Middle East Monitor
MEMO, September 6, 2010
A Palestinian human rights worker has reported that Israeli forces continue to prevent, Umm Ibrahim, an elderly woman in her 70s, from visiting her son after 14 years on the pretext that she poses as security threat to Israel. Umm Ibrahim had no choice but to find a Palestinian family from neighbouring area to adopt her son and visit him on her behalf, as she has previously done with other Arab prisoners.
Abdel Nasser Farwana who is a researcher specialising in prisoner affairs added that Umm Ibrahim Baroud, from Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, is one of thousands of Palestinians barred from visiting their sons who are being detained in Israeli jails on various pretexts. These include so-called security reasons that are used by the Israeli authorities to punish prisoners and their families.
Farwana stressed that the security-related measure of banning visits to prisoners is no longer an exceptional practice and constitutes a worrying phenomenon since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada (uprising).
This measure has become an established policy through which the families of thousands of detainees are denied the right to visit their sons. The pretext given has been “security reasons” and that families’ access to prisons constitutes a threat on Israeli security. Therefore, nearly one third of Palestinian prisoners are banned from family visits for various excuses.
Farawana also said that Umm Ibrahim is a witness to this unfair policy that has nothing to do with security. Rather, it is a policy that in its essence and implementation reflects the Israeli Occupations mentality of revenge which is clearly manifested in the way that it deals with prisoners and their families. These policies aim at punishment, preventing family reunions and communication and making things as difficult as possible to maximise suffering.
Farwana appealed to all international organizations, with the International Committee of the Red Cross at their forefront, for urgent intervention to lift the security ban on prisoners’ relatives in general, and with the aim of ensuring the resumption of the visits schedule and allowing all families to visit their sons in prisons.
He also mentioned that Umm Ibrahim’s eldest son, Ibrahim Baroud, 48, had been arrested on the 9th of April, 1986 and sentenced to 27 years – so far he has served 24 years, during which he was moved between several prisons. He is currently held in the Ashkelon prison.
By Ned Parker and Nadeem Hamid
The transfers come as American forces prepare to end their control of the sole remaining U.S. prison facility in Iraq.
July 14, 2010
Reporting from Baghdad —
The United States has handed over 29 members of Saddam Hussein’s government to Iraqi custody in recent weeks, including Tariq Aziz, the urbane, cigar-chomping official who served as the regime’s global spokesman, Iraqi officials and Aziz’s relatives said Wednesday.
The U.S. military confirmed that it transferred 26 former regime officials Monday and three others last month. It added that it continued to hold eight high-ranking members of Hussein’s government and his ruling Baath Party.
Both Aziz’s son and the Iraqi government said the former foreign minister and deputy prime minister has in an Iraqi prison since Monday.
His son, Ziad Aziz, said his father, who suffers from heart disease and diabetes, called him Wednesday and complained that he was now being held in a tiny cell and deprived of his medications. His son said the former official described the situation as “hard circumstances.”
“He hasn’t taken his medicine in three days. There’s no place to sit. He hasn’t seen a doctor,” Ziad Aziz said. He added that his father has been in a wheelchair in recent months after suffering a stroke. A medical report sent to the family by the International Committee for the Red Cross listed Aziz as also suffering from dementia and slurred speech.
Iraq’s deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim, denied that Aziz or any other detainees were being mistreated.
“This is street talk,” Ibrahim said. “The Ministry of Justice doesn’t have anything to hide, whether with former regime officials or former terrorists. Each has his rights and [the ministry has] duties to fulfill according to the international standards.”
Iraq’s detention facilities have been plagued by poor living conditions and allegations of abuse by guards. The justice, defense and interior ministries have implemented human rights inspections, but violations still occur. A U.N. human rights report released last week raised concern about abuses committed against detainees.
Tariq Aziz first gained notoriety in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He continued to promote Hussein’s views to the international community in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Fluent in English and well-educated, the former foreign minister came to symbolize Hussein’s regime in the West. He was Iraq’s senior-most Christian official.
In March 2009, an Iraqi court sentenced him to 15 years in prison for his role in the 1992 execution of 42 merchants who had been accused of price-fixing. He received another seven-year sentence in August 2009 for the displacement of Kurds in 1980.
