Investigation: Under slogans of tolerance, the Al-Khalifa regime perpetuates religious persecution
The ruling Al-Khalifa regime in Bahrain perpetuates violations and religious persecution behind the slogan of tolerance, which promotes its adoption as part of its efforts to conceal its repressive practices.
Al-Khalifa’s regime promotes an image of its governance as a paradise of religious tolerance, such as allowing the establishment of a temple for Hindus, a church for Christians and a temple for Jews.
But in reality, the Bahraini regime intensified its policies of strangeling religious freedoms. These methods are carried out systematically and strictly and are not subject to considerations of political loyalty.
At the forefront of this is the continuation of sectarian discrimination on the widest scale by the Al-Khalifa regime, as the vast majority of citizens are still marginalized in the fields of politics, economy and culture, and their religious beliefs are still targeted and absent from school curricula.
This coincides with targeting their senior religious figures with persecution, arrest and imprisonment. Prisons still house dozens of persecuted religious scholars subjected to the most horrific methods of insult and abuse.
While the Bahraini Shiites were preparing to celebrate the Ashura season, as they have been doing for hundreds of years, and hung black flags in the streets, the authorities began their historic aggression against the rituals.
So their mercenaries removed many of them in many areas, which prompted the citizens to repeatedly re-install them.
The Al-Khalifa torture apparatus also summoned many preachers and funeral owners to warn them against raising religious slogans.
In addition, the Al-Khalifa regime insisted on depriving Bahrainis of the right to practice their rituals and prevented them from visiting the holy sites in Iraq and Iran.
In recent weeks, the Al-Khalifa regime confronted the citizens again because of a religious anthem, so they issued orders to summon many people for “investigation.”
Alternative World website has previously said that the Al-Khalifa regime is pursuing repression and persecution as an alternative to settling the Bahrain crisis resulting from years of banning the popular movement demanding reform and the peaceful transfer of power.
The website stated that the evidence indicates that the Bahraini regime does not want to settle the political crisis but prefers security options, which involve repression, persecution, violations, arrests and unfair trials, which only complicate matters further.
The website emphasized that over the past decade, and especially during the Coronavirus pandemic, calls for the unconditional release of political detainees in the country grew.
It pointed out that there are thousands of prisoners of conscience in the notorious Jau Central Prison. They suffer from overcrowding and harsh conditions amid the absence of preventive measures, which threaten their lives.
It added that the Bahraini authorities still ignore all calls at home and abroad to release political detainees, mainly since their confessions were extracted by force and torture.
The website pointed out that after normalization with Israel, the Bahraini authorities resorted to escalating their repressive practices to terrorize the people and silence them from their legitimate demands for freedom.
The website called on the Bahraini government to release political prisoners as a rational step to calm the situation and settle its internal crises, as a political and humanitarian duty, especially since the detainees were subjected to malicious punishments that have no basis other than political motives.
