UK EVENT: Human Rights and Israel at 60

2008 sees the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of Israel. This conference discusses the conflicting paths of these projects.

Date: Sunday 4 May 2008
Venue: Islamic Centre of England, 140 Maida Vale, London, W9 1QB
Time: 11 a.m. – 6 pm

Themes to be discussed include: Self-determination, rights to life, land, property and water, freedom of movement.

Speakers include:

Michael Warschawski (Alternative Information Center)
Yehudit Keshet (Checkpoint Watch)
Daud Abdullah (Palestinian Return Centre)
Jennifer Loewenstein (University of Wisconsin)
Michael Bailey (Oxfam)
Meir Margalit (Israeli committee against House Demolitions)
Nearest Tube: Kilburn Park Station on the Bakerloo Line
National Rail: Kilburn High Rd Station
Bus Routes: 98, 16 and 32
On street parking available

All welcome. Entrance is free. Parent and child room, with relay, available. Lunch and refreshments provided.

Organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission
For more information, please contact 020 8904 4222, conference@ihrc.org

JOIN THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE. JOIN IHRC.

info@ihrc.org

More information, including poster / flyer available at:
http://www.ihrc.org.uk/080504/

Aliens in their own country

An opinion piece by the IHRC Chair, Massoud Shadjareh from the Thursday April 1, 2004 edition of The Guardian.

Seyf's a smart-looking guy, Mediterranean looking. If you're clued up about these things you'd guess he's of Turkish origin. Buying milk at his local supermarket he and his American flatmate of Pakistani origin were approached by a loud, white English shopper, who yelled in the middle of the dairy aisle: "Are you terrorists?"

This was an example of what passes as humour in Middle England at the moment. Before she burst out laughing and carried on what turned into a tirade, other shoppers stood by, nervously looking for staff and indicating that the two Muslim lads might be trouble.

Forget about the latest arrests around London. Forget about police profiling of Muslims (and of that there's plenty) - the general public now categorises all things Muslim as terror-orientated. Why? It's easy to blame victims of prejudice for their demonisation - it's a practice with a long pedigree. But the unending calls on Muslims, from rightwing shock jocks to former archbishops of Canterbury, to condemn terrorism reveal a level of conditionality that no other community has been asked to bear.
Throw into this mix the continuous police raids and arrests since 9/11 under various pieces of anti-terrorist legislation, the fanfare of media attention when Muslims of various origins are arrested and the deafening silence when most (some 450 out of 540) are released. Add the recent analysis of stop and search figures that shows a disproportionately high number of the 32,100 people who were stopped and searched in the last year (or more accurately 71,100 people when you take into account the misreporting of some police forces, according to Statewatch) were of Asian origin. Do not forget to include Islamophobic media coverage of an increasingly anti-Muslim "war on terror", and stir. The result?

British non-Muslims are scared of Muslims; they're angry with them and they're paranoid about the threat they perceive from Muslims ready to blow them up. British Muslims are scared of the backlash against them from non-Muslims. They're also paranoid about their safety from wider society, the security services and the other Muslims that they are told are out there waiting to blow everybody up.

At either end of this polarisation we are seeing a level of alienation that bodes ill for British society. For the Muslim part, their sense of grievance has to be taken on board by the government, its institutions and the media in a meaningful way. It's taken two years of lobbying the Met about stereotyping, but at last, yesterday, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke's statement to the press was at pains to make clear that the arrests and their focus should not cast aspersions on the Muslim community. Yet every breaking news story carried the label "Islamic terrorists" and the addition of the description "British of Pakistani origin". It may sell today's papers but it is ultimately crass vilification.

It is also at the heart of the growing anger among Muslim youth. Born and bred British, their citizenship is always conditional. When Kriss Akabussi won athletics medals he wasn't referred to as a British Christian of Nigerian origin. Yet Muslims are always alien by description - their religion and ethnicity used in reporting further edges them to the boundaries of society.

This isn't even a post-9/11 concern. After the Oldham riots in 2001, we heard that long-term unemployment or poor career opportunities, fuelled by racism and Islamophobia, in turn fuelled pain and anger among the young. Three years on, professional affluent Muslims, whose lives had seen little, if any, of the social deprivation and societal exclusion that the Cantle report identified, can tell of discrimination and hatred levelled against them.

