News / Interviews

Bahrain seeks to intimidate opposition with fake charges: Pundit

Monday, 12 December 2016 3:32 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 12 December 2016 3:33 PM ]

This file photo taken on May 29, 2016, shows a Bahraini man holding a placard bearing the portrait of Sheikh Ali Salman, head of the Shia opposition movement Al-Wefaq, during a protest against his arrest, in the village of Zinj on the outskirts of the capital Manama. (Photo by AFP)

Bahrain’s appeals court has upheld a nine-year jail sentence handed down to senior Shia opposition cleric, Sheikh Ali Salman, despite widespread criticism both at home and abroad against his imprisonment. Hundreds of Bahrainis have staged anti-regime protest rallies across the Persian Gulf kingdom to demand the immediate release of Sheikh Salman, the secretary general of the country’s dissolved al-Wefaq National Islamic Society.

Colin Cavell, a former lecturer of the University of Bahrain, believes this is typical of the Bahraini judicial system to continuously come up with fake charges against opposition leaders in an attempt to intimate them and to keep them quiet.

“The so-called judicial system in Bahrain charges people, then drops the charges, then reintroduces charges again and they keep doing this. They have done this to Sheikh Ali Salman, the leader of the largest opposition political party in Bahrain several times so far,” the academic told Press TV in an interview on Monday.

He also stated the Al Khalifa regime is doing everything it can to embarrass Sheikh Ali Salman and to continue to divide the opposition.

However, he argued, the Bahraini regime will not succeed in achieving its goals because the opposition knows that the Al Khalifa ‘dictatorship’ is illegitimate and enjoys very little support amongst the country’s population.

Cavell further opined that the United States in complicity with Britain and Saudi Arabia is keeping the Al Khalifa regime in power.

“They need these dictators to continue to rule over these areas in the Arabian Peninsula in order to continue to extract oil and natural gas from the region as well as utilize the land for bases, for naval bases, for airbases in order to police the region and to continue their hegemonic control over the Arab peoples in the region. It is pure imperialism,” he said.

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