Teen stabbed by soldiers in ‘stable condition’

HEBRON (Ma’an) — An 18-year-old stabbed by Israeli soldiers near Bethlehem on Sunday is in a stable condition after surgery, the Palestinian prisoners society said Wednesday.

Salah al-Zghayar underwent surgery at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center after he was stabbed in the abdomen at Gush Etzion junction, prisoners society lawyer Mofeed al-Haj said in a statement.

Al-Zghayar, from Hebron, told the lawyer he was attacked by several soldiers who were guarded by police.

His father Nidal told Ma’an he has not yet received permission from Israeli authorities to visit his son. He said his son was on his way to Bethlehem when he was stabbed.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said Sunday that al-Zghayar had approached soldiers while carrying a knife and “violently resisted a routine security check.”

He was wounded by his own knife, she said.

(www.maannews.net / 23.05.2012)

Israelis run organ trafficking network

A file photo of a transplant surgery

An illegal network of organ harvesters and traffickers, which exploits both the organ donors and recipients, has been uncovered in Israel.

According to Ha’aretz, at least 10 Israeli citizens were arrested for membership in the organ trafficking gang. Investigation into the ring began after representatives of several countries contacted the Israeli authorities and provided them with the names of suspects, who are all Israeli citizens.

In a November report, CNN said that the organs of the individuals trying to enter Israel from the Sinai desert had been trafficked.

The Italian New Generation Foundation for Human Rights and the Everyone Group has presented evidence indicating that Sinai locals harvest the organs of the people they transfer to Israel. In this connection, a number of mass graves have been found containing the corpses of Africans who were missing some of their organs.

(www.presstv.ir / 23.05.2012)

Interview: racism of Britain’s rulers in Palestine explored in major new exhibition

Sarah Irving  / The Electronic Intifada /21 May 2012

 

British troops blow up a Palestinian home in Nablus, late 1930s.

Anne Lineen is an exhibition curator dedicated to investigating Britain’s frequently brutal history. Her 2008 show Breaking the Chains examined the country’s role in the slave trade.

Over the past few years, Lineen has been working with the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. Along with the Palestinian author Karl Sabbagh, she prepared a major exhibition on the British Mandate, the colonial administration in Palestine from 1923 to 1948.

The project drew on testimonies from various people who had memories of the British Mandate period. Among the stories of arrests, house demolitions and hangings — strikingly similar to the actions of the current Israeli occupation — one man interviewed by Lineen in 2009 was particularly memorable. An elderly native of Nablus, who worked as a handyman and gardener, was literally too frightened to talk in detail about his experiences. More than sixty years later, the fear that someone would seek him out and punish him for resisting the British was still too strong.

Since that interview was conducted, the Empire and Commonwealth Museum has shut down, cancelled the exhibition and made Lineen redundant. But, absorbed by the documents and images she unearthed and the tales she heard from interviewees in Palestine, Britain and Jordan, she has remained committed to making the show happen.The British in Palestine is now scheduled to open at London’s Brunei Gallery in October.

Anne Lineen spoke to The Electronic Intifada contributor Sarah Irving.

Sarah Irving: What kind of material can we expect to see in this exhibition? It was originally conceptualized by the Empire and Commonwealth Museum as a very ambitious project, with lots of audio material and outreach work. Has the museum’s closure and withdrawal of support from the exhibition affected what will be shown?

Anne Lineen: There will be a lot of photographs, and some of them are very dramatic. There are lots of people in the UK who served in Palestine, either in the Palestine Police or the military or as administrators, and they have lots of very dramatic photographs of the events which they experienced, and often their albums will have their own little notes that give a sense of personal commentary and experiences of the period. And I’m also looking at some of the official British government documents which give a sense of the twists and turns of British policy in Palestine. So there are original documents, lots of documentary film from Palestine from this period and interviews with people and personal artifacts.

The Empire and Commonwealth Museum trustees wrote to me saying “no” [to a request to use material donated to the museum or bought by Lineen during the research process] but in some cases I’m doing interviews again and people are still willing to lend artifacts. But, for example, I visited a professor in Bethlehem who is an expert in newspapers from Palestine and bought off him a bound copy of Filastin [a Palestinian newspaper published in Jaffa between 1911 and 1948]. That’s now sitting in a museum basement in Bristol and I can’t use it.

