Resisting Carceralism and Fighting for Freedom—A Roundtable

As part of MER issue 312, “Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams,” MERIP editorial committee co-chair Lisa Hajjar and guest editor Basil Farraj organized a roundtable with four activists: Sahar Francis, Executive Director of the Palestinian organization Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; Asim Qureshi, Research Director of the UK-based organization CAGE International; Kaouther Ferjani, Tunisian-British activist; and Yara Sallam, Egyptian lawyer, feminist researcher and activist. They discussed their anti-carceral work, perspectives on prison policies, the challenges of life after prison and the importance of building transnational solidarity networks and campaigns. The responses have been edited and organized for clarity.

 

Can you tell us about yourself and how you got involved in anti-carceral work?

Sahar Francis: I’m a lawyer by training. I joined Addameer first as a volunteer in 1996, then as a full-time staff lawyer in 1998. I became the executive director in 2006. Addameer is a Palestinian non-governmental organization that was established by former prisoners to guarantee free legal aid for political prisoners. The organization’s work has expanded to include the documentation of torture and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, international advocacy and collaboration with global anti-prison movements.

I’m usually embarrassed to talk about my personal experiences, maybe because of the huge suffering of prisoners and their families. In 2001, in the middle of the second intifada, I was charged with a very serious offense of supporting a detainee to hide evidence. For the whole period of my trial, which took six years, I was banned from representing detainees under interrogation. Ultimately, I was acquitted, but the Israelis used my case to justify banning lawyer visits, claiming that Palestinian lawyers are supporting terrorists. In 2021, Israel declared Addameer and five other Palestinian NGOs “terrorist organizations” as part of a broader attack on Palestinian civil society. 

Asim Qureshi: I’m British-Pakistani from South London. For the last 21 years, the focus of my research and working life has been the continued detention, disappearances and torture of those caught up in the global “war on terror” launched by the United States in response to 9/11. This journey began in 2002. I was all set to do a master’s degree in corporate law, but I was radicalized by images of Muslim men on their knees in orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo Bay. On the first day of my MA program at SOAS, I changed my courses to study international human rights and humanitarian law. That same month, a group of friends initiated a project called Cage Prisoners (now CAGE)—which they created to support families of detained and released survivors—and asked me to get involved. For the last 15 years, I’ve also worked as a consultant with legal teams who are defending individuals facing trial in the Guantánamo military commissions.

Because I consistently refuse to condemn acts of political violence, choosing instead to try and contextualize that violence, in 2015, I was attacked by the British press. The British government and media have been consistently attacking me and my organization. In 2020, I edited a book, I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security [published by Manchester University Press], to present and explain this position.

Kaouther Ferjani: I was born in Tunisia in the 1980s. During that time, my country was a so-called success story in the region because the population was highly educated and many were middle class. Unemployment didn’t seem to be a pressing issue and women’s rights were seemingly ahead of any other country in the region. But Islamic religious expression was policed—for example, wearing hijabs and having beards were prohibited—and political dissent was not tolerated.

In 1987, just after Zine Ben Ali’s coup [that ousted Habib Bourguiba], my father, Said Ferjani, was arrested in front of me when I was just three years old. I attended most prison visits with my mother, as well as prison protests and even some meetings where she fiercely advocated for my father and other Islamist prisoners. In 1989, my father escaped and went to the United Kingdom as a political refugee. We joined him a year later. He remained dedicated to advocating for prisoners in Tunisia. I grew up attending weekly protests outside the Tunisian embassy in London demanding the release of political prisoners—some of whom have been tortured to death, forcibly disappeared or extrajudicially killed by the state.

Following the Arab uprisings [in 2010–11 in which Ben Ali was ousted and fled the country], my father returned to Tunisia to witness and contribute to a new and unfolding democratic process. Unfortunately, in 2021, Tunisia succumbed to a coup [elected President Kais Saied dissolved the parliament and assumed dictatorial powers], and the democratic gains made over the last ten years were lost. My father was arrested and imprisoned again in February 2023. Since then, I have been advocating for my father and on behalf of other political prisoners.

