Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): Are the volunteers today participating in combating the Coronavirus (COVID-19) the same as those who volunteered to take part in the (Honor Field), (Loyalty Swords) and (People's Committees) groups in 2011?

In the House of Representatives, the answer of the Assistant Undersecretary for Legal Affairs in the Ministry of Interior, Major General Mohammed Rashid Bouhamoud, was yes. These people, themselves, he says, are our volunteer citizens for whom we are seeking a law to organize, since we saw in 2011 our faithful honorable people setting up the gallows, as the law was not improvised or written at the moment, it was born after nine lean years we have been experiencing. This is not his exact answer, but what it should have been.

Tuesday's session was devoted to legislating the "Public Security Service Volunteering Act" which allows the Interior Ministry to accept volunteers to serve in public security.

Bouhamoud said that they have been thinking since then to make a legal framework giving these groups an official status, as if the groups that were involved in "Al-Zar party" lacked a law that would give them official status.

What his answer actually meant: Just as your esteemed council made in the summer of 2013 special laws for the government in an extraordinary session to give it the green light to practice repression and oppression, we have also been thinking of a law since 2011 to give (the thugs) a legal status.

Today's volunteers in the Coronavirus Campaign are not the participants of "Al-Zar Party", thus when you think about a law to regulate them, you have to get out of the mentality you had back then in 2011, which was a security mentality that is only similar to that which set the state security law in the 1970s.

It is clear that the mind of the Ministry of Interior is perplexed, because it, unfortunately, couldn't stop thinking about adapting the law to legalize oppression. This is why the MPs found it difficult in the session to understand the essence of this law. Some of them even talked about security tasks and training on the use of weapons, until the undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior, Nasser Al Khalifa, intervened to clarify that the law is related only to the civil defense department and volunteers will not be affiliated with any other department, and will not train on the use of weapons.

The answer of Interior Ministry Assistant Undersecretary for Legal Affairs was not successful at all. The law must be derived from historic national moments like this, as we witness Bahrainis rushing to help face a real danger. This act should open the eyes of the Interior Ministry to realize the sin that it has committed in mobilizing people against each other in 2011, not remind them of Al-Zar party and tell them that it was the basis of the volunteering law. The events and stories associated with any law give the law itself its sense of meaning and engrave it in the conscience of the people. 

Arabic Version