Mystery Solved: Bahrain Crackdown Actually "A Bureaucratic Mix-up"

The head of the BICI, Cherif Bassiouni, is being credited with having accomplished what many a lawyer and U.S. State Department official have been unable to do: secure the release of imprisoned al-Wifaq MPs Matar Matar and Jawad Fayruz; the high-profile defense attorney Muhammad al-Tajir; and 144 other detainees. This comes in addition to the release of 41 prisoners announced last week.


In an interview with The Washington Times--which incidentally also ran an op-ed attributed to King Hamad back in March; not sure what is going on there--Bassiouni tells that he was "promised" their release, explaining that

all 147 had been under the custody of military prosecutor general, accused of misdemeanors, and that the king had agreed to his request that they all be transferred to civilian courts prior to the royal order establishing the commission last month. Due to a bureaucratic mixup, however, he said the cases were not immediately transferred and he realized that most would linger in jail due to the onset of Ramadan, in most cases exceeding the maximum 6-month sentences for their alleged crimes.

Oops! Well, you know how those crazy Bahraini bureaucracies work: sometimes you're given access to a lawyer and charged with actual crimes and allowed to talk to your family while in prison for several months, and sometimes due to some clerical error you're not. That's just the way things go.

It's strange, moreover, that all of a sudden the two most prominent defendants (who by the way are only free pending trial) are now being accused of mere misdemeanors. Are people accused of misdemeanors usually chased through the streets along with their wife and kids by masked commandos brandishing machine guns? (See the story Matar Matar's wife tells Al-Jazeera English in the video below.)


Notably, finally, today's announcement sits in stark contrast to Bassiouni's widely-circulated comments to Reuters just two days ago, when he seemed to attempt once again to lower the expectations for the BICI investigation:

The investigation itself, he warned, cannot right relations between Bahrain's rulers and its Shi'ite population, which says it is systematically denied access to land, housing and state employment on sectarian grounds.
"This doesn't address the endemic problems, doesn't address the need for political change, for a new constitution, the economic disparities or the political division of Sunnis and Shi'a. All the underlying problems remain," Bassiouni said.

"That's not going to solve the problems of power disparities between the Shi'ite population and the Sunni rulers, nor the feeling of injustice the Shi'a community has."

He also seemed in the interview to offer a prelude to the likely findings of the inquiry, namely that while there were obvious mistakes made by individual police and military personnel, "there was never a policy of excessive use of force or torture...that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I think it was a case of people at the lower level acting, and there not being an effective chain of communication, control." That is to say, no one at high levels is (or will be held) accountable.

Well, in any case, some 185 people awaiting opaque military trials have been released from prison over the past week or so and will at least be tried under more reasonable circumstances. We can all agree to be happy in that, right? You would think so, wouldn't you?

Except that many on the pro-government side are not. Already pissed off by the Al-Jazeera English documentary and by the State of Qatar more generally, they are in no mood to welcome this newest development that smacks of BICI "interference in Bahrain's internal affairs." Quick: can someone check to see if there is a city in Iran called Bassioun?

Thus, for example, we have this commentator, who is representative of the general lot (although admittedly there are some who say if this is what the king wants then we should support him):