Yara Sallam: I was raised with conversations about my grandfather who served seven years in prison during Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s presidency for being a communist. It was quite normalized to think that political activities could land you in prison. In 2014, I was imprisoned for participating in a peaceful protest. It was then that I realized that I had never thought critically about this institution before. During the 15 months I spent in prison, I realized that the problem is not only about political prisoners or women who are jailed because of debt, for instance. The prison itself is an inherently patriarchal and unfair institution. During my time in captivity I met sex workers, drug dealers and women who killed because they were forced to marry older men or who were in abusive marriages and couldn’t get a divorce. I was detained with six other protesters next to the death penalty ward. For me, the cruelest thing about being in prison was hearing the women scream right before guards took them to be hung. I knew their stories. And I felt like if the underlying reasons they killed people were resolved, these women would not have killed and would not be killed.

I realized prison is not a solution but rather an additional harm inflicted on society and individuals. This thinking made me a prison abolitionist. There isn’t an abolitionist movement in Egypt beyond, traditionally speaking, demands and campaigns to free political prisoners and campaigns on behalf of people who are imprisoned for small debts. I wouldn’t even say that there’s a conceptualization for why the prison is actually a patriarchal institution and why we should be against it as a matter of principle. There’s so much to learn from transformative justice and restorative justice movements elsewhere.

 

What are some of the challenges you have faced in your anti-carceral activism?

Sahar: When I started working with prisoners 25 years ago, Israeli interrogators used physical and harsh methods of torture. After the 1999 Israeli High Court of Justice ruling [that prohibited the routine use of violent tactics], I witnessed how torture methods were developed to avoid leaving physical marks. During the second intifada, we witnessed all the violence and killings and the abuses that the detainees faced and continue to face.

But nothing compares to the period since October 2023. The techniques of torture are more violent than ever, and the level of humiliation Palestinians are subjected to by the Israeli army and police inside prisons, especially Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, is unbelievable. I think it’s very important to highlight what is going on now with the genocide in Gaza. Our organization is facing unprecedented challenges because more than 13,000 people have been arrested, including nearly 9,200 from the West Bank and 3,000 to 4,000 from the Gaza Strip, many of whom have been forcibly disappeared. The main challenge we are facing is the level of torture and degrading treatment. We have never documented such a huge number of deaths inside Israeli prisons.

My organization documented the experiences of the detainees from the Gaza Strip. Every prison guard and soldier working in the Israeli carceral system wants to break the souls of Palestinian detainees and humiliate them. I have never seen a Palestinian detainee broken in such a way, not even the most difficult cases I worked on previously. Historically, the torture and violence would make detainees more powerful, more resilient. But the ongoing humiliating treatment at the level of hygiene, access to showers, not allowing detainees to change their clothes for seven months, the odor that you start to smell from yourself, the way prisoners are being starved—all these conditions are beyond description. For me, it is very, very shocking to see how humanity could reach such a low level.

Kaouther: For the past year and a half, I’ve taken up activism full-time, especially with regards to my father and other political prisoners. As part of my work, I have been constantly traveling the world. I have been to the United States several times and made numerous contacts there with politicians and political staffers. We were supposed to travel there again in November/December 2023, but I refused to go. I have paused my lobbying work with western governments—in particular the United States—because of the ongoing war on Palestine.

As far as I’m concerned, my father is safe. I do not need to talk to people who could possibly use the Tunisian situation to cleanse their hands from what is going on in Palestine. I also forbade anyone else from my group to go to DC, and for this stance, I lost numerous contacts with people who could have helped me. These days, my attention is focused on human rights organizations, particularly those based in Tunisia, to criticize their discriminatory neglect of Islamist prisoners.

Sahar: I would like to tell Kaouther how important and essential her decision is. What has been unfolding in the Gaza Strip is not just about Palestine. The fact that this genocide is continuing for more than ten months is because of the decisions of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and all other complicit countries.

Asim: I also want to respond to what Kaouther said about refusing to meet with people because of their proximity to the genocide in Gaza. It is important that we don’t resign ourselves to the tepid politics of symbolic gestures, like meeting politicians or lobbyists, if the implication is that we are normalizing what they are doing elsewhere. As activists, we are constantly being drip fed this narrative that in order to be relevant, you have to have a seat at some table or another. But as one friend recently said to me, “You know we are the meal, right?” We have to remind ourselves at all times that we never really get a seat at the table because, if we’re there, it’s because we’re getting eaten. We have to maintain that view at all times.

