Activists Protest Deteriorating Palestinian Conditions on Fifth Anniversary of Oslo Accord

By Jane Adas

On the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo peace accord, a coalition of groups including the Palestine Aid Society, The Committee for Democratic Palestine, and New Yorkers for a Just Middle East Peace sponsored a demonstration outside the Israeli mission to the United Nations. The purpose of the protest was to call attention to the fact that economic conditions and human rights have deteriorated for the Palestinians following the famous handshake.

Thousands of new Israeli settlements have been built in the 73 percent of the West Bank that is still under occupation while the Israeli army has demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes. Israel continues to confiscate Palestinian land for settlement expansion and for settler bypass roads. While Netanyahu holds Yasser Arafat personally responsible for every Palestinian act of violence, settler harassment continues unchecked. Frequent closures and Israel’s control of all movement of people and goods via its extensive system of checkpoints has nearly tripled the level of unemployment and greatly reduced the standard of living among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Among those addressing the crowd of approximately 70 people was Father George Makhlouf, an Orthodox priest who was born in West Jerusalem, forced to move to East Jerusalem in 1948, and from there to Ramallah in 1985. He remembered when, during the intifada, Israeli soldiers invaded his church, interrupted the service, and beat him. Father Makhlouf said that the Palestinian people are not the only ones frustrated and shocked by Binyamin Netanyahu’s stubbornness and U.S. leniency toward Israeli oppression, but also all people of good will who want the United States as well as Palestine to be free.

IAC Delegation to Sudan

A fact-finding delegation organized by the International Action Center (IAC) traveled to Khartoum, Sudan, Sept. 18 to 21, to examine the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, which was destroyed by 16 U.S. cruise missiles on Aug. 20. The six-member team included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former president of the Islamic Medical Association Dr. Mohammed Haque. On Oct. 14 at the IAC office in New York, team members reported their findings and showed the powerful documentary of their visit, Eyewitness Sudan.

President Bill Clinton justified the surprise attack by calling the Al-Shifa plant a clandestine chemical weapons facility. He cited as proof the presence of a chemical weapon ingredient, EPTA, in a soil sample secretly taken by an unnamed person at an unspecified time from just outside the plant. But John Parker, a member of the delegation and a journalist, pointed out that the plant is surrounded by concrete and that the same substance is manufactured in Milwaukee. Dr. B.A. Salam, the general manager of Sudan’s Central Medical Supply, told the delegation that “this was a packaging facility. It didn’t even have equipment to synthesize milk into cheese, much less make nerve gas.”

Another delegation member, IAC coordinator Sara Flounders, displayed antibiotic tablets and bottles of veterinary medicine that the team found while freely walking around the site. Flounders pointed out the particular importance of the Al-Shifa plant after the toll that seven years of U.S. sanctions had taken on the Sudanese people. She read a letter to the government of Sudan from the Eli Lily company regretting that it could not supply insulin because it had been denied a license under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department.

The plant, which was officially opened in June 1997, enabled Sudan to increase its self-sufficiency in medicine from 3 percent to 50 percent. It produced all of the country’s veterinary medicine and more than half of the drugs used to treat the country’s leading causes of death, including malaria, diabetes, and tuberculosis. According to Ramsey Clark, the U.S. could not have chosen a target more designed to have a disastrous impact on the Sudanese. He described it as a quick form of sanctions.

Richard Becker, the IAC coordinator in San Francisco, wrote in the delegation report: “One person was killed and others terribly burned in the missile attack. In the coming months and years, tens of thousands will die and suffer from the lack of medicines Al-Shifa would have produced.” The IAC is demanding reparations and restitution by the U.S. government for the destroyed plant and the lifting of sanctions against the Sudan.

(The International Action Center is located at 39 West 14 Street, Room 206, New York, NY 10011. Phone: (212) 633-6646 and e-mail: iacenter@iacenter.org)

“Stop the Witch Hunt” Rally in Newark

On Friday, Oct. 30, a group of 40 protesters, some in costumes, gathered at the Peter Rodino federal building in Newark, New Jersey for a “Stop the Witch Hunt Halloween Rally” sponsored by the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom.

