MIDDLE EAST WATCH OVERVIEW

If it were not for the unchecked outrages committed by the Iraqi forces in occupwere rounded upied Kuwait after the August 2 invasion, it would be hard to say that 1990 had been a bad year for in the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, there were a number of positive developments: not least, a grudging recognition in regional capitals of the need to involve their people in decision making to a greater extent than before. Unfortunately, these developments were largely overshadowed in the West by the "rape of Kuwait," for which bore responsibility.

With the winds from Eastern Europe blowing strong, many governments acquired a new awareness of the importance of popular participation in the form of elections as a means of promoting national stability. Such diverse governments as those in Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt all held national elections of one kind or another since the European upheaval. With the exception of local changes in Algeria, none of these polls produced a transfer of power from longstanding rulers or governing parties. But, to differing degrees, each represented a step forward toward greater openness. Middle East Watch detailed its concerns over the electoral process in Egypt in a newsletter, and commented on President Asad's evident determination to hang on to power at all costs, including through murder, and imprisonment of perceived dissenters, in the course of a major report on Syria.

In the most conservative states of the region, those of the Arabian Peninsula, the example set by Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, who pledged to install an appointed consultative assembly, was rapidly followed by several of his smaller neighbors. From their place of exile in Saudi Arabia, the ousted Kuwaiti ruling family, the al-Sabahs, also promised to respect their own national constitution, albeit in the future -- to restore the National Assembly suspended four years earlier and reinstitute press freedom, once 's takeover of Kuwait was reversed. The impetus for these democratic gestures was, of course, the far- reaching crisis that had erupted around them; and only an optimist unfamiliar with the Middle East's chronic vacillation over could assume

425 unquestionably that these pledges will be fulfilled once the clouds lift. But, for a human rights organization such as Middle East Watch, they were nonetheless an important breakthrough -- one to be exploited in the coming months, even if the pledges failed to address the serious deprivations of civil and political rights that persist in those nations.

The appearance in 1990 of national unity in two formerly divided states -- Lebanon and Yemen -- was an unexpected bonus for the cause of human rights. As it descended into anarchy for over a decade, Lebanon had been synonymous in the public mind with often unspeakable brutalities, including the taking of hostages, committed by one sect against another. The West has been obsessed with its own small band of hostages, but over the years thousands of Lebanese have suffered similarly. Few are aware, for instance, of the 300 or so detainees in the Khiam prison in southern Lebanon, controlled by the Israeli-backed SLA militia. Held under dismal conditions, in some cases for years, these detainees have not enjoyed the luxury of due process. A Middle East Watch report on this prison, to which virtually all outside access is barred, is nearing completion for early 1991.

Freedom from the terror which reigned for so long will suffice, for now, for most Lebanese. But Syria's violent record at home leaves cause for concern that a new form of terror will be imposed on Lebanon -- one reflected in the October massacre of some 100 prisoners taken near Gen. 'Aoun's headquarters in Ba'bda. It would also be tragic if the Pax Syriana being overseen by Damascus through Lebanese President Elias Hrawi were, in the process of restoring order, to extinguish the effervescent cultural, intellectual and political life which once distinguished Lebanon among Middle Eastern states.

In Yemen, unification of the two former states in May was accompanied by the proclamation of far-reaching political and civil liberties, to an extent unseen anywhere else in the Arab world. Despite the strains imposed by the fusing of two very different political and social systems, in the north and the south, the practical implementation of these freedoms appears to date to have gone well. Over 30 political parties are now functioning in Sana'a, the capital, all political prisoners have been freed, and freedom of speech has been guaranteed. In the process, President Mohammed Salah appears to retain widespread popular support, and to have set an important example for the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

However, Yemen's open sympathy for Iraq in the Gulf crisis triggered

426 retaliatory action by Saudi Arabia against the two million-strong Yemeni population in the Kingdom. Rules of residence and employment affecting Yemenis were arbitrarily changed without warning, indirectly compelling an estimated 750,000 to return home, some destitute and maltreated. Palestinians in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, notably Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, suffered likewise for the PLO's political support of Iraq. Many hundreds were arbitrarily expelled from countries in which they had lived sometimes for decades. Stateless Palestinians of Gazan origin face a particularly uncertain future because Israeli authorities have refused permission for them to return home and other Arab nations will not grant them citizenship. Middle East Watch expects to publish its research on this issue in early 1991.

Women in Saudi Arabia, forcibly cloistered by their menfolk and the religious police, are among those Saudis who began to stir during the latter part of 1990, in the wake of the arrival on their soil of the huge US expeditionary force. But across the Persian Gulf, Iranian women found that the improvements in their lowly social condition expected to come from President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who portrays himself as a modernizing, progressive cleric, were not fulfilled. Female dress codes were even more strictly enforced than before, while women continued to be barred from certain professions and educational fields.

Throughout the region, in fact, women have been the principal victims of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. In Jordan and Algeria, Islamists made strong gains through the ballot box, putting them in a position to dictate the social agenda. For Algerian women, as a Middle East Watch mission recorded, the decaying power of the ruling FLN party and the concomitant rise of the Islamist FIS has meant an increase in attacks on women for behavior deemed inappropriate by FIS followers. In most cases, the police and local authorities responded passively, refusing to intervene.

Parliamentary elections expected to take place sometime during 1991 in Algeria, following 1990's municipal poll, could bring about an unprecedented development for the Arab world: the replacement of a ruling regime through elections. Apprehensions over the consequences for civil liberties of an Islamist- led government are, on the other hand, growing.

In Israel, the collapse of the second Likud-Labor coalition brought to power what, by general consent, is the most right-wing government in the country's history. With Cabinet Ministers who openly advocate the mass expulsion

427 of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories at his side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had been expected to take a much tougher approach to the Palestinian intifada. Nearly 800 Palestinians, almost none of them armed with anything beyond stones, have been killed by the Israeli security forces during the three- year uprising, raising acute concerns about the excessive use of force. Middle East Watch issued a report on the Israeli Defense Force's inadequate investigation and prosecution of soldiers who deviate from open-fire regulations, and criticized those guidelines as being too permissive.

However, the new Likud Defense Minister, Moshe Arens, surprised his critics by initially taking a less confrontational approach than his predecessor, Labor's Yitzhak Rabin. Casualties at the hands of Israeli troops dropped sharply. Until December an informal moratorium on the use of deportations was maintained. Meanwhile, West Bank schools and some universities, closed for over two years, were gradually reopened. Middle East Watch, in a May newsletter, called for the immediate opening of all schools and universities.

On the negative side of the balance sheet, the descent of the Jewish- Palestinian conflict into more chaotic, intercommunal -- and, in the Palestinian case, intracommunal -- strife has deepened. Over 150 killings of Palestinians deemed to be collaborators with Israel were recorded during the year, almost as many as in the previous two combined. A spate of stabbing attacks on Jewish civilians by Palestinians drew long jail sentences for those involved, but deaths attributed to militant Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories in the past rarely led to court, or serious punishment.

In the single most serious incident of the entire intifada, in October, paramilitary Border Police shot and killed at least 17 Palestinians, and wounded hundreds of others, on and around the holy Haram el-Sharif, or Temple Mount, compound in the Old City of Jerusalem. An official investigation reprimanded senior officers for lack of foresight to prevent the confrontation, but largely defended the use of lethal force. At year's end, a separate, judicial inquiry into the deaths was also underway.

While Israel continued strenuously to resist UN Security Council efforts to investigate its treatment of the Palestinians in territories captured during the June 1967 war, one of the most significant human rights developments of the year as far as Iran was concerned was the Rafsanjani government's decision to allow foreign human rights teams to conduct their own investigations. After five years of

428 being denied entry to Iran, the UN Special Representative, Professor Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, paid two visits, in February and October. His initial report was widely regarded as inadequate in its methodology and conclusions, but a second document produced a much more detailed, and severe, indictment of Iran's abysmal record. This includes the of exiled political opponents, the use of public stonings and beheadings for certain crimes, and mass executions of narcotics offenders. The government's displeasure at the second UN report notwithstanding, at the end of the year the International Committee of the Red Cross was negotiating the terms of its access to Iranian prisons. Middle East Watch had also been given approval, in principle, to conduct its own mission.

The torture and maltreatment of political prisoners continues to be an endemic problem throughout the Middle East and Maghreb regions. To take a few examples: in Iran, torture is believed to have been used to extract confessions from some of a group of over 30 prominent dissidents arrested in June and July after signing an open letter criticizing the government for the lack of freedom and for its failure to respect the rights set forth in the Iranian Constitution. The background to the arrests of members of Iran's sole remaining opposition functioning above ground was laid out in a Middle East Watch newsletter.

In neighboring Iraq, among many other issues, Middle East Watch's major report on that country documented the widespread use of torture by the mukhabarat -- even against children. It also catalogued the systematic abuses against , including the forced depopulation of Kurdish areas and the transfer of half a million Kurds. As a follow-up, Middle East Watch is now engaged in researching a book on the plight of the Kurds throughout the region; they also face discrimination in Syria, Iran and .

In Morocco, King Hassan's benign image abroad is belied by his cruel, and vindictive, treatment of those alleged to have plotted against him almost 20 years ago. At the Tazmamart prison, in southern Morocco, where over 50 of the accused plotters were detained and secretly held in medieval conditions, Middle East Watch reported that more than half of the inmates are believed to have died due to the maltreatment and conditions they were forced to endure. A mission to Morocco gathered information on abuses of the rule of law, for a report to be published in early 1991.

As elsewhere, torture is officially banned in Egypt. Its regular use against detainees held under a , during the term in office of former

429 Interior Minister Zaki Badr, was nevertheless confirmed by a Middle East Watch mission in May. General Abdel Halim Moussa, who replaced Badr in January, promised reforms, including an end to torture. In practice, what has transpired is that the repression of leftists and other secular opponents of the Mubarak government has been eased, while unrestrained action is being taken against Islamic fundamentalists, some of whom are armed and violent. Hundreds of Islamists were rounded up, many of whom were reportedly tortured following the assassination of the Speaker of the People's Assembly, Riftak Mahgoub, on October 12.

Where human rights are concerned, US policy toward the region during 1990 was decidedly mixed. While sotto voce criticism was leveled at a number of countries, few were publicly condemned in a forthright fashion. Nor were economic or political sanctions applied against any country for mistreating its own people; although Syria, Libya and Iran were all censured for their support for abroad.

The notable exception to this generalization was Iraq after it annexed Kuwait. Prior to August 2, the administration went to considerable lengths to block the imposition by Congress of economic sanctions on Iraq, refusing to acknowledge the self-evident: that the Saddam Hussein regime demonstrated "a consistent pattern of gross abuses of human rights," in the language of the Foreign Assistance Act mandating sanctions. Thereafter, the Iraqi President was demonized as "a ruthless Hitler" by President Bush himself.

With respect to Israel's behavior in the Occupied Territories, the Bush administration has taken a more robust line than its predecessor, joining in UN Security Council votes of criticism, while continuing to exercise a restraining influence on the resolutions of that forum. But while denouncing atrocities perpetrated against Kuwaitis living under occupation, the administration failed to endorse international protection of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In general, though, the US has chosen to take a low-key approach toward human rights abuses in this region, despite the extremely serious abuses committed there. And where broader geostrategic interests or long-term alliances are involved, human rights are relegated to a low priority. Morocco, for instance, a recipient of military and economic aid, and a close ally, is never criticized publicly. Egypt's President Mubarak gets similar kid-glove treatment,

430 although he receives some $2.8 billion a year in US aid.

Even regimes with whom relations are publicly distant, as with Syria prior to the Gulf crisis, or Iran, are spared a public tongue-lashing. Where was the Bush administration when Syrian troops and militiamen loyal to Syria allegedly massacred scores of General 'Aoun's troops and sympathizers after his surrender? And what did it say when Iranian Revolutionary Guards working on behalf of a hardline minister seized the relatives and political associates of former Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, a political moderate who the US had tried to cultivate after the 1979 revolution? Working to establish a firm and consistent US voice on human rights matters in the region is an important priority of Middle East Watch.

431 ALGERIA

Human Rights Developments

Algeria in 1990 continued to experience dramatic political and social changes which had a major impact on the human rights climate in that country. October 4 marked the second anniversary of urban riots that had shaken the country, leaving hundreds dead at the hands of security forces and forcing the government to accelerate its previously tentative attempts at social and economic reforms. Reforms since then have included the dismantling of the one- party state and the approval of a revised Constitution, with guarantees of freedom of association -- including the right to form political parties -- and freedom of expression, opinion and assembly.

The government's commitment to those reforms was tested in June, when it held the first elections since independence in which voters were allowed to choose among competing political parties. In those local elections, the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had held a monopoly of power for almost three decades, was decisively defeated by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), North Africa's first legal Islamic party. FIS won control of 32 of the 48 provinces. The government, to its credit, accepted the verdict of the polls and oversaw a peaceful transition of power at the municipal level.

Almost immediately, Abbasi Madani, the FIS leader, called for the dissolution of the National Assembly, all of whose members belong to the FLN. Faced with growing pressure from the public and the almost--complete demoralization of the FLN, President Chadli Bendjedid announced that legislative elections, originally scheduled for 1992, would be held in 1991.

