Ewa Jasiewicz is free!

from I-Mad! - 09.09.2004 14:02

Please find Below the statement of Ewa Jasiewicz after she got released from unlawful detention.

Statement on Three Weeks of Imprisonment in Israel and Deportation

First off, apologies and an explanation for the late reply to the whole
twisted story of trying to get into Israel and occupied Palestine to
both see friends and write a story on the Israeli left/peace
movement/anarchists against the wall for Red Pepper Magazine. Since I
got back, Ive been looking after Zeynab, a one-legged 11-year-old girl
from Basra who lost 17 members of her family including her mother, her
home and her right leg to a missile attack during the war last year. I
love her to bits but shes a total handful and I cant drag her down to
the Internet, its just too boring and frustrating for her, and I also
want to spend quality time with her too.

Ive also been trying to come to terms with the murder of an incredibly
close friend who I spent 4 months with, 24-7, in Iraq, a friend who
accompanied me, encouraged me, translated for me, facilitated my living
with Iraqi families, and drove me everywhere (and drove me totally crazy
a lot of the time but thats what happens in high-stress situations
where you have no independence, power or agency of your own and are
living under constant threat and depending on someone else to even be
able to step outside the door  Basra more than Baghdad) . He helped me
navigate my way through some of the toughest territory  physical,
political and emotional  for months and months and we got really close.
Hes the reason Im sitting here writing this today. He saved my life
and those of many others, including westerners kidnapped in Fallujah and
Basra. He was accompanying a humanitarian relief convoy from Najaf to
Baghdad which had delivered water and medical supplies to the bomb
devastated city. He had been leading the convoy in his battered up white
Nissan when it got hit by a roadside IED. Hed been with Italian
journalist Enzo Baldoni. Enzo was kidnapped by the Islamic Army, who
ever they are, who crafted a low-budget TV advert for mercy, from Enzo,
framed in a graphic fuzz, and then beheaded him. Its though that
Ghareeb, my friend, tried to stop Enzo getting kidnapped but was
allegedly shot in the head and three times in the chest and left
face-down on the burning August asphalt for a day and a night, until
found by local people passing through and lugged off to the nearest
morgue. I say allegedly for all of this, apart from Enzos beheading, as
no one knows what really happened. And also, disturbingly, no one has
been able to locate Ghareebs body. Only a photo taken by the Italian
Red Cross in the Eskanda hospital morgue remains. And now, according to
the Palestinian embassy, the body is missing and the worst is set to hit
us: that he will be if he already hasnt been, buried in an unmarked
grave. He wanted to be buried between his dead baby daughter and and
mother, had the plot staked out for himself, it was last wish, to lie
beside them. If noone can find him, how will anyone visit his grave,
focus on a physical place to remember him, pray for him, honour him,
grieve for him. How can we ever dispel the thought that maybe he didnt
die, maybe that picture isnt really real, maybe, maybe, maybe

I found out about Ghareebs murder in prison and had to suppress my
grief and the gnawing wondering, the internal bargaining, and the
ever-jarring Not Knowing - how, why, who. I only got to talk about it
twice with the friend who broke the news to me and then I was forbidden
from speaking
to him again. It gave me a greater insight into the experiences of
Palestinian friends of mine who have had to bear the lonleyness and
powerlessness of jail in grief and grief in jail. The dwarfing absence
of essential human contact to hold you through the post-traumatic
shockwave.

Many Palestinians were arrested, tortured and jailed following the Jenin
camp massacre in April 2002 and endured far worse conditions than mine.
They had their grief compounded by physical and psychological abuse and
isolation, and the sinking consciousness of joining the staggering
collective inter-generational walk on a well-worn path of collective
punishment and humiliation, which the Israeli occupation prison
experience is for Palestinians. From Nakob to Ofer to the open-air
prisons of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Internment for Palestinians is,
like the internment of Israelies into the military machine for three
years of their lives and 30 days-a-year thereafter, a rite of passage;
throwing your first stone, shooting your first M16, is a right of
passage. There is no control over ones life, and death and loss,
imminent and past, present and future, haunt every day, terrorise every
day.

Lastly, I also know Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both Italians, and
Raad Ali Abdul Azziz and Mahnoaz Bassam, Iraqi Intersos workers, who
were kidnapped yesterday from the Bridges to Baghdad office in Baghdad.
I came and stayed with them when I wasnt staying in Basra. Theyre all
fantastic people, so committed, so strong, so politically astute,
emotionally intelligent, supportive people, who live out their
principles of solidarity, who really walk the talk. I took a lot of
strength from their calm and joy and determination, and all the energy
and sacrifice they put into Bridges and Intersos  two of the
longest-running and effective grassroots NGOs with community respect in
Iraq. Its painful to read the disrespect and racism in the reports
where just the two Simonas are named, with the two other Iraqis
remaining nameless and thus their identities irrelevant. And its almost
unbearable to predict the outcome when the group responsible, the Al
Zawahiri Loyalists, has issued the following statement: We promise
you, Berlusconi, to burn your heart, and the heart of the crusader
criminal Italian people, with these two Italian women, as a punishment
to you for stealing the land of Muslims and killing Muslim people.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/international/middleeast/09iraq.html
I think my friends will be killed, horrifically, brutally killed.

