RSF asks FIFA states to act against Bahraini Sheikh Salman

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) to act against Bahraini Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifah’s attempt to become the president of the world football’s governing body.

“Sheikh Salman is completely inacceptable as the top representative of world soccer,” RSF Germany’s executive director Christian Mihr said on Friday.

He added that “as a member of Bahrain’s royal Family, Salman represents a regime that has been mercilessly repressing journalists and critical bloggers for years,” stressing, “Salman’s candidacy is an obvious attempt by Bahrain to exploit world-class sports for cultivating its international image while at the same time persecuting critics in its own country.”

Meanwhile, dozens of people, holding a banner depicting victims of Bahrain's anti-regime protests, have staged a demonstration in the Swiss city of Zurich to protest against Sheikh Salman’s candidacy as FIFA Congress is convening an extraordinary session to elect a new president for the world's governing body of football.

Maryam al-Khwaja, 28-year-old vice president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and a long-term critic of the al-Khalifah regime, said it would be a disaster if Sheikh Salman got elected as new FIFA head.

“If Sheikh Salman was to win the presidency election today at FIFA it would say that FIFA has gone from being an institution that has been run with corruption, into an institution that doesn't mind the targeting of athletes and the fact their own president is someone who has dirty hands basically,” Khwaja commented.

Human rights organizations have reacted furiously to Sheikh Salman, current president of the Asian Football Confederation, becoming the new favorite to succeed Sepp Blatter as FIFA president, arguing that he was involved in identifying athletes that took part in the anti-regime demonstrations in the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom 2011, and then imprisoning and torturing them.

“Since the peaceful anti-government protests of 2011, which the authorities responded to with brutal and lethal force, the al-Khalifah family have overseen a campaign of torture and mass incarceration that has decimated Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement,” said Nicholas McGeehan, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“If a member of Bahrain’s royal family is the cleanest pair of hands that FIFA can find, then the organization would appear to have the shallowest and least ethical pool of talent in world sport,” he pointed out.

Since February 14, 2011, thousands of anti-regime protesters have held numerous demonstrations on an almost daily basis in the kingdom, calling for the Al Khalifah family to relinquish power.

In March that year, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates invaded the country to assist the Bahraini government in its crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protesters.

Scores of people have been killed and hundreds of others injured or arrested in the ongoing heavy-handed crackdown on anti-regime rallies.

Amnesty International and other rights groups have repeatedly censured the Bahraini regime over the “rampant” human rights abuses against opposition activists and anti-government protesters.

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