In addition to the 29 detainees handed over by the Americans, Ibrahim said 26 other high-ranking former regime officials had been transferred to Iraqi custody about eight months ago.
The latest transfers come ahead of the end of American control of Camp Cropper at Baghdad’s international airport, the sole remaining U.S. prison facility in Iraq. On Thursday, the U.S. military will hand over a final 1,600 detainees, while another 200 prisoners will be held under joint Iraqi-U.S. custody, Ibrahim said.
The shutdown of U.S. detention facilities marks a major step as American forces wind down their formal combat mission in Iraq and reduce their troops to 50,000 by the end of August. All remaining U.S. soldiers are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.
The United States will continue to hold in joint custody with the Iraqi government eight high-ranking members of the old regime, including Hussein’s half-brothers Watban Ibrahim Hassan and Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan. Both men have been sentenced to death by Iraqi courts.
The most controversial case remains that of Hussein’s former defense minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai. Jabburi Tai was sentenced to death in 2007 for his role as a general in the north during the Hussein regime’s 1980s Anfal military campaign against the Kurds.
Jabburi Tai has been spared execution because Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, has refused the orders. Talabani has argued that Hashim should be spared for his contacts with the Iraqi opposition before 2003. It has long been rumored that Jabburi Tai helped to stand down the Iraqi army during the U.S. military invasion.
But many Shiite leaders, including Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, have pushed for his execution.
Ibrahim hinted that the Iraqi authorities were pushing for Jabburi Tai and the remaining seven regime officials to be transferred over as soon as possible.
“There are no negotiations,” the deputy justice minister said. “Whoever we want, we just inform the American side. We are running Iraq right now. The Americans are supporting us.”
– ned.parker@latimes.com
Hamid is a Times staff writer.
by Khalid Amayreh on June 30, 2010
The cruel Israeli regime is organizing a fresh campaign to demand the release of one of its occupation soldiers, detained in a secret Gaza location.
The new campaign, publicized by the Jewish-controlled media in Europe and North America, is assuming many expressions, including protests led by the soldier’s family, a propaganda ship organized by the American Jewish followers of the Nazi-minded rabbi Meir Kahana, and a call by happy-go-lucky French President Nicolas Sarkozy for the unconditional release of the Israeli soldier.
This is the same Sarkozy who kept silent during the murderous Israeli onslaught against the defenseless people of Gaza eighteen months ago. He is now invoking humanitarianism and charity as if the thousands of Gaza children, men and women, annihilated or maimed by the Israeli army were non-humans.
It is true that Gilad Shalit is not being accorded a five-star treatment. But this is not due to any presumed sadistic urges on Hamas’s part to torment the young soldier who is likely to have the blood of many children on his hands.
In Israel, it is difficult to find an adult Israeli male whose hands have not been stained with Palestinian blood. After all, Israel is a society of murderers and child-killers. It is a society whose members Zionism has transformed into racists, cannibals and Nazi-minded murderers and child killers.
Indeed, were it not for the fact that Israel has been making constant and meticulous efforts to discover his whereabouts and liberate him by force, there is no doubt that Hamas would allow the International Commission of the Red Cross, even his family, to visit him.
But Israel, a country that murders peace activists on high seas and then calls the cold-blooded murder “armed confrontations with terrorists,” can’t be trusted.
Palestinians have had a long and bitter experience with Israeli treachery. This is why Hamas can’t allow itself to make the slightest risk in this regard. Yes, one might sympathize with Shalit at a certain human level. However, Shalit is only one person while the entire Palestinian people are held hostage by an evil regime that can only be compared with history’s worst.
There are, of course, other aspects to this sensitive issue. Israel detains thousands of Palestinian political and resistance prisoners in its dungeons. And as the recently-freed Palestinian Islamic leader Sheikh Nayef Rajoub revealed, many of these prisoners are being subjected to Medieval savagery at the hands of those claiming to be “a light upon the nations.”
For those who have forgotten, Shalit was taken prisoner in battlefield. Moreover, had Israel succeeded in carrying out a rescue operation, he would have most likely got killed.