They see an older Muslim leadership panic under the strain of negativity. While younger organisations such as the London Muslim Coalition called on mosques to pray for peace for all in the wake of the horror of Madrid, the Muslim Council of Britain called on mosques to report any suspicions they had about anything. It's the difference between being a part of society, however marginalised, and perpetuating the idea that you are an unruly guest, your stay determined by different conditions than for everyone else. You don't have to be disaffected youth to see the anomalies and feel the isolation.

For all the Muslim communities' faults - and we, like all other communities and individuals, have many - our empathy, often inspired by our faith, with the deprived and oppressed is not one of them. To want an end to injustice against Palestinians doesn't make you a terrorist, opposing the war against Iraq or calling on Russia to withdraw from Chechnya doesn't make you an extremist of any class. Yet when British Muslims participate in demonstrations and leafleting - against their government's participation in occupations of Muslim lands - this is seen as more evidence of inherent detachment from British mores and, worse still, attachment to potential, if not actual, terrorist causes.

The late Sulayman Zain ul-Abedin, who was the first to be tried and found not guilty of offences under the Terrorism Act of 2000, found his reading material used as "evidence" against him. In a letter to some mosques last year the Charity Commission is alleged to have asked some not to allow prayers to be recited for Palestine as this was "political". So, as a British Muslim you can't act on what you believe in, however just; you mustn't read about it and you can't even pray for it.

Seyf is a volunteer at our offices. Formerly a journalist in Turkey, he is seeking asylum, having been tortured by police for his views on Turkish foreign policy. Some of his colleagues are serving sentences for possessing reading material deemed seditious. Civil society can only save Britain from becoming a country that people seek asylum from, when its institutions and its media realise that the alienation of Muslims and many others is neither self-imposed or imported from abroad.

· Massoud Shadjareh is chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission

Freedom Is My Daughter's Name

It is ten years since this article was published, it must be noted that the AK-Party now in power have made torture a criminal offence, drastically amended the sexual crimes against women laws to allow more prosecutions for rape, child abuse etc., and many scores of political detainees have been released. Voted in with a large mandate from the Kurdish community, they have also announced the 'Democratic Initiative' which allows for Kurdish rights to be respected.

Having said all that, the hijab ban at universities remains, despite their attempts to have it overturned.

This was published in Q-News, at the end of 1999, and is also posted on the Innovative Minds Website. An abridged version was published in
New Internationalist in August 1999. Gul Aslan was released in September 1999.

Can Turkey justify its horrendous catalogue of human rights’ abuses in the name of modernity?

I had thought that after years working in Human Rights, I had become desensitised to horrors inflicted and suffering unlimited. Torture should have been just another research topic. Talking to Ipek Firat, the wife of a political prisoner, I was proved wrong.

Turkish prison officers use similar methods of torture as the Algerian and Iraqi security services. Electric shocks to genitalia, buggery with broken bottles, ‘water treatment’ (dousing a naked prisoner in cold water, and opening the cell windows during winter) were examples Nazat Ashik, a housewife in her fifties recounted. Her son, Mustafa, is serving a 17 year prison sentence for writing against the government. He bled from his genitalia for two months before admitting the charge. Nazat has set up an organisation to help families and prisoners in a similar situation. How many there are is unknown – no organisation can agree, even begin to fathom the numbers involved in a country where even criticising its founding dictator is treason.

In many cases prisoners remain interred long after their terms have expired. For example, Nazat recently discovered four Egyptians imprisoned twenty years ago in Bilecik, for protesting against Camp David. They should have been released two years ago. Knowledge of their existence was accidental.

Our trip to Istanbul was a paradox: a snapshot of radical Europhilia and consumerism; of a country mired in the murders of 10,000 political opponents in ten years. We trudged around the standard sights. Orthodox monuments and retreats, the Basilica cistern, sign-posted in Latin and Slavic tongues catered for the tourist. No such considerations for our unofficial guide Rabia, a Turkish woman, one of thousands of women banned from university at the beginning of the academic year.
Rabia is articulate, intelligent and determined - a veritable heroine of a human rights epic that sweeps the nation. She is suspended from University because she is a practising Muslim. Her sporting of a headscarf has cost her dear. Her beliefs are part of an ideology dressed up in the Western psyche as fundamentalist, backward, repressive. Turkey’s oppression is however thoroughly modern.