The FIS victory at the polls, while a clear expression of popular disenchantment with repressive and ineffectual FLN policies, is a matter of deep concern in certain Algerian circles. Human rights and women's rights activists and multiparty advocates, who had been at the forefront of demands for reform, question the commitment of FIS to democratic rule. A number of verbal and physical attacks against women and the use of strong--arm tactics against members of rival political parties have underscored their concern. In both cases,

432 Islamic militants have been identified as the culprits.198

The attacks against women have usually occurred during attempts by Islamic fundamentalists to force women to conform to their own strict interpretation of religious precepts, such as wearing particular clothing and limiting their participation in public life. In one incident in April in the town of Blida, several female college students were attacked by bearded men with whips, when they attempted to leave their campus to attend a rally sponsored by the communist Socialist Vanguard Party.199 In another incident in the city of Annaba, Islamic militants burned down the house of a member of a women's rights association who was leading a campaign against FIS' attempts to impose Shari'a religious law. Activists accuse the government of adopting a "hands--off" policy toward the perpetrators of such violence. (However, several Islamists received long prison sentences in January 1991 for setting fire in 1989 to the house of a women they accused of having "loose morals." The sentences, handed down in a court in Ouargla, were reported to be the first time Islamists have received stiff punishments for such attacks.)

Women in Algeria continued to experience legal discrimination. Their subordinate status is enshrined in the Family Code, enacted in 1984, which gives the sanction of law to inequalities in such areas as polygamy and divorce. Women are also affected by two provisions of the current Electoral Code: one, known as procuration (proxy voting), allows one person to vote on behalf of three others, and the second allows spouses to vote for each other. Women's rights activists note that each provision, while formally neutral as to gender, has the potential in Algerian society to work to the detriment of women.

In 1989, after widespread reports of torture of those arrested in the 1988

198 "Islamic militants" refers to adherents of a variety of groups. However, witnesses to these attacks have frequently accused members of FIS, the main populist movement. The leaders of FIS have usually distanced themselves from the violence. However, they have failed to unequivocally condemn these attacks, which usually went unpunished by the authorities.

199 In Algeria, male Islamic activists, the majority of whom are FIS members, usually wear beards and long robes. "Les barbus," as they are commonly known, have been blamed for a number of attacks against women.

433 riots, the government ratified the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In 1990, however, there was evidence that the practice of torture, although greatly diminished, continued in some prisons and police holding cells. The National Committee Against Torture, a respected organization created after the 1988 riots, provided evidence of torture in a prison at Blida and at the police headquarters in Tenes.

The report on the incident at Blida, written by representatives of the Committee, the Algerian League of Human Rights (LADH), the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH) and the head of the local court system in Blida, stated that a number of prisoners who had escaped and then been recaptured had been subjected to torture. While prison authorities allowed the investigators to interview the torture victims, the report noted their failure to punish those responsible for the torture, and urged that all who committed acts of torture be prosecuted.

At a press conference in late October, Anouar Ben Malek, the president of the Committee Against Torture, provided details of the report to the press. He also raised objections to the amnesty, passed in July to cover all those involved in the 1988 riots. Although the amnesty law did not specifically include officials accused of torture, the government has provided an implicit amnesty by not prosecuting any of the alleged torturers. Ben Malek stated that the failure of the government to prosecute torture provided implicit approval of abuse.

His concerns were underscored when reports emerged of a second incident, in the town of Tenes, west of Algiers. In that incident 22 young men, detained on charges of rioting and destruction of property, alleged that they had been beaten and tortured in a police cell, prior to their transfer to the nearest prison. In contrast to the cooperation received in the investigation of Blida incident, representatives of the Committee Against Torture and the LADDH were prevented from meeting with the alleged victims, on the grounds that there had been no formal complaint from any of them. Human rights groups saw this as an attempt to obstruct justice, given that they had had access to the prisoners at Blida despite their having filed no formal complaint.

However, human rights groups welcomed the government's announcement on September 22 that the Delegation Générale pour la Documentation et la Securité (DGDS) had been dissolved, although some critics feared that the intelligence agency could be reconstituted in the future. The

434 groups hoped that the dissolution of the organization, heir to the feared Military Security which had been responsible for torture on a grand scale, indicated that the government remained committed to peaceful democratic evolution.

US Policy

There is little US aid to Algeria. $130,000 was provided for the International Military Education Training program (IMET) in fiscal year 1990, and $100,000 has been requested for FY91. Still, there is a potential for US influence on human rights practices in light of the marked improvement in US-Algerian relations. In the past, Algeria's socialist system and alliances with radical governments and movements had been major obstacles to the establishment of friendly relations between the two countries. The dismantling of that system and the democratic opening provide an opportunity for the Bush administration to exercise increased leverage with the Algerian government. Unfortunately, apart from the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the Bush administration made no public comment on human rights matters in Algeria, either to note commendable efforts at reform or to express concern over ongoing abuses.

The Work of Middle East Watch

Middle East Watch's strategy toward Algeria has been to monitor the rapid changes and investigate specific areas of abuse. In 1989, Middle East Watch issued a newsletter that criticized the government for its failure to prosecute cases of torture, urged it to ensure freedom of expression and political association, and called upon it to respect the rights of the Berber population to their language and culture.

In 1990, a Middle East Watch researcher traveled to Algeria and raised some of these concerns with officials of the government, including the Minister of Justice. The researcher also examined the status of Algerian women and the government's response to the growing incidence of harassment and assault by Islamic extremists.

435 IRAN

Human Rights DevelDevelopmentsopments

Commencing with the 1979 revolution, the militant clergy who seized power under the late Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini systematically crushed all forms of dissent or behavior which did not conform to their own proclaimed norms. Those who have suffered most have been secular-minded women, left- wingers, the People's Mujahedin opposition group and adherents of the Baha'i faith. But repression has not been confined to these groups. A pall of intolerance and fear, which President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's election in July 1989 has done little to dissipate, hangs over Iran's entire 55 million-strong population.

In 1990, the government went to some lengths to alter the Islamic Republic's pariah status in the world -- an isolation brought about, at least in part, by the regime's massive human rights violations. This desire for international rehabilitation was demonstrated in a number of different, but unmistakeable, ways. Among the signals were: permitting the first United Nations' human rights team to visit the country since the revolution, freeing two American prisoners, soliciting loans from the World Bank, supporting UN sanctions against Iraq and reestablishing diplomatic relations with a number of European countries.

Unfortunately, these signs of change toward the outside world were not matched on the domestic front, where conditions remained as deplorable as in previous years, or in the regime's tolerance of opposition, from whatever quarter. A crackdown on domestic unrest, the assassination of opponents abroad, the execution of political prisoners and drug-traffickers -- the latter on a large scale -- the use of torture and forced confessions, and the curtailment of basic civil and political freedoms all continued unabated.

An undeclared moratorium on action against the remnants of the clergy's above-ground opposition ended in June, when Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Prosecutor ordered the arrest of more than 30 signatories of an open letter to President Rafsanjani. The signatories, many of whom were associates of former Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, had criticized Rafsanjani's policies toward civil rights, economic reconstruction and foreign affairs. One

436 grievance was the government's refusal to permit the operation of the Iran Freedom Movement, led by former Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, and the banning of its affiliate, the Association for the Defense of Freedom and the Sovereignty of the Iranian Nation (ADFSIN),200 in violation of the government's own December 1988 commitment to reactivate a basic law on political parties.

Bazargan and his associates, many of whom had served in Iran's first post-revolutionary government, were accused of having "acted as a fifth column in the interests of the enemies of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian people" during the . Despite their advanced age and poor health, these prisoners were placed in incommunicado detention at an undisclosed location. The treatment they encountered served to underline the force of the charges contained in their open letter. Detained at the behest of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, rather than by the Justice Ministry, they were still being held at the end of 1990 without having been formally charged. Torture was believed to have been used on several to extract alleged confessions, one of which was broadcast on the state-controlled media. In late November, six detainees were released.

This was not the regime's first effort at staging a confession show. In April, the government announced that ten persons had been sentenced to death on charges of espionage for the . The "confessions" of some of their number had previously been broadcast at length on the government-controlled radio and television network, run by President Rafsanjani's brother. Middle East Watch was told in May by a senior official at the Iranian mission to the United Nations that the announcement had been only for deterrent purposes. At year's end, it remained unclear whether any of the death sentences had been carried out.

Iran's diplomatic drive for respectability abroad was only one arm of a two-pronged policy: in 1990, the regime continued its practice of liquidating exiled opponents through extrajudicial executions.201 In March, Mohammad Reza

200 ADFSIN was established in March 1986 by Mehdi Bazargan, Dr. Ali Ardalan (Secretary General) and a score of other liberal-minded political figures who called for the rule of law and respect for civil liberties. The association was never granted official recognition and its members came under harassment after calling for an end to the Iran- .

201 Since 1980, the Iranian government has been accused of complicity in at least 22

437 Akhavan-Jam, a former Tehran University professor who was the chief of the People's Mujahedin in Istanbul, was killed as he was driving to the Istanbul airport. In April, Dr. Kazem Rajavi, the Mujahedin's representative at the UN Human Rights Commission and an older brother of the guerrilla organization's leader, Massoud Rajavi, was assassinated in a suburb of Geneva. In October, Cyrus Elahi, a former professor of political science at Melli University who was the second-in- command of the Paris-based Flag of Freedom Organization, was slain in his home in France. Unlike the first two cases, in which police inquiries identified Iranian agents as responsible, proof was lacking in Elahi's assassination, but once again Tehran's hand was suspected. The vendetta against the regime's opponents continued with similar attacks in Sweden, Germany and Turkey.

Despite the government's proclamation about the right of political parties to operate freely, the list of bona fide parties was still limited to pro- regime or apolitical bodies, most of which were fronts for different factions of the clergy. The application of other parties that had filed for legal status met with outright rejection or bureaucratic procrastination.

Freedom of expression in Iran continued to be severely circumscribed. The Rafsanjani government upheld Ayatollah Khomeini's religious edict -- a death sentence -- against the British author Salman Rushdie, pronouncing it irrevocable. Regrettably, Britain restored diplomatic relations with Iran without securing concrete progress on either this case or that of Roger Cooper, a businessman jailed since 1985 on a variety of charges, including currency violations, espionage and -- most recently -- public morality offenses.

Censorship remained the order of the day in most cultural domains. Literature, publishing, theater, the press, music, radio, television and cinema continued to be carefully screened for their content by agents of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. In an interview with , Iran's preeminent film-director, Darius Mehrjui, spoke of the close community formed between his colleagues and the government censors in which the former "now know unconsciously what's allowed and what's not allowed."202 An Islamization

against Iranian nationals in Europe, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Cyprus.

202 Philip Shenon, "An Iranian Director Finds His Way Past a Double Censorship," New York Times, August 15, 1990.

438 campaign aimed at the "edification" of the populace lingered on, with no apparent end in sight. This pernicious brand of ideological censorship notwithstanding, Iran still possessed a lively print media which expressed often violently different points of view within the clerical factions. What cannot be published is material deemed critical of Islam or the rule of the clergy, including the concept of velayat- e-faghih, political leadership by a supreme religious figure. Nor is it possible usually to criticize the lack of freedom in Iran, or the treatment of women and religious minorities or to expound an avowedly secular point of view.

Capital punishment continued to be broadly applied. Since the introduction of a tough anti-narcotics ordinance in January 1989 which prescribed a mandatory death sentence for those caught carrying or smuggling drugs, hundreds of people have been executed on charges of being drug- traffickers or addicts. The government itself claimed that out of the 113 people it admitted to executing between March and October 1990, 71 had been involved in drug-smuggling.203 In at least one case, 46 people, some of whom were Afghan nationals, were executed in a single day, on September 5, in the northeastern city of Mashad, on charges of smuggling and distributing drugs.

Similarly, the perpetrators of such prohibited sexual acts as adultery, prostitution, pederasty, homosexuality, fornication and pimping have often been punished by such means as execution, public hanging, and stoning to death.204

Political prisoners, some of whom are nonviolent, have shared the brunt of executions with drug offenders. In addition, they reportedly have been subject to corporal punishment, mutilation, sexual abuse, and psychological torture. Thousands of political prisoners have had to endure arbitrary and indefinite pretrial detention, followed by secretly held summary trials, in which they were deprived of a defense counsel, the right to call witnesses and the right to appeal their sentences.205

203 These figures must be viewed with some suspicion. The opposition claims that the true figure of executions is far higher. According to the People's Mujahedin, over 550 executions were officially announced in the Iranian media between January and mid-November 1990.

204 At least five such executions were carried out in January 1990 alone.

205 In a more positive development, however, the government said that between September 3, 1989, and October 7, 1990, it granted amnesty or clemency to 4,641 political and common

439

In a country where women's subjugation has become one of its leading hallmarks, the year 1990 brought yet another round of harassment of women for violating the official dress code. The government implemented a new plan to enforce Islamic regulations on proper modes of attire. Those "charged" with wearing improper dress, the provocative use of cosmetics, or exposing their hair were subjected to indecent language, imprisonment, monetary fines or flogging. Women endured a multitude of legal and social restrictions concerning employment, education, child custody, divorce and inheritance.

Among the many minority communities that make up the ethnic mosaic of Iran, the Kurds continued to be severely punished for having waged an incessant war against the central government in support of a campaign for autonomy. However, a limited degree of Kurdish cultural expression is permitted, including broadcasts on state radio in Kurdish, and permission to publish certain books in the language. Circumscribed though it may be, this is more than was permitted under the monarchy. As for the status of such religious minorities as the Baha'is, Jews and Armenian Christians, the year 1990 contained mixed signals. Although the number of imprisoned or executed religious minorities continued to drop, flagrant violations of their civil, religious and cultural rights nonetheless persisted. The confiscation of property, dismissal from jobs, denial of pensions, educational restrictions, and the closure or forced takeover of religious schools constitute only a partial list of such blatant violations.206 On December 3, a Muslim convert to Christianity, the Reverend Mossein Soudmard, was hanged in Mashad after being charged with converting Muslims to Christianity, being an apostate from Islam, opening and operating a Christian bookstore and opening and operating an illegal Christian church.

