A Web of Suffering: Syria’s Network of Terror Centres

Regime intelligence services are running an “archipelago of torture centers scattered across the country”, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The NGO interviewed hundreds of detainees and defectors who confirmed that there are twenty-seven facilities across Syria where the use of acid burning, sexual assault and nail-pulling have been used.

The existence of these facilities and types of torture techniques were confirmed by multiple witnesses. HRW have called it a ‘crime against humanity’ and said that this could be the tip of the iceberg – that many more centers could exist.

Last year, when reports began to leak out of the torture centers in Syria, Jonathan Miller, foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4, presented the mounting body of evidence to ministers in the Assad government. The Syrian regime fiercely denied these accusations and continues to do so.

In an American television interview last year, President Assad said:

“We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kills its people unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

The HRW report comes as Assad puts through a series of new ‘anti-terrorist’ laws. According to the parliamentary bills:

“Those who are direct members of a terrorist group may be sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison with hard labor, but the punishment will be harder if the goal is to change the regime or the nature of the state.”

Critics said the new laws are clearly targeting members of the opposition and will likely lead to increased detentions in centers where torture is a known interrogation technique.

Although most of the detainees interviewed were men between the ages of 18 and 35, women and children were also amongst the victims.

One 31-year-old detainee spoke to HRW about his experiences in Idlib Central Prison:

“They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The staples in the ears were the most painful. They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again. They tortured me like this three times over three days.”

There are now calls to get the International Criminal Court involved but the court would only have jurisdiction via the UN Security Council, and with Russia still at odds with the rest of the members, this seems unlikely to happen.

 

A Poem Longing For Love

“Masood”

All I need is your hand
to hold on….
All I need is your soul
to depend on….
All I need is your shoulder
to cry on…..
All I need is your bossom
to rest on….
All I need is your face
to cling on….
All I need is you love
to live on…..
All I need is your smile
to die on….

–Amina Janjua, wife of Masood Ahmed Janjua, January 2006

 

Disappeared In Pakistan: Gone but Not Forgotten

 

 

ISLAMABAD — They huddled in small groups under a bright orange tarpaulin, seated on rugs and prayer mats laid out end to end to protect against the chilly February ground. Some of the protesters were resting, some sharing a meal of lentil dahl and naan bread, others solemnly clutching homemade posters bearing the faces and neatly scripted names of their missing loved ones.

Infants and elderly, housewives and working professionals, entire families representing Pakistan’s so-called “missing persons” have set up a protest camp near the parliament here to demand answers on the whereabouts of their relatives. “People are pinning their hopes here,” said the group’s leader, Amina Masood Janjua. “We have no guns, no nuclear weapons. Our words and our grief is the power.”

The two countries are allies but their relationship has been plagued by mistrust over the last 50 years.

Her husband, businessman Masood Ahmed Janjua, now 51, disappeared six years ago. She said he was last seen in Rawalpindi, a city just outside the capital, on his way to Peshawar.

Janjua is one of hundreds if not thousands who have been “disappeared” — seized in extrajudicial detentions allegedly conducted by Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, according to human rights officials. The missing are presumed by the agency to be terrorists and Islamist militants.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate is thought to be behind the seizures of the putative terrorists, because when those detained are allowed to go home, they say they were with the intelligence agencies, said Amina Janjua.

 

 

The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear

When I first read the U.S. government’s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted—and yet so absurdly incriminating—that I simply assumed she was innocent.

According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating “weapons involving biological material,” descriptions of U.S. “military assets,” and numerous unnamed “chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.”

Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who lived in the United States for eleven years, had vanished from her hometown in Pakistan in 2003, along with all three of her children, two of whom were U.S. citizens. The complaint does not address where she was those five years or why she suddenly decided to emerge into a public square outside Pakistan and far from the United States, nor does it address why she would do so in the company of her American son.

 

Fowzia Siddiqui Released, Many Injured in Pakistan Protest Attack

At a rally for Dr. Aafia, Pakistani security forces arrested and violently intercepted thousands of protesters wishing to stage a peaceful demonstration. According to reports, Dr. Fauzia, sister of Dr. Aafia was beaten by security forces and sustained facial injuries. She was first removed to an undisclosed detention center then transferred to a police station. Several others were also injured and detained.

According to details, the rally, bound for US consulate, was intercepted by riot police on Abdullah Haroon Road. Upon resistance police water-cannon, baton, and teargas squads jumped into action to disperse the protesters. Following the brutal arrest of Dr Fowzia Siddiqui was released on the orders of Governor Sindh Dr Isharat-ul-Ebad, along with other Aafia Movement supporters earlier today at a rally at the US Consulate, Karachi, the majority have thankfully been released from custody.