This is probably the endgame that Israel wishes for its imprisoned soldier. A dead Shalit would be a Hasbara bonanza for the Zionist propaganda machine. On the one hand, it would allow Israel to torture and kill more Palestinian political prisoners (several Palestinian prisoners died recently due to torture, medical negligence and other causes). It would also absolve Israel from freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as demanded by Hamas and insisted by the vast bulk of the Palestinian masses, irrespective of their political orientation.
To be sure, Hamas had been negotiating in good faith with Israel, hoping to reach a dignified breakthrough that would see the repatriation of Shalit to his family in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees to their families. That would be a win-win formula for everyone.
However, the Israeli government consistently and arrogantly rejected this logical proposal, making racist arguments which even the leaders and ideologues of the Third Reich didn’t dare to make.
For example, Israeli leaders routinely invoke the mendacious canard that the Judeo-Nazi state cannot free prisoners who have Jewish blood on their hands. Well, what about the thousands or tens thousands of Israelis who have Palestinian, Lebanese and now Turkish blood on their hands? Is non-Jewish blood less red than Jewish blood?
Israel doesn’t dare indulge in a genuine argument in this regard. The reason is simple. Israel views the blood and lives of non-Jews as insignificant, at least in comparison to Jewish blood and Jewish lives. Just try to have a brief conversation with a rabbi and you will be more than shocked hearing what he will be saying in this regard.
In any case, Hamas must not show the slightest sign of fatigue vis-à-vis Israel because the lives and freedom of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are at stake. Hamas has been successfully managing this Shalit affair for over three years. Israel committed untold massacres and has been imposing a manifestly criminal siege on 1.7 million human beings, in the hope of creating a crack in Hamas’s wall of steadfastness. But neither Israeli pressure, nor western conspiracy, nor Arab collusion and Palestinian Authority treachery, have succeeded in pressurizing Hamas to give in or give up.
In the final analysis, Hamas has a huge moral responsibility toward thousands of Palestinian families whose children are languishing in Israeli concentration camps and dungeons.
Needless to say, these people have spent the prime of their lives in Israeli prisons so that their people will be able to live in dignity and in order to maintain the hope for freedom and liberation from evil Zionism.
Hence, we must not hesitate to proclaim and reassert the Palestinian position in this regard, namely that Shalit must stay behind bars as long as Israel insists on keeping our men, and women and children behind bars.
This position may not be popular in New York and Paris. But why show the slightest concern about what Paris and New York think in the first place. They have always been and continue to be our direct or indirect tormentors. Our responsibility is first and foremost toward these tortured Palestinian prisoners and their suffering families who have kept our national just cause alive.
In a nutshell, our prisoners are not children of a lesser God.
* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983.
Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:40:50 GMT
7,300 Palestinians, including 17 legislators and two former ministers, are currently detained in about 20 Israeli prisons, a report says.
Hundreds of them have never been charged or put on trial.
Among the detained are 33 women, nearly 300 children, 296 administrative detainees, and dozens of political leaders, Palestinian researcher Abdul Nasser Farawna said in a report issued on Monday.
Farawana, who specializes in detainee affairs, said that 1,500 of them are ill and need urgent medical attention and dozens need surgeries and hospitalization, but no action has been taken by the Israeli authorities.
The detainees are held in about twenty prisons and detention and interrogation centers, mainly in Ramon, Shatta, Galboa, Asqalan, Hadarim, Al-Damoun, Be’er Sheva, Ofer, Majoddo, and the Negev detention camp, he added.
He went on to say that 83 percent of the detainees are from the West Bank, 10.6 percent are from Gaza, while the rest are Arab residents of Israel and other Arab nationals.
Jail terms range from 10 years to life sentences, Farawna, who is also a former detainee, explained.
Political figures like Nael al-Barghouthi, Fakhri al-Barghouthi, and Akram Mansour have been in prison for over 30 years.
Farawna has asked human rights groups and other similar institutions to bring this issue to light and is seeking help to obtain their release.
He added that the only Israeli prisoner of war, Gilad Shalit, who is held in Gaza, should not be released until all Palestinian detainees are released.