Despite the cessation of military operations in August 1988, Iran and Iraq had still failed to release all of the 70,000 prisoners captured by both sides in their eight years of bloody fighting. At the year's end, at least 30,000 Iraqi prisoners were believed to remain in Iran's camps -- many of them unseen and unregistered by the Internationl Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The slow pace of the prisoners.

206 As two examples, the Iranian Bible Society was dissolved in February 1990 and an Armenian Christian school was transformed into a Muslim school.

440 exchange of prisoners was in clear violation of the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.

On the positive side of the ledger, the major event of 1990 was Iran's endorsement of the first external investigation into its human rights practices. A Special Representative of the UN Human Rights Commission, Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, made two separate visits to Iran, in January and October. After the first visit, a 76-page report mildly critical of the Iranian government's record was released. While acknowledging the continuation of human right abuses at the hands of the government, this controversial report ruled out as "unsubstantiated" frequent allegations by opposition groups that political prisoners were being executed under the guise of being drug-smugglers.

His second mission produced a more critical report in which numerous and detailed allegations of human rights abuses were cited. It led, on December 4, to a unanimously approved resolution in the UN General Assembly's Third Committee calling on the Islamic Republic:

to intensify its efforts to investigate and rectify the human rights issues raised by the Special Representative in his observations, in particular as regards the administration of justice and due process of law in order to comply with international instruments on human rights, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Islamic Republic of Iran is a party, and to ensure that all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction, including religious groups, enjoy the rights recognized in these instruments.

The resolution was approved by the full General Assembly ten days later.

By its endorsement of the resolution, Iran committed itself to implement this key, operative paragraph. It also accepted, grudgingly, the continuation for a further year of UN monitoring. In return, the Iranian government's improved cooperation with the Special Representative and with the ICRC was publicly recognized. The ICRC was invited to visit prisons in Iran, although the precise terms of its access to detainees had yet to be finalized. Middle East Watch has, likewise, been given permission in principle to conduct a mission to Iran in early 1991.

441

The UN resolution was a watered-down version of an earlier draft, which had singled out particular abuses noted in the Galindo Pohl report. Behind the scenes, Iran was believed to have exercised pressure on several of the resolution's West European co-sponsors, warning that their trade interests would suffer if the resolution proceeded in its original form. In a further demonstration of Iran's sensitivity toward international public opinion on this score, its UN Mission worked hard to ensure that there would not be an embarassing debate at the General Assembly over the resolution. Its shortcomings notwithstanding, the resolution's passage nonetheless represented a major step towards Iran's acceptance of international human rights standards.

US Policy

Regrettably, in this delicate process of coaxing Iran back into the fold, the Bush administration appeard to be playing only a passive role. The US did not join the sponsors of the UN resolution, which included all 12 European Community nations, as well as Australia, Canada and several Scandinavian countries. Nor did it put its undoubted weight behind a similar resolution nine months earlier, at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Its customary argument for lying low on these occasions -- a thesis untested in the case of Iran -- is that to take a lead would be counterproductive to the goals involved.

Apart from a balanced overview contained in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the only statement during 1990 by a US official on the subject of Iranian human rights came at the Geneva session. Expressing regret at Iran's lack of progress in moderating its "grave violations," a brief statement highlighted the plight of the Baha'i religious minority, a particular US concern. Apart from that, the only other pertinent announcement was a statement issued a few weeks later by the White House thanking both Iran and Syria for facilitating the release of an American hostage in Lebanon, Robert Polhill. About such outrages as the assassination in Geneva of Dr. Rajavi, or the round-up of Bazargan's associates, there was only silence. Taken together, the abiding impression was of an administration treading carefully, for fear of damaging a budding rapprochement with a one-time close ally.

442 US actions toward Iran -- many of which were of tangible financial benefit for the hard-pressed Rafsanjani government -- spoke much louder than its words. This was especially the case after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, when Iran's potential value as a regional ally against Saddam Hussein was underlined. The administration's refusal to block a $750 million World Bank loan to Iran through its weight on the Bank's Executive Board was one such step. Another was the release of part of Iran's assets, frozen 11 years earlier after the capture of the US embassy in Tehran. As of May, the two sides had settled more than 3,300 cases of financial claims against one another, lodged at the United States-Iran Claims Tribunal at The Hague, and an agreement on many other outstanding mutual claims appeared to be nearing finalization. In the summer, humanitarian aid was offered to the victims of a devastating earthquake. And, in November, the ban on oil imports from the Islamic Republic was relaxed. All of this took place against the background of stepped-up overtures to Iran by the Bush administration, mostly conducted through third parties.

Nowhere was it evident that the principles enunciated to Congress by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly on November 9, 1989 were being applied. In the course of a major policy statement to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Kelly had said that US economic sanctions would be softened only in response to changes in Iran's conduct. He added that the US would continue to speak out about human rights abuses such as torture and without proper trial. In Middle East Watch's opinion, few changes are yet evident in Iran's treatment of its own people or in its support for assassination overseas, while the Bush administration has conspicuously failed to speak out on abuses for which there was ample evidence.

The Iranian government's willingness to accept visits by such international bodies as the ICRC or the UN appears motivated more by political exigency than by a genuine moral transformation. The following political commentary published by the Persian-language weekly Keyhan Havai, with the clear blessing of the government, on the eve of Galindo Pohl's second fact-finding mission supports this view.

Even if the findings of Galindo Pohl favor the Islamic Republic, it should not be interpreted or promoted as Iran's acceptance of the dominant world order. Considering the dominance and influence of the superpowers upon the course of decision-

443 makings in these institutions and forums, our appeal to them should not be one based on matters of principle but rather one based on exigency and repelling of criticism. Thus we believe after accomplishing our task of exposing Western propaganda on violations of human rights in Iran and withdrawing Iran's name from the list of countries [accused of] violating human rights, the Islamic Republic should seriously refrain from the practice of allowing its actions to be judged by Westerners' standards and yardsticks. We should not repeat the repetitive experience of [testing] the uselessness and inefficiency of international authorities.207

How authoritative this opinion was can be judged by the warning from Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, contained in the second Galindo Pohl report. According to the UN Special Representative, Velayati said: "International monitoring of the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran should not continue indefinitely. The country could not tolerate such monitoring for long."

What appears to have motivated the Iranian government in modifying its belligerent posture vis-a-vis the West is the need for Western capital, for post-war reconstruction and the assuaging of popular discontent. Deep discontent, fed by economic causes as well as the unending repression, threatens both President Rafsanjani's own position and the clergy's overall tenure of power. Western bankers, and the governments behind them, thus have the potential leverage to influence Iran's behavior toward the basic human rights of the Iranian people.

In the light of Iran's increasing apprehensions about world public opinion it is imperative that the Bush administration refrain from the flip-flopping policy of its predecessor. A policy of appeasement toward Tehran for the sake of its cooperation during the Persian Gulf crisis would have catastrophic consequences for human rights in Iran. Considering the abusive nature of the Iranian regime, the Bush administration must accord precedence to human rights concerns and apply effective pressure against Iran to restore basic civil and political rights to its citizens. A good starting point would be observation of the protections and rights enshrined in the 1979 constitution, as modified in 1989. The implementation of the rule rof law -- the issue at the heart of the Bazargan open

207 Keyhan Havai, October 17, 1990, p. 2.

444 letter -- is fundamental.

As the events of 1990 indicate, the United States' considerable influence in the world economy, international organizations such as the World Bank and the UN, and the global balance of power far outweighs its usual claim not to have much leverage with Tehran's clerical authorities. Iran presents a good opportunity for the Bush administration to reinterpret the dictum that "diplomacy is the art of the possible" in a positive, not a negative, sense. Given the reemerging importance of Iran on the regional and world stages after a decade of isolation, the US could -- and should -- be doing far more to promote the cause of human rights in that country.

The Work of Middle East Watch

Middle East Watch commenced the monitoring of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic in mid-1990. In May, it took up with the Iranaian authorities the case of ten alleged spies for the US Central Intelligence Agency, whose imminent execution had been announced by the state-controlled media. As previously noted, a government official responded by claiming that the executions were not, in fact, going to be carried out.

Following the first wave of arrests of some of the 90 signatories of an open letter to President Rafsanjani, in June, Middle East Watch appealed directly to the President, to intervene in the case. The Bazargan group had used purely peaceful means to press for respect by the government for constitutionally guranteed rights, such as freedom of speech and association, and adherence to the rule of law. A newsletter issued at the end of the month laid out the background to the case.

Thereafter, we continued to keep abreast of further grave develpments in the case, including the use of torture against at least half a dozen of the 30 detainees, and the televised "confession" of one of their number, Farhad Behbehani. Research was well advanced at the year's end into a planned newsletter on the longstanding Iranian practice of using extorted confessions from political prisoners to subvert the judicial process and to stigmatize, or ban, dissident political groups.

445

One of Middle East Watch's initial goals is to open a dialogue with the Iranian authorities, on the basis of the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights -- to which Iran remains a party -- and the freedoms guaranteed by the country's post-revolution constitution. This would be one of the tasks of a fact- finding mission to Tehran, provisionally scheduled for the first quarter of 1991. The mission would take the opportunity to gather information on the wide range of rights violations being perpetrated in Iran, for a major report to be issued later in the year. Research for this report among the two-million-strong Iranian exile community in Western Europe and the United States began in the fall of 1990.

446 208 IRAQ AND OCCUPIED KUWAIT

Any examination of the Iraqi government's human rights record in 1990, in the light of the stance adopted by the Bush administration toward that stained balance sheet, would have to conclude that this was a "before and after" portrait. For the United States, the moment of truth was August 2 -- the date when President Saddam Hussein shocked the world by invading, and occupying, neighboring Kuwait. His forces' brutal treatment of many thousands of Kuwaitis and foreigners trapped by the conflict is now familiar knowledge to most readers.

With the US and the United Nations Security Council in the vanguard, a chorus of denunciation of the Iraqi forces' abuses in Kuwait was heard during the fall. Graphic eyewitness testimony from Kuwaiti civilians to heinous human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and large-scale arbitrary imprisonment filled newspaper columns and television screens around the world. UN Security Council resolution after resolution condemned the Iraqi government in unequivocal terms, calling on it to respect the various international human rights instruments to which it is a party.

Saddam's flagrant disregard for the fundamental rights of his own citizens had, however, long been familiar to Iraqis themselves, and to some outside observers. Over the past two years, the US State Department, the staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a number of Western journalists were among those who documented the regime's crimes. In February 1990, Middle East Watch issued a 193-page report, Human Rights in Iraq, cataloging the extraordinary oppressiveness of the Ba'th Party regime since its seizure of power in 1968. The report concluded that over the past two decades, apart from freedom of worship, virtually every important liberty has been denied Iraq's 17 million people.

208By treating occupied Kuwait as part of the chapter on Iraq, Middle East Watch in no sense condones the Iraqi invasion or recognizes the declared annexation of Kuwait. Rather, this treatment reflects the organization's policy of addressing abuses according to the forces committing them rather than the geographic boundaries in which they happen to be committed. For a discussion of human rights conditions in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion, see the separate chapter on Kuwait, infra.

447

Human Rights Developments in Iraq

Given the closed nature of Iraq, obtaining independent information about such matters as judicial procedure and the exercise of the rule of law is particularly difficult for any external observer, whether a diplomat or a human rights worker. However, during the spring of 1990, two legal cases -- one in and the other in London -- provided a rare glimpse into the machinations of the Iraqi judicial and political system.

Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born journalist working for The Observer, the London weekly, had been arrested on September 15, 1989, together with a British nurse, after investigating reports of a huge explosion at the al-Qaa Qaa munitions plant. Held incommunicado for six months, Bazoft was apparently tortured to extract a televised confession of espionage on behalf of Israel and Britain -- an admission he subsequently retracted. After a summary hearing, a closed-door revolutionary court pronounced the death sentence.

Political leaders around the world, including UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, joined in appeals to Saddam Hussein for clemency. (To its discredit, the Bush administration did not feel it necessary to endorse these appeals.) Ignoring the international outcry, the Iraqi government hung Bazoft on March 15.

Iraqi Information Minister Latif Nasif Jasim, a close aide to the President, indicated the levity with which his government imposes the ultimate sentence when he remarked, "Thatcher wanted him alive. We sent him in a box." Iraq makes liberal provision for the use of the death penalty, including for such offenses as the propagation of Zionism or Freemasonry, or membership by former military officers in parties other than the ruling Ba'th.

Much less public attention was given a few weeks later to another case, this time before the High Court in London. Nominally, the case involved a financial dispute between the Iraqi government-owned Rafidain Bank, as the plaintiff, and a subsidiary of the Patriotic Union of (PUK), a Kurdish guerrilla organization-cum-political-party. But court documents made clear that, in fact, it

448 pitted the highest echelons of the Iraqi government against the PUK. Its outcome hung on the validity of the government's tendentious assertion that the rule of law and the separation of powers prevail in contemporary Iraq, in theory and practice.

The case was eventually settled, inconclusively, out of court, but not before sworn depositions had revealed that the Iraqi government had framed two Rafidan Bank employees: sentencing them to long jail sentences so as to make its own case against the PUK more plausible. When a key witness in the case, a Kurd identified only as "Hassan," fled the country for his own safety, several of his close relatives were seized in his place, and imprisoned.

In a society of victims, the Kurds stand out. The Kurdish minority is a non- Arab ethnic group, with its own language and ancient cultural identity, which numbers between three and four million in Iraq. Most live in the mountainous northeast part of the country, adjoining the Kurdish-populated regions of Iran and Turkey. At least 12 million Kurds live in Turkey, seven million in Iran and another million or so in Syria and the Soviet Union.