But the British were obsessed with mapping; in the Royal Geographical Society and the National Archive they have maps which give a sense of population and the language and culture of the area. There are some beautiful hand-drawn maps in the Palestine Exploration Fund, for example, from when they did their surveys. They produced very vivid, detailed, hand-drawn maps and wrote descriptions. So you’ll have a map which shows a little village with gardens and orange groves and then in the records they’ll describe that village, saying “they have gardens, they grow pomegranates and olives, 1,600 people live there” — a great mass of material which gives a real idea of what Palestine was like before the British came.

SI: It must be likely that many of these villages were destroyed in 1948 when the State of Israel was established?

AL: I’m sure, yes. So, that adds to the poignancy of it.

SI: Will the interviews be available for visitors to listen to, as originally planned? How has translation been affected by the change in the exhibition’s circumstances?

AL: We’ve got a lot of interviews, nearly a hundred, many done in English, and in some of the interviews done with Naseer [Arafat, an architect in Nablus], he was translating as we went along. In little extracts that works quite well because you’ve got a bit of the conversation. But sadly any of the material that was in Arabic I won’t be able to use because I don’t have the resources to translate it. All the Gaza material was in Arabic but there are some written extracts so I can use those.

It’s a shame in some ways — the original idea for the exhibition was very ambitious, it would tour America and the Middle East. Now it’s just me, so it’ll be different — it will be much more personal, but I think in some ways that will be one of its strengths, it will be more organic and accessible. It won’t be glossy and overblown. And I’m always looking for more stories, people whose families lived in Palestine, who have stories of their parents’ experience, or any relatives. It’s not too late if people have anything to offer.

SI: There is a sense from the information about the exhibition that there was a big gap between the “official” British narratives about Mandate Palestine and the actual experiences of the people you’ve interviewed, especially Palestinians but also British people who were in the police and military under the Mandate.

AL: Yes, you’ve got the official narrative, and set against that you’ve got the personal material which gives a sense of people on the ground. Many of them have very personal photographs and documents which they’re very kindly lending, so you get a sense of the human stories.

It was fascinating [during the research] to hear both Arabs and Jews talking about their day-to-day relationships and interactions. I don’t want to be romantic and suggest that it was wonderful, but in the big mixed cities such as Haifa and Jerusalem people got on, they had to. There was somebody I interviewed from an Arab family; his father was a dentist, and he was able to go to the cinema run by a Jewish proprietor and get in free because his dentist father treated the proprietor. Or an Arab family who would go to a Jewish tailor — simple, daily interactions.

But what the British were doing was seeing people as groups. Somebody was either “Arab” or “Jewish,” and they had these very prejudiced ideas about the characteristics of both groups. The British had these terribly racist ideas — they thought that Palestine needed “developing,” it needed economic development, and they thought the Arabs couldn’t do that, so they need the Jews with all their wealth to come and do it for them. Just in that attitude you’ve got so many problems, it’s hard to know where to start. So in order to undermine that I’ve looked for examples of Palestinians setting up their own businesses. There was one person from Haifa whose father took a correspondence course in electronic engineering — ordinary people with their ambitions and aspirations which the British simply didn’t see, they were so fixated with Arabs being “backward” and passive and Jews being dynamic and rich.

 

Palestinian fighters during the 1936-39 uprising against the British.

SI: Many of the people who actually remember the Mandate era must be very old by now, but you also spoke to family members who will recall what their parents or other relative said about the period. What does this tell you are the Palestinian experience of British rule?

AL: We talked to families as well because family memories can be very interesting. You have a sense that this tragic history becomes part of the family memories. You’ve also got very poignant mementos that people have from the period like photographs and documents and the odd artifact, a teapot or coffee pot that people managed to retain, so very ordinary items become extremely precious. I think it’s interesting to see what meaning people attach to those items and what they say about the memories they have of Palestine. So that’s something I want to explore in the exhibition as well.

SI: You’re no stranger to mounting exhibitions on sensitive issues. Has this exhibition faced any controversy yet?

