July/August 1994, pp. 60-62

Human Rights

By R. Clemente Holder

Egyptian Lawyer's Death Triggers Cairo Protests

The death in police custody of Abdel Harith Madani, a lawyer for Islamist militants, triggered a major protest by the Islamist-dominated Egyptian Bar Association. Madani was seized in his office last April 26 and forced to stand with his arms raised for three hours while police searched the office and intercepted his phone calls. Next he was taken to his home, which also was searched, and then he was blindfolded and driven away. On May 6, his family was directed to pick up his body. They were not permitted to open the coffin or arrange an independent autopsy.

Police statements indicated the 30-year-old lawyer died the day after his arrest from an asthma attack. However, persons who claimed to have seen his body in the morgue said it bore bruises and puncture marks.

When an estimated 1,000 members of the Egyptian Lawyer's Syndicate sought to march from their Cairo headquarters to demand access to Madani's autopsy report and the immediate release of 34 other lawyers allegedly being detained without charges or trial, the Lawyer's Syndicate building was surrounded by police who prevented them from exiting. As a crowd grew outside and the lawyers tried to leave, the police fired tear gas grenades that set off a stampede in which an estimated 100 persons suffered injuries, most of them superficial.

The disturbances highlighted the Hosni Mubarak government's ongoing struggle with Islamic militants, who have set off bombs and murdered policemen and tourists in many parts of the country. Human rights activists charge that Egypt has arrested 20,000 to 30,000 political prisoners and, after trials in military courts, executed more than 35 convicted extremists since 1992. The Egyptian Lawyer's Syndicate, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch, an international organization, have demanded an independent investigation into Madani's death.

In statements to the press, the Egyptian government has charged Madani was acting as a conduit between jailed members of the outlawed Gamaa al Islamiya and their supporters outside. Disputing this, Kamel Khaled, a lawyer member of Egypt's parliament, said Madani was believed to be seeking to deliver to responsible government officials a message from the Gamaa al Islamiya saying it realized it was being manipulated by foreign governments and was ready to negotiate a truce.

Missing Dissident's Wife Says Libya Seeks Her Silence

Bahaa Alomary, wife of former Libyan Foreign Minister Mansour Kikhia, who disappeared in Egypt last Dec. 10, charged that a Libyan official told her on May 7 that the government of Muammer Qaddafi was prepared to assume all expenses for her four children and herself, including costs of housing, schooling and medical care. In an interview in France, where she lives, she said she interpreted the offer as being conditioned on her softening her campaign on behalf of her missing husband, who had defected from the Qaddafi government in 1981 to become one of the eccentric Libyan strongman's most outspoken critics.

"I said no way," she told The New York Times. "I will not sully his integrity by accepting money from them." Kikhia disappeared while attending a human rights conference in Cairo. The following day, several vehicles with Libyan diplomatic plates crossed the Egyptian border into Libya. Shortly afterward, Almoary received a hurried telephone call from abroad saying her husband was in Libya.

"Maybe I am living in a dream," she told a reporter in Paris. "Yet everything tells me he is alive, that they are just groping for a way to let him go without a fuss."

Hanan Ashrawi Focuses On Human Rights Work

Hanan Ashrawi, former spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace talks, has an nounced that she wishes to focus her efforts on a Palestinian human rights group she helped found last year, and for which she left her unpaid position as Palestinian delegation spokesperson.

U.N. Commission Criticizes Sudan Punishments, Anti-Semitism

The government of Sudan responded to criticism by United Nations monitor Gaspar Biro, a Hungarian professor of law, with charges that his complaints concerning punishments inflicted under Sudan's Islamic laws were blasphemous. The dispute divided Islamic countries at a March meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

In a March 9 report, the commission unanimously approved a resolution that named "anti-Semitism" as a human rights abuse. The commission called upon one of its officers to examine and report back on "incidents of contemporary racism, racial discrimination, any form of discrimination against Blacks, Arabs and Muslims, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance as well as governmental measures to overcome them."

Kuwait Answers Human Rights Charges

Amnesty International accused Kuwait in late February of "serious human rights violations" during the three years since U.S.- and GCC-led coalition troops freed Kuwait of Iraqi military occupation. "The Kuwaiti government has failed to apply even the minimum international standards to its law courts, and scores of suspected `collaborators,' detained since 1991, continue to be sentenced to prison terms after grossly unfair trials," the London-based human rights groups said.