And I know that this is daily life, lived in fear, violence and
mourning, for many people living in conflict zones, combatants and
civilians.

All of the above has made the past week being back in the UK, very
difficult (this is classic Iraqi understatement-talk) and the last
thing Ive wanted to do is to sit myself down in front of a computer
screen and get sucked into the internet and the 3-week mountain of
emails to sort through. But, Ive forced myself so here it is:

I have been a journalist and member of the National Union of Journalists
for the past five years and have worked for the Big Issue, Pride
Magazine, a London news agency, Mute Magazine, Labour Left Briefing,
Z-Net, Socialist Review, Red Pepper, the We Are Everywhere project and
Reuters (Iraq) in that time. I have also been a human rights activist
and have worked with advocacy and direct action organisations the
International Solidarity Movement, Voices in the Wilderness, and
Occupation Watch in Palestine and Iraq respectively for most of the past
two years. These two identities are interdependent and can and do
co-exist with one another.

First off I have to address the claims of me having two passports or a
fake passport/fake documents. I have never had more than one passport at
any one time and I changed my name by statutory declaration, legally, in
2003 for the purposes of securing my entry into Israel to undertake
humanitarian and solidarity work and writing in occupied Palestine. This
included riding with ambulances, checking on families whod had their
homes occupied by soldiers, observing military operations, and reporting
on the situation there through independent media channels. I reluctantly
changed my name on the advice of Palestinian, Israeli and other friends
who told me I would not be allowed into Israel again after having spoken
out and written about Bahas killing. A journalist for The City
magazine in Israel told me that Israeli journalists had had to change
their names in order to work in Iraq recently and during the gulf war.
The evidence is there, not just in the context of Israel but all over
the world. Journalists and human rights activists have to adapt to the
specific conditions and political contexts they are working in order the
carry out their work. After I returned from Iraq, where I spent 9 months
directly after Palestine and where having a passport with a different
name on it that I wasnt using made me incredibly vulnerable and open to
sabotage or fueling peoples worst paranoias. I changed my name back to
my own when I returned this February.

In September 2002, myself and three other internationals witnessed the
murder of 14-year-old Baha al Bahesh, a young friend from Nablus. He was
shot dead by an Israeli soldier from an Armoured Personnel Carrier. I
will never forget feeling the bullet that ended his short, brave life,
rush past my face as I braced myself watching the soldier take aim, or
the blood bubbling up from his mouth and his eyes bulged back in shock
as he lay gasping for his life in a shop doorway, held and comforted by
friends who pretended hed be ok, that it wasnt his chest, because he
could hear us, he could see us. And an ex-soldier had the nerve to tell
me I dreamed it. Did I dream myself speaking out to every single media
outlet, paper, radio or TV station that would listen? Did I dream myself
going on Channel 2, one of Israels most watched TV channels and talk at
length about Bahas killing? Boris my interrogator from the Ministry
of Defence didnt dream it, he saw me on Channel 2 and told me so during
my initial 8-hour detention at Ben Gurion Airport. He also asked me why
I had given statements to a lawyer about the killing. I know, from my
own experience, what Israeli soldiers do when they commit a crime, when
they shoot a civilian, when they kill a child or demolish a home.
Nothing. They get on with their lives, maybe repeat it later. Or maybe
they grieve for it afterwards, question it afterwards or maybe they
relish it, I dont really know but legally, they feel nothing. Human
Rights activists and journalists report it, fight to get it known and
tackled in the public domain. Our agenda is justice for the family and
working to make sure these things can never happen again. Bahas killer
is free. Noone has been charged with the ordering of an entire
neighbourhood in Jenin Camp to be bulldozed continuously for four days,
nor with any of the thousands of warcrimes committed by Israeli soldiers
during the four years of this intifada. 6 months after our witness
statements where submitted we were told by the Chief Justice of the Army
had answered that Baha was infact still alive. A slap in the face to
Bahas family and friends who carried his body through the streets of
Nablus and buried him and wept for him. 6 months after that statement
the Chief Justice declared that Baha was actually dead, but that he had
brought his own killing on himself because he had been holding a Molotov
cocktail at the time. He had nothing in had hands whatsoever at the
time, the APC was about 100 feet away, and there was no stone-throwing
or any kind of street-level resistance going on at the time.