Upon the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds asserted their right to self-determination on the basis of their ethnic, linguistic and cultural cohesion -- a right recognized in the 1921 Treaty of Sèvres. However, more powerful national interests prevailed over those of the Kurds. The British, with the consent of the , included the oil-rich, and largely Kurdish, Ottoman province of Mosul within the boundaries of a new state of Iraq. The result was an embittered, intermittently rebellious population that has been a constant thorn in the side of its host countries, as well as a tool in the hands of feuding neighboring states.

While the Kurds have rarely, if ever, been ruled with benevolence, nowhere has their repression been more devastating than in Iraq. Recent examples of their treatment include:

o Chemicals weapons slaughter. On April 15-16, 1987, March 16-17, and August 25-27, 1988, dozens of villages in Kurdish areas of Iraq were decimated by chemical weapons delivered by aerial bombardment. The US State Department reckoned the death toll in the thousands. Many of the male victims were Pesh Merga (Kurdish nationalist) guerrillas. However, investigations by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee concluded that those clearly hors de combat -- women, children, the

449 aged and the infirm -- comprised the overwhelming majority of victims. Well over 140,000 Kurds were forced to flee to neighboring Iran and Turkey, abandoning their possessions.

o Persecution of returning refugees. Responding in part to a series of amnesties proclaimed by Baghdad, and in part to pressure from Turkish authorities, several thousand Kurds returned to Iraq in 1989 and 1990. According to Amnesty International and Kurdish exile groups, hundreds who returned in 1989 were soon seized by the authorities and disappeared, or were forcibly transported to resettlement camps guarded by the Iraqi army, far from their homeland.209 In 1990, the treatment of returning refugees improved. Between 400 and 500 returned from Turkey in two batches, in the March-April and June-July periods. Preliminary information suggests that they came to no harm.

o Forced resettlement. In 1985, the government embarked on the latest of an historic series of attempts to alter the population composition of the rebellious northeast of the country by replacing Kurds with . According to the US State Department, about half a million Kurds had been relocated in the secret operation through the end of 1990, while hundreds of Kurdish villages and small towns were destroyed. Eyewitnesses say the Kurds' new houses are typically in desolate areas bereft of economic opportunity. By 1990, the forcible depopulation of the Kurdish countryside was largely complete. Ironically, however, in a bid to boost domestic food production following the imposition of the UN- sanctioned trade embargo, some relocated Kurdish farmers were encouraged in the fall to return to their original lands.

o Mass disappearances. In August 1983, an estimated 8,000 members of the Kurdish Barzani clan, 315 of whom were children, were arrested. (The late Mulla was the founder and long-time leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the largest of the Iraqi Kurdish

209Amnesty International also reported that 33 Assyrian Christians and their families who returned from Turkey and Iran to Iraq in late 1988 and early 1989, under various amnesties, were said in March 1989 to have disappeared. Most were from Dohuk province. Amnesty International, Iraqi Kurds: at risk of forcible repatriation from Turkey and human rights violations in Iraq, June 1990, p. 5.

450 guerrilla forces.) No information has ever been given as to the fate of those detained. The "Barzani 8,000" are merely the largest of many such disappearances. The KDP has recorded the names of 439 Kurds rounded up in late 1988 after they were unable to escape abroad following the chemical weapons attacks of that year; their whereabouts remain unknown. Other estimates of the number unaccounted for range up to 7,500.

o Extrajudicial killings. In August or September 1989, Kurdish opposition parties claim that about 60 fishermen plying their trade on Lake Dukan, in northwest Iraq, were killed under fire from Iraqi helicopter gunships. While the PUK acknowledges that it had been ferrying fighters across the lake from a nearby military camp, it insists that, in this case, unarmed noncombattants were the victims.210 The action appeared to be a repetition of the use of such gunships against Iraqi army deserters hiding out in the marshes of southern Iraq, in 1988 and 1989.

Exile sources and human rights organizations say that the persecution of the Kurds, as well as of the country's smaller Turcoman and Assyrian Christian minorities, continued into 1990, albeit on a reduced scale. In January, for instance, 30 Turcomans are believed to have been executed, on unspecified charges. Among them were four people who had returned from Turkey the previous year under official amnesties.211

Two years after the Kurds' flight, in November 1990, a Middle East Watch mission to southeast Turkey was able to visit two of the three refugee camps for the 27,000 Iraqi Kurds still temporarily housed in that region. Three mass outbreaks of food poisoning in the camps -- in Kizel Tepe, on June 8-9, 1989, Mus, in December 1989, and Diyabaker, on February 1, 1990 -- resulting in serious illness for thousands, and at least three deaths, were plausibly blamed by camp leaders on Iraqi agents intent on coercing the refugees into returning to their homeland.212

210Interview by Middle East Watch with Dr. Latif Rashid, European representative of the PUK, January 3, 1990.

211 Amnesty International, ibid, p.5.

212 The mission observed overcrowding, a lack of schooling and employment, and poor sanitation in the camps.

451

As Iraqis of all backgrounds have learned at their cost, no political dissent, however mildly expressed, is permitted under Saddam Hussein. Such is the prevailing fear of the mukhabarat, the ubiquitous , that Western reporters in Baghdad found no one willing to voice for attribution any criticism of the President or his policies.

Nor is it possible for officials to disagree with his decisions, as discovered by the dozens of senior army officers reported by exile organizations to have been executed in July for opposing the decision to invade Kuwait. In June 1989, Defense Minister Adnan Khairallah Talfah, Saddam's own brother-in-law, was officially said to have been killed in a helicopter crash. However, Iraqi exiles in London are convinced that he, too, was secretly executed, for criticizing the President's decision to take a second, younger wife.

Over the 22 years of Ba'th Party rule, thousands of Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been forced into voluntary exile in Western Europe and the United States. But even abroad, those who have engaged in political activity have not been safe. In January 1988, Shi'a Muslim leader Sayyed Mahdi al-Hakim was lured from his place of exile in Iran to the Sudan, where he was shot to death at the Khartoum Hilton. The Sudanese government later accused Iraqi embassy personnel of involvement in the murder, compelling Baghdad to close the mission.

Assassination attempts have even extended to the United States. An abortive plot against two Iraqi exiles in California in 1990 was linked to the Iraqi mission to the United Nations. Unlike their Sudanese counterparts, though, the State Department shrunk from the public condemnation of Baghdad which the evidence of official Iraqi complicity warranted.

The case began on February 17, when federal and local police in Modesto, California, arrested an Iraqi immigrant, Adni Khoshaba, in connection with a suspected assassination plot against Sargon Dadesho, an exiled Iraqi dissident active in California's Assyrian community. Three days later, Khoshaba was released on grounds of insufficient evidence. According to The Modesto Bee, which first reported the story, by the end of the week Khoshaba was traced by federal agents to the Iraqi mission in New York, where he had previously worked as a driver. From there, he left the United States.

Despite the ostensible dearth of evidence, Khoshaba was indicted in

452 absentia by a federal court six weeks later, on charges of plotting to kill Dadesho and another unidentified Iraqi exile of Kurdish extraction. The two-count indictment charged that Khoshaba had made two round trips to New York to meet an Iraqi diplomat, who promised him $50,000 to assassinate or arrange the assassination of the two men. Hours after the indictment was made public, the State Department announced that an unnamed Iraqi diplomat had been expelled from the UN mission, for "abuse of his privileges of residence in the United States." The diplomat, it transpired, was First Secretary Ahmad Al-Amari.213

During 1990, Iraqi officials as well as the country's supporters in the United States spoke confidently of extensive revisions being drafted to the Interim Constitution of 1970. The implication was that these revisions would liberalize the treatment of citizens, improving basic rights such as freedom of expression, assembly and political participation.214 With the war against Iran over, the argument ran, the regime could afford to relax its grip. Foreign travel restrictions were eased in early 1990, providing the limited number of Iraqis who could afford to travel, and were permitted to leave, with a much-needed breath of fresh air. But by the end of 1990 there was still no sign of the promised new constitution.

One legislative change which was introduced, far from advancing personal liberties and civil rights, marked a significant regressive step by a regime which had previously proclaimed the existence in Iraq of sexual equality. On February 28, President Saddam signed a new law, Decree 111, effectively decriminalizing the murder of women alleged to have engaged in sexual relations outside marriage, as well as of their lovers, by the women's male relatives. The new law, believed by US officials to have been introduced in response to a spate of wife-killings by recently demobilized soldiers, was promulgated on March 12.

Its introduction provoked an unexpected storm of protest from women's groups in several parts of the Muslim world, as well as private diplomatic representations from Egypt, then a close ally of Iraq. Hundreds of Egyptian citizens -- migrant laborers in Iraq -- had reportedly been among the victims of the affronted Iraqi men. Apparently in response to these protests, Saddam Hussein

213Middle East Watch interview with Sargon Dadesho, November 1990.

214Amended in 1973 and 1974, the Interim Constitution is Iraq's basic legal document. Draft revisions were said to have been in preparation in 1989 as well, but never materialized.

453 had second thoughts and withdrew the legislation the following day, March 13.215 It was a potent example of the effectiveness of diplomatic and public pressure on the Iraqi regime, refuting standard US government arguments to the contrary.

What political changes there were in the offing in Iraq in 1990 appeared more likely to entrench further the personal position of Saddam Hussein, already head of state, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council -- the top policy- making body -- secretary of the so-called Regional Command (the Iraqi section) of the ruling Arab Ba'th Socialist Party, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Foreign journalists visiting Baghdad in 1990 noted with interest the political rehabilitation of the once reviled Iraqi monarchy, overthrown in a 1958 coup; the well publicized return from exile of Saddam's disgraced eldest son, Udayy, generally regarded by Western diplomats as the heir apparent;216 and the deepening of a Ceausescu-style personality cult around Saddam.

As for the National Assembly, a legislative body with strictly limited powers, its unanimous endorsement of every proposal made by Saddam during the Gulf crisis indicated that it remained as much a rubber stamp for the executive's actions as ever.217 Elections to the Assembly were held in April 1989, and some independents were allowed to run. But all candidates were subject to prior screening by the mukhabarat to determine their support for the government.218

Hopes for a more democratic government in Iraq, committed to a

215Letter to Middle East Watch from Dr. Abdul Amir Al-Anbari, Ambassador of Iraq to the United Nations, April 12, 1990.

216Udayy Hussein had been responsible for the killing of his father's favorite bodyguard in 1989, and was subsequently sent into exile in Western Europe. No charges were ever brought against him after the then Minister of Justice publicly pleaded with Saddam to display clemency to his son.

217See Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, February 1990, p. 38.

218 Testimony by Joshua R. Gilder, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at a hearing entitled "US Relations with Iraq"; 15 June, 1990.

454 reversal of the many abuses committed by the Saddam regime, depend crucially on the outcome of the confrontation in the Persian Gulf over the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Prospects that a hypothetical post-Saddam government might pay greater respect to human rights improved after a marathon series of meetings of Iraqi opposition groups abroad. On December 27, seventeen parties concluded an agreement in Beirut committing themselves to democracy and a multiparty system. Among the agreement's points were an end to discrimination against Shi'ites (Iraq's leadership is currently dominated by members of the country's minority Sunni Islam sect); the reversal of the "Arabization" of Kurdish towns; and a recognition of Kurdish rights, as contained in the KDP's March 11, 1970 Declaration.219

Human Rights Developments in IraqiIraqi----OccupiedOccupied Kuwait

Gross human rights abuses against Kuwaiti citizens and other residents of Kuwait commenced in the immediate aftermath of the August 2 invasion. Hundreds were killed or wounded, and thousands detained, in the takeover. Hundreds of thousands of others were forced to flee the country.

Iraqi soldiers and militia committed countless acts of , rape and assault on civilians. Others participated in criminal activity as law and order broke down. In an attempt to improve its public image, Iraq publicized the summary execution of a handful of accused looters and rapists.

During August, Iraq attempted unsuccessfully to find support among Kuwaiti public figures. Instead, Kuwaiti volunteers acting on their own initiative took over the running of hospitals and food cooperatives and the performance of sanitation work and gasoline distribution. Faced with these perceived challenges and in response to continued resistance -- both peaceful and armed -- Iraqi occupying authorities acted swiftly, and violently, to assert their unquestionable control in Kuwait.

219The 17 parties that took part in three months of meetings in Damascus and Beirut ranged from the Communists to the Islamists, together with the five-party Front and a dissident Ba'th faction.

455

Scores of people were summarily executed in September and October, including physicians, hospital volunteers and food-distribution personnel, some of them in front of their families. Scores more were killed in confrontations with Iraqi forces, or in detention. Iraq has yet to give an accounting of people killed in its custody -- either to relatives or to neutral organizations. Middle East Watch estimates that at least 600 were killed in the first three months following the invasion.

In that same time, more than 5,000 were arrested. Detainees included political leaders, such as members of the former National Assembly, as well as Red Crescent and other medical personnel and community volunteers. Political figures were detained with family members, including children as young as 13 years of age. Arbitrary arrest and detention continued unabated through the end of the year. So did the practice of holding detainees incommunicado for long periods, and the practice of illegally transferring them to Iraq. The Iraqi government gave no accounting of those it held, despite requests to do so by Middle East Watch and other organizations.

Detainees reported being housed in crowded and unsanitary makeshift detention centers. There, they were systematically tortured to extract information, gain cooperation, mute opposition or set an example to discourage others. Interviews with former detainees showed widespread, and apparently officially sanctioned, ill-treatment of those in custody, such as sleep deprivation, beatings with sticks and metal pipes, mock executions, and threats of execution or harm to family members.