Speaker Ahmad Saadoun of the Kuwaiti parliament, who led a goodwill delegation to the U.S., Canada and Russia in May, responded at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to charges by Amnesty International that 62 persons "disappeared" just after the liberation. Referring also to charges that the Emirate had condoned murders, kidnappings and rapes of persons accused of collaboration with the Iraqi occupation, critics of the Kuwaiti government, and Asian domestic servants, Saadoun told journalists: "Kuwaitis are not angels. A number of Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, especially right after the liberation, took the law into their own hands...but that is not policy."

To date only one Kuwaiti, Jabar Amari, has been convicted of such abuses. He was found guilty of the murder of a Lebanese national who was a long-time employee of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Interior, murder of the man's son, and the rape and attempted murder of the man's daughter.

The conviction was obtained on eye-witness testimony by the wounded woman, Naimat Farhat, who was raped, shot in the head, and left for dead in the family home. The Kuwait government funded her return from the Santa Rosa, CA home of a surviving brother, a U.S. citizen. The brother, Naim Farhat, told the Washington Report that although the convicted murderer was a former Kuwaiti police officer who arrived at the family home accompanied by other Kuwaitis who seemed to be police officers, the government of Kuwait has not responded to requests for compensation for the loss of his family and the lifetime medical care that will be required by his sister, who remains partially paralyzed from her wounds.

Amnesty International Charges Tunisia With Violations

In a Jan. 12 report, Amnesty International charged that "Tunisia's growing mastery in deploying the vocabulary and diplomacy of human rights abroad serves to mask a practice of serious and systematic human rights violations at home... Tunisia has actively engaged in dialogue with Amnesty International and the organization has made many detailed recommendations to the Tunisian government," the report continued. However, political repression continues to expand unabated and the forms it takes to multiply. The numbers of victims of human rights violations continues to grow." The report called on Tunisia "to take immediate concrete steps to end the systematic perpetration of human rights violations of the past three years."

Saudi Spokesman Denies Amnesty International Charges

Amnesty International has charged Saudi Arabia, which allowed Iraqi refugees to remain in desert camps within its territory after the Gulf war, with abuses of inmates who criticized the administration of the camps in which they awaited relocation.

Based on interviews with 200 Iraqis who subsequently were settled in other countries, the London-based human rights organization said Saudi camp guards had beaten inmates charged with being "trouble-makers" or "disobedient."

"It's not true," said Saudi Information Ministry official Shihab Jamjoun of the report. "Saudi Arabia is doing its best...We don't torture anybody."

The camps originally were set up to house an expected flood of Iraqi prisoners of war. After the Gulf war, the Saudis allowed prisoners who did not want to return to Iraq to remain while they applied for immigration to other countries. The prisoners subsequently were joined by an influx of Iraqi army deserters and refugees from the failed Shi'i and Kurdish revolts against Saddam Hussain's rule who crossed into Saudi Arabia and claimed political asylum.

Minefields Making Large Areas Uninhabitable

The deaths of two American journalists, photographer Brian Brinson and translator Francis Tomasic, when their vehicle hit two mines as they tried to turn around on a road near Mostar in Bosnia called attention to a major problem that will continue to haunt Bosnia, Croatia and other parts of former Yugoslavia long after the fighting there dies down. Some 3 million mines have been planted in the Balkans, according to the U.S. State Department.

As a result, said Human Rights Watch official Kenneth Anderson, "the parties could kiss and make up tomorrow, and they'd still be facing a humanitarian disaster." This, he explained, is because the combatants have mined territory indiscriminately, even when they hoped to return to it later.

Journalist Danica Kirka, writing in the Washington Times, predicts that the Balkans will join Afghanistan and Cambodia in having to deal with these dangerous weapons for decades to come. Human rights groups have mounted a campaign to ban the deadly devices outright, as is the case with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Some arms manufacturers propose instead that all mines be provided with self-destruct devices that would activate automatically after a specified time period.

Although that would add considerably to the cost of making mines, currently about $20 each, it might save the $300 to $1,000 cost of removing each such device. So far in the conflict in former Yugoslavia, 12 U.N. peacekeepers have been killed by mines, and another 128 have been injured.

India Bars Amnesty International From Kashmir

India has refused to allow Amnesty International observers into Kashmir to investigate allegations of human rights abuses by Indian security forces fighting Muslim guerrillas. The Indian Foreign Ministry said the London-based group "has not been fair or balanced or just with regard to India."