[Dryerase] Alarm!--Detention & aid

[The Alarm!Newswire]

Detention and aid  An examination of Israel and Egypt

By Chris Kortright
The Alarm! Newspaper Contributor

When looking at the effects of 9/11 on the Middle East, I have decided 
to focus on the policies of detainment practiced by Israel and Egypt. 
While we are assaulted daily with information regarding the major 
conflicts in the region, and especially with TV images of the violence 
in Israel and Palestine, this information is only a partial picture of 
what is going on. Israel and Egypt’s detainment policies are a more 
hidden indicator of the status of conflict in the region.

Egypt and Israel used detainment and military trials before 9/11. The 
governments of both countries have used detainment of dissidents as a 
tactic to maintain their power. However, the reasoning used to justify 
detainment has shifted since 9/11.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, the government has detained 
Palestinians who resisted Israeli occupation. It has violated every 
international agreement on human rights in order to maintain its 
security and its possession of the occupied territories. The US has 
turned a blind eye to most of Israel’s practices, but since 9/11 and 
the “War on Terrorism,” the US has wholeheartedly supported Israel’s 
actions to put down the new Intifada. 9/11 has given Israel the excuse 
to exercise all might necessary in its attempt to crush Palestinian 
resistance, and the US has applauded its actions.

Egypt’s practices of detainment are no different than those of Israel, 
but Egypt has a different historical relationship to the US. Egypt has 
a long history of banning and imprisoning opposition movements. Since 
the success of the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian government has 
outlawed Islamists and communist organizations and arrested their 
membership. After 9/11, Egypt has increased its detainment of Islamists 
(specifically those from the Muslim Brotherhood). The practice has 
benefitted Egypt two-fold. First, it maintains its power and stops 
opposition. Second, this practice strengthens the relationship between 
the US and Egypt because, in the process, Egypt becomes an ally in the 
US’s “War on Terrorism.”

Even in the wake of 9/11, the US has a double standard towards these 
two key allies. This double standard can be seen in the US’s reaction 
to these two governments’ policies towards detainment. It becomes 
particularly clear when we look at the detainment of US citizens by 
each country.

Israel
Israel claims that it has detained 4,250 to 5,000 Palestinians in the 
current ongoing campaign. Although not all of these individuals have 
been detained since 9/11, the US has given Israel free reign regarding 
detainment if they do so under the name of the “War on Terrorism.” 
Israel gladly uses the “War on Terrorism” to justify its current 
actions.

Both Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have been up in arms 
over the conditions that the detainees have been living under. Al-Haq, 
a Palestinian human rights advocacy group, reported that Ofra-Batil 
detention center (the same detention center where the military courts 
are located) is divided into four sections, each section housing 250 
tents. The tents are designed to hold twenty individuals, but each tent 
presently holds twice as many detainees. Detainees are given boards to 
sleep on, but there are no mattresses. They are given one blanket for 
every two people even though the temperature can fall below freezing at 
night. Daily food is rationed to one tomato shared between every four 
detainees and one pot of yogurt between eight. Detainees are not 
allowed to move out of the tents.

On April 5, Al-haq and two Israeli human rights groups, Hamoked and 
B’tselem, lodged a case with the Israeli High Court alleging that the 
detainees at Ofra have had their fingers, toes and other bones broken 
during interrogation. Prisoners, aged from thirteen to seventy, have 
their wrists bound for long periods with plastic cuffs and their 
identity papers confiscated, making it difficult and dangerous to 
travel if or when they are released.

Israel is not just detaining Palestinians, they are also detaining aid 
workers who are helping Palestinians. Dr. Riad Abdel-Karim, a 
34-year-old American born Palestinian, was working for the 
International Medical Corps in Palestine when he was detained by 
Israeli soldiers on May 5. He was boarding his flight home from Ben 
Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv when arrested. The Israelis accused 
Abdel-Karim of transferring money to sponsor suicide bombings, but they 
furnished no evidence to support the claim.

After an eighteen-hour interrogation session at the airport, 
Abdel-Karim was transferred to a police station near Petach Tikva where 
he was held in a four by three meter cell with twelve other inmates. 
After he complained about the inhumane conditions the police 
transferred him to the “dungeon,” which is a two by two-and-a -half 
meter room with no windows, poor ventilation and a hole that serves as 
a toilet. After his release, Abdel-Karim claimed that his arrest was 
part of a deliberate campaign on the part of Israel to block 
humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, particularly aid from 
American charity and relief organizations.

Abdel-Karim is one of many American aid workers who have been 
unlawfully detained by Israel in direct violation of their human rights 
and with little intervention by the US government. Abdel-Karim said 
that though US consular officials visited several times to check on him 
and tried to obtain medication for him, he said their main purpose was 
to ensure that he was being treated “in accordance with Israeli law.” 
Abdel-Karim’s response to this was, “If I were an American citizen 
detained wrongfully in any other country in the world, I would have 
found my government working to secure my release. But in Israel, where 
my country and my tax dollars provide so much assistance each year, my 
government is reduced to the role of begging my jailers to give me my 
medication. How very sad.”

