Photo: Irish Delegation with Nabeel Rajab, President of BCHR
Photo: Irish Delegation with Nabeel Rajab, President of BCHR
Orthopaedic surgeon Prof Damian McCormack tells Lloyd Mudiwa about his eye-opening experiences while answering distress calls from Irish-trained doctors in Bahrain.
The relationship between a medical trainer and the trainee rarely goes beyond the confines of the healthcare setting, but one trainer went above and beyond the call of duty when his former trainees were apparently “kidnapped”.
Describing his experience as an “eye-opener”, Prof Damian McCormack told Irish Medical Times that he simply heeded the call when some colleagues of two of the doctors from Bahrain whom he had trained contacted him, at some personal risk, in March to tell him that the duo had been arrested. “They asked for help and I helped,” the Orthopaedic Surgeon at Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and the Mater Hospital responded, when asked about the motivation for putting his own life at risk.
Speaking on his return from the Gulf state of Bahrain, Prof McCormack claimed that while some of his colleagues in Dublin expressed concern about the behaviour of the authorities in the Kingdom and sympathy for the doctors arrested, most medical organisations had been unhelpful.
Drumming up support
Prof McCormack alleged: “[I] wrote to several organisations — the Irish Medical Organisation, who were not helpful. I went in twice personally to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, who told me the situation was complicated and that they were making the authorities over there aware of their concerns, but that’s all they were doing. I wrote twice to the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; I got no reply. I wrote to the INMO [Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation], who replied immediately by return and issued a press release — and they were the first medical organisation to reply.
“So for the first couple of weeks I wasn’t getting very far,” Prof McCormack commented.
The IMO told IMT last week that it had notified Prof McCormack that it wrote to the Bahraini authorities on foot of communication from the World Medical Association, of which the IMO is a member. “The IMO upholds the right of medical personnel to ‘non-combatant’ status in any conflict zone and insists that prompt due process be available to any personnel detained in the course of their work in all such zones,” a spokesperson said.
While the RCSI last week said it was not commenting on the issue, the College has previously said punishing doctors or nurses for treating patients, irrespective of their background, was completely unacceptable. The RCPI, which went on a fact-finding mission in Bahrain to gather “first-hand, albeit limited” information, said it was supporting calls for justice for doctors arrested in Bahrain.
A human rights activist had forwarded Prof McCormack’s email to numerous other individuals in Ireland, and through that contact the surgeon made contact with Front Line Defenders in Blackrock, whom he described as a “fantastic NGO”.
“They [Front Line] agreed to declare the doctors human rights defenders defending the right to health, which they are, and so they got on board.”
Front Line has taken up the cases of all the arrested doctors, including the Irish-trained doctors, Dr Ali Al Ekr, Dr Basim Dhaif and Dr Ghassan Dhaif, whom the NGO says are currently being subjected to an unfair trial before a military court on unsubstantiated charges. For more than two months after their arrest, the doctors were denied access to their families or lawyers, and there is credible evidence of torture, according to the NGO.
Meanwhile, Prof McCormack had contacted several of his local politicians, but the only one to reply was Senator Averil Power, who agreed to help.
He was then invited onto Pat Kenny’s show on RTÉ Radio 1, and subsequently other media. “Pat Kenny, I think, asked me what I wanted to do about the thing and, without really thinking about it I suppose, I said at that stage that I would like to go and see my friends.”
By the time an Irish delegation went a month later, the families of the detained doctors were getting anxious, because they felt that the story was being forgotten about and there was insufficient international media support, Prof McCormack said. He said his colleagues in the Mater and Temple Street kindly covered his shifts during the visit.
He asked Front Line to initially pay for flights and accommodation for their delegation, but gave them personal guarantees that the cost of all of this would be on the medical community in the country.
The orthopaedic consultants in the Mater Group have given €10,000, but while he has also written to all of the orthopaedic consultants in the country asking them to donate €200 each, very few have responded to date, he said, adding that the campaign had cost approximately €70,000 to date, which included a full-page advert in The Irish Times and some UK national newspapers.
Ambassadors
His delegation, including former Minister for Foreign Affairs David Andrews, Marian Harkin MEP, Senator Power, and Prof Eoin O’Brien, managed to meet the Bahraini officials (see IMT July 22, http://bit.ly/p9NCPF), as well as three ambassadors from Switzerland, Poland and Austria, who were there on similar fact-finding missions. Prof McCormack said: “The ambassadors had only met the Government officials and they had no real insight into the true nature of the torture and human rights abuses, so we had time to relay what we had heard directly from the detainees or their families, which shocked them.”
He also alleged: “We also asked the families of the detained and the released if any of them had been approached by the College of Surgeons or the College of Physicians. The College of Physicians said they went on a fact-finding mission, but they haven’t had any contact with the Irish graduates.
“We also met a girl, a doctor, who worked as a lecturer for three years in the College [of Physicians], who was abducted, tortured and threatened with rape, and so on, and then released on bail for trial. And she had no contact at all with the College. So she was very much involved with the College, she was one of their staff, but her immediate former boss… nobody contacted her. There was no contact, which upsets her greatly.”
Prof McCormack said the team had initially felt uneasy at passport control because the immigration officers took their passports and they were unsure if the officials were going to release them, admit them or detain them.
He said they had also felt unsafe when they were mobbed at a press conference they held in a hotel, especially when they heard that Dr Nabeel Al Ansari, Chairman of the Bahrain Medical Society and a supporter of the Bahraini regime, allegedly photographed the car which brought them to the conference and published the registration number.
“We had just come from the house of a human rights activists and that house had been attacked on several occasions, and he has been beaten up on several occasions… the only reason he has not disappeared is that he is in constant communication via Twitter with the world and everybody knows him.
“But some of his family had brought us back to the hotel, so it was very threatening and very frightening — those last few hours — because we were not sure if we could exit the hotel safely, and it seems they had obviously put out word on the street to intimidate us,” Prof McCormack concluded.