AL: To be honest, no. People see the issue as controversial, but actually when you go to museums in Britain they respond very enthusiastically, and individuals as well. They are very keen to see this history brought out into the open, because they feel that because it’s controversial nobody will deal with it, or it’s dealt with in a particular agenda. So anybody coming along and just saying, I want to look at what happened, I want to find out about you and what happened to you and your family, they’re really keen that their parents’ stories are told. I’m not trying to make out that anybody’s bad or evil, I just want to look at why people did the things they did, so generally I’ve been pleased that museums and individuals have been so supportive and enthusiastic.

SI: To what extent has your research been a reminder of how much Britain was involved in creating the problems of the modern Middle East, and how much this country might be seen as responsible for what happened in Palestine?

AL: Inevitably it is, because the conflict started under the British and they have to take some responsibility for that. I think it shows the dangers of a country or an imperial power getting involved in another country without really knowing anything about it, and always pursuing their own interests without seeing the damage that could do. What’s ironic is that in the end it wasn’t in Britain’s interests at all. Lots of young British men were killed in Palestine. They were the ones having to deal with the tensions on the ground, it wasn’t the politicians in the Colonial Office. There were dissenting voices, there were politicians who were critical of what Britain was doing, but if what they were saying wasn’t seen to be in Britain’s interests they were ignored.

SI: From your descriptions of what British men and women who served in the police and military in Palestine had to say, it sounds as if they have quite mixed feelings about their role there. Many people would see them as having been an occupying colonial power, but for individuals it obviously had a big impact on their lives.

AL: British people who were in Palestine, even if they were there for a short time, it’s still got a real grip on their imaginations. It is quite complex for some of them. For example, the police — some of them were only 17 or 18, doing national service. They had the typical attitude of a young person — this is an adventure, I’ll be abroad, and they also had this sense that they were indestructible. And they weren’t given a huge amount of information about what was going on and what they could expect and they did experience some really shocking things. They might not admit to being shocked or affected, but obviously they were.

I think they didn’t personally feel responsible but they did feel that the government was responsible. A couple of them did say things like “we let the Arabs down” — you would always get the sense that that’s what they felt. And the former soldiers always said morale was very high, but the soldiers’ mentality is of “doing what needs to be done.” They were given an order and that’s what they did. So they would go into Jaffa and stop the fighting, and a few days later they’d come out again and they’d know the conflict would resume. But those are their orders. So certainly in the military in the last couple of months [of the British Mandate] in Palestine it seems like an illogical situation where sometimes they intervene and sometimes they don’t.

(electronicintifada.net / 23.05.2012)

Tunisian military tribunal seeks death penalty for ex-President Ben Ali

Former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is being tried in absentia for the deaths of at least 22 people during the January 2011 pro-democracy protests in the towns of Thala and Kasserine.

A Tunisian military prosecutor demanded the death penalty Wednesday for ex-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who is being tried in absentia over killings during last year’s popular uprising, an official said.

The prosecutor at the military tribunal also sought the “toughest penalties possible” for Ben Ali’s 22 co-defendants, ex-senior officials who are being prosecuted for the deaths of at least 22 people during the January 2011 pro-democracy protests in the towns of Thala and Kasserine.

It is the first time the death penalty has been sought against the ousted longtime dictator, although he has already been sentenced to more than 66 years in prison on a range of other charges including drug trafficking to torture and embezzlement.

Ben Ali was absent for those court cases, having fled Tunisia on January 14 to seek exile in Saudi Arabia.

The protest against his autocratic rule triggered what would become the Arab Spring uprisings that swept other strongmen from power across the Arab world.

Among those on trial in the case are former interior ministers Rafik Belhaj Kacem and Ahmed Friaa.

During the trial, none of the defendants has admitted giving the order to open fire on protesters and no one has named names.

Defense arguments are scheduled to get under way Thursday.

On Tuesday, Tunisia’s justice minister said he suspected Ben Ali was still benefiting from funds stashed abroad 16 months after his overthrow and urged Saudi Arabia to extradite the former president for trial.