While Baghdad issued an order for Iraqis who had moved to Kuwait after the invasion to leave, it did not clarify its position on the return of Kuwaitis to their country. Kuwaitis were arrested and detained when they tried to enter Kuwait -- for clearly peaceful purposes -- through desert routes from Saudi Arabia. One person known to Middle East Watch was arrested in early December while trying to return home to take his aged mother out of Kuwait. Three others were also arrested that month when they tried to enter Kuwait to be with their families. All four were held incommunicado. During December, the Iraqi government did allow several hundred Kuwaitis to return to Kuwait through Jordan and Iraq. That flow stopped, however, after the reported harassment of returnees, some of whom were active in a grassroots armed resistance.

456 The Iraqi invasion turned some 400,000 Kuwaiti citizens into refugees, and displaced hundreds of thousands of foreigners who had made Kuwait their home.

Collective punishment was meted out in response to individual acts of resistance. Houses were methodically burned, or deliberately destroyed by tank fire or explosives. Relatives of suspects and wanted public figures were detained and tortured to extract information on their relatives' whereabouts.

All of Kuwait's public hospitals, which constitute the overwhelming majority of health care facilities, and some of its private clinics were taken over by the Iraqi military, making access difficult for Kuwaitis, and next to impossible for victims of official abuse. A number of physicians, a hospital administrator and several medical volunteers were executed on suspicion of helping the resistance. Medical equipment and drugs were seized and shipped to Iraq, resulting in severe shortages of vital drugs. The deterioration of health care, which was further aggravated by the flight of most medical personnel, contributed to the departure of many Kuwaitis to neighboring countries, and to the death of patients for whom the health care system could no longer provide adequate help, including newly born infants.

Kuwaiti food stocks were seized and shipped to Iraq, leading to severe shortages of food, including baby formula. Food coops, which had been owned by Kuwaiti citizens, were taken over by Iraqi administrators, leading to credible charges of discrimination against Kuwaitis. The manager of one food coop and a volunteer at another were summarily executed, and dozens of other volunteers were detained. A number are known to have died while in government custody.

Free assembly and expression were banned by Iraq, and those found with illegal leaflets were killed or otherwise severely punished. Only one newspaper, al-Nida' -- a newly created mouthpiece for the occupying power -- was allowed to publish. Occupation authorities took control of the University of Kuwait campuses, replacing top university administrators and deans with Iraqis.

The rare visits by foreign journalists to Kuwait took place only with official escorts. Iraq did not allow any humanitarian organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, into Kuwait. In fact, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and right-hand man to the President, went so far as to threaten with mutilation any person attempting to go to Kuwait to

457 investigate human rights conditions without Iraq's permission.

Kuwaiti public property was seized and shipped to Iraq. There was large- scale, systematic and officially sanctioned appropriation of property belonging to Kuwaiti government institutions, including vehicles, office furniture, school and medical equipment, goods in port warehouses and military and aviation hardware. Some private property was also seized by the Iraqi government or looted. Robbery by soldiers and was so extensive and widespread that it could only have taken place with official sanction or as a result of gross negligence by the Iraqi authorities. One shopping mall was looted even though it was located next to a large Iraqi command post at the Sheraton Hotel.

Although the Kuwaiti dinar was previously worth three Iraqi dinars, Iraq decreed parity between the two currencies and then declared the Kuwaiti dinar unacceptable tender. All bank accounts were figured according to the new formula, drastically reducing their value.

US Policy

In the early stages of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the US government decided to try to staunch a threatening wave of Islamic fundamentalism emanating from Tehran. From this step, undisclosed at the time, flowed a policy of pinning at least part of future US commercial and geopolitical interests in the region on the Saddam regime. The record thus shows that criticism by the Reagan and Bush administrations of the Iraqi dictator's domestic conduct was consistently muted, and economic assistance to his financially hard-pressed government -- in the form of US government-backed credits and loan guarantees running into billions of dollars -- was made freely available.

Prior to the Kuwait invasion, it seemed as if the Bush administration, aided by certain friendly members of Congress and a well oiled business lobby, was prepared to go to considerable lengths not to upset steadily improving relations with Baghdad. Attempts during the first half of 1990 by both the House and the Senate to introduce trade-sanctions legislation against Iraq -- citing that country's threats against Israel, its military build-up and its human rights record -- were consistently blocked by the administration. Just two days before the

458 invasion, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly testified on Capitol Hill to this end.

This conciliatory approach to dealing with the Saddam regime appeared to have been set from the top. Its pitfalls, and contradictions, were exposed most glaringly in the transcript of a conversation in Baghdad on July 25 -- eight days before the invasion of Kuwait -- between US Ambassador April Glaspie and the Iraqi President. According to the Iraqi transcript, the accuracy of which has not been challenged by the State Department, Ambassador Glaspie was conciliatory almost to the point of subservience. At one stage, she allegedly referred to the Iraq-Kuwait dispute as "an inter-Arab affair of no concern to the United States."

It was not only the State Department that was guilty of fawning on Saddam Hussein. Both the Commerce and Agriculture Departments were strong proponents of closer trade links with Iraq, a leading purchaser of US wheat and rice. Only when Iraq began to fall into serious arrears in repayments on US loans guaranteed by the Export-Import Bank did the administration reluctantly take action, in early 1990, to cut its credit line.

Congress, too, must bear its share of the blame. According to another Iraqi transcript of a meeting in Baghdad on April 12, Senator Robert Dole ingratiatingly assured the Iraqi leader that a Voice of America staffer responsible for a broadcast that had indirectly compared Saddam with the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had been fired. He was wrong.

This resistance to sanctions came despite the State Department's ample cataloguing of Iraqi atrocities. Published in February 1990, the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1989 was largely accurate in its findings on Iraq, although in places it appeared ready to give the Iraqi government the benefit of the doubt where such generosity was undeserved, as in the case of torture, where evidence of its unchecked and widespread practice was not reflected. Similarly, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 15, Joshua Gilder, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, pulled no punches in describing Iraqi abuses, stating:

Human rights, as such, are not recognized in Iraq. As our report

459 details, the ordinary Iraqi citizen knows no personal security against government violence. Disappearances, followed by secret executions, appear to be common....The penalty for expressing opinions deemed objectionable by the regime is swift and brutal. We believe that over the past ten years many thousands to tens of thousands...have been arrested by the secret police on suspicion of opposition to the government....[T]here is not even the charade of due process for those charged with security-related offenses broadly defined to include such routine criminal matters as currency violations....Torture is routine, for security offenses and ordinary crimes alike, and confessions extracted under torture are admissible in court....In general, the regime is ruthless in its efforts to maintain absolute control over the population.

Apart from these commendable denunciations by the State Department's Human Rights Bureau, public criticisms of Iraqi abuses were few and far between. There was nothing comparable to the Gilder statement at venues such as the UN Commission on Human Rights, when attempts in February to put Iraq in the dock were being mounted by other Western countries, or at moments such as the Bazoft trial, when leadership from the US could have been decisive. Instead, despite protestations by officials about their use of private diplomacy for human rights concerns, it seems that the US chose to do nothing.

The response to the suspected assassination plot in California, in February, strongly indicated a desire to shield the Saddam regime from too much public opprobrium. On March 2, before the story became public, Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned Assistant Secretary Kelly about allegations that the Iraqi mission in New York had been involved in attempts to assassinate political opponents in the United States. Stonewalling, Kelly pleaded the need to preserve confidentiality on the subject.

It was only after the publication of the incident in several newspapers, and the retaliatory expulsion of a US diplomat from Baghdad, that the reluctant administration publicly confirmed the essential facts of the case. However, what was missing from the statement, delivered by Kelly to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, was the clear connection to the Iraqi government itself. Nor did the US government publicly protest to Baghdad about the incident.

460

After August 2, it was, of course, a different story. Then it seemed as if the subject of human rights in Iraq and occupied Kuwait was on every official's lips, from President Bush on down. The President's remarks in December, to the effect that he wished to bring the Persian Gulf crisis to an early resolution -- if necessary, by waging war -- because of an explosive Amnesty International report, indicated the extent to which accounts of human rights abuses had become political dynamite.

The Work of Middle East Watch

In February, Middle East Watch published the fruit of a year's research into Saddam Hussein's rights practices, in a lengthy report entitled Human Rights in Iraq. With updating, this comprehensive document was rereleased in the fall, in a new joint publishing venture with Yale University Press.

During the course of the year, the organization continued to monitor developments inside Iraq, raising them with the Iraqi authorities when required. In March, it protested over the absence of due process in the Bazoft case, highlighting the strong suspicion that torture had been used against the journalist. Later that month, it raised the issue of new legislation encouraging violence against women. This inquiry elicited a rare response from the government, stating that the legislation had been withdrawn.

In the High Court case in London between the Iraqi government and the PUK in May, Middle East Watch agreed to act as an expert witness for the defense. Written and verbal testimony was provided, challenging the government's central assertion that all officials, including Saddam Hussein himself, were subject to the law of the land.

The invasion of Kuwait in August provoked an intensive effort by Middle East Watch to monitor the human rights situation inside Kuwait, despite Iraq's refusal to permit access by neutral observers to Kuwait. An additional complication in accurately documenting the abuses was the exaggerations being accepted as fact by some Western officials.

461 Over the five-month period to the end of the year, the organization issued three newsletters based on extensive interviews with recent refugees from Kuwait in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the other Gulf states. The first, in August, dealt with the human rights and humanitarian law standards incumbent on all parties to the conflict, and with the foreigners used as hostages and "human shields." The second, in September, addressed the conduct of Iraqi troops in Kuwait. The third, in mid-November, provided a comprehensive overview of the violations committed by Iraqi forces -- an overview which was updated a month later.

Middle East Watch also raised with UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar the neglected issue of tens of thousands of Asian workers stranded in Iraq and Kuwait who faced starvation, due to the restrictive approach to the food embargo adopted by the UN sanctions committee, as well as Saddam's callous disregard for the workers' well-being and his refusal to permit access by international humanitarian organizations to distribute food. Research was also launched into the poor treatment by several Arab Pensinsula states -- all allies of the US -- of another overlooked group of victims: the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians resident in the Gulf for decades.

During the course of the crisis Middle East Watch gave dozens of radio, television and press interviews, and took part in many other public speaking engagements.

462 ISRAELI-OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Human Rights Developments

For the third consecutive year, the human rights situation in the Israeli- occupied territories was dominated by Israel's efforts to quell the Palestinian uprising. Severe violations conitnued, with their frequency declining in some cases and increasing in others. The general downward trend in killings by security forces indicated that fatal shootings are a controllable phenomenon when the will is there. At the same time, the continued use of live ammunition in non-life-threatening situations, the revival of deportations, the widespread use of , extensive curfews, university closures and other measures indicated the grave level of abuses that persisted for the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The use of deadly force continued to be among the most pressing human rights concerns in 1990. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) continued to be inadequately prepared to employ nonlethal means for handling civil unrest, including the use of plastic shields and the deployment of adequate numbers of troops to control crowds without resorting to gunfire. The government-appointed commission investigating the killing of 17 Palestinians by the Jerusalem Police on October 8 emphasized "the immediate need to develop alternatives to the use of live ammunition." This belated recommendation applies equally well to IDF troops patrolling the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While failing to adopt nonlethal techniques for handling unrest, the IDF took some steps during much of 1990 to lower fatalities: patrols in some heavily populated areas were reduced, and soldiers, apparently on orders from their superiors, showed greater restraint in opening fire with live and plastic bullets.

These changes in IDF conduct, along with a decline in the frequency with which Palestinians engaged soldiers in physical confrontations, contributed to a reduction by more than one-half in the monthly average of fatal shootings when compared to 1988 and 1989. Israeli security forces killed 137 Palestinians by gunfire between December 1, 1989 and December 31, 1990, compared to 555 over the two years from December 8, 1987 to November 30, 1989, according to B'Tselem,

463 the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.220

However, when the relative calm of 1990 was broken, it was by clashes that proved to be exceptionally fierce and bloody, most notably the confrontations that followed the murder of seven Palestinian workers by an apparently deranged Israeli civilian on May 20, and the clash in Jerusalem on October 8 in the al-Aqsa mosque compound (known to the Muslim world as Haram el-Sharif, and to the Jewish community as the Temple Mount).

While modifications in the practices of patrolling and opening fire contributed to greater restraint by soldiers during 1990, the military justice system did little during the year to reinforce that sense of restraint. As in previous years, only a handful of incidents of killing or injury inflicted by soldiers led to courts-martial or trials, and no soldier received a sentence of more than one year in prison. The cases prosecuted represented only a small portion of cases in which there was prima facie evidence -- credible eyewitness testimony and, in some cases, medical evidence -- that soldiers had exceeded their open-fire orders.

A similar reluctance to hold security forces responsible for using excessive force characterized the report of the government-appointed commission looking into the killings at the al-Aqsa mosque compound. Its report mentioned only in passing the "uncontrolled use of live ammunition" by police, giving scant attention to what should have been a central issue: the use of excessive force, including shooting into a crowd with bursts of automatic-weapon fire. While a continuing judicial inquest may still lead to charges against police who caused the deaths of Palestinians that day, the commission's report was symptomatic of the low priority given by Israeli authorities to encouraging a

220 Killings caused by means other than gunfire also showed a decline. In the two years prior to December 1, 1989, thirty-one Palestinians died from burns, beatings and other methods used by the Israeli security forces, according to B'Tselem, compared to four Palestinians from that date through the end of 1990.

