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America's Injustice Omar Khadr It seems difficult to believe that after being held here at Guantánamo Bay for close to eight years and having been put through an astonishing array of legal twists and turns – including charges being thrown out at one point and then reinstated – Omar Khadr is about to face trial by military commission, possibly this week if pre-trial proceedings are completed.

I’m here to observe these proceedings on behalf of Amnesty International. And quite honestly at this stage I find it very difficult to predict just what I will observe. All that seems certain is that it will be another phase in the systematic injustice to which Omar Khadr has been subjected.

First, today there will be more legal arguments as to whether all or at least some of the statements Omar Khadr made in the course of over 100 interrogation sessions between 2002 and 2004 – first at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then here at Guantánamo – will be excluded from the trial. He has laid out detailed and credible allegations as to the many forms of physical and psychological torture and other abuse he says he was subject to at that time, including during many of the interrogation sessions. The prosecution has maintained in its legal filings that “the accused was not tortured; nor subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”. Yet at a hearing in May, one of Omar Khadr’s interrogators at Bagram admitted to using a rape scenario as a fear tactic against the teenager. And it is clear that at Guantánamo, Omar Khadr was one of the detainees subjected to the sleep disruption/deprivation technique known as the “frequent flyer” program.

Then there is the question of his legal representation. Omar Khadr dismissed his civilian US lawyers last month. He has not been allowed to dismiss his US military lawyer, but it is not yet clear whether he will try to represent himself or allow his military lawyer to. He does still have his Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney and Nate Whitling, but as they are not US citizens they are not permitted to take part in the legal proceedings here, just observe and provide assistance.

It is also not clear whether Omar Khadr will even attend the proceedings. Last month he told the military judge that he would boycott the trial because of “the unfairness and unjustice [sic] of it”. Today, the day before pre-trial hearings resume, his lawyers are indicating they do not know whether he will appear or not. If he does stay away there is every indication that proceedings will simply go on without him.

One thing that still does seem certain is that there will be little if any regard for the fact that Omar Khadr was 15 years of age at the time of his alleged offense. From the outset the USA should have taken full account of his young age, and he should have been given special protections under international human rights law. The fact that he was taken into custody following a firefight in Afghanistan also placed him within the scope of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, ratified by the USA in 2002. The USA’s treatment of Omar Khadr and its looming trial of him by military commission flies in the face not only of its international obligations in relation to fair trials and juvenile justice, but also of its stated objectives and policies aimed at preventing the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the expert body which oversees implementation of the Optional Protocol, has called on the USA not to try any such child before a military tribunal.

Also apparently certain is that the Canadian government will maintain its steadfast indifference to the many human rights violations in this case, including violations for which Canadian officials who came here several years ago to interrogate Omar Khadr were themselves involved. There have been numerous Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal rulings chastising the Canadian government and calling for the government to remedy the violations, including by seeking his return to Canada.

And the Supreme Court of Canada – not once but twice – has found that the Canadian government has violated and continues to violate Omar Khadr’s rights. Earlier this year the Court concluded that it was not its role to specify how those violations should be remedied but that they certainly must be remedied. The government’s less than half-hearted response to that ruling – a request to US officials not to make use of information they had received from Canada – was not only ineffective it was rejected by the US several months ago. So here we sit, proceedings about to get underway in this US military base with the Canadian government failing to provide any meaningful aid to its national who has been trapped in a circle of injustice since he was 15 years of age.

Gaza Strip 'Not one refugee will return. The old will die. The young will forget.' This prediction, uttered by David Ben-Gurion in 1948, did not come true. Not only the keys of the houses, that the Palestinians were forced to leave, passed on from generation to the other, but so did the memoirs and the deep roots and emotional attachment to the Land of Palestine endured over the years.

