Serious Crackdown on Saudi Detainees and Their Families in Al-Hayer Prison

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Sep 2, 2012 Saudi Arabia
[Protests over prisoner treatment in Al-Hayer] [Protests over prisoner treatment in Al-Hayer]

Serious Crackdown on Saudi Detainees and Their Families in Al-Hayer Prison

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Alkarama on 29 August 2012.] 

“The total number of detainees is nearly 30,000. Those imprisoned do not know when they will be out, as they are often not given any trials or sentences, and if they are tried and sentenced, then they are not released when the sentence expires. This is the situation of most political prisoners.”

These are the words of more than five hundred Saudi women in a petition appealing for support to release their imprisoned relatives. Alkarama, a Swiss Non Governmental Organization (NGO) based in Geneva and whose work centers on the promotion and protection of human rights in the Arab World, received the petition on 23 July 2012. Arbitrary or illegal detention is a serious matter of concern regarding the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia.

The ongoing events in al-Hayer Prison near Riyadh in Saudi Arabia highlight this dramatic situation. Families of detainees and human rights activists claim that a serious crackdown has been occurring against prisoners in al-Hayer for almost two months. Al-Hayer is a maximum-security detention facility and Saudi Arabia`s largest prison. The complex includes facilities for both common criminals and security offenders, and reportedly houses a number of presumed terrorists as well as political prisoners. In September 2003, a major fire occurred at al-Hayer in which sixty-seven inmates died and at least twenty were injured.

Starting in July 2012, tensions were reported in the prison due to the unjust and poor conditions that the large number of individuals detained arbitrarily have to endure. On Friday 13 July, Mohammad Mosleh Al Shahri, who suffers from cancer, was refused medical treatment. This action led to a mass protest by detainees in Wing 3 of the New al-Hayer Prison, one of the recent extensions of the prison built in 2009. The attendant violent clashes between detainees and security forces quickly spread to other wings as guards failed to quell the protests and control the detainees. Families of detainees have since been prevented from visiting their relatives, with the near complete information blackout provoking deep fears and concerns amongst families and human rights organizations.

Faced with this total information blackout, the families wrote an urgent letter to the Saudi Arabian Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution (the governmental unit charged with investigating reports of wrongdoing) expressing their deep concerns. They eventually met an official who simply denied any wrongdoing was taking place. On 17 July, Saudi authorities issued a statement describing “minor incidents” in the prison, while other sources reported the death of two detainees and injury of several others. Unsatisfied by the Saudi authorities’ response, the families sent a letter to the King and to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, demanding that their right to visit their relatives be reinstated. They also approached the Saudi Human Rights Commission (the national human rights institution) and the National Human Rights Society (an NGO close to the Government), to no avail. The public prosecutor even chased families out of his office, while both the Saudi Human Rights Commission and the National Human Rights Society deny anything of concern is happening at the infamous prison.

Denied access to the detainees, their families started gathering in protest in front of al-Hayer to obtain more information and to visit their relatives. They were dispersed violently. On 13 August, a group of detainees’ families were called to the prison to “reason” with their detained relatives. Once at the prison, they were taken to what appeared to be an empty isolation wing. A prison official asked the brother of a detainee and other relatives to sign an “official document” that was not on letterhead, on which was simply written: “I visited my brother and tried to convince him to stop the rebellion and he refused.” The families refused to sign the document despite threats from the prison officials, fearing it could justify their relatives’ deaths at a later date. Other family members were contacted on 14 August and were also told they would be allowed to meet with their relatives. However, when a group of approximately one hundred fifty people turned up, only a smaller group of almost twenty people was allowed into the prison. Family members who were able to enter the prison were only shown pictures of their relatives and then asked to leave. The smaller group inside protested and was violently beaten and attacked with tear gas and non lethal weapons. Some were even arrested for a few hours. Then on 19 August, on Eid el Fitr—the religious festivity that marks the end of Ramadan—approximately one hundred family members tried to visit their relatives in prison to give them presents. Anti-riot forces precented them from entering the prison, using live ammunition for the frist time since the beginning of the events. No injuries or casualties have been reported.

It has been close to two months since families of detainees have been able to visit their relatives or even get information about their well-being. The situation has been accompanied by a near-total media blackout on the issue, both domestically and internationally. Concerns about the events inside the prison are only disseminated through social media by Saudi human rights defenders and Saudi associations of families. The violent crackdown on protesters in Qatif following the arrest of Sheikh Nimr al Nimr, which caused the death of two protesters and the ongoing events in al-Hayer raise serious concerns about the current human rights situation in Saudi Arabia. These events and the large number of reported cases of arbitrary detention raise concerns about Saudi Arabia’s compliance with its international obligations in dealing with demands from political opponents and human rights activists. Rachid Mesli, head of the legal department of Alkarama points out that “these events raise questions on how the Saudi authorities will respond to the rising demands for increased political participation from its population and what the consequences of this type of repression will have for the rest of the region.”

Given this alarming situation, Alkarama calls on the Saudi authorities to provide information on what is happening in al-Hayer prison and to ensure families have access to their relatives. Saudi Arabia should furthermore end all arbitrary detention and either try or release all those currently detained without any legal proceedings in order to comply with its international obligations.

 Photos from a protest of Al-Hayer on 19 August 2012: 

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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