At least 72 Palestinians died after exposure to tear gas fired by Israeli troops in the two years before December 1, 1989 and another 13 through the end of 1990, B'Tselem reported. However, the organization acknowledged that, "[f]rom a medical point of view, it is difficult to pinpoint exposure to tear gas as a direct and sole cause of death."

464 policy of restraint in handling disturbances.

There were some positive developments in the military justice system in 1990. IDF criminal investigators showed an increased willingness to contact some independent organizations, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, when they claimed to possess information pertinent to the investigation of particular cases. And throughout the year, the court-martial of Col. Yehuda Meir, which was ordered by Israel's High Court of Justice, kept the issue of senior officers' responsibility for abuses committed by their subordinates very much in the public eye. The trial of Col. Meir, who is charged with ordering the beatings of Palestinian in custody in January 1988, was still in progress at the end of 1990. In another significant development, the only other officer ranked colonel or above to be court-martialed for an intifada-related abuse, Col. Yaakov Sadeh, was convicted on December 13 of negligence in the death of a Gaza youth during a disturbance in 1989. The court-martial found Col. Sadeh guilty of violating the regulations on firing plastic bullets; he announced plans to appeal, and a sentence has not yet been handed down.

Fewer Palestinians spent periods in administrative detention -- internment without trial or charge -- during 1990 than during the two previous years, when the number of Palestinians under administrative detention remained above 2,000 much of the time. In mid-December 1990, the IDF Judge Advocate- General said there were 910 administrative detainees. While lower than in previous years, the detention of this number of Palestinians goes well beyond the exceptional use of this drastic measure -- "for imperative reasons of security" -- that is authorized by Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.221

In our report on 1989, we noted that the IDF doubled the maximum length

221 The US government, like most of the international community, maintains that the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in the Time of War applies to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Israel is a party to that convention, but disputes its applicability to the occupied territories on the grounds that those territories were not legally part of Egypt or Jordan prior to their capture by Israel in 1967, and thus are not occupied within the meaning of the convention. Israel has nonetheless stated that it will abide by the convention's humanitarian provisions, but claims that this undertaking is merely a voluntary one that is not enforceable in local courts.

465 of an administrative detention order from six months to one year. Since then, only a small fraction of those detained were issued the full one-year sentence; in December 1990, the Ramallah-based human rights organization al-Haq said it knew of 15 Palestinians serving one-year orders at that time.

In practice, authorities exercised their power to renew shorter detention orders more often than their power to sign initial one-year detention orders. Although statistics were not available, a significant minority of administrative detainees found their terms renewed upon their expiry; a handful have served as many as five or six terms -- that is, two to three years in detention without charge or trial, with little or no interruption.

Credible and frequent accounts of physical abuse of Palestinian security suspects during interrogation continued in 1990, although the data were unavailable to determine whether its frequency and severity increased or decreased. Suspects continued to report the same forms of mistreatment by General Security Service (Shin Bet) interrogators as have been regularly reported in the past, including hooding, long periods of forced standing with the hands tied, confinement in closet-like rooms, and beatings. In Gaza Central Prison, three suspects died during interrogation between December 1989 and November 1990; in one of the cases, two General Security Service interrogators were indicted after an autopsy showed that one of the victims, Khaled al-Sheikh Ali, died from severe blows to the abdomen.

With the apparent exception of the interrogation period, prison conditions for many Palestinian inmates convicted or accused of security offenses improved during 1990, due in part to the expansion and upgrading of facilities and the decline in the size of the prison population. However, the improvement in many facilities was overshadowed by the confinement of roughly one-half of the Palestinians in custody at the Ketsiot detention center in the Negev desert, where unacceptably harsh conditions prevailed. The more than 6,000 prisoners at Ketsiot experience extreme physical heat, impeded access to their lawyers and mail, and an atmosphere of great tension in which soldiers regularly point loaded rifles at them and frequently fire tear gas into the tent areas. The atmosphere was in stark contrast to the conditions in Israeli civilian prisons, in which professionally trained and unarmed guards, rather than reserve soldiers, watched over the prisoners. In addition, due to a standoff between the IDF and Palestinians that the IDF could quickly resolve if it chose, no family visits have taken place since Ketsiot was opened in March 1988. Finally, it bears repeating

466 that the detention of Gaza and West Bank residents in Ketsiot, inside Israel and a long drive from the occupied territories, violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires an occupying power to detain protected persons within the territory under occupation.

West Bank schools, which military authorities had kept closed for most of 1988 and 1989 on the grounds that they were "centers of intifada violence," were permitted to remain open during 1990, with the exception of a few periods lasting up to several days. In addition to these system-wide closures, local closure orders led to an average of 13 schools being closed per week between January 10 and May 31, according to B'Tselem. In the Gaza Strip, where military authorities have refrained from shutting down the entire school system during the intifada, pupils missed school days due to curfews, local closure orders, and strikes declared by Palestinian leaders.

In 1990, military authorities permitted the reopening of two of the smaller Palestinian universities and all 16 junior and technical colleges. However, the four main universities remained shut for the third consecutive year, preventing some 12,000 university students and over 1,000 staff members from entering their campuses. Unlike previous years, authorities did not attempt to break up the off-campus classes that the closed universities had organized.

Curfews of areas large and small continued to be imposed frequently during 1990, both in response to incidents of violence and in anticipation of unrest. The entire Gaza Strip remained under a permanent curfew from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. (9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan) and experienced 24-hour curfews on at least seven occasions during 1990, each one lasting up to seven days. In a clear example of an anticipatory curfew, over 100,000 people in the Nablus area were confined to their homes on May 3 to permit Jewish settlers and politicians to dedicate the Torah scriptures for a new religious school at the Tomb of Joseph, which is located inside the city. On November 14, one day before Palestinians celebrated the second anniversary of their self-declared independence, a two-day curfew was imposed on most refugee camps and major cities in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While a curfew may be justified under humanitarian law for a limited duration to prevent an even more severe disruption of civil life and public order, the circumstances, scope and duration of curfews imposed by Israeli authorities suggested that they were in many instances punitive and in violation of the

467 prohibition against collective punishment contained in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

For example, the permanent nighttime curfew throughout the Gaza Strip appears punitive when one considers that it restricts all 700,000 residents of the district and not only those living in turbulent areas, and that authorities have not once tried to lift the curfew during three years to test whether it actually was contributing to quiet. A suit challenging the legality of the blanket curfew was rejected by Israel's High Court of Justice in August; the army had argued that the curfew prevented nighttime activity by Palestinian strike committees.

Military authorities continued to demolish the homes of the families of Palestinians suspected of committing grave, politically motivated acts of violence. Resort to this form of collective punishment declined somewhat in the months following the July 1989 High Court of Justice ruling that gave Palestinians an opportunity to appeal demolition orders to the Court, except in cases of "operational military needs." Nevertheless, 79 homes were demolished between January and mid-November 1990, according to B'Tselem, compared to 164 in 1989. This punishment -- and the less drastic measure of sealing shut part or all of a house --justified by military authorities as a deterrent to others, is almost always meted out before the suspect is convicted. It is never used against Jews suspected or convicted of comparable assaults on Palestinians; Jewish residents of the occupied territories are subject to Israeli law and not the emergency regulations that permit demolitions.

One form of that was revived at the end of 1990 after having been shunned by Israel since 1988 was deportation. On December 15, following a wave of knifings by Palestinians that left seven Israelis dead and others wounded during the nine weeks following the killings in the al-Aqsa mosque compound, Defense Minister Moshe Arens ordered the expulsion of four Gazans accused of being active in Hamas, a militant Islamic organization. Hamas had called for lethal attacks against Israelis and had claimed responsibility for the fatal stabbings of three Israelis in Jaffa the day before. [The four were deported on January 8.]

The decision to suspend deportations in 1988 has been attributed to two factors: steady pressure from the international community, including the United States, which had made deportation a priority among its human rights concerns, and a sense among many in Israel's political and defense establishment that the

468 efficacy of the sanction was undermined by the time-consuming appeals process available to those served with deportation orders. Some IDF and government officials have pressed for an accelerated and more limited appeals process. At the end of 1990, concern was growing that an expedited appeals process would soon be implemented.

Unlike the deportation of security suspects, the deportation of Palestinians lacking Israeli-issued residence papers has not been resumed since its suspension. The practice was halted in early 1990 after more than 250 Palestinians had been summarily deported, some in the middle of the night, during the previous year.

Most Palestinians deported in this fashion had been unable to obtain residency permits that would allow them to live legally in the territories with spouses or children who are legal residents. Instead, they entered on visitor's visas which later expired.

Israel conducted a census of the West Bank and Gaza Strip shortly after capturing them in the June 1967 war. Palestinians present at the time of the count were registered. Palestinians outside the area at the time -- for example, those studying or working abroad or who fled during the hostilities -- had to apply for residency.

Many of those unable to obtain legal residency were Palestinian women who grew up in Jordan or elswhere and then married residents of the West Bank. Between 1967 and 1987, only 9,000 out of 140,000 petitions for family reunification had been approved by the Israeli authorities, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross; the pace of approvals slowed further during the intifada.222 The decisions on applications are made by military committees that do not hold hearings or give applicants an opportunity to present their case.

A halt to the deportation of "illegals" was announced on January 31, one day after the Washington Post ran a front-page story about the deportations and the State Department criticized the practice. In the spring, following a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, some of the

222 Joshua Brilliant, "Intifada Caused Sharp Drop in Family-Reunion Permits," Jerusalem Post, February 2, 1990.

469 spouses and children who had been deported were permitted to return on longer, renewable visitor's visas. Nevertheless, the plight of members of divided families who have been unable to obtain permission to live together in the occupied territories remains unresolved.

During 1990, administrative forms of control continued to place a burden on all Palestinians. Bureaucratic regulation of life in the territories was deliberately increased during the intifada on various stated grounds, including the authorities' desire to catch up with tax boycotters and to control the movement of Palestinians with records of security arrests. Since 1988, Palestinians wishing to do such things as travel abroad, obtain a driver's license or a telephone, or register a newborn infant or an automobile, have had to obtain clearance from a series of agencies. Depending on the applicant and the procedure, these include various tax authorities, the police, the military, civil administration and the General Security Service. The process routinely involved long lines, fees, and the arbitrary and humiliating behavior of the authorities involved. While bureaucratic red tape is characteristic of many societies, its pervasiveness in the occupied territories amounted to a form of deliberate discrimination and harassment.

* * *

While killings by Israeli security forces declined during 1990, killings by Palestinians of other Palestinians accelerated. From the beginning of the intifada until the end of November 1989, some 153 Palestinians were slain by other Palestinians on what was said to be suspicion of collaborating, according to the Associated Press; during the next 13 months, 171 more were murdered. The basis for the suspicion of collaborating was not known in every case; some of the killings may have had other motives.

Some Palestinians defend the killing of "collaborators" as necessary to protect the population from informants who help security forces by identifying activists and facilitating arrests and ambushes, thereby putting activists at risk of arrest or gunfire. Palestinian collaborators are also issued arms by the Israeli authorities and have reportedly been responsible for killing ten other Palestinians from the beginning of the intifada through the end of 1990, according to B'Tselem, and for causing injuries and property damage in many instances.

Regardless of the accusations against these individuals, the manner in

470 which they have been punished is deplorable. Their deaths did not come about in a situation of battle or combat. Almost without exception, killings of "collaborators" have been carried out execution-style, sometimes after torture. Although some of the victims received warnings and had some opportunity to plead their case, it cannot be said that any of them received a fair hearing before an independent tribunal. The deprivation of their basic due process rights was all the more serious in light of the severe punishment meted out.

Journalists and others who have studied the issue report that many of these killings have been carried out by local persons acting autonomously. However, there is evidence that the Unified National Leadership of the Intifada (UNLI), the local underground front comprised of representatives of the main Palestinian political factions, played a central role in approving the punishment of some of the suspected collaborators. Both the Palestine Liberation Organization and the UNLI condoned the killings under certain circumstances and at the very least failed to condemn them at a time when they had become an almost-daily phenomenon.

Since late 1989, however, the public positions of the Palestinian leadership appear to have evolved toward opposing the killings. In late December 1990, the UNLI issued its clearest orders yet forbidding activists from killing suspected collaborators without a decision being taken at the highest level. Middle East Watch urges Palestinians who exercise some measure of political authority over their compatriots to press hard in 1991 to eliminate these assassinations altogether.

US Policy

The United States showed tentative but important signs of becoming more vocal about Israeli human rights abuses during 1990. Most significantly, the US endorsed two UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel's killing of the 17 Palestinians in Jerusalem on October 8, as well as a third protesting Israel's resumption of deportations of Palestinians. Other than a resolution criticizing deportations in January 1988, these were the first instances since 1980 that the US supported Security Council resolutions critical of Israeli violations of human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

471

The United States also demonstrated how it might condition bilateral aid on Israeli practices in the occupied territories. This was done in response to a request by Israel for a $400 million loan guarantee223 to finance housing for Soviet immigrants. Although the administration eventually approved the guarantee, it delayed approval for several months while it voiced concern repeatedly about Israel's settlement policy in the occupied territories.

Despite these signs of chafing at Israeli practices, US policy remained fundamentally unchanged. Economic and military aid to Israel, by far the largest bilateral aid program of the United States, increased during 1990, with no public suggestion by any administration official that the $3 billion in annual grants should be linked to greater respect for human rights.224 The aid received by Israel amounted to one-fifth of all US foreign assistance in fiscal year 1990. The total package consisted of $1.8 billion in military grants and $1.2 billion in economic grants. In addition, the US attached several favorable conditions to the Israeli aid package, such as an early disbursement that allows Israel rather than the United States to collect interest on the grants during the year, which increased the value of the total package to well over $3 billion.225

The budget for fiscal year 1991 adds $700 million to this basic $3 billion package of grants. The supplemental appropriation, which was approved by Congress following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, authorizes the President to transfer up to $700 million worth of Defense Department stockpiles to Israel. Backers of the amendment contended that the Gulf crisis had increased the military threat to Israel.