Whenever Palestine, in whatever way, is being raised and is flagged in the courts or in any part of the system, we have to do the hard work in terms of defending the ethics of what Palestinians are fighting for, which is taking on a settler-colonial, genocidal apartheid state. We have to listen to what Palestinians are saying, take that line and then carry it forward. Because of our work, we get called extremists and terrorist sympathizers by various governments and counter-terrorism experts and God knows who else. But that’s part of the work.

 

Drawing on your experiences, can you talk about the challenges of life after captivity?

Asim: In some ways dealing with detained individuals is easier than dealing with released individuals. The detained have only one real need, which is to be released. Maybe they also need some amelioration of their conditions. You’re constantly trying to make the conditions of confinement better. I mostly deal with Muslim political prisoners who have a few other demands, such as having the right to congregational prayer. The release part is what I think is the hardest. And I think that we, as a community of activists and lawyers, have not done enough quality work on caring for and supporting released prisoners—because the emphasis has been on the reality and conditions of detention itself.

In our work with people released from Guantánamo, we give them a little bit of money—maybe £5,000 [roughly $6,500]—as a welcome home gesture to help them get settled. But the challenges for them are intense and often insurmountable. I can give you one example. Recently, when I met one of the released Guantánamo detainees, during the first minute of my interview with this man, he tells me, “I have come back home, and I want to be with my wife. She has waited for me for twenty years, but I cannot get it up.” It just struck me that whatever problems released prisoners are facing, that is front and center in their lives. They are stuck in this new prison that is constructed in freedom, but they’re still living with the continuities of torture. Torture is never over because people have to live with it forever. If you don’t have an adequate program to deal with that continuity of torture, released people can end up hurting those they love the most. Who do they take their frustration out on? I’ve heard this again and again and again: Oh, he’s so nice, he’s a family man, he’s so kind to strangers. But he’s an absolute monster at home.

The Rabbani brothers [Abdul and Mohammed, who were incarcerated in Guantánamo for over 20 years and were released in February 2023] are a particularly good example of another kind of challenge after being released. They’re having a very difficult time. They’re ethnically Rohingya, but they were released to Pakistan—a country that is not their ethnic origin, and they don’t have any nationality there. They don’t speak the language, and they don’t have connections. I think almost every person who has been released to a foreign environment has said to me, “I wish I was back in Guantánamo.”

We lawyers and activists tend to think of release as a success whereas it’s actually the beginning of a whole new series of traumas. For example, not having met a child for 16 years because the child was born after you were kidnapped. There is nothing—no amount of money or resources and love and affection and family connections and friendship structures—that can bridge that gap. We employed Mansoor Adayfi, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee from Yemen, to specifically play this role within our organization. He maintains contact with all of the community of former Guantánamo detainees to see what their needs are and to figure out how we can help. For example, one of the men who was released to Bermuda needed a prosthetic limb. [In 2009, four Chinese Uighurs were sent to Bermuda.] We ran a crowdfund campaign to purchase that prosthetic limb. That’s the kind of thing that we are able to do. But we need to work with other organizations like Reprieve and partner charities because the British government keeps shutting down our bank accounts.

Yara: What Asim said resonates with me. Nothing prepared me for coming out of prison, even though I was just there for 15 months. A lot of people did not understand why I had such a difficult time after I got out. Even my mother did not understand. She would say, “But you weren’t tortured like my father was, and he came out just fine. Why are you not well?”

I spent three years feeling completely abnormal. All my privileges, all of the knowledge that I have, all of the experience with therapy were not enough. Imagine how the experience would be for someone who has no resources, no support network and no human rights organizations to fall back to. It is crucial that we focus on reintegration and rehabilitation of prisoners following their release.

There was a Syrian woman who was in prison [in Egypt] for 25 years. She was caught smuggling cocaine from Syria to Egypt. When she was about to be released, she didn’t know where to go. The revolution in Syria happened, and she had lost contact with her family. She didn’t want to get out of prison. For her, prison is home. It’s where she has friends. It’s where she listened to Umm Kulthoum while working. It’s where she lived her life for 25 years.

Sahar: For us as Palestinians, because it’s about the political conflict, Palestinian society treats prisoners as heroes. For this reason, I think many people who need support after they are released end up without it. This might be because people who are thought of as heroes are hesitant to ask for help because of how the community might potentially judge them. In the last ten to 15 years, however, awareness regarding these issues has increased.

