Aqabat Jaber: Passing Through. Directed by Eyal Sivan. Produced and distributed by Dune Vision, 1987.
Rissala… Min Zamen al-Harb (Letter from a Time of War). Directed by Borhan Alaouie. Produced and distributed by France Media, 1986.
Zahrat al-Kindoul: Women of South Lebanon. Directed by Jean Chamoun and Mai Masri. Produced by MTC Lebanon, 1986. Distributed in the US by Camera News Inc.
Three recent documentaries, one dealing with the Palestinians and two with the war in Lebanon, were among the films screened at the Cinema du Reel, an international festival of ethnographic and sociological films, held in Paris this March.
Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism — Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).
A ragged, barefoot boy, hands clutched behind his back, stands witness to the scene before him. The small boy in the cartoon is Naji al-‘Ali, popular cartoonist, at age 10, when he was expelled from his native Palestine to Lebanon in 1948. Naji used to say that the boy was a symbol of the Palestinian people and, more personally, of his aborted youth. “They tell little children to turn their backs, but I don’t turn. The boy is the age I was when I left Palestine, and he will not grow up until I return.”
The German Greens are having a hard time defining a Middle East policy. No wonder. Besides the usual difficulties of the whole European left, they are German.
How hard it could be was brought home with a thud by the six Greens who toured Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the occupied territories in December 1984. Trip leaders Jürgen Reents, of the Hamburg left wing of the party, and Gabriele Gottwald, the Greens’ most dedicated Third World solidarity militant, were startled and hurt when the Israeli press distorted their views and impugned their motives.
He does not wish to be identified because he believes that the long arm of the Syrian government will reach him anywhere in the world. Take his word for it, he said, he knew them better than anyone else. He ought to; he was once a censor in the ministry of information. He is also a writer and journalist who would like to continue as such.
Censorship as we know it now in Syria began with the first coup d’état in 1947 which was led by Husni al-Zaim, and which was followed by a series of coups. With each new coup, censorship increased and was further tightened. By the time of the last coup, led by Hafiz al-Asad in 1970, the whole state structure was transformed into one large intelligence and censorship apparatus.
Do you, too, believe that I betrayed my motherhood when I left you, against my will, to go to prison?…. I have read an article by the Moroccan writer Hadiya Sa‘id…she expressed a point of view maintained by some of our friends who love me and are concerned about you. She says that I must cease my political work and leave it to Husayn, for the sake of you children…. [1]
So writes Farida al-Naqqash to her daughter in 1981, during her second confinement in the Barrages women’s prison just north of Cairo.
Just after midnight on May 15, 1986, some 75 Special Forces of the Public Security Department stormed a dormitory at Yarmuk University to put an end to a student demonstration. They tear-gassed and clubbed the students with “a zeal that bordered on the ruthless,” according to witnesses. At least three and probably six students — men and women — were killed in the melee, scores were injured and hundreds detained. Three of those killed were Palestinians.
On Wednesday, June 16, 1987, police units entered the offices of the Jordanian Writers’ Association, ordered all writers and employees out, then searched and sealed the premises. The order to disband the Association came directly from the desk of Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifa‘i. Under the martial law in effect since 1967, he is also the military governor general of Jordan. The Ministry of Information claimed that JWA “members had gone beyond the Association’s aims by using the JWA as a meeting place to serve their own selfish interests.” [1]
Nabil al-Hilali has been active as a labor and civil liberties lawyer in Egypt since the 1950s. He serves on the executive committees of the Egyptian Bar Association and the International Committee of Democratic Jurists. He ran as an independent in the parliamentary elections of April 1987. In 1986 he was acquitted after a long trail on charges of being a member of the illegal Egyptian Communist Party. His defense in that trial has been published in Beirut as a small book called In Defense of Liberty. Joe Stork interviewed him in Cairo in February 1987.
How long have you been engaged in this work of defending workers and political prisoners?
38 years, sometimes as a lawyer and sometimes as a defendant myself.
