Son of UAE94 Detainee Tortured for Four Days

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

Son of UAE94 Detainee Tortured for Four Days

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Alkarama Foundation on 3 April 2014]

Osama Al Najjar, an Emirati human rights activist and the son of one of the `UAE94`, was tortured for four days during his secret detention by officers from the state security services who arrested him for a tweet. He was arrested on 17 March 2014 on his way back home, the day after he posted a tweet in reply to a radio statement made by the Emir of Sharjah Emirate on the `UAE94` case. On 19 March, as he was held in secret detention, Alkarama solicited the urgent intervention of the UN Special Procedures with the UAE authorities. It was only two weeks later that Alkarama learned about what happened to him during his secret detention.

On 17 March 2014, at around 4 pm, Osama was reportedly stopped on the road by several officers from the state security services in civilian clothes on his way back to Ajman. He was returning home from a visit at his doctor after a surgery he had a couple of days before. The officers forced him to get into one of their civilian cars and started beating him on all parts of his body after he refused to give them the password for his phone. Then, they took him to his house, undertook a full search of the place, confiscated all his electronic devices. Osama`s mother, who arrived home at 6 pm from a visit to Al Razeen prison where her husband is currently detained, reports that no arrest warrant was shown. The agents left the place at around 7 pm and took him, blindfolded and handcuffed, to a location which is believed to be a secret place of detention in Abu Dhabi controlled by the State Security services.

This is where, during four days, he was secretly detained. Four days during which he was interrogated and tortured almost without interruption.

As soon as Osama arrived at the state security services` premises, two officers began the interrogation session. They brought him on a wheelchair as he could not move due to the severe beating inflicted on him. He was continuously beaten on the face, the ears and other parts of his body. He was also beaten on the legs with plastic covered wires and exposed to extremely cold temperature, as the air conditioning was put on the lowest temperature.

Following the acts of torture he was subjected to, Osama started bleeding heavily from his recent surgery. The officers forced him to stand up but then took him to the prison`s doctor when they understood the severity of his condition.

On 19 March 2014, on the third day of his secret detention, he was reportedly taken to the State Prosecution in Abu Dhabi. He would have been brought before the Chief Prosecutor Ahmed Al-Dhanhani, then to a second prosecutor but, after Mr Al Najjar challenged the authority of these two Prosecution`s officials due to previous arguments in his father`s case, he was finally interrogated by a third prosecutor.

On 21 March 2014, he was transferred to Al Wathba prison in Abu Dhabi. It was through unofficial channels that Osama`s family finally learnt where he was: the family of Waleed Al Shehhi, who is also unlawfully detained there in the context of the `UAE94` case, informed them. They were allowed to visit him for the first time on 31 March 2014. Osama told them that he was apparently accused of "belonging to Al-Islah", "offending the State via Twitter", "instigating hatred against the State via Twitter" and "spreading false information according to which his father was tortured in Emirati jails".

He is currently being held in very poor conditions of detention. Although his current health condition needs urgent medication, he has not yet been provided with any access to medical care.

Today, Alkarama informed the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture about these new developments. We requested his intervention with the Emirati authorities to remind them of their obligations under the Convention against torture, ensure that prompt, independent and efficient investigations be open into these allegations, release Osama immediately and provide him with adequate reparation and prosecute the perpetrators. Extremely concerned by the systematic use of torture against people expressing peacefully their right to freedom of opinion and expression, Alkarama also suggested the UN expert to undertake a visit in view of reminding the UAE of their obligations to take appropriate measures to prevent acts of torture and ensure that no exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Alkarama also shared the information related to Osama Al Najjar`s case with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers who, during a recent visitin the UAE, expressed her concerns about the "acts of torture" she was informed about.

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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