In my 6 months spent living in occupied Jenin and Nablus, I witnessed
children killed and injured by the use of live ammunition, the shooting
in the face of Brian Avery  an American ISM activist who had his face
blown off in front of me. I saw Israeli tanks and bulldozers wilfully
damage public and private property, including shops, homes and cars,
collective punishment in the demolition of homes belonging to the
families of suicide bombers, olive trees destroyed, arbitrary arrests
and round-ups of men aged between 15-30, evidence of the extrajudicial
killing of resistance fighters, attacks on schools, hospitals, medical
services and even a grave yard and also the use of civilians as human
shields. I myself was used as a human shield along with some 13
Palestinian civilians  three of them young girls - during an arrest
operation and shoot-out in Jenin camp last summer. I have also been
assaulted by soldiers and shot at with rubber bullets and live
ammunition.

The first thing a person or people do before they carry out criminal
acts is they make sure they eliminate all witnesses. Make sure they get
away with it, unchecked, unseen and unaccountable. A process of
criminalisation and steady dehumanisation has historically paved the way
for some of the worst acts of inhumanity to be committed by one
population against another  so that those people come to believe that
they are not committing crimes and the use of killing, violence,
imprisonment and exclusion as a policy is justified and acceptable.

When a community is criminalized, social relationships with people in
that community become suspect, become dangerous, as they not only
transgress the imposed image of this community as something to be feared
and rejected not just in Israel but also on an international level
worldwide  but it also allows for those who live with those communities
to be labelled security threats in the process. I think the only
security I threatened trying to come back into Palestine and Israel was
that of the prescribed identity of Palestinians as a community to be a
rejected, their struggle to be ignored or refused as terrorist rather
than a legitimate struggle for liberation from a brutal occupation. It
was the security of the Israeli army to operate with impunity in the
occupied territories and commit human rights violations without
witnesses. It was the security of the government to continue to promote
colonisation and bantustanisation of the West Bank with illegal
settlements and create the fact on the ground of the apartheid wall and
steal yet more land, livelihoods and hopes for justice and co-existence
in the future.

The work of human rights activists, such as those working with the ISM
and advocacy journalists, is to resist policies and practices of
dehumanisation and destruction disguised as security and to forge social
relationships with such criminalized communities and contradict and
counteract the pathology of apartheid and to help build bridges and
bring down the walls between alienated and mutually demonised
communities.

Despite two district judges declaring that I am not a threat to the
national security of Israel, I am still banned from the country, with
Judge Kobo at the Tel Aviv District Court flagging up my commitment to
fighting racism and fascism and my naiveti as factors, which could
enable Palestinians to use me to threaten national security. Again,
nothing is defined. This is a direct reference to my political beliefs 
the real reason I am not being allowed into Israel and the OPTs. The
reference to naiveti has no basis, and can only be interpreted as an
attack on my character given the failing of the Shin Bet to successfully
paint me as a danger and the discrediting of their alleged evidence
against me. The Kafkaesque smokescreen kicks in; I may not think I know
violent Palestinians, but I do, but I just dont know I do. I may not be
a conscious security threat but I could be an unconscious one but then I
wont know if I was or not

Myself and my defence team are not interested in the details of how the
Shin Bets secret evidence against me was gathered or who the agents
were who gathered it but we want to know what the precise allegations
are against me. What are they based upon? If we cannot know then they
cannot be contested.

I was locked up for 21 days. If I really had been a security threat
witting or unwitting, I would have been re-questioned. My lawyer, Yael
Berda, told me to expect this. But nothing happened. Friends in the UK
also told me to accept a little chat with MI6 or the Special Branch
upon returning to England. Nothing happened.

My legal team is appealing to the Ministry of the Interior and the
Attorney General to have the secret evidence released and viewed. Like
the thousands of Palestinians interned indefinitely on the basis of
secret evidence, I know Im fighting a losing battle. The worlds
reputedly best intelligence service will not expose its most effective
and oft-used weapon which is deployed again and again to the extent that
some 40% of the male Palestinian population is imprisoned at some point
in their lives, many using the States trump-card, the catch-all secret
evidence. Structures of inequality and exploitative agendas are kept in
place through secrecy and denial; they demand absolute silence for their
perpetuation and in the suppression of alternative views or ideas or
ways of organising society.

Regarding the Supreme Court appeal, much as I would like to have seen it
through to the end, the risk of other journalists being barred from
witnessing and writing on the suppressed and silenced realities of life
in Occupied Palestine based on Shin Bet secret 'evidence' is too great.
This case became bigger then me and my individual struggle. I had to
consider the international repercussions of a decision which would de
facto authorize the Shin Bet to decide where I can and cannot go, and
who I can and cannot see or talk to, and through this, set the precedent
and conditions for others to be constricted and restricted from entering
the OPTs. It would only serve to further empower such undemocratic
procedures and power structures, which perpetuate the criminalisation of
the Palestinian community and those who engage with it and have
relationships with it.

I made many sacrifices in the past three weeks but I will never
sacrifice what I consider to be my right to move freely, write honestly
and enjoy relationships with the people I meet in this process.