223 The loan guarantee saved Israel about $21 million in borrowing costs.

224 The $400 million loan guarantee mentioned above is not part of the foreign aid package, but rather a response to a special request made by the Israeli government to cope with the influx of Soviet immigrants.

225 See Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Israel Has a Unique Deal for U.S. Aid," New York Times, September 23, 1990; Colin Campbell, "U.S. Devises Many Ways to Help Its Friend Israel," Atlanta Constitution, January 21, 1990; and Martha Wenger, "The Money Tree: U.S. Aid to Israel," Middle East Report, May-August 1990.

472

In its public pronouncements on human rights in 1990, the Bush administration seemed content, until the fall at least, to repeat the pattern of the previous year. As in 1989, the publication in February of a strong chapter on Israeli abuses in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices was followed by months of near-silence on the continuing abuses that the report described. In 1990, however, this reluctance to speak out lasted only until October, when the killings in Jerusalem and political considerations related to the Gulf crisis prompted a more vocal stance.

The Bush administration, like its predecessor, justified a low-profile policy on Israeli human rights violations on the grounds that the abuses were merely a symptom of the absence of peace. As Richard Schifter, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 21:

In other situations, the human rights issue is the center of the problem....In this situation, the real problem...is the peace process, and the problems that arise in the occupied territories...rise out of the fact that we don't have peace, and we have, therefore, this problem of continued military occupation....

Following this logic, the Bush administration opted either to shun public criticism of abuses as counterproductive to the peace process, or to criticize them more as impediments to peace than as abuses per se. While muting its public comments, the administration claimed to be lobbying the Israelis extensively in private. "The State Department has communicated with the government of Israel more than with any other government of the world, frequently on a high level," Assistant Secretary Schifter testified at a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 9. "There's no other country with whom I have had as many communications."

In the view of Middle East Watch, the US should respond to ongoing gross abuses of human rights through public statements as well as diplomatic contacts, especially in view of the unparalleled amount of US aid sent to Israel each year. To date, the US has not explained how fair public criticism of human rights violations committed both by Israel and its neighbors would derail the diplomatic process.

473 In searching for an appropriate human rights agenda for the year, the administration needed to search no further than its own Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1989. The chapter on the Israeli-occupied territories depicted the range and seriousness of the violations, although it presented them in a disembodied manner that often failed to convey the degree to which they were systematic rather than aberrational.226

In the months following publication of the Country Reports, it became clear that once again, the administration considered that document to be the main statement that would be made during the year on Israeli abuses. For example, at the May 9 joint hearing of the two House Foreign Affairs subcommittees, Assistant Secretary Schifter in his prepared testimony would not even repeat the criticisms contained in the Country Reports but simply made reference to them. It was not until intense questioning by the subcommittees that he reluctantly uttered a word of criticism.

In response to a question, Schifter did say that the administration had "tried to come up with a short list [of issues to raise with the Israeli government], which is more useful than a long list." On that list, he said, were deportations, house demolitions, and the number of fatalities. On the latter issue, Schifter said, the US had stressed that there should be no doubt about the circumstances in which a soldier may open fire. He said that the US also focused on the nature of the IDF's patrols in the territories, in particular their size and how often they were deployed. Commenting on the decline in the number of Palestinians killed by security forces in the preceding months, Schifter said he hoped that the reduction in deaths "has something to do with our conversations."

As noted earlier, beginning in the spring of 1990, Israeli troops with few exceptions appeared to have limited the frequency of patrols and to have exercised greater restraint in using lethal force. The Bush administration should

226 The circumspect tone of the chapter may have been due to the way that the office of Assistant Secretary Schifter edited the material prepared by diplomatic staff in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which monitors human rights conditions on the ground. A senior source in the State Department told Middle East Watch that the editorial changes, which were more substantial than is commonly the case for other chapters, effectively softened the picture of Israeli abuses. See also Timothy Phelps, "U.S. Official Toned Down Israel Critique," Newsday, February 22, 1990.

474 be commended if it, indeed, chose to stress this critical issue in bilateral discussions. However, since the US rarely went public with its concerns about the use of excessive force by Israeli security forces -- until the October 8 killings -- it was not possible to ascertain how much pressure the US in fact applied on this issue.

Certainly, the US did not use the occasion of bilateral meetings to comment publicly on this or any other human rights concern. While neither President Bush nor Secretary of State James Baker visited Israel during 1990,227 Israeli officials were in Washington on several occasions during the year, both before and after the replacement of the Labor-Likud coalition government by a narrow Likud government in the spring. Then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin came in January, then-Foreign Minister Moshe Arens came in February, and in September, Foreign Minister David Levy came twice and Foreign Minister Arens came once. Rabin saw, among others, Vice President Dan Quayle, Secretary of State Baker and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. In February, Arens conferred with Baker; in September, he met with Cheney to request additional military aid in response to the Gulf crisis. Levy met with Baker on both of his trips in September. During these visits, US officials did not once publicly raise human rights concerns.

The Bush administration also failed to comment publicly on human rights during Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's only official visit to the United States in 1990. The Bush-Shamir meeting, which took place on December 11 and lasted nearly two hours, was intended mainly to show unity at a time of strained relations during the Gulf crisis, according to press reports. Their discussion did not even broach the killings in the al-Aqsa mosque compound or Israel's rejection of a UN investigation of the incident, because "the flow of conversation didn't go that way," according to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly.

In their talks two days later, Secretary Baker reportedly reminded Shamir of US opposition to the deportation of Palestinians on security grounds. Although at the time Israel had issued no new deportation orders since 1988, the Israelis were considering a revival of the measure in response to a surge of violent attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians. Four days after the Shamir-Baker

227 Assistant Secretary Schifter made a week-long working trip in August, but made no public statements about human rights during or immediately following his stay.

475 meeting, Defense Minister Arens ordered four Gazans deported, as noted above, which prompted the State Department to denounce the extrajudicial measure and recommend that "charges of wrongdoing should be brought in a court of law based on evidence to be argued in a public trial." The deportations also reportedly prodded the US toward sponsoring a UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel that had been under negotiation for several weeks, as discussed below.

Despite its shunning of public criticism during bilateral discussions, the Bush administration was outspoken on two issues during the year. The first was the continued construction and expansion of Jewish settlements in the lands captured in 1967, and the second was the killings in the al-Aqsa mosque compound in October.

The issue of settlements was raised by the administration in response to Israel's request for $400 million in loan guarantees to finance housing for Soviet Jewish immigrants. In March, both President Bush and Secretary Baker used the occasion of the request to remind Israel of US opposition to settlements in an unusually blunt manner. "I don't think it's unreasonable of us to ask for some assurances that these funds will not be used to create new settlements or expand old settlements in the occupied territories," the Secretary of State testified before a House Appropriations subcommittee on March 1.

Two days later, President Bush commented that US opposition to settlements applied to annexed East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although the treatment of annexed Jerusalem as part of the occupied territories is consistent with long-standing US policy, Bush's comments stirred a furor because this policy is rarely made explicit.

US displeasure with Israeli settlement policy was also registered at the United Nations, where the Bush administration participated in drafting a proposed Security Council resolution that would criticize settlements in the occupied territories as a breach of international law. This would have represented a new step for the administration, which has not taken a position on the legality of settlements, having criticized them only as obstacles to peace. Although the draft resolution became bogged down in discussions, where it remained at the end of 1990, US involvement in drafting the resolution sent a message to Israel.

In May, Congress approved the $400 million loan guarantee, but the administration continued to hold up its implementation. It was only in October,

476 after receiving written assurances from Foreign Minister Levy that the funds would not be used beyond the Green Line marking Israel's pre-1967 borders, that Secretary Baker announced approval of the loan guarantees.

The controversy did not end there. Accused by some Israelis of having conceded too much to the Americans, Levy then issued a clarification stating that while these loans would not be used in East Jerusalem, Israel had no intention of preventing Soviet Jews from settling there. Defiant statements from other Israeli officials to the effect that Israel would encourage Soviet Jews to settle in East Jerusalem prompted the State Department to delay further the finalizing of the guarantees.

While the administration ultimately approved the package, President Bush's willingness to link in a public fashion his concerns on settlements to US aid provided a useful model of how human rights issues such issues as the excessive use of lethal force or the use of administrative detention might be raised. It represented the first time in recent memory that the US made a public issue of whether Israel was spending US aid in the occupied territories, something that is forbidden under the terms on which the US aid is appropriated.

There were, to be sure, other occasions during 1990 when the US voiced disapproval of Israeli practices, primarily when those practices received prominent press coverage. In January, for example, the arrest of one Palestinian leader and the imposition of travel restrictions on several others prompted the State Department to comment that these measures "send the wrong signal to Palestinians who favor dialogue" and "discourage Palestinian confidence in the peace process."

On January 30, Margaret Tutwiler, the State Department spokeswoman, commented on a lengthy report in the Washington Post, noted above, about the policy of summarily deporting Palestinian spouses and children who had overstayed their visitor's visas. "As we currently understand their policies," she said, "the Israelis impose difficult conditions of residence. We hope that the government of Israel would apply residency requirements with sensitivity and flexibility." The following day, Israel announced that it would suspend the summary eviction of Palestinians.

In May, when soldiers killed 12 Palestinians and wounded several hundred during three days of fierce demonstrations and riots, the administration

477 made several comments on the casualties. At a State Department briefing on May 21, spokesman Richard Boucher said: "We're disturbed by the number of casualties inflicted by the Israeli army. We've repeatedly called upon the Government of Israel to exercise restraint in these situations in order to avoid heavy casualties." President Bush said in a press conference later in the week: "I have called on both sides for restraint. I've called on the Israeli forces to show constraint."

These bland reactions to the killings were eclipsed by a seemingly bolder response by Secretary Baker, who announced that the US "would be prepared to discuss the question of a UN observer team if that indeed comes up at the UN Security Council session." Baker's remarks caused a stir because they hinted that the US might support efforts to dispatch a Security Council team to investigate human rights conditions in the territories. However, later clarifications by Baker revealed that US opposition to a high-profile UN mission had not changed: the US would only support an envoy who would be dispatched by the Secretary General. The resolution that was put to a vote on May 31 called instead for the Security Council mission, and the US vetoed it in a 14-1-0 vote.

Explaining the veto, US Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering made a classic articulation of the US policy of soft-pedaling human rights abuses by Israel on the stated grounds that public criticism endangers the peace process. He said that the resolution

does not focus attention on the real needs of moving the peace process forward, an endeavor that must be undertaken by the parties themselves in the region. Rather, it would too easily become a vehicle which could be misused to generate needless controversy and dispute in the area, something clearly inappropriate, especially under present circumstances. It thus appears to us more likely to add to rather than to help resolve the problems in the region.

While the US offer justified its opposition to UN resolutions by calling them one- sided and counter-productive, the administration rarely substituted its own public criticism.

The US took a more aggressive approach in the fall, following the killings in the al-Aqsa mosque compound. The US took the lead in formulating the Security Council response and, on October 12, joined a unanimous vote in favor of

478 Resolution 672, which condemned "especially the acts of violence committed by the Israeli security forces resulting in injuries and loss of human life" and called upon Israel "to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is applicable to all the territories occupied by Israel since 1967."

The resolution represented a compromise; the US had rejected a stronger resolution which would have mandated that a delegation be sent by the Security Council to recommend methods for protecting Palestinians in the occupied territories. The resolution adopted asked instead for a mission dispatched by the Secretary General to submit its "findings and conclusions" by the end of the month. Despite its opposition to the stronger recommendations, the US took a big step by supporting the resolution that passed.

US criticism of Israel's handling of the disturbances in the al-Aqsa mosque compound was reinforced by strong language from President Bush and Secretary Baker about the fundamental human rights issue in the incident: the use of excessive force. At a press conference on October 9, the President said, "Israeli security forces need to be better prepared for such situations, need to act with greater restraint, particularly when it comes to the use of deadly force."

Secretary Baker reiterated the point in a letter sent on October 14 to Foreign Minister Levy that was published in the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot. Baker wrote that the US supported the Security Council resolution "because honestly we thought that Israel should have been ready and able to handle violence and riots without killing 20228 people and wounding 150."

Israel reacted angrily to the UN resolution, declaring that a UN mission would get no cooperation from the government if it came. The US lobbied Israel to accept a compromise formula, but Israel remained defiant. On October 25, the US once again joined in a unanimous vote in favor of Security Council Resolution 673, which deplored Israel's refusal to receive the UN mission. In the face of Israel's refusal to cooperate, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar decided to submit his report on the occupied territories without dispatching the mission.

Security Council concern with the plight of Palestinians continued after

228 The initial counts of 20 dead turned out to have been too high by three.

479 passage of the two resolutions. After extended negotiations over language, the US came around to backing a third resolution on Israel that passed unanimously on December 20. One of the factors reported to have persuaded the administration to back the measure was Israel's revival of deportations five days earlier.

The December 20 resolution "deplored" the resumption of deportations and urged Israel to accept de jure applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to all territories occupied by Israel since 1949, including Jerusalem. It asked the Secretary General, in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross,

to develop further the idea...of convening a meeting of the high contracting parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention and to discuss possible measures that might be taken by them under the Convention and for this purpose to invite these parties to submit their views on how the idea could contribute to the goals of the Convention....

