into the village of Bani Jamrah, next
door to where I was staying. The villagers would get on their roofs yelling
“Down, down, Hamad” (referring to the king). In exchange, as a form of
collective punishment, the whole village would be doused in tear gas. I went to
bed coughing, eyes burning, wondering how in the world the Bahrainis could stand
this.
Tear gas is
supposed to be used to disperse violent gatherings that pose a threat to law and
order. It is not supposed to be used on unarmed protesters who are exercising
their freedoms of expression and assembly.
“Shamefully,
Bahrain has the highest tear gas use, per capita, in the world,” said human
rights activist Nabeel Rajab. “And the police don’t just shoot outside to
disperse crowds. They use the tear gas canisters as weapons, shooting them
directly at people. And they shoot the gas right into people’s houses. If Mr.
Timoney thinks the use of tear gas here is ‘moderate,’ he has obviously not
spent many evenings in Bahraini villages.”
Timoney also
told reporters that there is no evidence that tear gas has killed anyone. He
should meet Zahra Ali, the mother of Yassin Jassim Al
Asfoor.
On November 19,
2011, riot police, running around the village of Ma'ameer searching for a few
people chanting anti-government slogans, fired three tear gas canisters directly
into her home.
Everyone in the
family started choking, especially 13-year-old Yassin, who suffered from asthma.
Yassin could barely breathe. Panicking, his parents called an ambulance. “I’m
dying from the tear gas, I’m dying,” Yassin cried on the way to the hospital. He
struggled desperately to survive for the next 29 days before his lungs
collapsed.
Zahra Ali showed
me photos of Yassin donning a party hat, celebrating his 14th birthday in the
hospital a few days before he died. “All the doctors and nurses loved him-Sunni,
Shia, everyone. They even came here for his funeral,” she said
proudly.
I asked Zahra if
she had a message about the tear gas for Police Chief Timoney. “Just ask him if
he has ever lost a child,” she whispered.
Timoney should
also meet the parents of 14-year-old Ali Jawad al-Sheik. He did not die from
inhalation. He was killed on August 31, 2011, when the police fired tear gas at
protesters from roughly 20 feet away. A canister busted open the young boy’s
face. To his parent’s fury, the autopsy said the cause of death was
“unknown.”
The same thing
happened four months later to 15-year-old Sayyed Hashem Saeed. The police later
used tear gas to disperse mourners at Sayyed’s funeral.
Faisal Abdali, a
businessman who lives at the entrance of Sitra, would also love to speak to the
police chief. He is hopping mad and wants some justice and
accountability.
For months now,
as the police enter the village of Sitra, they have been tossing tear gas
directly into his house. Every time he lodged a complaint, the house would be
targeted even worse the next day.
Abdali had taped
up all the windows and sealed the air conditioners to keep the gasses out. On
January 27, 2012 the police shot tear gas inside the garage. When Abdali's wife
opened the garage door, the gases filled the house. Everyone felt sick,
especially Abdali's father-a healthy 58-year-old. He started vomiting, and went
to bed early in the hopes that he would feel better the next day. When Abdali
opened his father’s bedroom door the next morning, he found him lying on the
floor. Five days later, he was dead. The doctor said he died from tear gas, but
he was not allowed to put that on his death certificate.
Faisal Abdali
showed me about 10 of the canisters that had been thrown into his house. Three
of them came from Combined Systems in Jamestown, Pennsylvania and three from
factories in Brazil. The rest had no markings at all. Abdali thought the
unmarked ones were the most toxic.
A Bahraini
doctor told Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) about the different types of gas
she found in the villages. “[There was] a white gas and a yellow one, but I also
saw a third gas of a blue color from a distance. The gas felt like a poison,
like a thousand knives and needles all over your body. What kind of tear gas is
supposed to affect people this way? I have seen tear gas patients who are in a
state of convulsion that never ends, like a prolonged
seizure.”
Other Bahraini
doctors have noted that the symptoms of the tear gas are unusual. When they
asked the Ministry of Health to run tests on the gas canisters, their requests
were denied.
Since the
long-term effects of prolonged and repeated exposure to tear gas have never been
studied, physicians and environmentalists in Bahrain have begun to worry about
the impact repeated exposure to these chemicals may have on the general
population.
On January 26,
2012, Amnesty International called on Bahrain to investigate 13 deaths following
the misuse of tear gas by security forces. At least three of those deaths
occurred after Timoney was hired.
Environmentalist
Moh’d Jawad Fursan told me there are no accurate records of how many people have
died from the tear gas, since doctors are not allowed to report this as the
cause of death. He thinks more than 13 people have died and thousands have been
affected, particularly the young and the elderly. Fursan says the rates of
miscarriages and stillborn babies have increased, and he expects the rates of
cancer will soar, as well as babies born with deformities.
The day before I
was deported from Bahrain, I visited the home of a poor extended family where 44
people lived in an open-air complex. They had one tiny, windowless room that was
covered; they called this the “safe room” for the little children. The day I
visited, a nursing mother of a 2-week-old infant, another baby and a 2-year-old
were in the “safe room,” which reeked of tear gas just like the open space
around it.
“The babies cry,
their eyes are all red and swollen, they get skin rashes, but what can we do?”
the young mother said. “We have no way to protect our children. We have nowhere
to hide.”
Mr. Timoney, I
suggest you take another tour of Bahrain, led not by government minders but by
women from the villages. (Make sure you bring along a gas mask.) I also suggest
you donate the blood money you’re taking from the Bahraini government to a fund
for the tear gas victims.
DT/KA
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