This witch hunt, according to Arthur Kinoy, constitutional law professor at Rutgers University Law School, is the most serious threat to the American Constitution in many years. It consists of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detaining and imprisoning immigrants and placing them in deportation proceedings based solely on secret evidence and anonymous accusations to which neither the accused nor their lawyers are given access. This is clearly a violation of the most essential element of due process: the right to face one’s accuser and defend oneself against specific allegations. For over a hundred years the Supreme Court has held that the constitutional demands of due process apply to aliens as well as to citizens.

Since 1992 there have been more than 50 such cases, with 25 currently pending. All have one thing in common: the accused are Arabs. According to David Pugh of the Network Against the “Counter-Terrorism” Act, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 gave a green light to the INS to step up the use of secret evidence. Two victims of this process were singled out at the Newark rally.

Nasser Ahmed has been in solitary confinement in the Metropolitan Correction Center in downtown Manhattan since April 23, 1996 as a possible threat to national security. The one-sentence summary of the secret evidence against him included “information concerning respondent’s association with a known terrorist association.” The particular association was not identified.

Mr. Ahmed is a 39-year-old Egyptian who has lived and worked as an engineer in the U.S. since 1986. His wife, also Egyptian, is a medical doctor. The couple have three children. Mr. Ahmed, a deeply religious Muslim, is on the board of directors of the Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn, where he met Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

After the World Trade Center bombing, Sheikh Omar was indicted for seditious conspiracy and taken into custody. The presiding judge, Michael Mukasey, appointed Nasser Ahmed as paralegal and translator. During the lengthy and controversial trial, INS and FBI agents tried to recruit Mr. Ahmed to testify against Sheikh Omar and threatened him with deportation. His refusal to cooperate with the government’s investigations led to his detention.

In deportation proceedings in May 1997, before immigration judge Donn Livingston, Nasser Ahmed requested asylum, stating that because of his human rights activities vis-â-vis the Egyptian government and his known association with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, he would be tortured if he returned to Egypt.

Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified at Mr. Ahmed’s hearing about “Egypt’s ‘Emergency Law’ [which] provides for warrantless arrests of persons suspected of terrorism” and about widespread official mistreatment of political dissidents at the hands of the Egyptian government.

Neil Hicks of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights stated that “the Egyptian government treats political detainees very severely. Torture is systematic. The process of interrogation invariably leads to a signed confession. Families of the detainees are also subject to detention. Many detainees die while in custody.” There are currently more than 80,000 political detainees in Egypt.

Judge Livingston agreed that Nasser Ahmed qualifies for asylum. However this judgment was overridden by secret, classified evidence that accuses Mr. Ahmed of being “a danger to the security of the United States.”

Ahmad Sattar, paralegal for Nasser Ahmed, said that in September the government finally released 50 censored pages of evidence. It consisted of newspaper clippings, the report of an FBI agent, and testimony from a man with whom Mr. Ahmed had an argument years ago. This is apparently the basis for keeping Nasser Ahmed in solitary confinement and separated from his wife and children for 2 years.

Hany Kiareldeen, now 30, was born in Gaza and came to the U.S. in 1990. He was arrested in March on the basis of secret evidence provided by a confidential informer. In April a declassified summary of allegations was given to his lawyer.

This accused Mr. Kiareldeen of meeting with terrorists, including Nidal Ayyad, a convicted World Trade Center conspirator, in his Nutley, NJ home one week before the Feb. 26, 1993 bombing and of threatening to kill Attorney General Janet Reno.

However, Mr. Kiareldeen did not live in Nutley at the time of the alleged meeting, denies knowing Mr. Ayyad, and testified that he did not know who Janet Reno was prior to his arrest.

Mr. Kiareldeen’s lawyer, Regis Fernandis, said he has proof that the informer is Mr. Kiareldeen’s former wife, Amal Mohammad, who, even before the couple’s divorce last year, had a history of making baseless accusations. She herself faces deportation proceedings. When called to testify at Mr. Kiareldeen’s hearing in August, Ms. Mohammad refused to answer questions.

Hany Kiareldeen’s brother, Ghassan Khairaldin, who has also been accused of being at the meeting of terrorists, but has not yet been arrested, describes his brother as secular and extremely apolitical. He said that he never would have believed that prosecutors could use secret evidence in the United States. If the government really views his brother as a security threat, he said, it should declassify the secret evidence and prosecute him in open court. Otherwise it would seem that secret evidence is that evidence that will not hold up in court.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer living in the New York metropolitan area.