But imagine the experience of people from Gaza who are released in this period after suffering so much trauma in prison. How will they deal with their own experiences after they return to a devastated community that is facing such violent and horrible circumstances? Upon their release, some of the prisoners may discover that their whole family was assassinated. Some of them will not find any trace of their homes and neighborhoods. I cannot even imagine the resources that we need to face and deal with such a number of affected people.

 

How would you describe the function of carceralism in your societies?

Kaouther: Before the revolution, Tunisia had one of the highest police per capita rates in the world. Everyone knew about prison. Prison is central to so many songs and films. Even if your family was not political, you would know someone in prison. One of your cousins might have been to prison just because they wore a hijab or someone saw them praying. Considering that we are not Palestine and we don’t have some foreign entity doing this to us, it’s kind of weird that prisons have been so embedded in our culture.

The police state created a culture of fear and suspicion and alienation. It could be that you do not talk about anything in front of your family because you don’t know who is going to snitch. For the police state, it wasn’t enough to send people to prison. It wasn’t good enough that you lost your livelihood. They made sure you lose your family and any kind of support network you could possibly have.  Many people became estranged from their families or distanced themselves from religion because they saw the impact any kind of association with prisoners would have on their lives.

Yara: The moment I stepped into prison—although I grew up hearing prison stories—I understood how states use prisons to scare us by justifying imprisonment as good for society and dehumanizing those they send inside. Thankfully, I wasn’t tortured, but I was so scared of the other women [prisoners], which was very strange for someone like me because I think of myself as a feminist. I came to understand that the state hides people behind bars to scare us about them. I now understand that they were not the problem; they were scapegoats to justify carceralism. Sex work should not be criminalized. Drug use should not be criminalized. Egypt is such a conservative society, you cannot even say “sex worker” because it’s not considered work to most people, including people in a lot of human rights organizations.

There was a huge divide in 2013 during the coup because some so-called human rights organizations would not defend Muslim Brothers or people belonging to other political Islamist groups. The same with other groups, such as women who are imprisoned for posting videos because they violated social norms or people belonging to the LGBTQ community. These are divisive factors within the human rights scene.

My personal belief is that we’re all born equal and we’re all born good, and then things happen and the way to correct things is not by putting people behind bars. That makes everything worse. After I got out, I started reading Angela Davis [an American scholar and prison abolitionist] and other writings from the American context because I didn’t feel like there’s even a space for this conversation to happen in Egypt. A lot of [Egyptian] feminists argue for harsher prison sentences and harsher criminalization for sexual violence—understandably so. But that has been the dominant discourse around prison in Egypt: After the coup in 2013, a lot of people were calling for the release of anyone except Muslim Brotherhood detainees and other Islamists. If you are on the good side of things, you would call for everyone’s release. That’s actually the protest that I got arrested for—we were calling for the release of all political prisoners across the entire political spectrum.

Asim: It’s impossible to reform prisons without restructuring society. The prison is the byproduct of structural injustices we see daily. My organization is always cussed out by people who say, “you guys are criticizing the government but what are your solutions? Why don’t you present an alternative?” In response, we wrote a report, Beyond PREVENT: A Real Alternative to Securitised Policies. [PREVENT is a British government program of surveillance and profiling that ostensibly aims to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.] Our report outlines clear actions and a framework that would help Britain foster healthy and safe societies without antagonizing communities. This includes an end to securitizing and militarizing policies that affect society and a fix to the National Health Service, including provisions to expand mental health services and restoring funding for primary care and provision of services. There is a need to address structural problems if we want to address the real issues in our societies.

Kaouther: When my father first went to prison [in 1987], he was in a cell with 120 people, mostly just normal [i.e., not political] criminals. And the message he would tell us would not just be about himself. He was talking about how unjust it was for some of them to be there and the conditions that they’re in. Like this one guy who was arrested for writing a bad check because he needed medicine for his mother, and now he was in prison and was too poor to have a lawyer, so he’s stuck indefinitely. After the revolution when my dad returned to Tunisia, he was working in the Ministry of Justice for a bit. He was trying to reform the whole bouncing check thing because he was disturbed that rich people can write one bad check for millions and get a couple of years. Meanwhile, someone poor will write a bad check for one dinar, five dinars and they mount up. The time in prison reflects the total amount of bad checks—for poor people who write several small-money checks, each one adds years to the sentence. My dad was trying to reduce that injustice.