This headscarf ban is the most strictly enforced since the coups of the 1980’s. Treason covers many ‘crimes’ and few Deans are brave enough to allow their students a choice. A daily battle of wills between students and academics, more fearful for their liberty than any ‘Islamic’ threat, has ensued. Everyday groups of students arrive at class. Everyday the police remove them. Everyday the students show their defiance by holding their own classes on the pavements outside.

I met Ipek Firat at the offices of Mazlumder, a human rights organisation with 22 branches nation-wide. We stumbled upon a writer facing jail, for his book on Kurdish orphans bereaved by security forces. The fine of 4 billion TL ($1,200) – beyond his means – was a relief. The separatist / terrorist PKK, Marx and Kurds are still an inimical part of the ruling ethic, but now bigger 'enemies' and bigger victims loom.

Since the1997 ruling by the National Security Council (an amalgam of politicians and generals) that Muslims were the “number one enemy of the principles of modern Turkey,” Mazlumder’s offices have been repeatedly raided. Three were recently closed down, and the organisation’s accounts frozen. Ipek was detained on a prison visit to her husband Mehmet, an alleged associate of an Islamist group. Mehmet and Ipek’s cellmate, journalist Gul Aslan were consistently tortured. Ipek was released without charge. Her husband ‘confessed’ and is now serving a fifteen and a twenty two year term consecutively. Aslan’s case hasn’t been heard after 2 and a half years. I met her in Bandirma Prison.

Behind two sets of bars and reinforced perspex, she looked far older than her 24 years. Her spirit is remarkable. Leaning aside and disappearing through four sheets of bore holed metal, she scolded me. “Don’t worry about me,” she smiled, almost smug in her passive resistance. “The fact that I’m here means they… generals, are scared…it’s only a matter of time before their rule will end.” How long will that be? In her lifetime? Conscious that her lifetime could be considerably shorter than most, she answered, “Maybe, God willing.”

This scares those in whom power resides. The Republic’s founder, known in Britain as ‘the benign dictator,’ Mustafa Kemal Pasha took on the title Ataturk – Father of the Turks. Women like Aslan, have had enough of patriarchy a la Pasha. General friendly and compliant, the mainstream media neglects to report arrests and protests unless there’s a violent photo-opportunity. The countrywide demonstrations in support of veiled students, in October 1998, saw 4 million protestors male, female, veiled and mini-skirted, hold hands. However, only a skirmish between police and protestors in Ankara, made news. Inevitably such incidents are attributed to ‘foreign’ agitation. These are never “Ataturk’s children.”

The bastardisation of women like Rabia, Ipek and Gul is backfiring. They have become the new advocates for emancipation. Akit, a well-respected, secular periodical asked: why not be like Iran? It pointed amongst others matters to UN statistics: Turkey is significantly behind in the numbers of women attending and lecturing at university; in the medical profession and the media. The Ayatollah has outstripped Ataturk. Turkey’s Islamophobia is one of its more ridiculous emulations of the Europe its Generals so desperately want to be part of. Istanbul’s elected mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was prosecuted for statements purporting to cause division in society (treason once more) – he read out Ottoman poetry in public. He was sentenced last September to one year of imprisonment and a lifetime ban from all political activities, to run from the 75th anniversary of the Republic in October.

Our visit coincided with the anniversary holiday. Ataturk’s image festooned street lights in celebration. In popular imagination, he is either devil incarnate or prophet of modernity. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Nietzche’s last man – amoral, apolitical and above all modern, looked down from Istanbul’s lamp-posts, on his subjects. Turkey was celebrating his acceptance of civilised, European, universal ideals. And all were celebrating – government employees ensured dismissal if they did not attend the commemorative rallies. The End of History would indeed be nigh, if the West’s perception of Turkey as modernising and an (almost) democratised state had any meaning.

