Press Release: Crackdown on 'UAE94' Activists Extends to Relatives

[Logo of the Alkarama Foundation. Image from alkarama.org] [Logo of the Alkarama Foundation. Image from alkarama.org]

Press Release: Crackdown on 'UAE94' Activists Extends to Relatives

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Alkarama Foundation on 19 March 2014]

Two days ago, Osama Al Najjar, a 25 year-old architectural engineer, was arrested on the road by several men in civilian clothes on his way back home from a visit to his doctor at around 4 pm. Osama is now being held in an unknown location outside the protection of the law. Given the systematic use of torture in detention centres controlled by the Emirati security services, Alkarama solicited the urgent intervention of the UN Special Rapporteur of torture today to ensure that Osama Al Najjar is not subjected to any torture or ill-treatment, and is immediately released.

"We do not hate our country but we will not forget the injustice..."

Osama Al Najjar is the son of Husain Al Najjar, one of the UAE94 detainees sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment following a massively unfair trial. Since his father was arrested almost two years ago at the height of the crackdown on peaceful activists, Osama has been very active on Twitter in defending the UAE94 and disseminating information on their unfair trial.

Recently, Sheikh Sultan Ben Mohamed Al Qassimi, the Emir of Sharjah Emirate, made the following statement in a radio broadcasted interview: "the families of those arrested [the UAE 94 detainees] should not fill their children with hate and malice against their country".

Osama Al Najjar responded to the statement on his Twitter account: "Your highness, (...) we do not hate our country but we will not forget the injustice we have faced even if our mothers do. Those who were unjust to my father owe twenty 20 months of prison and harassment".

This is the last tweet Osama posted before his arrest, on 16 March 2014, exactly 20 months after his father`s arrest.

On 17 March 2014, Osama was returning home from a visit to his doctor when he was arrested on his way back home by six civilian cars at around 4 pm. About a dozen of men wearing civilian clothes took him to his home and undertook a full search of Mr Al Najjar`s house, confiscated all his electronic devices and left the house at around 7 pm.

Osama`s mother came back home at 6 pm from a visit to Al Razeen prison where her husband is currently detained. She discovered his son under arrest in one of the six cars parked in front of her home. According to her, no valid document was shown to justify the arrest and no indication was given about where the victim was being taken, who is now detained in an unknown place. The victim`s family suspects that Mr Al Najjar was arrested by State Security Services, as he had been previously harassed following the public positions he adopted about his father`s trial on Twitter.

It is believed that he is currently held in the premises of the State Security Services in Abu Dhabi. Given reports of the systematic use of torture and ill-treatment places of detention controlled by the Emirati security services, Alkarama is concerned that Mr Al Najjar will be tortured and subjected to ill-treatment during his incommunicado detention.

Although no reason was given to the victim and his family to justify the arrest, it is believed that Osama`s current disappearance is linked to his activities on Twitter related to the UAE94 and specifically his last tweet.

Crackdown on the `UAE94` activists extends to relatives & supporters

The disappearance of Osama Al Najjar is not the first example of the crackdown carried out by the UAE authorities against relatives and supporters of the UAE94. Jamal Al Hammadi, the brother of one of the UAE94, has been disappeared since 20 April 2013.Waleed Al-Sheehi and Abdulhamid Al Hadidi, two Emirati human rights defenders who are very active on Twitter have been harassed and prosecuted for publishing information on the UAE94 trial.

Osama`s disappearance follows the same pattern used by the State Security Services in numerous other similar cases in the United Arab Emirates against peaceful activists. People are detained incommunicado or enforcedly disappeared for months, then reappear and are put on trial for political motives. Detainees are often tortured during the first period of their detention and forced to sign false confessions which are then used against them during unfair trials.

"How can the UAE pledges to the UN Human Rights Council that it takes "its international obligations in the area of human rights very seriously" while at the same time they disappear, torture, detain unlawfully and unfairly try peaceful activists?" said Alkarama`s Legal Director Rachid Mesli. "We are extremely concerned about the persistence of this pattern which underlines the grave degradation of the human rights situation in the country since the beginning of the crackdown in 2011."

Today, Alkarama asked the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to intervene urgently with the Emirati authorities to ensure that Osama Al Najjar does not suffer torture or ill-treatment and that he is immediately released or placed under the protection of the law. We also ask the UAE authorities to inform his family of his fate and whereabouts in the shortest possible delays and allow them to contact him.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412