Yemeni Teacher Unlawfully Detained Since Revolution

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Feb 25, 2014 Yemen
[Official logo of Alkarama Foundation] [Official logo of Alkarama Foundation]

Yemeni Teacher Unlawfully Detained Since Revolution

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Alkarama Foundation on 21 February 2014]

Mohammad Muthana Al Ammari, a 34 year-old Yemeni teacher who had participated, like so many others, in the demonstrations that toppled former Yemeni president Saleh, was abducted from the street in Sana`a on 5 December 2011 by a dozen armed men. After being disappeared and tortured, he was sentenced on 19 October 2012 to two years in prison by a special courtfor political motives after a grossly unfair trial. It has been three years since the Yemeni revolution. And it has been two years that Mohammad has been unlawfully detained in Sana`a`s political prison despite having completed his sentence. Today, Alkarama sent his case to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to seek their intervention with the Yemeni authorities on his behalf.

Demonstrators, and Loyalists` Immunity

After the beginning of protests against President Ali Abdallah Saleh`s 33-year rule in January 2011, Yemeni security forces detained hundreds of demonstrators and other people perceived as opponents to his regime. Despite this repression, President Saleh was forced to transfer power to a transition government as a consequence of months of continued protests. The transitional government was led by current President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in the aftermath of a transition agreement signed on 23 November 2011 in Riyadh. While Saleh agreed to resign as president, an immunity law enacted by the Yemeni parliament on 21 January 2012 granted amnesty to him and immunity for "political" crimes committed by all those who had served with him during his rule.

In January 2012, Yemen`s caretaker cabinet and a committee responsible for restructuring the military, headed by Hadi who was elected president on 21 February 2012, ordered the release of all those detained arbitrarily as a gesture of goodwill. However, security and intelligence units, notably the Republican Guard, Political Security and National Security, run by Saleh`s relatives and loyalists, continued to operate largely outside of central government control, undertaking arrests outside the scope of the law.

It is in this context that Mr Al Ammari was forcedly disappeared in December 2011 by Political Security agents, and remains detained today. Prior to his detention, he had been active in Change Square during the early days of the 2011 revolution. In response to his activism, he began receiving threats from Political Security agents, who held him for a half-day in March 2011 and warned him to stay away from the protests or otherwise risk harm to himself and his family.

Arrested by Armed Men

Around 12pm on 5 December 2011, a dozen of armed men surrounded Mr Al Ammari in the street as he left his father-in-law`s house, located on the main street next to the Political Security building, with his wife and his young son. Mr Al Ammari was placed in a silver sport utility vehicle, carrying private plates, and driven into the Political Security parking lot. The entire incident was witnessed by his wife, his son and his father-in-law.

Mr Al Ammari`s wife, Ahlan Al Ariqi, went to Political Security headquarters the next morning to ask about her husband`s whereabouts, but officials there denied detaining him. However, on 15 December 2011, pro-government newspaper Al-Thawra ran a front-page article with the headline "Six Terrorists from al-Qaeda arrested" featuring photos of the six men, which included Mr Al Ammari. The newspaper quoted a government source who described them as dangerous armed militants captured by the authorities. Despite this, Political Security officials continued to deny detaining Mr Al Ammari for weeks. They exerted psychological pressure on his wife, telling her that they would soon provide her with information and the next day that she should not bother waiting to receive any information.

Finally, on 11 February 2012, an official from Political Security informed her that they were detaining Mr Al Ammari, and that they would call her when she was authorised to see him. She was denied this right even after President Hadi`s election on 23 February 2012 and was only able to see her husband in June 2012, six months after Mr Al Ammari`s arrest.

Torture in detention

While detained at the Political Security detention center, Mr Al Ammari told Alkarama, he was tortured during the first few months of his detention. He was hung by the feet for hours several times, beaten with sticks, and he was denied visits from the date of his arrest until 6 June 2012, when his wife was finally allowed to see him for the first time.

Unfair Trial

Mr Al Ammari was not brought before any competent judicial authority until his trial in October 2012 as he was disappeared and detained incommunicado by the Political Security for the entire duration of his detention. As a consequence, Mr Al Ammari`s lawyer filed a complaint with the General Prosecution in June 2012 asking that binding orders be issued to Political Security to ensure his client be presented to court, as the delay in presenting him was prolonging legal proceedings and was harming his client who had already been detained for months without knowing the reasons for his detention. The lawyer also called for Mr Al Ammari to be moved from the Political Security detention center to the Central Prison, request which was denied by Political Security.

Following this complaint, Mr Al Ammari was referred to the Specialized Criminal Court in Sana`a by the General Prosecution at the beginning of September 2012 on charges of belonging to al-Qaeda and "participation in an armed gang in order to carry out a military attack against governmental installations, security interests of the State and foreign institutions" at the beginning of September 2012. However, Political Security refused the directives of the General Prosecution to allow him to appear at the court hearing until 19 October 2012, invoking security reasons.

Mr Al Ammari was finally presented to the Court and sentenced to two years in prison on 19 October 2012, following a trial marred with irregularities, and during which no single piece of material evidence was provided to the judge by the accusation. The verdict specified that the sentence began from the first day of Mr Al Ammari`s arrest on 5 December 2011, and that he should therefore be released on 5 December 2013.

The continued incommunicado detention of Mr Al Ammari for six months, the absence of material evidence presented by the accusation at his trial, the ill-treatment he was subjected to during his pre-trial detention, the lack of presumption of innocence, and the interference of Political Security in the judicial process clearly demonstrate that the Yemeni authorities failed to provide the victim with basic guarantees for a fair trial.

Appeal and Ongoing Detention

 Mr Al Ammari`s lawyer appealed the sentence at the Specialized Criminal Court. He asked for the verdict to be reversed, as the sentence "violated the general principles of evidence, given the lack of forensic and legal evidence to prove the truth of what happened". The Appeal Court, which agreed to receive the appeal, refused to re-examine the content of the appeal, arguing that the matter was "subject to the discretion and authority of the first judge, who is himself under the control of God and his conscience". The Appeal Judge consequently upheld the first sentence of two years imprisonment for Mr Al Ammari. Mr Al Ammari subsequently served out his sentence in the Political Security`s detention centre.

While Mr Al Ammari was scheduled to be released on 5 December 2013 after having served his sentence, he remains detained in the Political Security detention centre until now, and has no idea when Political Security will release him.

It is very likely that the exercise of his internationally recognized right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression is the cause of his current detention by Political Security. Mr Al Ammari`s imprisonment is not an isolated case, as dozens of demonstrators were held by security forces under the same circumstances for days, weeks, or months without charge during the transition period. Mr Al Ammari`s current detention therefore seems to be an act of revenge by former President Saleh loyalists who are still seeking to punish people who protested against his rule. These loyalists have benefited from the unstable transitional period and the immunity agreement that had just been signed at the time to detain people who had stood up against the former regime.

As no legal basis can justify the teacher`s current detention, the Yemeni authorities should immediately put an end to it by releasing him at once and provide him with adequate compensation for all the abuses he has been subjected to since his arrest.
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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