The press crackdowns on both sides of the Gulf must end

For years, the Bahraini government and its supporters have impugned opposition leaders as Iranian agents bent on pushing the country into the orbit of Tehran. Never mind that the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry found no concrete evidence of Iranian involvement in the protests of 2011; the government has used the excuse of Iranian meddling to justify the arrest of independent and dissident voices.

The sad irony is that with each arrest Bahrain resembles Iran more by the day – especially in the practice of imprisoning the press.

Even before the launch of the Green Movement protests more than five years ago, Iran was no friend of the press. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least nine journalists were behind bars on election day, June 12, 2009. In response to the subsequent mass protests against claimed electoral fraud, the government responded harshly. Within the month, the number of journalists imprisoned had skyrocketed to at least 39.

That crackdown that begin in 2009 against the Iranian press has never stopped, and Iran has ranked among the world’s top three worst jailers of the press every year since. Many journalists remain in jail today on anti-state charges stemming from their coverage of the 2009 election and protests, even as more of their colleagues cycle in and out of jail. Too often journalists are accused of espionage as part of so-called Western or Zionist plots.

CPJ recorded a similarly disturbing spike in the arrest of journalists in Bahrain after the launch of the February 14 protests. According to CPJ research, there were at least two journalists in jail by the end of 2010, both of whom were temporarily released as part of a general amnesty in February 2011. Since then, the number of journalists jailed in Bahrain has increased steadily, especially as village protests turned violent in the face of government repression. By the end of 2014, Bahrain was the worst country in the world for journalists imprisoned per capita.

Like in Iran, many of the journalists and bloggers arrested in Bahrain have received harsh prison sentences. In 2014 alone, freelance photojournalists Ahmed Humaidan and Hussein Hubail received ten and five year sentences respectively. Such lengthy sentences suggest that Bahrain’s post-2011 crackdown will mirror the post-2009 crackdown in Iran, extending for years as jail cells fill with journalists convicted on bogus charges.

And like in Iran, the arrests have very little to do with so-called foreign meddling or terrorism or any of the other charges levied against journalists. But they have everything to do with power – or rather, the attempt by the government to keep it. In both countries, journalists who threaten that power by challenging official narratives are the ones who wind up in jail.

But there is still some reason for hope. Both President Hassan Rouhani in Iran and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain have pledged reform. Yet in both cases, they have proven either unable or unwilling to confront hardliners to end the press crackdowns. King Hamad instead opted in 2014 to approve a law that stipulates up to seven years in prison for insulting His Majesty.

King Hamad must change course. As he said to commemorate 2014’s World Press Freedom Day, press freedom is a cornerstone of the reform project in Bahrain. Yet by allowing so many journalists to languish in jail, he has undermined that cornerstone and thereby the entire reform project he claims to want to build.

Jason Stern is a research associate for CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program. His master’s thesis for George Washington University explored the potential for political reconciliation in Bahrain.