Tunisia’s government has faced persistent criticism over its failure to persuade Saudi Arabia to hand over Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, a former hairdresser whose lavish lifestyle and clique of wealthy relatives had come to be seen by many Tunisians as a symbol of the corrupt Ben Ali era.

During his 23 years in office, members of Ben Ali’s extended family are believed to have accumulated fortunes, stashing money in foreign accounts, while his security forces routinely arrested anyone who dared to dissent.

(english.alarabiya.net / 23.05.2012)

The stakes in Egypt’s presidential election

INTERVIEW: MOSTAFA ALI

Egyptians will vote on May 23 and 24 in the first presidential election since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in February of last year. If, as seems likely, no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff election in June between the top two candidates. Mostafa Ali, a journalist for Ahram Online and member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists, spoke with Alan Maass about who the presidential candidates are and what they represent.

Voting in Egypt’s first fully free elections (Ahmed Abdel-fatah)

WHO ARE the major candidates in the presidential election and what do they stand for?

THERE ARE three candidates who have been at the top of the opinion polls all along, and two others who have risen in the polls in recent weeks.

One of them is Amr Moussa, Hosni Mubarak’s former foreign minister from 1991 to 2001 and the former secretary-general of the Arab League from 2001 to 2011. He has been leading in the polls for a long time. He reestablished himself after the revolution last year as an opponent of Mubarak–as someone who differed with him on major foreign policy issues, especially the question of Israel.

The second person who is one of the main frontrunners is Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a longtime opponent of Mubarak and one of the leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was expelled from the Muslim Brotherhood last summer for breaking party rules and running for president. The Muslim Brotherhood, knowing that it would win the parliamentary elections, had promised not to field a candidate for president–to assure people, especially the West and the ruling military council, that it had no intention of monopolizing all aspects of power in the country.

Aboul Fotouh broke ranks and announced he was running for president. He is considered to be from the liberal wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has a social democratic program and is quite liberal on social issues, on the role of women, on the Coptic Christian minority and so on.

The third person who been at the top of opinion polls is Hamdeen Sabahi. He is a longtime opponent of Mubarak who has also been in jail a number of times, just like Aboul Fotouh. He is the candidate of the Nasserist Dignity Party and is well known for his anti-Zionist positions, ever since his student days in the 1970s.

Those three candidates have led in opinion polls for quite a few months. But in the past few weeks, there have been some twists–in particular, two people who jumped into the race late.

One is Mohamed Morsi, the head of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had serious conflicts with the military council that has ruled Egypt since Mubarak’s downfall, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF. About a month and a half ago, it reneged on its promise not to put up a presidential candidate. It is now running Morsi, one of its leading members, and he has been moving up in the polls, right behind the three frontrunners.

The other twist is that Mubarak’s former aviation minister and his last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, has also decided to enter the race. He was brought in by Mubarak when the rebellion was underway in the hopes of appeasing the protesters with a new government–though clearly that didn’t work.

Shafiq is believed to have played a part in masterminding the infamous Battle of the Camel on February 2 last year, when thousands of pro-Mubarak forces attacked the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, killing dozens and injuring hundreds of people. If he didn’t plan the attack, he at least did nothing to stop it.

Shafiq has moved up in the polls quite fast in the last few weeks as well and is considered to be a serious contender.

These are the major frontrunners, but one other candidate is important to mention. His name is Khaled Ali. He is well behind in the polls, but his campaign has picked up a lot of steam–he was little known to the general public until about a month ago.

Ali is a labor lawyer and a left-wing activist. He made name for himself among human rights activists and also among sections of workers, because he spent years fighting in the courts against Mubarak’s privatization of public-sector companies. Ali actually won some historic lawsuits to renationalize some of these companies. He was also the lawyer who won a historic verdict from the courts two years ago to set a minimum wage for all workers in the country.

Ali calls himself a socialist–he’s running for president on a radical left-wing program centered around getting the army out of political life and the redistribution of wealth in the country.

COULD YOU talk about where these candidates stand in relation to the revolution that toppled Mubarak–whether they stand for the continuation of Egypt’s transformation or restoration of the status quo?

FROM THE point of view of activists in Egypt–those who want to see the revolution extended–you could group these candidates into three categories.