Sporting bleached blond hair, black stockings, heavy mascara and mauve-tinted lenses, some 30 homosexuals from Istanbul began a hunger strike at Taksim Park on April 27, the first day of Ramadan. Nearly all of them transvestites, and all proudly wearing bright pink boutonnieres, they said they would continue “until arbitrary police violence ends.” Eighteen of the strikers claim to be recent victims of police violence, and they have medical certificates to back them up.
“Unless you allow our sons, the journalists that you beat up, to come back here, you will have to move my dead body from this spot. They say there is democracy in this country — where? As if what they do to our people inside weren’t enough, they drag and beat us up, 70-year-old mothers and all. If I could, I’d pull up my skirt and show you my bruises…. We are afraid of nothing!”
Political prisoners in Turkey have long confronted a chilling reality: once arrested, they face almost certain torture. Based on thousands of reports over many years, Amnesty International has concluded that “anybody detained in the country for political reasons is at great risk of being tortured, and very few detainees are not subjected to some form of ill-treatment in police stations, security forces’ interrogation and detention centres and prisons.” This has been true under all Turkish administrations, military or civilian, since the early 1970s.
In early April, the president of the banned Turkish Peace Association invited friends from END (European Nuclear Disarmament) and other peace groups across Europe to join him and the TPA executive in Istanbul in celebrating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the TPA. They planned to hold a public peace forum and a press conference.
For a few hours on Saturday morning last June 27, a small antechamber in Tunis’s main court building was filled to capacity with a veritable who’s who of Tunisia’s opposition. At any other time and venue, those present would have risked arrest for unlawful assembly. But there — beneath a large discolored print of President Habib Bourguiba in lawyer’s garb — they milled around without restrictions. Also in the room were a representative of Amnesty International, four or five journalists from the BBC and international news agencies, an observer from the International Commission of Jurists and a junior official from the American embassy.
The driving force behind the original Algerian Human Rights League is ‘Abd al-Nur ‘Ali Yahya, 66, a lawyer who has spent all of his adult life struggling for democratic causes in Algeria. He began as a school teacher in his native Kabylia, joined the Algerian People’s Party in 1945 and the National Liberation Front (FLN) 10 years later A founding member of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), he was arrested by the French in 1956 and spent the next five years in detention. Upon his release, he became secretary-general of the UGTA. After independence, he was elected deputy from Tizi-Ouzou. For a time he served as a minister in the Boumedienne government, but he resigned in 1968 and took up law.
The recent history of the struggle for human rights in the Arab world is marked by some modest success, but the task remains enormous. The region is a disaster area in terms of human rights. Irrespective of the type of government, ideological coloration or foreign policy orientation, whether pro-West or pro-Soviet, conservative or “progressive,” theocratic or secular, nearly all regimes have displayed a thorough disregard for individual human rights. Most have been reluctant to cooperate with international human rights organizations; most have made it a criminal offense to disseminate information about human rights violations inside the country or abroad; most still have not ratified treaties such as the United Nations human rights charters.
Ibn Sina hospital, in a beautiful suburb of Rabat, is Morocco’s finest medical facility. It is the major teaching hospital of Morocco’s top medical school, a place where Moroccan and foreign medical experts carry on research and perform medical care at the highest level.
Not long ago, a patient jumped to his death from the top floor of Ibn Sina. His body bore signs of torture. A special section of the hospital, it turned out, had been used for years to detain and perhaps even to interrogate political prisoners.
Twenty Years After: Other Realities
The Report devoted to “The June War: Twenty Years After” (MER 146), while a commendable effort, falls short in confronting other realities befalling the Palestinians, especially in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Would that the situation was merely a confrontation between the Israeli state (particularly in the form of the IDF) and the Palestinians who are living there! Things, unfortunately, are not that simple.
Dilip Hiro, Iran Under the Ayatollahs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
Although this book is thin on analysis, it is filled with valuable details about political and economic developments during the first five years of the Islamic Republic. It is thus a good source book for information about the drafting of the constitution, the Mojahedin struggle against the regime, the cultural revolution, the impact of the war on the domestic economy and relations with the West.
J. E. Peterson, Defending Arabia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).