When the founding of Israel was declared on May 15, 1948, the then Zionist militias had already depopulated 212 Palestinian villages and three major towns before even one Arab soldiers had set foot in Palestine. The Arab armies, who did not intervene against the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians before May 15, 1948, declared war against the newly established state, in a desperate attempt to protect the areas allocated to the Palestinian state. The war ended with a ceasefire. At that point, more than 700,000 Arab inhabitants were forced out or fled their homes in Palestine. Many Palestinians left in order to escape the fighting – with the intent to return to their homes when the fighting would cease - or because they were expelled by Israeli (Zionist) forces. The Palestinians commemorate this tragic event as the “Nakba” or the Catastrophe.

Ramzy Baroud, a US-Palestinian, columnist, journalist, gifted writer and Editor-in-Chief of The Palestine Chronicle, writes the story of his family, which was expelled from their village Beit Daras, located 46 kilometers to the north-east of Gaza City. The village belonged to those that fell victim to Ben-Gurion’s vision of an exclusive Jewish state, devoid of its indigenous population. The Baroud family ended up as refugees in the Gaza Strip like hundreds of thousands of others from the depopulated villages.

In the book’s Foreword, Salman Abu Sitta, founder and president of Palestine Land Society, mentions that the population of Gaza equals now the total population of Palestine in 1948, namely 1.4 million. Israeli politicians and their supporters in the West always mention that the Gaza Strip is the most densely populated place on earth without mentioning Israel’s responsibility for this situation. Israeli state institutions, including its armed forces, keep the whole population of Gaza incarcerated in what is sometimes termed the biggest open-air prison in he world. The entire Gaza Strip has been surrounded by barbed wire. And during the 43 long years of occupation, Israel has systematically prevented the economic development of the Gaza Strip. (See Sara Roy’s detailed study: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development.)

The author portrays the life and the struggle for survival of his family and the Palestinian people in Gaza. He describes six decades of suffering with no end in sight. After having read the book, one gets the impression that the Nakba was not limited to 1948, but is still ongoing. When Israeli settlers were still living in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army made life for the Palestinians “a living hell”, writes Baroud. The story the author tells us is basically about the life of his father Mohammed. His story could only been told after he passed away. “Israeli soldiers can no longer raid, search and ravage his house. They can no longer deny him permission to travel for medical treatment. No more humiliation from a smart-ass teenage Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. No more questioning and no more abuse.”

Focusing mainly on the story of his uprooted family, Baroud’s moving chronicle also sheds light on the live of the Palestinian population in general and their persisting ordeal caused by Israeli occupation. He locates the life of his family in a wider political, social and economic context. As a ten-year-old boy, Mohammad Baroud, the author’s father, found himself displaced in the middle of nowhere in Gaza, light years away from his farm where his family grew its own crops. This “nightmare was to be his true, everlasting reality”. The 200 000 refugees were not welcomed by the 80 000 Gazans. However, tensions between the two groups grew, and the Egyptian occupiers did little for their relief. The opposite was the case; they only created the impression that they took care of the refugees.

Unlike his older brother, Mohammed was not a source of pride to his parents. He was resentful, disobeying orders, and possessed a rebellious spirit, which led to merciless reprimands and beatings. “The more he resented his parents’ unfair treatment, the more punishment he received.” This early experience marked his life. Having survived the several wars, he decided to join the newly established “Palestinian Liberation Army“ (PLA) to achieve something besides more than Arab rhetoric. After Israel occupied the rest of Palestine in June of 1967, the rules of the games changed fundamentally.

When the so-called peace process took place, Mohammed described the Oslo accords as "the best-timed disaster that had ever befallen Gaza". The PLO acted as Israel’s security agent, shot at demonstrators protesting the accords and put them in jail. In the last elections, Mohammed voted for Hamas because it presented a “culture of resistance”. His funeral was attended by thousands of people “who shared his plight, hopes and struggles", writes his son, Ramzy.

The book’s story is depressing as the history of the Palestinian people is concerned. On the other hand, the life and the inner attitude of Mohammed Baroud give hope to the “Wretched of the Earth“. He showed that surrender to injustice and repression can never be an option. This should be understood as a hint to Palestinians who seem to prefer, with Abbas leading the way, the easier way to “independence”. Ramzy Baroud and his father stand for the alternative: freedom and self-respect.