Rally protests Guantanamo violations
A Bar Association seminar meant to show solidarity with Guantanamo detainees ended up demonstrating against US treatment of the Arab and Muslim world in general. Jailan Halawi reports
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US human rights abuses against Arab and Muslims were the focus of a Bar Association seminar
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A seminar held Sunday at the Bar Association's downtown headquarters was headlined "Human rights and the Guantanamo detainees". The seminar was highly critical of Arab governments' silence in the face of the US's "flagrant violation of Arab and Muslim human rights". Speakers said Guantanamo detainees' "basic" human rights were being violated, and that the international community's silence was "humanity's shame".
Audience members and speakers alike chanted anti-US slogans throughout the two-hour session, agreeing that the issue of Islamists detained at Guantanamo is inseparable from a possible US war on Iraq and the aggression inflicted on Palestinians in the occupied territories. The US and Israel were defined as the Muslim world's "real enemies".
According to Sameh Ashour, chairman of the Bar Association and head of the Arab Lawyers Union, the US, as the sole superpower in the world today, "is embarking on [a road of] old- fashioned militaristic imperialism and no one seems able to stop it". This, said Ashour, is a result of the world's "silence" in the face of US actions, which has enabled the Americans to "threaten to turn Iraq into another Afghanistan".
As for the Palestinian issue, Ashour opined that the "US's obvious bias towards Israel" is laying the groundwork for Israel to rule the Middle East on behalf of the US. "Our real enemy is not just Israel, but America as well," Ashour said, since "they are both parties to the same conspiracy."
Ashour called on Arab and Muslim states to "awaken from their slumber."
Mirroring this opinion, Naguib El- Ne'imy, former Qatari minister of justice and head of the Arab Lawyers Committee in charge of defending the Guantanamo detainees, blamed the detainees' deteriorating human rights condition on the "passivity and silence" of Arab and Muslim governments. El- Ne'imy described the living conditions at Guantanamo as "bleak", and the way the US was dealing with the detainees as "humiliating and inhuman", their extended detention without trial a "violation of all human rights and tenets of international law".
Confronting US bias against the Muslim world, El-Ne'imy suggested, would have to involve organisational efforts, with people meeting, demonstrating, striking, and distributing leaflets voicing their opinions to the world. In light of deteriorating political conditions, El- Ne'imy said this was the only option. He also said that "we need to contact" anti-war factions in the US and "work together in order to achieve our goals".
As the audience interrupted El- Ne'imy's speech with anti-American slogans linking Guantanamo to Iraq, Islamist lawyer Montasser El-Zayyat expressed his concerns that Iraq would become yet another Guantanamo unless Muslims took action to pressure their governments into stopping an attack on Iraq. El-Zayyat said the seminar's aim was "to mobilise public opinion against US policies".
He also announced that a committee of Egyptian lawyers had been formed with a mandate to monitor US violations against Muslims and file lawsuits against the US in international courts.
