Amnesty International Charges Khiam War Crimes
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
JULY 2000, pages 11-12
Special Report
By Ahmed Karaoud (Amnesty International, Tunisia), Ina Tin Iversen (Amnesty International, Norway), Elizabeth Hodgkin and Claudio Cordone (International Secretariat)
(Eyewitness report from an Amnesty International delegation
visiting Khiam Prison in South Lebanon.)
Dear Friends,
We arrived at the Khiam detention center, on a wind-swept hill
overlooking the town of Khiam with a beautiful view of the
surrounding fields and mountains of southern Lebanon, in the early
afternoon of May 29. We drove there with a number of former
detainees we had visited in the morning in their homes in the
villages of Rmeish and Ainata.
Only six days before our visit, this was still a frightening
detention center, with its tales of torture, degradation and
hopelessness. The stories we had just heard in the morning from
detainees most recently arrested and freed on 23 May did not differ
significantly from those we had become familiar with over the years.
Filthy hoods, relentless interrogation through beatings, repeated
suspension from an electricity pylon, dousing with water, and
electroshocks—one recent addition seems to have been a lie-detector
machine. Only a few months ago detainees were sometimes still taken
to Israel first for interrogation and then to Khiam, or taken to
Israel from Khiam and back. Detention in crowded, dark and dirty
cells followed interrogation. The waiting started, with minimal
exposure to daylight, bad food and rare contact with the outside
world—and this only in recent years.
Worst of all, there was the fear for their relatives who were
often detained and abused as a way of putting pressure on the
detainees. Detainees also suffered from the knowledge that they were
being held as hostages as part of the trade in human beings or their
remains, a situation in which Israel, Hezbollah and others have
engaged, and which continues to this day. Only yesterday the Israeli
Supreme Court was hearing the case of two prominent Lebanese
detainees held in Israel openly as “bargaining chips” to find out
the fate of Israeli soldiers missing in Lebanon.
Then, all of a sudden, around midday on 23 May, there was the
dramatic liberation. No jailers showed up with the keys to the
cells, they actually ran away from the prison to join other SLA
members streaming to the border to seek refuge in Israel, as Israeli
troops themselves rushed to the border. In a scene almost from
another age, we were told that the people of Khiam, acting out of
the momentum created by the hurried and confused Israeli withdrawal,
went to the detention center demanding the liberation of the
prisoners. The SLA jailers negotiated a safe passage for themselves
out of the prison and left, leaving much behind, and no one was
hurt. Detainees heard shouting, some shooting (it was in the air),
and did not know what was happening. Some feared that people were
being executed:
“We got close to the window in our cell to try to hear better, as
we did not understand what was happening. There was shouting and we
heard shooting. Then we saw a boy out of the window. He said, ‘Where
is the door?’ We knew then we were free.”
Using any tools they could find, the people from Khiam broke down
the doors, letting the detainees out, in the chaotic and exciting
scenes that were captured on television. All 144 remaining detainees
came out, many left their few belongings behind. For the first time,
they could also see without terror the places and some of the
instruments of torture that the SLA abandoned in their panicky
flight. Former prisoners accompanied us, as we saw the filthy hoods,
many made of thick blue material, scattered around. We also saw a
metal grid, roughly built on the face of a wall, in what we were
told was the main interrogation room—at the foot of one of the
watchtowers. This was also reminiscent of another age. Prisoners
Ni’ma Daqduq and De Gaulle Boutros showed us how they were tied to
the grid and beaten. This is where the electroshock machine was
apparently kept, although, perhaps not surprisingly, it is no longer
there.
They also took us to the electricity pylon placed in a small
enclosed courtyard, where so many were tied up, stripped to their
underwear and, with a hood over their heads, were beaten or doused
with water. As the former prisoners related this experience to us
standing next to the pylon, other visitors gathered around to
listen, many clearly moved. The prisoners themselves were being
affected, as we saw in the case of Najwa Semhat, who was returning
for the first time after her release six days before, with her
daughter and husband—himself a former detainee—especially when she
faced her cell with memories all too fresh. But they were all
incredibly brave, patiently telling us what had happened to them,
and often repeating it to journalists and others from among the
hundreds, possibly thousands, of people coming to see the detention
center.
