Advocating violence through silence: the anti-Islamist West

Last Sunday, three UAE citizens, sisters Asma Khalifa Al-Suwaidi, Mariam Khalifa Al-Suwaidi and Alyaziyah Khalifa Al-Suwaidi, were told to report to an Abu Dhabi police station. The trio had been campaigning for the release of Dr Issa Al-Suwaidi, their brother, who is serving a ten-year sentence on what are believed to be politically motivated charges. He has been designated by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. The sisters have not been heard from since they entered the police station.

In a trial last year, Issa Al-Suwaidi was jailed alongside ninety-three others for being a member of Al-Islah (“reform” in Arabic), an Emirati Muslim Brotherhood organisation calling for political reform. All credible evidence suggests that the group does not advocate violence. The trial was a judicial freak show. Most of the activists were held in secret for seven months before it opened; indeed, most of the evidence against them wasn’t made public.

After their relatives threatened a sit-in protest, the prisoners were led to the court wearing blindfolds. Some had clearly been tortured. The men looked unhealthy, not well fed and exhausted. Many were to receive life sentences, the others ten- or five-year stretches. It was on behalf of these men that the three sisters had been campaigning, before they too disappeared just eight days ago.

A petition released by Al-Islah on the day the trial began called for an elected parliament to represent the Emirati people, with full legislative and regulatory powers. The group also asked for basic rights to be offered as standard to all UAE citizens. The requests for these freedoms stood in stark contrast to the superficial display of judicial barbarity swamping the courtroom; this was the Emirates regime spitting in the face of international human rights.

That courtroom charade concealed clumsily what the Bin Zayed family was really up to; calming their own fears, their own pathetic paranoia, by persecuting Al-Islah. The regime oppresses the Brotherhood simply because it is scared of organised resistance to its autocracy. As one UAE expert put it to me, “If liberals or secular reformers were as well-organised, the reaction [by the government] would be the same.”

The Bin Zayed family and their international supporters, including Riyadh, Amman and hard-right elements in Westminster, Washington and Brussels, say that it is all of the rest of us who should be afraid. Abu Dhabi recently declared the Brotherhood to be “terrorists” in the same press release that it sanctioned ISIS. It was a smear; the sticky substance of the “terrorist” label, ladled across the non-violent Al-Islah. The evidence to back the Bin Zayed claim that the Brotherhood is a terrorist group is as dubious as the family’s right to govern.

Britain’s own investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood was instigated last year at the behest of the UAE and Saudi royal families, in the hope that its findings would serve their own propaganda needs by confirming that the movement is, indeed, involved in “terrorism”. In return for finalising a lucrative arms deal for British weapons manufacturers selling fighter jets to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, David Cameron agreed to look into the Brotherhood, and announced his move to the world media. The final report, which leaks suggest contains no credible evidence of terrorist links on the part of the movement would not endear the British to their friends in the Gulf, and so its release has been put on hold.

Likewise, a briefing note from the European Union’s Directorate General for External Policies pointed out recently Al-Islah’s commitment to non-violence over two decades of collaboration with Emirati state officials, and that the organisation only attracted the ire of the authorities once it started to call for democratic reforms. Whether the Brotherhood is or is not involved in the alleged terrorist activities is actually irrelevant as far as the UAE government is concerned; the family firm must protect its own privileged position.

I wasn’t alive during the darkest days of the so-called Troubles, when the Irish Republican Army terrorised the British mainland and Northern Ireland with deadly bomb attacks. However, I believe that I would have felt deeply uncomfortable if members of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, had been paraded in front of a British court blindfolded, malnourished and telling the judge that they had been tortured, as Al-Islah members were last year. Or even if known IRA activists had been treated thus. I would have felt especially uncomfortable if the accused’s female relatives had then been “disappeared” forcibly, after calling for their brother’s release.

There are elements in the West who seem happy to gloss over the fact that Muslim Brotherhood members are being tortured across the Middle East, or sentenced to death en masse, or simply disappeared, like these three women. They say or imply by their silence that these human rights abuses are justified, because they are perpetrated against Islamists, who are, such a worldview seems to proclaim, undeserving of being afforded even basic human rights.

There is a deafening silence when thousands of Brotherhood members are massacred in Egypt, but righteous outrage over ISIS committing atrocities in Iraq. You will hear Westerners supporting or tolerating oppression in Bahrain, because that is a “Shia” revolution, and “Shia” means Iran, and Iran means Islamist. Then you will read ludicrously over-paid and genuinely ignorant American columnists writing that the UAE is a paradise in the Middle East, telling their readers what the PR firm who paid for their trip told them to say; thus do heinous human rights abuses become a mirage.

Three young women, in their twenties, are now missing in the United Arab Emirates; they are most likely being held in a state security prison, run by mercenaries, where torture is commonplace. I don’t care if their brother is a terrorist (though I don’t believe that he is), and I’d certainly never vote for his party (I’m an atheist), but I, like any decent human being, want them freed. If you’re a Western hawk crowing at their capture, or smugly silent at their demise, just imagine for one moment what you would feel if it was your sisters, mother, aunt or niece who have been disappeared. It just isn’t right, Islamists or not.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.