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'
 The
United States has always been reluctant to ratify
international conventions, such as, the
Kyoto Protocol
to protect the environment,
or impeded the work of
pressure groups opposing the arms trade, or exploited
the International law for its own interests, or
otherwise ignored it altogether. For those who are
acquainted with the American decision-making rules and
their relationship to the industrial and financial
world, and who are aware of the extent of its hegemonyc
ambitions, such policies would not come as a surprise.
However, what is surprising is that, in 2005, the US
became the country responsible for the most violations
of human rights among the 35 countries which signed the
Helsinki Agreement
more than 30 years ago.
The American
Administration is also responsible for secret prisons
and to detentions unrestricted by limits on time, place
or subject in order to impose its will by force. The US
is the only country that runs security investigations
across continents from the Jordanian desert, to resorts
near Nairobi and Addis Ababa, to the Bagram base in
Afghanistan, or to a Polish army base. The current US
administration not only issued military laws and
establish special courts but also persuaded 24 other
countries (till now) to pass anti-terrorism laws thus
making all the achievements of International human
rights laws from 1948 to 2007 subject to debate again.
Even the success of the NGO’s and the Committee on Human
Rights in Geneva in August 2006 failed to change
anything in the American policy. On the contrary, the US
administration had totally rejected the Commission's
condemnation of the Guantanamo detention center and the
US President ignored the requests of the European
Parliament and other important American personalities to
close this shameful institution.
Consequently,
many American, European and Arab personalities formed a
global network to defend the detainees of Guantanamo.
The global coordination for Sami Al-Haj and other
detainees in Guantanamo includes about 32 American,
European and Arab organizations. More information can be
found in the dedicated website, available in English,
Arabic, French and Spanish: www.samisolidarity.net
Many organizations and websites have
been mobilized, we can mention the American Center for
Constitutional Rights,
Reprieve in
London, Amnesty International, ACHR and the website
http://quibla.net and
other defiant organizations and sites. All operate with
all available means to put an end to the Guantanamo
model, which became more like an immoral cover to the
conditions of prisons allover the world.
Guantanamo today
symbolizes the most modern torture techniques that use
sound, light, temperature and advanced technology
together with the barbaric shackling of the prisoner
during the entire period of his detention. It is not
strange, then, to find in the official statistics 41
cases of attempted suicide, in addition to the corpses
of four detainees who already died by committing suicide
as announced by the prison administration who handed
them over to the governments of Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, there are several cases of freed detainees who
now live with psychological and/or physical disability.
The Sudanese
Photographer, Sami Al-Haj, became a symbol of the
victims of the barbaric violations of human rights in
Guantanamo. For more than six months, he has been daily
obliged to drink liquids via tubes entering his nose
through to his stomach in order to force him to halt the
hunger strike he started four months ago. During five
years, Sami was subject to interrogations almost every
ten days. Amnesty International reported that Sami was
terrorized severely with different methods of torture
including being terrified by police dogs upon his
arrival in Guantanamo, subjected to racist abuse by
color, granted less time outside his cell; chained and
had pepper sprinkled on his body before being allowed to
meet the Sudanese intelligence agents, who came to
Guantanamo. The prison guards also smashed his ankle and
beat him on the sole of his feet, along with the
humiliating interrogations imposed upon him...
This is also the
case of the Saudi citizen Abdullah Al-Matrifi who is
still detained in Guantanamo while his partners from
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were already released without
any charges, trial or compensation. Al-Matrifi was in
Afghanistan, where he established a charitable
foundation, WAFA, providing essential and much needed
services to the Afghani people. According to the World
Health Organization, WAFA brought the Malaria vaccine
from Europe and supported the Kabul hospital by
supplying furniture, medicine, X-ray apparatus,
equipment for surgery rooms and intensive care sections.
WAFA also used to send a number of medical convoys to
remote villages and deserted areas, for a week or ten
days, to treat people onsite so that only serious cases
are transferred to the Kabul hospital. Furthermore, WAFA
was also behind the drilling of more than 120 wells
equipped with pumps to draw water to the surface and was
behind the purchase of agricultural equipment for
farmers. In addition, this charity had also distributed
school material for students in need.
Another example
is a prisoner from Sudan called Adel Hassan Hamad, 49
years, who is married and has 4 children. Mr. Hamad was
arrested from his house in Peshawar (a Pakistani city on
the Afghan border) in 2002 just after his return from a
vacation with his family in Sudan. Under armed threats
and as a request from the American security authorities
the Pakistani intelligence imprisoned him for 6 months
and a half, where he suffered dreadful conditions and
lost more than 30 kg of his weight. He was then moved to
the American Bagram base in the Afghan territory for
about two months before he was transferred to Guantanamo
bay. His family did not know anything about him until he
sent a message via the International Committee of the
Red Cross informing them of his detention. He worked as
an administrator in Paktia hospital in Afghanistan and
the regional office of the Islamic Committee. After the
American war on Afghanistan in 2001, Hamad supervised,
from the International office of Peshawar, the relief
effort for the Afghan refugees
who fled
the war. After five years of detention, the prison
administration of Guantanamo finally issued the decision
of his release. However, more than six months has
already passed and Hamad is still detained till this
moment in Guantanamo.
Sami Al-Haj,
Abdullah Al-Matrifi, Fawzi Audeh, Adel Hamad and many
others shared the misfortune of being present in the
wrong place at the wrong time as was imposed by the
arbitrary logic of the war on terrorism. Their fate made
them witness a black page in the history of mankind that
enters its sixth year, in which thousands of people were
detained, kidnapped and assassinated.
After the
condemnation of the High Commission for Human Rights,
the Council for Cooperation and Security in Europe, the
European Parliament, the European Council and the
organizations of human rights, it became possible to say
that the claimants to close Guantanamo prison became a
non negligible force even within the United States where
critics of Bush's policies are frequently repressed
under the pretext of fighting terrorism and maintaining
security.
Those who demand
the closure of the Guantanamo prison, however, face the
dilemma of what the fate of its victims who were
detained without any charge will be once they are
released. Many of them were already wanted by the
security authorities of their own countries, as is the
case of detainees from Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Libya
and Egypt. If they are released and deported to their
countries they might well be subjected yet again to
torture, unjust trials and long imprisonment, as was the
case in Tunisia with Abdallah Hajji and Lotfi Al-Agha
(condemned for 3 and 7 years).
Therefore, we
are today looking for countries that respect the right
of political asylum and accept about 40 detainees, who
had previously fled their own countries because of their
affiliation to some currents of political Islam but have
never committed any crime that violates the laws of the
countries of residence.
Ironically,
while the triplet Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush continue to
commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and to
violate International Law without any accountability or
punishment, the prisoners of Guantanamo continue to be
detained without any guilt. Moreover, the US
administration works hard to avoid compensating the
victims despite not being convicted of any crime. All
they could receive was that their prison guards say to
them at the farewell: "We are sorry for what happened to
you!"
Violette
Daguerre
President of the
Arab Commission for Human Rights
Intervention on
Anti-imperialist International Conference at Calcutta
27
to 29 November 2007
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