First, there’s Moussa and Shafiq, the former ministers from Mubarak’s government. They are considered by most of the revolutionary forces to be remnants of the old regime–even though Moussa has tried to distance himself from Mubarak. That isn’t how the general population views them, but for the most left-wing sections of activists, a victory for either of them will be seen as a defeat for the revolution.

Second, there is Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, who cannot be considered a remnant of the old regime. But he and the Brotherhood are viewed quite negatively by the left as people who cut deals with the old regime at many points in the past–and who played a destructive role through their alliances with the military council over the course of the last year.

The Brotherhood hasn’t participated in the massacres of protesters, but ideologically, it backed the SCAF in its attacks on the revolutionaries. So for the left, the Brotherhood is considered to be in the camp of the old regime and the counterrevolution, even if it wasn’t a remnant of the old regime.

The third category is the candidates who are associated with the revolution. These include Aboul Fotouh, who was expelled from the Muslim Brotherhood; the Nasserist Sabahi; and the socialist candidate Khaled Ali. These three contenders are seen as candidates of the revolution because of their long-time opposition to the regime, their participation in the struggle last year, and their more or less principled opposition of military rule throughout the past year.

LET’S TALK more about each of these categories of candidates. First, how is it possible that candidates who represent the old regime could have the possibility of winning the presidency so soon after Mubarak’s downfall?

IT’S IMPORTANT to understand that most people aren’t looking at the candidates in the same way as those who are most active in the revolutionary movement.

For example, many people who are voting for Moussa–Mubarak’s former foreign minster and the head of the Arab League–are actually pro-revolution, but they have accepted his argument that he was a longtime Mubarak opponent. These people are attracted to Moussa because at a time of instability, he has a lot of government experience and a lot of international experience, and despite his age–he’s in his 70s –he seems to them like someone who can lead the country at this moment.

The situation is different with Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister. Shafiq is an outright counterrevolutionary. He repeats every day that Mubarak is his role model, and he promises to use an iron fist to deal with protesters and revolutionaries–in order to bring back law and order within 24 hours of assuming the presidency.

So it is quite surprising that he has become one of the frontrunners. But this has to do with two factors. First, after more than a year of ruling the country, the military council has succeeded in weakening the revolutionary forces. By using the fact that most people were waiting for the parliamentary and presidential elections, they were able to gain the upper hand and, I believe, temporarily stabilize the system, at least politically.

This has given tremendous confidence to Mubarak’s old ruling party and the remnants of the old regime–which are definitely still a force in politics and the state machinery. The forces of the counterrevolution believe the revolutionary moment has passed by, and they’re organizing like mad in support of Shafiq.

But it’s also true that a lot of ordinary people will vote for him not necessarily because they are against the revolution, but because in the context of the economic crisis, Shafiq poses himself as a man of action–a man who will be able to deliver on domestic security issues and economic issues right away, having been in government before.

CAN YOU talk about the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to change course and run a candidate? And another question: The Brotherhood and other Islamist parties dominated the legislative elections that began late last year. Why isn’t Morsi dominating in the presidential election now that he is running?

THE MUSLIM Brotherhood came into a serious conflict with the military council after it won a parliamentary majority at the end of elections back in January.

The Brotherhood wanted to be able to appoint a cabinet and dismiss the one that was appointed by the SCAF. Secondly, there is a fight over who’s going to write the constitution. The Brotherhood obviously wanted to do this, using its parliamentary majority. The SCAF wanted to have the upper hand in writing the constitution and opposed that.

Because of these conflicts, the SCAF has led a major propaganda campaign against the Brotherhood, with the participation of the mainstream media, even the privately owned media. There has been an intense campaign of Islamophobia over the past four months–with the idea that the Brotherhood is power-hungry and wants to turn Egypt into a new Iran and so on.

That campaign obviously hurt the Brotherhood’s credibility. But more than that, the Brotherhood, with its parliamentary majority since the start of the year, has failed to really address some key issues–not just long-term economic issues, but even immediate crises, like an acute gas shortage which has left cars and trucks lining up for a day or two to wait for gas. Actually, the Brotherhood in parliament is constrained in what it can and can’t do to address some of the immediate economic issues.