A crude checklist reveals the delusive success of the Enlightenment project in the (a)historic land of infidels. Turkish George Michaels and Madonnas regale on terrestrial and satellite tv. Ads for carpet shampoo and exotic nightlife purport the existence of values that conceptualise semi-naked women on billboards selling cars, and a culture of imported (female) and indigenous (tourist-oriented male) prostitution, as freedom. Ataturk’s sons and daughters can buy (into) it all. Still they resist.

Westernisation, according to author Emine Senlikoglu, means everything goes except for political opposition. She currently awaits the outcome of two cases against her for mooting an independent judiciary on air. Her first prison term was for a book on freedom of speech. Her second, was the result of answering from a conference platform, why she was imprisoned.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights granted freedom of expression. Some rights however are less universal than others. After the Refah Party was deposed by what incoming ministers called the army’s soft-coup in 1997, Newsnight was horrified at castigation of the generals, ‘because all they tried to do was protect Turkey’s secular constitution.’ The price of that protection? A fascism that enforces the liberal ethos of Western society, without contradiction. We cannot accept the horror, unless we admit that pro-Islamists, neo-Marxists and others might just be right: the liberal ethos is as violent and oppressive as the ‘demons’ it eschews.

Aslan’s husband Tamar still suffers torture. She too was arrested on a prison-visit. Their three year old daughter sees them every two weeks. Had she been a criminal, her child could have stayed with her. Instead Tamar’s parents keep her.

“What is your daughter’s name?” I asked, as the girl ran around the visitors’ hall.

“Azad,” she replied, “FREEDOM.”

Arzu Merali is a freelance journalist and campaigner for human rights.

© Arzu Merali, 1999

Ataturk's children

Site Info
In the Name of the Most High.
I have been blessed and privileged in the last fifteen years to have travelled widely and met with some of the most extraordinary and inspiring people, to witness many important events and then have my notes and thoughts published. From attending world conferences to meeting with the downtrodden and oppressed, this site is an archive of work published across the last decade or so, a sort of travelogue that serves as much a reminder to myself that the world is a happy and diverse place, and also that sadly many problems remain.

I also intend to use it to publish more recent thoughts and to revisit old ideas and themes, as well as publishing the thoughts of colleagues on similar issues. Posting may be erratic and not always thematic, so please bear with the site. Thank you for taking the time to visit.

Arzu.
London, March, 2007

It is ten years since this article was published, it must be noted that the AK-Party now in power have made torture a criminal offence, drastically amended the sexual crimes against women laws to allow more prosecutions for rape, child abuse etc., and many scores of political detainees have been released. Voted in with a large mandate from the Kurdish community, they have also announced the 'Democratic Initiative' which allows for Kurdish rights to be respected.

Having said all that, the hijab ban at universities remains, despite their attempts to have it overturned.

This was published in New Internationalist in August 1999. A month later Gul Aslan, mentioned herein, was released. At the time of posting (March 2007) Tayyip Erdogan is now Prime Minister of Turkey. The Hijab ban persists and is affecting women in all walks of life. This is an abridged version of 'Freedom is My Daughter's Name' published in Q-News, later that same year.

We trudged around the standard sights of Istanbul: Orthodox monuments and retreats, the Basilica cistern, signposts in Latin and Slavic script to cater for the tourists. Our trip was a snapshot of radical Europhilia and consumerism – and of a country mired in the murder of 10,000 political prisoners in ten years.

We had arrived on the 75th anniversary of the Republic. Its founder, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, took the title Ataturk – Father of the Turks. His image, Nietzsche’s last man – amoral, apolitical and above all modern – looked down on his subjects from all the lamp posts.

The end of history would indeed be nigh if the West’s perception of Turkey as a ‘modernizing’ and ‘democratizing’ state had any meaning. Turkish George Michaels and Madonnas perform on terrestrial and satellite TV channels. Advertisements for shampoo and exotic night-life are set beside semi-naked women on billboards selling cars. A culture of imported (female) and indigenous (male) prostitution mimics the meaning of freedom. Ataturk’s children can buy (into) it all. But still they resist.