Egypt
The Egyptian government has used the events of 9/11as a reason to 
detain and try, in military court, members of both leftist and Islamist 
opposition groups. Islamist organizations have been hit the hardest, 
with the Muslim Brotherhood bearing the burden of this repression.

On December 26, the Supreme Military Court started the trial of 
twenty-two prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were accused 
of “seeking to make use of current events in the Arab and Islamic world 
to incite the public against the government in order to take over.” The 
defendants included nine university professors and eight doctors. The 
rest were engineers and businessmen. All were well known activists in 
the eighty-three-year-old political Islamic organization, which has 
been banned since 1954.

Adel Adbel-Maqsoud, a spokesperson for the fifty-member defense team 
(which is made up of lawyers belonging to various political groups 
including liberals, leftists, Christians and women), said the latest 
clampdown “clearly was aimed at a carefully selected group of 
Brotherhood leaders in order to send a message that the government will 
not tolerate any protests after the September 11 attacks in America.” 
He went on to say, “It was not a coincident that the arrests took place 
almost at the same time the United States decided to expand its 
crackdown on Islamic groups to include the Brotherhood.”

On August 1, the Supreme Military Court announced their ruling, 
sentencing sixteen of the Brotherhood members. Five defendants were 
charged with having leading roles in the organization and were each 
given five years in prison. Another eleven were each given three years 
in prison for being members of the Brotherhood. Six defendants were 
acquitted.  Between May and August of this year, 300 Brotherhood 
members have been arrested; they all face similar charges and trials as 
those above.

During another military trial of suspected Islamists, a police officer 
said, “Now they [the US and Britain] are praising what we are doing. 
But even our military trials are better then those held in the United 
States. The trials in the US will be secret, while ours are 
open—because we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Egypt is not only cracking down on Islamists, they are also cracking 
down on leftists.  This can be seen in the Saabeddin Ibrahim case.  
Ibrahim was a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo 
and a NGO activist. He is 62 years old and both an Egyptian and 
American citizen. Ibrahim is the founder and director of the Ibn 
Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which was closed after his 
arrest.

The government charged Ibrahim and twenty-seven other people connected 
to the Center with several crimes, including accepting foreign funds 
without government approval. The foreign donor in question was the 
European Union, which provided money to promote political awareness and 
participation in Egypt’s general election. Other charges included 
compiling false reports about the status of Copts in Egypt, attempting 
to embezzle money and making plans to bribe radio and television 
officials to broadcast programs about the Ibn Khaldun Center. The State 
Security Court made a decision on May 21 that Sasdeddin Ibrahim would 
serve seven years in prison.

Battle for Aid
President George W. Bush opposed new aid to Egypt in protest against 
the sentencing of Saadeddin Ibrahim. On August 15, the White House 
announced that its decision will not affect existing aid programs to 
Egypt, which equal almost $2 billion a year in economic and military 
assistance. The decision by Bush will prevent Egypt from receiving the 
extra $130 million it had been seeking to compliment an Israeli request 
for $200 million to fight terrorism. Egypt traditionally receives aid 
that equals about two-thirds of any new aid the US gives to Israel.

Secretary General of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights Hafez 
Abu-Sae’da (Saadeddin Ibrahim’s good friend and one of his most vocal 
supporters) told Al-Ahram Weekly that he denounces international 
pressure when there is a “double standard” in its application. He 
emphasized that while the US has a right to defend Saadeddin Ibrahim as 
an American citizen, it should not use aid as a tool to pressure 
countries, “especially since Israel enjoys the support and assistance 
of the US despite its flagrant violations of international human rights 
laws.” The different responces evoked by the cases of Dr. Riad 
Abdel-Karim and Saabeddin Ibrahim are a clear example of this double 
standard.

With the US supporting repressive governments throughout the Arab world 
in the name of the “War on Terrorism,” the double standard in aid 
support is telling. The US will always give an endless supply of 
economic aid to Israel even when they detain American citizens. The 
“War on Terrorism” has promoted the repression of dissidents the world 
over. As Bahieddin Hassan, the head of the Cairo Center for Human 
Rights studies, said, “In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, 
the US’s ‘War on Terrorism’ has come at the expense of civil liberties, 
leading to a set back in democracy world wide. Thus, it is impossible 
for any human rights activist to accept the US as an advocate of 
democracy.”

     All content Copyleft © 2002 by The Alarm! Newspaper. Except where 
noted otherwise, this material may be copied and distributed freely in 
whole or in part by anyone except where used for commercial purposes or 
by government agencies.

-----
The Alarm! Newspaper
a local weekly newspaper for an engaged populace

http://www.the-alarm.com/
info at the-alarm.com
P.O. Box 1205, Santa Cruz, CA 95061
(831) 429-NEWS - office
(831) 420-1498 - fax