Despite the media blackout imposed by the Omani authorities on internal affairs, the regime practices arbitrary detention and psychological torture against its prisoners and opponents. This is used to suppress its fears of popular movements escalating since the 2011 Arab Spring.
The Sultanate has a long record of torture against opposition members, due to their political activism since the beginning of the Arab Spring and until the recent youth demonstrations in May 2021, which spread across several Omani cities after attempts to suppress them using force against protestors.
On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Muwatin highlighted and identified patterns of torture and ill-treatment in Omani prisons, based on the testimonies of victims.
The Arab Spring movement
On February 25, 2011, Oman witnessed a large-scale protest movement that swept the country’s cities, demanding economic reforms and later political reforms. The authorities mobilized its security forces to suppress the peaceful protests.
The movement was preceded by a series of strikes undertaken by school teachers in early February 2011 to demand an improvement to their living conditions, which led to the suspension of most of the country’s schools. This was followed by labor strikes in the oil refineries in Muscat and Sohar in mid-March 2011.
The strikes were accompanied by protest movements that spread from the city of Sohar to the rest of the Omani cities including the capital Muscat.
During the Omani Spring movement and in the years that followed, many activists were tortured, revealing the regime’s means to silence voices of dissent.
Mock executions, solitary confinement, beatings, hooding, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and psychological torture are only some methods to which prisoners were subjected. Most of the convictions were based on charges not internationally recognized, such as defamation of authority and peaceful assembly.
In a previous report, Muwatin contacted people residing in Oman to speak about their experience in detention centers due to their peaceful activism.
Most respondents excused themselves from giving a statement and expressed their feeling that they were still under surveillance. A young Omani woman responded that she is still suffering from her experience in prison, despite that many years has passed since her arrest in 2012.
Victims of torture
On April 8, 2011, Basema Al-Rajhi, a former programme presenter on a local radio station, and activist Saeed Al-Hashmi, were abducted while returning from a protest in the capital Muscat. Ten men forcefully took Al-Rajhi and Al-Hashmi out of their car, handcuffed them, beat them, and covered their faces with a black bag.
While Al-Rajhi thought they were being taken to the police station, they were taken off the road into a remote area at around 8 pm.
Basema Al-Rajhi recalls hearing the kidnappers hitting Al-Hashmi with sticks and batons, thinking they were killing him. The kidnappers then uncovered her face, smashed her head violently, while she had a duct tape on her mouth. After Al-Hashmi was thrown out of the car, they continued on the road until they pulled Al-Rajhi by her feet and threw her away into the desert.
Al-Rajhi had to crawl and climb rocks until she got to the road. A car stopped and took her to the hospital, where she was forced to undergo a virginity test, an experience that she described as humiliating.
In 2012, Basema was arrested and convicted of “participating in an illegal gathering” and subsequently sentenced to four months in prison. She was clearly convicted for exercising her right of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
In January 2013, two officers visited her sister at her workplace and asked her if Basema had “learned her lesson”.
In April 2011, the authorities forced a group of young protest organizers to sign confessions for possessing explosives and planning to target security forces. The youths, who the government called the “explosives gang”, were sentenced to two and a half years in prison based on the signed confessions.
Social media bloggers and activists were not isolated from the authorities’ violence, which was the regime’s automatic response to the exercise of freedom of expression in public and political affairs.
On June 11,2012, authorities arrested writer and political activist Mohammed Al-Fazari. He was charged with illegal assembly and insulting the Sultan. Al-Fazari spent 27 days in an internal security detention center and then another 24 days in a solitary cell in the General Prison. He was later transferred to the notorious Central Prison in Samail.
During his arrest, Al-Fazari was subjected to torture, solitary confinement, head covering, loud music, extreme temperatures, and bright lights. Confinement was in crowded rooms exceeding 30 prisoners, double their capacity.
On April 28, 2018, former Diplomat Hasan Al-Basham died in his cell after being subjected to torture, ill-treatment and medical neglect. He was serving a three-year prison sentence for expressing his views on social networking sites, under charges such as insulting God and the Sultan.
May 2021 protests
On May 24, 2021, young Omanis went out to express their discontent with the high unemployment rate that was met with no solutions by the government, evoking the Omani Spring protests of 2011.
Demonstrators in Sohar faced the same violence of the Omani Spring protests. The demonstration was confronted with violence and arrests.
The demonstrations continued and spread to other cities, while the arrests of participants and activists behind the protests continued. Our sources reported that the authorities threatened the most prominent activists on social media to stop talking about the demonstrations and launched a massive arrest campaign.
The Sultan’s method of torture
Torture in Oman takes the shape of the Sultan’s baton that the regime waves in front of unarmed peaceful activists.
In May 2019, our sources informed us that the authorities had physically assaulted a group from the Shihuh tribe in Musandam for criticizing government policies. They were later sentenced to life imprisonment based on confessions extracted under torture.
The Omani Human Rights Commission, a governmental institution, said that it had investigated the matter and refuted the allegations of torture. Government investigations are usually considered dishonest and biased.
Forms of torture
Muwatin Centre for Human Rights monitors different forms and methods of torture in Omani prisons, based on the testimonies of former detainees who faced various forms of physical and psychological torture.
Mock executions
Prisoners or abductees are forced to cover their faces with masks, and hear security officers beating and assaulting others to insinuate that they are killing them. According to some testimonies, this was one of the methods practiced to force them into confessions or deter them from acts of opposition or defending human rights.
Torture through extreme temperatures
The authorities deliberately regulate the temperatures by making them too hot or too cold, using air conditioning systems, making them unbearable for the prisoners. Most of the prisoners reported that they were subjected to this type of torture.
Insanity
Single cells that were unbearably bright, with loud music that glorified the regime. This was intended to deprive the prisoners of sleep and drive them mad.
Prison conditions
The conditions of Omani prisons are deplorable. Prisoners are badly treated by the security officers and the administration.
The poor conditions of the prisons include lack of food and medical neglect. The Central Prison of Samail fails to provide or prescribe medicines for patients with diabetes and other healthcare problems. Moreover, there is no authority to which prisoners can submit complaints about conditions inside the prisons.
The authorities fail to provide interpreters for foreign prisoners. Foreign consulates complain about the delay in the regime’s system in notifying them of their detained citizens and the system’s complications to make it difficult to interview foreign prisoners.
It is also noteworthy that Oman did not ratify the Convention against Torture and Other International Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment until last year in 2020.