Robert Fisk: The Arabs have their gulags too
[Robert Fisk is The Independent's Middle East correspondent.]
We know all about Guantanamo. We know about "black" prisons. You only have to read the evidence from the latest drum-head "trial" at Guantanamo – a man called Khadr, arrested by the Americans for killing a US soldier at the age of 15, found chained in a tiny cell at Bagram by an American medic, hooded and crying – to know what Western "justice" still means.
But let's flip the curtain a bit and take a look at the other side. For there are Guantanamos galore in the Muslim world and, by and large, we don't care a damn about them.
How many Independent readers can name a single man imprisoned in the Arab gulags? How many tourists to Egypt know that in the Tora prison complex, prison guards have forced inmates to rape each other? How many men have been "renditioned" to Egypt and Syria and Morocco by the Americans or by our Muslim "allies"? So this week, let's be specific. Take the cases of Bahaa Mustafa Joughel, Syrian identity card number 01020288992, and Mohamed Aiman Abo Attot, Syrian ID no 01020265346. Haven't heard of them, have you?
Here, according to their families, are their stories. Bahaa Joughel, born in Damascus in 1976, is married with two children and used to live in Pakistan with his family, his sister and her daughters. A partial cripple, Joughel worked on computers and ran a small IT company from his home. Again according to his family, he engaged in no political activities. On 30 January 2002, Pakistani security police raided their home in Islamabad, apparently under the orders of a US officer. Joughel disappeared for five months, his family told only that he was being "investigated" by the Americans. But the Joughel family was later shocked to learn that he had been "renditioned" to Syria scarcely three months after his arrest – on 4 May 2002, to be precise – and jailed at the "Palestine" branch of Syrian military intelligence. This institution makes the adjective "notorious" irrelevant. He spent 20 months in underground solitary confinement – tortured in his grave-like concrete cabin, his sight damaged by his confinement, just as Canadian Maher Arar was after the Americans sent him to Syria around the same time – before being transferred to Sednaya prison. He was released on 12 February 2005, but was forbidden to leave Syria and then re-arrested on Christmas Eve the same year. No charges have ever been made against him...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
We know all about Guantanamo. We know about "black" prisons. You only have to read the evidence from the latest drum-head "trial" at Guantanamo – a man called Khadr, arrested by the Americans for killing a US soldier at the age of 15, found chained in a tiny cell at Bagram by an American medic, hooded and crying – to know what Western "justice" still means.
But let's flip the curtain a bit and take a look at the other side. For there are Guantanamos galore in the Muslim world and, by and large, we don't care a damn about them.
How many Independent readers can name a single man imprisoned in the Arab gulags? How many tourists to Egypt know that in the Tora prison complex, prison guards have forced inmates to rape each other? How many men have been "renditioned" to Egypt and Syria and Morocco by the Americans or by our Muslim "allies"? So this week, let's be specific. Take the cases of Bahaa Mustafa Joughel, Syrian identity card number 01020288992, and Mohamed Aiman Abo Attot, Syrian ID no 01020265346. Haven't heard of them, have you?
Here, according to their families, are their stories. Bahaa Joughel, born in Damascus in 1976, is married with two children and used to live in Pakistan with his family, his sister and her daughters. A partial cripple, Joughel worked on computers and ran a small IT company from his home. Again according to his family, he engaged in no political activities. On 30 January 2002, Pakistani security police raided their home in Islamabad, apparently under the orders of a US officer. Joughel disappeared for five months, his family told only that he was being "investigated" by the Americans. But the Joughel family was later shocked to learn that he had been "renditioned" to Syria scarcely three months after his arrest – on 4 May 2002, to be precise – and jailed at the "Palestine" branch of Syrian military intelligence. This institution makes the adjective "notorious" irrelevant. He spent 20 months in underground solitary confinement – tortured in his grave-like concrete cabin, his sight damaged by his confinement, just as Canadian Maher Arar was after the Americans sent him to Syria around the same time – before being transferred to Sednaya prison. He was released on 12 February 2005, but was forbidden to leave Syria and then re-arrested on Christmas Eve the same year. No charges have ever been made against him...