So this combination of factors–first, the Brotherhood entering into a serious conflict with the military council, and second, its inability to really challenge the neoliberal policies set by the former regime–has taken a toll on the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity.

The Brotherhood probably won 50 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, and that doesn’t count the votes that went to other Islamist parties, But it’s not expected the presidential elections.

However, having said that, the Muslim Brotherhood is still the largest political organization in the country, with deep roots in working-class communities all over the country, north and south. On May 17, it organized a human chain in support of Mursi, with people locking arms in long lines–and it was one of the longest human chains in history, stretching about 700 miles, from Aswan in the south of the country, all the way to Alexandria in the north.

That sheer ability of the Brotherhood to mobilize is why its candidate, despite entering the presidential race very late, has managed to go from the low single digits in opinion polls not so many days ago to being among the frontrunners.

Still, there is a drop in popularity for the Brotherhood since the parliamentary election. Many people–not a majority, probably, but many–who voted for the Brotherhood then, now don’t think it’s actually committed to fighting corruption and changing the system. Some of these people are falling into the hands of the Mubarak candidates. But others are supporting the candidates associated with the revolution.

So Aboul Fotouh, who was expelled from the Brotherhood, has gained a lot of support from young people in the organization–exactly because he was expelled and because he supports the revolution and refused to join the attack on activists and protesters during the past year.

WHAT ABOUT Aboul Fotouh and the other candidates associated with the revolution? How will they do?

THE FORCES that are the most committed to the revolution and to stopping a return to the old regime are divided in the election between three or four candidates. So the vote will be split among them.

But the positive sign is that if you add the votes that will go to the three main candidates associated with the revolution–Aboul Fotouh, Sabahi and Ali–they will probably get between 30 and 35 percent of the vote between them. That’s not that bad, considering the situation–the fact that there aren’t sizeable organizations on the ground throughout the last year, like there are representing the Islamists or the regime forces.

There has been a retreat in the last few months in terms of mass mobilizations, because people have been waiting for the presidential elections. More people are expected to vote for the president than in the parliamentary elections–and the turnout in the parliamentary elections was quite massive.

Part of the reason is that a lot of people had hopes the parliament would have immediate solutions to the acute economic crisis. A lot of workers voted for the Brotherhood on that basis. Now, as people get dismayed with the parliament, more and more of them are putting their faith in the next president to have a magic want to solve the country’s economic crisis and bring about freedom and justice. It’s very ironic–now that people are turning their hopes away from parliament, many are putting their faith into the next president.

In reality, the next president–even if it’s a president who comes from the left–will inherit a system that is mostly still intact from the Mubarak days: the same state machinery and same ruling class, determined to continue the same neoliberal policies and deals with the IMF. It may take a few months, but it’s inevitable that people will come to realize that electing a new president isn’t going to be enough to change the system.

It’s interesting that strikes around the country have not only continued, but have matured in a number of ways. Workers are not only walking out–they’re going out on strike because they’ve realized that so many promises made by the government over the course of the last year and now by the Muslim Brotherhood aren’t being met.

So it’s a very intense situation, and a new president is going to have to make important concessions to millions of workers and the poor to stand a chance of maintaining any kind of popularity for an extended period of time.

The elections are taking place in a period of intense economic struggles, but unfortunately, a lot of these strikes do shake the Military Council, but not enough, because they aren’t coordinated and there is no political representation for the working class movement.

Overall, these are learning experiences for a lot of people–through economic struggle and through political struggles in terms of learning what the parliamentary system is about.

Maybe one point to end on is the massive excitement about the presidential election among a majority of people. In spite of everything that’s happened, the terrible things the SCAF has done and the Brotherhood’s broken promises, there’s a sense of excitement that the first-ever democratic election is going to take place, and that people now have the right to discuss politics and choose candidates.

That’s a very important step for a population that has been quite beaten down for 60 years.The elections will be a major accomplishment of the revolution, and there’s quite a lot of excitement about that, despite everything else.

(socialistworker.org / 23.05.2012)

Immigratiebeleid gestoeld op leugens?