Nazat Ashik is in her fifties. She has set up an organization to help prisoners and their families, in a country where even criticizing the founding dictator is still treason and no-one knows exactly how many prisoners there are. Her son, Mustafa, is serving a 17-year sentence for writing against the Government. He bled from his genitalia for two months before admitting the charge. Turkish prison officers use similar methods to the Algerian and Iraqi security forces – electric shocks, dousing in cold water, buggery with broken bottles.

Mazlumder is the name of a human-rights organization with 22 branches around the country. Since the 1997 ruling by the National Security Council (an amalgam of politicians and generals) that Muslims were the ‘number-one enemy of the principles of modern Turkey’, its offices have been repeatedly raided. Three were recently closed down and the organization’s accounts frozen.

I first met Ipek Firat at Mazlumder. She had been detained during a prison visit to her husband, Mehmet, who is an alleged associate of an Islamist group. Together with their cellmate, the journalist Gul Aslan, they were repeatedly tortured. Ipek was released without charge. Her husband ‘confessed’ and is now serving 15- and 22-year sentences consecutively.

Aslan’s case hasn’t been heard in two-and-a-half years. I met her in Bandirma Prison. Behind two sets of bars and reinforced perspex she looked far older than her 24 years. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she smiled, almost smug in her passive resistance. ‘The fact that I’m here means they, the generals, are scared... It’s only a matter of time before their rule will end.’ How long would that be? In her lifetime? Conscious that her lifetime might be considerably shorter than most, she answered: ‘Maybe. God willing.’

Our unofficial guide, Rabia, is articulate, intelligent and determined – a veritable heroine of the human-rights epic that is gripping her country. She is one among thousands of Turkish women students who have been banned from attending university. She is ‘suspended’ because she is a practising Muslim who wears a headscarf. The ban on headscarves is now more strictly enforced than at any time since the military coups of the 1980s. Few teachers are brave enough to allow any choice – ‘treason’ covers many crimes. So every day groups of students arrive at class. Every day the police remove them. Every day they show their defiance by holding their own classes on the pavements outside.

In October 1998 countrywide demonstrations in support of veiled students saw four million protesters – male and female, veiled and mini-skirted – hold hands. Only a skirmish between police and protesters in Ankara made the news. These are never ‘Ataturk’s children’.

Women like Rabia, Ipek and Gul have, however, become the new advocates of emancipation in Turkey. Akit, a well-respected secular periodical, asked: ‘Why not be like Iran?’ Turkey has fewer women in universities, the medical profession or the media. The Ayatollah has outstripped Ataturk.

Islamaphobia in Turkey is one of the more ridiculous imports from a Europe the generals so desperately wish to join. Istanbul’s elected Mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was prosecuted for reading out Ottoman poetry in public. He was sentenced to a year in prison and a lifetime ban from all political activities.

Westernization, says the author Emine Senlikoglu, means that ‘anything goes’ – except political opposition. She currently awaits the outcome of two cases against her for proposing an independent judiciary. Her first prison term was for a book on freedom of speech, her second for answering from a conference platform a question about why she was imprisoned.

Aslan’s husband, Tamar, still suffers torture. She too was arrested on a prison visit. Their three-year-old daughter sees them every two weeks – had Aslan been a common criminal, her child could have stayed with her.

‘What’s your daughter’s name?’ I asked as the little girl ran around the prison visitors’ hall.

‘Azad,’ she replied. ‘FREEDOM.’

Arzu Merali is a freelance journalist based in London.

War on Islam, Turkish Style

This was written at the end of 2001, when it was announced that Turkish troops would be sent to Afghanistan. At the time of posting, in March 2007, it is worth noting that the hijab ban is still in place and worsening, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in its favour. Huda Kaya and her daughters were eventually released as was Mehmet Ali Tekin, after much campaigning.

So Turkey – that shining example of modernity, a secular Muslim country - will be sending special forces to Afghanistan to “support humanitarian missions and protect innocent people…when necessary.” It’s a chilling thought. It would have made Mehmet Ali Tekin, an erstwhile journalist from Istanbul, cry. His image stares back at us as we leave the office. For those of us who have met him the glance at his photograph before our departure is a guilt-ridden reminder of how little we have done for the thousands of Turkish political detainees.

