January 1994, Page 60

Human Rights

By R. Clemente Holder

Middle East Watch Criticizes Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Clinton

Middle East Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch, has issued reports critical of Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon. The New York-based organization also strongly criticized a reported U. S. role in suppression of Middle East protests against the Sept. 13 PLO-Israel accord.

Material in the first of the three reports, entitled "Iraq: Background on Human Rights Conditions, 1984-1992," issued in August 1993, was gathered in July and August 1992 from Iraqi victims, eyewitnesses and family members currently living in Syria and Jordan, according to the human rights organization.

Most of the Iraqis interviewed had left their country in 1991, and the interviews marked the first time they could speak freely about abuses they or their relatives had endured, or that they had witnessed. The first part of the MEW report examines methods used by the Saddam Hussain regime to maintain control of Baghdad and southern Iraq after post-Gulf war uprisings were crushed in March 1991. The second section consists of detailed testimony about human rights abuses from 1984 to 1989.

The Middle East Watch report on Kuwait, issued in September 1993, deplores the dissolution of all unlicensed organizations ordered by the Kuwaiti government on Aug. 6. Especially targeted, according to Middle East Watch, were groups probing the fate of Kuwaitis who disappeared during the Iraqi occupation and are believed either to be dead or still held in Iraq, and human rights groups, including the Kuwaiti Association to Defend War Victims, Kuwait's main non-governmental human rights organization.

"The closure is a clear violation of the universally recognized right of free peaceful association, a principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Middle East Watch declared. "Most immediately affected by the closure are families of the disappeared Kuwaitis. So are victims of human rights abuses committed since the liberation of Kuwait in February 1991. . ."

The MEW report calls the Kuwaiti government's action "a serious reversal of the significant steps that Kuwait has taken towards restoration of democracy since its liberation. " The report added that it "puts an end to the pioneering work that Kuwaiti human rights advocates have played in the region. "

The third MEW report criticized the killing of seven men and one woman on Sept. 13 in Beirut as they demonstrated against the accord on principles of peace being signed that day at the White House in Washington, DC. The demonstration had been called by Hezbollah, an Iranian funded Shi'i Muslim extremist group, despite a mid-August Lebanese government ban on "all assemblies and processions. "

MEW called on the Lebanese government "to rescind its ban on peaceful demonstrations" and conduct "a full and independent investigation" to determine "responsibility for the deaths and injuries of peaceful demonstrators on Sept. 13." The U.S. human rights organization was especially critical of "troublesome" reports of a telephone call allegedly placed by U.S. President Bill Clinton to Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad on Sept. 15.

"It is especially dismaying that President Clinton should have called President Assad to request that he silence Palestinian critics of the peace accord between Israel and the PLO," the MEW report said. "The Syrian government has had a bloody history of suppressing political dissent. Peace will indeed be hollow if it is going to be built on canceling civil and political rights, including the right to free expression."

The three reports can be obtained from Middle East Watch, 485 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10017-6104, phone (212) 972-8400, fax (212) 972-0905.

Amnesty Update on "Death Squads"

Amnesty International issued a report on Oct. 20 detailing death squad activities in countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa that have resulted in tens of thousands of disappearances and political murders. The offenders are no longer just military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the London-based human rights organization charged.

Some offenders are U.S. allies. Among violators named were Turkey and India which, the report said, "pay lip service to human rights on the one hand, but kill on the other."

U.N. Condemns Iran

The United Nations has condemned the government of Iran for mistreatment of religious minorities, particularly members of the Baha'i sect, and for hit squad attacks against Iranian political dissidents abroad, particularly members of the principal opposition group, the People's Mojahedin of Iran.

The December resolution, sponsored by Iran's major European trading partners as well as the United States, cited "the high number of executions, cases of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment [and] the absence of guarantees of due process of law."

Saudi Arabia Warns Critics

Saudi Arabia, which recently announced an amnesty agreement with Shi'i Muslim critics abroad, has warned ultra-conservative critics not to oppose the Kingdom's modernization programs.

Members of the Shi'i Muslim "Reform Movement" said they were halting publication of their newsletter, Arabian Peninsula, which had been distributed from London. In return, The New York Times reported, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz has agreed to allow the critics to return home and the Saudi government has promised to reissue passports to those whose passports had been confiscated. Shi'i Muslims in Saudi Arabia number about 700,000, concentrated almost exclusively in the country's Eastern Province, in a population of more than 12 million Saudis and an additional large number of non-Saudi residents.

The New York Times also reported that Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah Bin Abdul Aziz, heir to the Saudi throne, in an Oct. 24 address to deans of the Islamic Imam Mohammad Bin Saud University, considered a bastion of religious conservatism, warned that "many Muslims have distorted the image of Islam in the view of the West and the East, where many people now look upon a Muslim as a terrorist and a murderer."

The purpose of the address, a member of the royal family told Times correspondent Youssef M. Ibrahim, was to warn the country's religious establishment against opposing modernization introduced in recent years.

"The idea was to say this is the red line," the Saudi informant told the Times. "We have instituted these reforms, and they are not reversible."

Egyptian Court

Egyptian human rights activists hailed a civilian court's acquittal last August of 24 defendants charged with the assassination of the speaker of Egypt's parliament and three bodyguards in October 1990. The presiding judge said he and his two fellow judges discounted statements of two witnesses arrested as suspects and threw out the confessions of two defendants, including the one charged with carrying out the shooting, because there was evidence police used torture used to obtain them.

"The security system has to learn that when they torture someone, the country cannot take their confessions," said human rights worker Hisham Mubarak. However, Interior Minister Mohammed Hassan Al Alfi rejected the torture allegations by human rights groups as "false, fabricated and mere lies."

The Egyptian minister added that such reports "are helping those evil people and terrorists." Since the acquittals, there have been two assassination attempts in November against Al Alfi and against Egypt's prime minister. Neither Egyptian official was seriously injured, but in the second attempt, involving a car bomb near a girls' school that exploded as the prime minister drove by, one schoolgirl was killed and a number injured.

R. Clemente Holder is a writer on human rights and environmental affairs.