Vandaag, woensdag 23 mei, kon Nederland weer meemaken hoe de overheid omgaat met uitgeprocedeerde asielzoekers: het tentenkamp in ter Apel werd door politie en ME ontruimd en onze gasten werden te kijk gezet als criminelen.

Henny Kreeft, voorzitter van de Nederlandse Moslim Partij, is woedend hoe de overheid met de mensen in Ter Apel is omgegaan. Tevens is hij woedend hoe hij zelf van het kastje naar de muur is gestuurd.  Dinsdag heeft hij het COA gebeld voor informatie, werd daar doorverwezen naar het ministerie. Kreeft: “Dan maar onmiddellijk bellen met de heer Leers, maar dat is natuurlijk niet zo snel mogelijk”; hij werd opgevangen door het secretariaat van de heer Leers, die aangaf dat het beleid i.v.m. de asielzoekers en veiligheid van de landen terug te vinden is in de respectievelijke ambtsberichten. Deze ambtsberichten zijn terug te vinden op de site van de rijksoverheid; de verschillende ambtsberichten zijn bekeken en er kan niets anders geconcludeerd worden, dan dat “in de verschillende ambtsberichten te lezen staat dat de landen NIET veilig zijn.” Kreeft geeft aan dat als het beleid gestoeld is op deze berichten, er toch een verschil is in wat de minister zegt tegen de asielzoekers en wat er in de berichten staat: “Ik kan niets anders concluderen dat in de ambtsberichten geschreven staat dat de landen Irak, Iran, Afghanistan en Somalië niet veilig zijn. In sommige berichten staat zelfs te lezen dat de veiligheid in bepaalde gebieden is afgenomen. Hoe kan dan de minister zeggen dat de asielzoekers terug kunnen omdat de landen veilig zijn? Of de berichten kloppen niet, of zijn er andere berichten die niet geplaatst zijn of het is een grove leugen dat de landen veilig zijn”. Dit laatste is volgens Henny Kreeft regelmatig op tv te zien.

Woensdag is Kreeft in contact gebleven met mensen van het kamp, maar heeft vóór de ontruiming mevrouw  Kompier, burgemeester van Vlagtwedde trachten te bellen i.v.m. de geruchten van een ontruiming en de aangekondigde aanvraag van een kort geding. Kreeft: “De secretaresse heeft mijn mening en gegevens genoteerd en mijn telefoonnummer en ik zou teruggebeld worden daar de burgemeester in bespreking zat.” De burgemeester moet nog steeds terug bellen, maar ondertussen is het kamp wel ontruimd, dus hier weer een leugen, want men had kunnen zeggen waar ze mee bezig waren. “Als bezorgd inwoner van dit land, die meeleeft met mensen die al heel lang in de justitiële molen zitten, word je gewoon aan het lijntje gehouden, wordt er niet de waarheid gezegd en in feite voorgelogen.” Kreeft is niet te spreken over het beleid van deze minister en deze burgemeester en is zeer bezorgd over de mensen die zgn. vrijwillig uit het kamp zijn vertrokken (de Irakezen) en degenen die met geweld zijn verwijderd en nu opgesloten zitten. Er is maar een beleid van deze minister en dat is deze groep asielzoekers zo snel mogelijk het land uit te krijgen, goedschiks of kwaadschiks of desnoods met een leugen. Want dat de Iraakse asielzoekers ook op de duur het land uit gezet worden, ondanks de toestemming van de minister van onderdak en medewerking,  staat voor Kreeft als een paal boven water.
Kreeft: “Het kan toch niet zo zijn dat mensen die hier al meer dan zoveel jaren bezig zijn met de asielaanvraag, en van het kastje naar de muur worden gestuurd, dossiers moeten aanleggen van alle papieren die ingevuld moet worden en tevens nog een inburgeringscursus voorgeschoteld krijgen of op eigen initiatief inburgeren, dan na al die jaren – sommige wel na 10, 15 of 18 jaar – te horen krijgen dat ze hier niet welkom zijn. Van welke partij is de heer Leers lid? Iets met een C heb ik begrepen. Het laatste woord is hier nog niet over gezegd, er zal een dezer dagen een brief naar de heer Leers voor tekst en uitleg worden gestuurd  en mogelijk een naar mevrouw Kompier.”