A superbly-made futuristic animated cartoon broadcast by Hamas movement on Sunday is creating waves in Israel. It is thought to be the first of its kind from the military wing of Hamas that does not depend on the traditional images of brave Hamas warriors fighting against Israel.
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHVR63sDY7c
The film wants to send the message that unless there is a real change in thinking on the part of the Israeli government, captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit will be returned to his family in a coffin rather than standing on his own feet.
The Israeli government reacted angrily to the film, describing it as “deplorable” and blamed Hamas for the failure to agree a deal for the release of Shalit, who was captured in June 2006. He is alive and believed to be held somewhere in Gaza.
The Hebrew animation is broadcast on various popular video websites, predominantly with English subtitles. On the website of Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas armed wing, the item also appears in Arabic, giving rise to guess that the intended target audiences are both Israelis and Palestinians.
If Hamas was looking for a reaction in Israel with the video, it certainly has achieved that on Sunday and Monday as news outlets gave substantial time and space to the animation.
Israeli politicians and pundits alike felt the need to talk about the movie. “It is best if Hamas leaders would focus less on videos and presentations and more concerned about the interests of their prisoners and the public in Gaza,” Noam Shalit, father of Gilad Shalit, told the Israeli news website Ynet.
The film focuses on Noam Shalit. Through a series of vignettes, Noam is portrayed trudging through the streets of Israel and being confronted by huge advertising boardings each with a different Israeli leader pledging to free his son and then finds a newspaper discarded in a rubbish bin showing on its front page a $50m reward for information on his son’s case.
Towards the end of the clip, Noam is an old man when he arrives at the Gaza border to greet Gilad at his long-awaited homecoming. He lets out an anguished cry as he sees his son is no longer alive.
Hamas and Israel have been in on-off negotiations for Gilad Shalit’s release since the soldier was captured by Hamas-led Gaza militants on the Gaza frontier in June 2006.
A deal between Israel and Hamas, negotiated by German intelligence officials, appeared close at the end of last year but fell through at the last minute when Israel stepped back. Hamas was to release Shalit and in return Israel would free 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. About 11,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails, most of which without charge.
Date: 29 / 04 / 2009 Time: 12:54
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Bethlehem – Ma’an – On Friday, 1 May, Palestinian Nael Barghouthi will become the world’s record-holder as the longest-held political prisoner.
Barghouthi will have completed more than 31 years in Israeli custody by May, said Abd An-Nasser Farawna, a Palestinian specialist in prisoners affairs. On Friday, Barghouthi will break the Guinness World Record, which is currently held by Sa’id Al-Ataba, a Palestinian who was also in Israeli custody.
According to Farawna, Barghouthi was detained on 4 April 1978. He became the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner after his fellow prisoner, Sa’id Al-Ataba, was released on 25 August 2008 after efforts made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Al-Ataba spent 31 years and 26 days in Israeli custody.
Barghouthi was born in 1957 in Ramallah in the central West Bank. He was detained on 4 April 1978 at the age of 21, and an Israeli military court later sentenced him to life imprisonment. He has already been in prison ten years longer than he was free.
Please forward widely….
Dear Everyone:
Please take a few minutes to read the call-out below from a broad Gaza-based prisoner solidarity campaign made up of a coalition of prisoner rights groups, local and international activists, prisoner families and Ministry of Detainees representatives in Gaza.
Friday April 17th is the international day of solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. Just over 11,000 are behind bars in occupation prisons inside the apartheid lines and outside the ghetto walls of the West Bank and Gaza.
Prisoners are a community under siege which represents every faction in Palestine. Solidarity between prisoners inside Israeli jails crosses all political borders. They have sacrificed their individual freedom for collective freedom.
From taking direct action to symbolic gestures (in the case if prisoner campaigns, simple visual solidarity gestures drawing public attention to the struggle of prisoners is always effective in keeping memories, spirit and solidarity alive). Please take action this week! And email us about it…
April 17th is the international day of solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. These over 11,000 men, women and children are ghost prisoners, forgotten by the international community and media which has focused on the systematic and physical psychological torture of prisoners in high profile camps such as Guantanamo Bay but has largely ignored the network of Israel’s ‘Guantanamos’ inside ‘Israel’.
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