The Turkish presence will help George Bush peddle the lie that we are not witness to a war against Islam. Yet Turkey launched its own crusade in February 1997 when its general-led National Security Council stated that Islam and Muslims represented the biggest threat to the republic. Violent crackdowns have ensued, yet scarily we see endless column inches devoted to Turkey as a model for the remaking of Afghanistan. It seems to be of no concern that some 30,000 Turkish women are banned from university for wearing a headscarf. Many more cannot hold jobs in public office or basic identification documents unless they remove their head-covering. Ditto if you’re a man with a beard.

It’s three years since I went to Turkey as part of a team of human rights monitors. Whilst there we met with political prisoners and assessed how the situation was rapidly deteriorating, particularly for practising Muslims.

The ban on the Welfare Party that the European Court of Human Rights deemed valid in July last year is the least of Turkey’s crimes. Its security services are some of the most vicious known on this earth. Their political masters over many years have directly or otherwise been the generals of its armed forces. Oppose them and you could end up imprisoned without charge, tortured and forced to confess to treasonous crimes that merit life sentences, or even disappear. Maybe like Feliz Bayaz, a student jailed for wearing a headscarf to class, you are killed in a hit and run accident as you leave your incarceration.

Our team met with members of Mazlumder, a human rights organisation whose activists have been subject to arbitrary arrest, its offices repeatedly closed down, their bank accounts often frozen. They have represented all manner of victim including the most apolitical of citizens, dervishes. One was beaten to death by prison guards after being arrested for violating the constitutional ban on religious (i.e. Muslim) dress. His friends, similarly attired, were locked up when they came to take his body away for burial.

Tekin was a writer at Selam, a former Muslim newspaper based in Istanbul. Its staff faced peculiar and extreme persecution. Gul Aslan, Huda Kaya, Alpetkin Dursunoglu, Nurettin Sirin are just a few of the others arrested and detained. At one point Kaya and her three daughters faced a possible death penalty for participating in a peaceful demonstration against the headscarf ban. The charges against one of her daughters, Gul Intisaar Saatcioglu, related to her composition and recital of a poem entitled ‘Song of Freedom’ at the rally in Malatya. Eventually they were released on suspended sentences. Koral, was sentenced to over a 100 years imprisonment on 33 separate charges– to be served consecutively – for writing an article criticising the burgeoning Turkish-Israeli alliance.

Tekin was originally arrested in 2000 in connection with the murder of Umur Mumcu, another journalist killed in 1993. Since Mumcu’s murder several people from a variety of political backgrounds have been arrested for the same crime and eventually released. Tekin and his co-defendants were tortured. After a month the charges were changed to membership of an illegal organisation – Selam. He was sentenced in January to 12 and half years in prison. Like Kaya at one point he faced a possible death penalty.

Aslan spent three years in Bandirma Prison without charge. How do we know that those we met there were not terrorists masquerading as prisoners of conscience? Any doubts were dispelled when we tried to leave. Two heavily armed guards stopped us on the grounds that our visit should last all day. “It’s okay they can go” one growled, “They’re with the political detainees.”

At the end of 1999 Turkey was invited to negotiate for EU entry. Less than two months later the appeal courts were ready to reinstate the death penalty against Kaya et al. Their convictions currently bounce between appellate courts which cannot decide whether death, life imprisonment or eight years will adequately punish them. A few insipid words from Commissioner Patten on reminding Turkey of its responsibilities ring hollow in the ears of those who know about what’s going on there, let alone the people of those cells. European civil society didn’t require that Turkish adherents to the Islamic faith should not be abused, before their government was allowed to begin the processes that lead to either joining the EU or receiving financial assistance or favoured trading status.

Post-September 11 to be a so-called ‘Islamist’ is a crime in almost every land, what hope have the forgotten Muslims of Turkey at the hands of their secular Taliban? The last I heard Tekin was in solitary confinement allowed occasional visits from family but no-one else. In the days before Turkey could negotiate and freedom to believe meant anything to anyone at all, his lawyers would threaten to litigate and appeal all the way to ECHR. Not now.

Arzu Merali is a writer on human rights and one of the founders of the Islamic Human Rights Commission.