The following update was provided by a member of the Siddiqui family:

I just spoke with Fowzia.  She was injured, deliberately and with malice, but has now been released.  They released her early but she did not leave until all workers being detained were also released. The main violent attack took place after the demonstration was broken up and media was leaving.  Then a wave of security vehicles came and attackers were special unit security forces and witnesses say they came from the direction of the US consulate but were in local police uniforms.

Many were injured.  Several severely and are hospitalized.  Altaf Shakoor had both arms broken. The Aafia Movement photographer had his head smashed in and his camera destroyed. Four people are still missing. Mohammad, Fowzia’s son, was taken into custody, had his clothes ripped and sent home with a “message” for Fowzia to shut up or else worse will happen next time.

Why the government reacted this way to a routine demonstration and who ordered the final attack are questions that are still to be answered.

 

Report on Protest for Prisoner Rights 23 October & Conditions in Morocco

The Joint Committee of former “Islamist Detainees” in co-ordination with “Al-Haqiqa: for Defending Prisoners of Conscience and Belief” announces that the protest planned for October 23rd had been subjected to barbaric methods of suppression and intimidation by the Moroccan Government. This protest was organised under the banner of ‘Together for the Sake of Ending Oppression and Ending the Sexual Abuse Taking Place in Moroccan Prisons.’

During the repression by the Moroccan authorities, protesters were subjected to severe brutality to the extent that severe injuries were reported including broken bones and the victimisation of children. The slew of injuries occurred when protesters were stamped on, hit by sticks, chased along the streets, arrested and detained for long hours. Human rights activist, Mohammed Haqiqi, director of Al Karama, was also targeted in a savage assault by the security forces as they stamped on him, tore off his clothes and arrested him as well.

We would like to say that in the case of the Islamist detainees, they have endured horrendous forms of abuse and are still undergoing this inhumane treatment.  The abuse varies from kidnapping, torture (physical and mental), electrocution, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, stress positions, and mock trials.  This category of prisoners is not given even their basic legal rights and forced to take part in biased and unfair trials with no access to legal representation. 

 

Eastern Europe: Accommodating America’s Illegal Extraordinary Rendition

On 7 March 2003 a CIA Gulfstream Jet landed at a remote airstrip in north-eastern Poland. Human rights officials and campaigners are convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the most senior al-Qaeda suspects, was on board.

American agents took him to a secret facility where, he says, he was tortured before being eventually transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

The secret transfer of CIA prisoners is said to have taken place in both Poland and Lithuania – a region where,
only a generation ago, people were subject to arbitrary detention and torture at the hands of Communist secret police. Now, seven years on, the full story of Poland’s secret detention site is emerging.

Dick Marty, the Council of Europe’s former Rapporteur on Torture, told the BBC: “If I use the judicial standard of proof – and I used to be a magistrate – then I say ‘Yes, Mohammed was in Poland. Yes, he was tortured.‘  Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner on Human Rights, said he now believed detainees had been subjected to “intense torture” and called for prosecutions. 

 

Pakistani Security Forces ‘Disappear’ Opponents in Balochistan

Government Fails to Confront Military, Intelligence Agencies on Abuses

Demonstration in front of Pakistan's Supreme Court by relatives of "disappeared" persons from Balochistan province, January 5, 2010.

Pakistan’s security forces are engaging in an abusive free-for-all in Balochistan as Baloch nationalists and suspected militants ‘disappear,’ and in many cases are executed. The national government has done little to end the carnage in Balochistan, calling into question its willingness or ability to control the military and intelligence agencies.”Pakistan’s government should immediately end widespread disappearances of suspected militants and activists by the military, intelligence agencies, and the paramilitary Frontier Corps in the southwestern province of Balochistan, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Several of those “disappeared” were among the dozens of people extrajudicially executed in recent months in the resource-rich and violence-wracked province.

The 132-page report, “‘We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years’: Enforced Disappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in Balochistan,” documents dozens of enforced disappearances,in which the authorities take people into custody and then deny all responsibility or knowledge of their fate or whereabouts. The report details 45 alleged cases of enforced disappearances, the majority in 2009 and 2010. While hundreds of people have been forcibly disappeared in Balochistan since 2005, dozens of new enforced disappearances have occurred since Pakistan returned to civilian rule in 2008. Brad Adams reports:

“Pakistan’s security forces are engaging in an abusive free-for-all in Balochistan as Baloch nationalists and suspected militants ‘disappear,’ and in many cases are executed, The national government has done little to end the carnage in Balochistan, calling into question its willingness or ability to control the military and intelligence agencies.”