For the former Khiam detainees, it must be difficult to realize
that they are actually free, that the nightmare of Khiam is over. It
was all so sudden. Muhammad Jamil found among the clothes, food and
other things scattered around in his former cell, a piece of
embroidery he had made; De Gaulle Boutros picked up a drawing on a
paper tissue: small but significant things that became important in
their prisoner lives.
It was an extraordinary and moving day, full of incongruous
sights and strong, mixed emotions. On the one hand, a festive
atmosphere, with kids waving flags—primarily those of Hezbullah and
Amal—playing in the wreck of a military vehicle abandoned in the
central courtyard and enjoying refreshments from vendors at the gate
of the center. On the other hand, former prisoners, sometimes with
their families and sometimes alone, telling their stories, bumping
into each other, recognizing and embracing each other in highly
emotional scenes, often fighting back the tears. And occasionally
the sight of Lebanese government, religious and party officials,
also in the melee.
With the traces of its terrible past still fresh, Khiam is at the
same time already well into history. The feelings we felt and shared
with others were a sense of relief, even celebration, as something
terrible was over for good. At the same time we knew that the
euphoria will not last, that in the next weeks and months prisoners
will have to restart their lives away from the limelight, facing
health problems, economic and other difficulties. A chapter is
closing, but another one has immediately opened, more intimate, more
difficult for the prisoners and their families. Amnesty
International will continue to help
International Solidarity
International solidarity will be essential to provide a minimum
of practical as well as psychological support to the victims of
Khiam. We have seen how solidarity does have an effect as prisoners
learned, some for the first time, that people from different
countries, including countries they associate with their former
tormentors, had actually been campaigning for years on their behalf
and are ready to continue to help.
For us, it felt that this is what Amnesty International is really
about. We showed copies of our actions and reports, from the first
Urgent Action of November 1985, to the main report on 1992, to the
last Urgent Action issued only one week before the prisoners were
freed. We had with us some of the hundreds of letters we received
from the Israeli authorities saying they could not deliver them to
the SLA or that in any case they had nothing to do with the
detention center. No letters were ever received by the detainees and
they did not know that Amnesty International members and others
around the world were working for them.
Toward the end of our visit, we gave the former prisoners a
letter that was sent via Israel to the commander of the SLA by an
Urgent Action group from Cornell University in the United States of
America in November 1985. It was returned to the group by the
Israeli authorities saying they could not deliver it, a fiction that
was to be repeated in the following years. Now Amnesty International
delegates had brought the still-sealed letter to Khiam, and the
prisoners opened it under the barbed wire of the exercise yard. One
of them, Muhammad Jamil, read it out in English. It was an appeal
for protection against torture and arbitrary detention. Another
prisoner we encountered turned out to be one of those whose
photographs were featured on the cover of our 1992 report on Khiam.
He clutched his copy thankfully while we inquired about how he was
doing and took his current address. Amnesty International will stay
in touch.
Beyond the reality of the prisoners, there is that of the former
jailers and their masters. The crimes committed in Khiam were of the
most serious violations of human rights and international
humanitarian law—in short, war crimes. Hundreds of SLA members have
been arrested, perhaps including some who were involved in the
crimes of Khiam. While Lebanon is entitled to exercise leniency or
even pardon them for their taking up arms on the side of Israel,
there should be no blanket amnesty for any serious abuses they have
committed. For torture and other serious abuses they should be
brought to justice in fair trials without the death penalty.
Together with the responsibility of the SLA, there is the
responsibility of the state of Israel, which is fully accountable
for the arbitrary detention, torture and other abuses committed in
Khiam. Repeated denials of this never rang true and sometimes seemed
more of an attempt to dissociate Israel from the worst excesses
officials knew were being committed in Khiam.
Last year Israel admitted, in a High Court case to which Amnesty
International’s information had contributed, that Israel paid and
trained the SLA guards, and even that their personnel assisted with
polygraph tests. Najwa Semhat told us that only this January she was
taken to Israel for interrogation for a few hours and then returned
to Khiam.
Of course the fate of the Israeli soldiers missing in Lebanon
must be clarified, and those responsible for any abuses committed
against them must also be held to account (one of the soldiers, Ron
Arad, appears to have been held for up to a year by a Lebanese
militia before “disappearing”). But this does not provide Israel
with any justification to commit abuses.
One thing is clear, among the rapid and complex changes witnessed
in south Lebanon in recent days: that much of the work begins now,
for members of Amnesty International as well as for others who care
about human rights, regardless of borders.