Another issue in Tunisia relates to racism. I’m not saying Tunis was free of racism in the past, but they were getting there. For example, anti-Black racism was banned [in 2018]. Last year [February 21, 2023], when the new dictator [Saied] came out with that speech attacking Black Africans, it was very shocking. But it’s clear that he is looking for any scapegoat because of his own incompetence in running the country. And it’s intensified a lot of violence, not just at the hands of police but even some vigilantes who are searching for African migrants in Tunisia. This is how racism and demonization boost carceralism.

 

Many governments—including all Middle Eastern states—are carceral regimes, but as all of you have shown, the contexts are specific and varying. In light of these commonalities and variations, how important are transnational networks and solidarity campaigns in your work?

Sahar: Since the establishment of Addameer, we have been aware of the importance of sharing experiences and efforts in order to understand methods of torture, to raise awareness about techniques and strategies used by the oppressors. They [oppressor states] share as well: Israel is sharing information on torture techniques with the United States and other countries. Also, the technology of surveillance is an instrument of oppression, and Israel is a global leader in manufacturing and exporting this technology. This is why we—people who work on prisoners’ rights—should share experiences and engage in joint efforts in order to face and fight these carceral strategies. For us, it was very important to learn about the Kurdish experience [in Turkey], the Latin American experience [during the military dictatorships] and the kinds of carceral experiences different communities in the United States face. We should have joint campaigns against security companies that produce repressive surveillance techniques. We should campaign against the use of solitary confinement that prison systems implement to control prisoners. Isolation is a form of psychological torture, so it should be condemned as illegal. It’s very important to be aware of how isolation is implemented in US prisons, in Turkey, in Palestine and elsewhere. This is part of what we were trying to do as an organization.

Asim: I will come at this question about transnationalism from a different angle. The research I did for my latest book with Walaa Quisay, When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners [Pluto Press, 2024], compares the US and Egyptian carceral regimes. Egypt, which is a Muslim majority country, uses religion in order to harm its political prisoners, and the US uses religion to harm its political prisoners—especially those who are Muslims. As part of our research, Walaa interviewed Sheikh Muhammad al-Hasan al-Dido, the Mauritanian Islamic scholar based in Qatar, and asked how Islamic scholarship conceptualizes the space of the prison. Sheikh al-Dido said all detentions in countries like Egypt are political imprisonment because the system and the structure of the society itself are oppressive and unjust. Therefore, everything that emanates from the state is an injustice because there’s no justice within society—there is no social welfare, no adequate provision for poor people. Imprisonment actually flows and emanates from the lack of due care and responsibility that the state owes to its own citizenry.

Because the state cannot trust its own citizenry to be righteous, it has to militarize itself against them and surveil them. Whether it’s Egypt or the US, the state claims ownership of that central morality. If we take the role of the Grand Mufti of Al-Azhar, for example, his is the final signature on all executions that take place in Egypt. It’s really the state and the judges that are executing this individual, but they have this ceremonial process where the final stamp is that of the Grand Mufti. Why? Because they require a religious sanctification for everything they do. Punishment within these societies is understood as an exercise in righteousness—that the state is acting righteously and protecting society: When everything is treated as a security matter, anything we [the state] do is necessary.

When you actually strip things back and start asking what [Islamic] scholarship says about detention, there is a consensus that anything over one year is an act of oppression that is not compatible with sharia because it is considered to be a waste of life. What I am suggesting is that Islam can be deployed for a transnational campaign against long-term detention. This is a way of bringing in the idea of prison abolition. Calling for an end to all these detentions in the name of religion and righteousness would be a means of restructuring the state itself.

Yara: My answer relates to where I stand right now in my activism. This is pushing me to learn about activism in other contexts, like the Black Lives Matter movement, the campaign to defund the police and other global struggles against oppression and violence, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. I’m also trying to learn about what feminists did during apartheid in South Africa. I am eager to learn about what people before me did and how other feminists are suggesting different things. How do we envision a just society? I think having solid international networks that exchange ideas and campaigns is extremely important. Being in this space, being here today and speaking to all of you and listening to all of you is part of this solidarity.

 

This issue of Middle East Report, Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams, has been produced in partnership with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Security in Context.

 

This article appears in MER issue 312 “Carceral Realities & Freedom Dreams.”

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