The resolution backed, however tentatively, an increased role for the international community in monitoring conditions in the occupied territories, including Jerusalem. By supporting it, the US underscored its insistence on the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Most observers believed that despite administration denials, the US had toughened its policy toward Israel at the UN during the fall of 1990 in large part to preserve the fragile coalition of Arab nations opposing Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. While the Bush administration's more vocal criticism of Israeli abuses since August was appropriate and long overdue, its political motivation -- at a time when the administration was rewarding such gross abusers of human rights as Syria and for supporting the anti-Iraq alliance -- engendered some understandable cynicism. Only by maintaining a vocal and consistent policy toward human rights abuses can the US best utilize its considerable influence to improve the human rights practices of the Israeli government.

The Work of Middle East Watch

During 1990, Middle East Watch determined that it could be most effective in addressing Israeli human rights violations by concentrating its efforts

480 on a few specific issues. These choices were made after consultation with human rights organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

The way that the Israeli authorities investigate killings by soldiers was the subject of a major report released in July. One consideration underlying the selection of this topic was the IDF's apparently greater willingness to cooperate with an investigation by a US-based organization than with a local group. Indeed, officials of the IDF Judge Advocate General's office held many hours of discussion with Middle East Watch representatives who were preparing the report.

The report, entitled The Israeli Army and the Intifada: Policies that Contribute to Killings, criticized the permissive rules for opening fire with lethal ammunition in the occupied territories, the way in which the IDF investigates killings by its own troops, and the restrictions it imposes on monitoring by independent observers. These policies, the report charged, contributed to a lack of restraint and to excessive killings by the IDF. The IDF wrote a lengthy rebuttal, which Middle East Watch included in the final version of the report.

While the report was nearing completion, Middle East Watch testified before two House Foreign Affairs subcommittees on the content of the report as well as other human rights concerns in the occupied territories. The material prepared by Middle East Watch for the May 9 session helped members of the subcommittees to formulate questions for the hearing's main witness, Assistant Secretary Schifter.

Later in May, Middle East Watch issued a newsletter calling for Palestinian universities to be reopened. The newsletter detailed the restrictions imposed on universities during the intifada and described who had been affected.

In October, Middle East Watch issued a statement on the use of excessive force by the police in the Temple Mount killings on October 8, and began monitoring the judicial investigations that were launched into the police actions that day. The investigations were still proceeding at the end of 1990.

At year's end, Middle East Watch was also preparing a report entitled Prison Conditions in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The report is based on visits by representatives of Middle East Watch to twelve facilities in July and August. The facilities included those run by the IDF, the civilian prison authorities, and the police.

481

During 1990, Middle East Watch intervened on several occasions when Palestinian human rights monitors were the victims of arrest, mistreatment or travel restrictions. In January, Middle East Watch protested the denial to Gaza human rights lawyer Raji Sourani of a laissez passer for him to travel to the United States to participate in a human rights program at Columbia University. He was eventually permitted to leave, but only after authorities required him to sign a document imposing onerous conditions on his freedom of movement and expression while abroad.

Telegrams were also sent to protest the detention of al-Haq human rights field-worker Iyad al-Haddad in September and Gaza human rights lawyer Muhammad Abu Sha'ban in November. The former prompted a reply from West Bank legal advisor Col. Ahaz Ben-Ari, which said:

Mr. al-Haddad has been detained for his repeated inciting and organizing of violent disturbances against the security forces in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank]. In addition, Mr. Haddad has been an active participant in these violent disturbances....[U]nder no condition was Mr. al-Haddad detained because of his association with al-Haq.

This was the only substantive reply that Middle East Watch received to its protest cables during 1990. Both al-Haddad and Sha'ban were released in December. Israeli authorities neither charged them nor disclosed any evidence of their having engaged in specific illegal activities.

Middle East Watch did receive a reply to an intervention it made in 1989 on behalf of al-Haq field-worker Sha'wan Jabarin, who had been badly beaten during his arrest in October of that year. The Ministry of Justice wrote that as the result of an investigation, one soldier was to be court-martialed and two would face disciplinary proceedings in connection with the beating. A request by Middle East Watch to be informed of the disposition of the cases went unanswered. However, Middle East Watch learned that two of the soldiers charged in connection with the beating were court-martialed and ordered imprisoned for periods of 14 and 28 days.

482 KUWAIT BEFORE THE IRAQI INVASION AND THE 229 GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE

Human Rights Developments

The Emir of Kuwait dissolved the National Assembly on July 3, 1986, during the Iran-Iraq war, citing concerns that national security was being compromised by open debate. Although the war ended in July 1988, the Kuwaiti government continued in 1990 to resist calls to restore parliamentary rule and to relax the severe restrictions imposed on freedom of expression and assembly. It continued to rule by decree, to tolerate torture, and to permit secret trial of security cases by special tribunals whose decisions were not subject to appeal. Although the August 2 Iraqi invasion eliminated the Kuwaiti government's power to continue many of these practices, it did not lead to any willingness on the part of the Emir and his government-in-exile to give firm commitments of reform should Kuwait be liberated.

The beginning of 1990 witnessed intensified calls for the restoration of the National Assembly. When the Emir had dissolved the Assembly, he had also suspended some key provisions of the 1962 Kuwaiti Constitution, including Article 107, which stipulates that when the Assembly is dissolved, elections for a new legislature must be held within two months. Otherwise, the article mandates, "the dissolved Assembly shall be restored to its full constitutional authority and shall meet immediately as if the dissolution had not taken place. The Assembly shall then continue functioning until the new Assembly is elected." Free of Article 107's constraints, the government took full advantage of Article 71, which allows the government to rule by decree "if the National Assembly is not in session or is dissolved," provided that decrees are not contrary to the Constitution. Opposition members maintained that suspension of Article 107 was unconstitutional, as were government decrees banning or severely restricting free speech and assembly.

229 For a discussion of Iraqi abuses during the occupation of Kuwait, see the chapter on Iraq and Occupied Kuwait, supra.

483

A major source of discontent were restrictions on press freedom guaranteed by Article 37 of the Constitution. Since radio and television were owned by the state and usually reflected only government views, Kuwaiti newspapers and the foreign media were the only sources of independent information. Kuwaiti newspapers were privately owned and enjoyed more freedom than in any of the surrounding countries. Once the National Assembly was dissolved, the government enacted a law giving itself the authority to close a newspaper for up to two years or to revoke its license. It also subjected newspapers to a system of strict prior censorship, with prison penalties of up to three years and fines of up to five thousand Kuwaiti dinars ($17,150) for violators.

Such censorship continued in 1990, with a Ministry of Information official placed in every newspaper office to review articles. Censorship also extended to foreign publications. Two Jordanian newspapers, al-Ra'y and al-Dustur, were banned in January for reporting on the campaign in Kuwait to restore the National Assembly. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)230 agreements ratified by Kuwait after the National Assembly was dissolved added more restrictions on the Kuwaiti press by banning from all GCC countries publications critical of any member state.

Although Article 44 of the Constitution gives individuals "the right to assemble without permit or prior notification," Law 31 of 1970 subjects to fines and imprisonment "anyone who participates in a mass gathering of at least five people in a public place with the intention of disturbing public safety and who remains assembled after an order by public authorities to disperse is issued." Through a liberal interpretation of the law, the government banned all public assembly, and on January 9, 1990, banned any meeting that discusses "concrete national issues," including in diwaniyyas, the traditional Kuwaiti semi-public living rooms. It threatened legal action against violators.

Despite the government practice of forcibly dispersing them, peaceful meetings calling for restoration of parliamentary rule continued to be held in 1990. On January 8, two thousand people peacefully assembled in al-Jahra to hear

230The GCC is made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

484 speeches by former members of the National Assembly; they were disrupted by security forces who beat some, including Ahmed al-Shrai'an, a 70-year-old former Assembly member. On January 22, another peaceful assembly was forcibly dispersed by the police and ten were arrested; they were released two weeks later without charges having been filed.

Calls to restore democracy continued, and on April 22, the government announced plans to form a 75-member National Council: 25 to be appointed by the Emir and 50 to be chosen in an election to be held in June. The powers of the National Council as outlined in the royal decree were limited in comparison to the constitutionally mandated powers of the dissolved National Assembly. One of the Council's purposes, according to Crown Prince and Prime Minister Shaikh Saad, was to propose "limitations of freedom," since "an excess of freedom turns into anarchy." Despite promises by the government that the new National Council would not replace the dissolved National Assembly, a May 13 decree by the Emir designated the National Assembly Building as the venue for the new Council, giving credence to opposition fears.

On May 5, twenty-six former members of the National Assembly announced that they would boycott the elections as unconstitutional. On May 7, Ahmed al-Baqer, a former member of the Assembly, and a companion were arrested for distributing leaflets critical of the proposed National Council. The following day, security forces forcibly dispersed a diwaniyya meeting assembled to hear Dr. Ahmed al-Khatib, another former member of the Assembly. Eight people were arrested, including Dr. al-Khatib and other former members of the Assembly who were in attendance. Other former members were arrested when security forces dispersed further peaceful meetings on May 14 and 16. They were all released on bail and received a royal pardon without being charged or convicted.

National Council elections took place without incident on June 10. Under the Kuwaiti system of limited male franchise, only 62,123 were eligible to vote -- equivalent to eight percent of all citizens, or three percent of the total population of two million. Sixty-two percent of this small electorate -- 38,683 men -- took part in the election. Some members won with as few as 150 votes. No political parties were permitted, although voters were able to choose from among 348 candidates competing for the 50 elected seats.

A campaign by the Kuwaiti government against Shi'a community activists, started in September 1989, continued in 1990. Following bomb attacks

485 that left one man dead during the annual Muslim pilgrimage in July 1989, Saudi Arabia arrested hundreds of Shi'a pilgrims, including many Kuwaitis. Sixteen Kuwaiti nationals were later executed in Saudi Arabia, on September 21. In protest, Kuwaiti Shi'as demonstrated in Kuwait demanding the return of the bodies of those killed and family visits for those still in detention. The Kuwaiti government responded by arresting more than 20 Shi'a leaders in September and November. Seyed Muhammed Baqer al-Musawi, a religious leader, was arrested, charged with planning terrorist acts and held incommunicado for most of his time in jail from September 23, 1989 until he was acquitted -- with three other defendants -- by a court on June 18, 1990. There were credible reports that the four were subjected to torture and ill-treatment by the State Security Intelligence Service.

Thirteen more Shi'a leaders were arrested on February 14 and 18, and released on bail on March 3, without being formally charged with any crime. Detainees included relatives of the sixteen Kuwaitis executed in Saudi Arabia and two members of the dissolved National Assembly: Hassan Habib al-Salman and Abdel Muhsen Jamal.

In September 1989, the government dissolved the board of directors of the Social and Cultural Association -- the only officially sanctioned philanthropic Shi'a society in Kuwait. Its deputy director, Khalil Musa al-Musa, was later arrested, on November 13, 1989, and detained for a month without charge, then rearrested in February 1990 and released in March on bail, again without ever being charged with a crime.

In 1990, the government continued to use the State Security Court for state security offenses. The Court is staffed by part-time judges who almost always meet in secret and whose decisions are not open to appeal.

It has been argued by some in Kuwait, including privately by government officials, that certain restrictions on freedom of the press, parliamentary debate and Shi'a activity were imposed partly in deference to the Iraqi government. It was contended that Iraq, recently at a war with Iran and engaged in severe repression of its own Shi'a, Kurdish and secular dissidents, would not tolerate free discussion, whether at home or within earshot of its citizens. Others put the blame on pressure from conservative Saudi Arabia.

Following the August 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government- in-exile continued to come under critical scrutiny by the exiled Kuwaiti

486 opposition, providing one measure of how the ruling al-Sabah family still fell short of democratic norms. Taking the lead in these criticisms were the Constitutional Movement, which includes 32 former members of the National Assembly, and the Committee of Forty-Five, a group of Kuwaiti business leaders, intellectuals, professors and former members of the National Assembly. These groups challenged restrictions on basic freedoms and the failure to reinstate the National Assembly.

In response to these criticisms, and to demonstrate national unity, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile called for a popular conference to be held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between October 13 and 16. It was attended by 1,200 Kuwaitis from all walks of life. When the opposition finally agreed to take part in the conference, one of its leaders said that, while liberation of Kuwait was the primary and most urgent national task, the opposition did not see any reason why political reform could not start before liberation. He called for restoration of the 1962 Constitution and the 1986 National Assembly. Since the Emir had not called for new National Assembly elections within two months of the Assembly's dissolution, he argued, the dissolved Assembly should be re-convened in an open, emergency session. He also called for an expanded national-unity coalition government -- accountable to the reconvened National Assembly -- to formulate an effective policy to liberate Kuwait and to help Kuwaiti refugees.

The opposition program enjoyed wide support, even among religious groups and senior government officials, but the government as a whole was apparently not prepared to accede to the principal opposition demands. In his speech on the first day of the conference, the Crown Prince said that, after liberation, "guided by the Constitution of 1962, Kuwait will take the necessary measures to consolidate democracy and allow for more extensive participation on the part of the masses." This was one of the few concessions that the government made to the opposition, although its phraseology was weaker than the opposition wanted. In the same speech, the Crown Prince went on to argue that the critical situation in Kuwait precluded open debate and democratic reform, making clear that these would have to await liberation. Even then, he indicated, there would have to be restrictions on freedom of expression to preserve "national unity."

While no opposition member was allowed to address the conference, a moderate figure was permitted to take the podium -- Abdel Aziz al-Saqer, chairman of the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and a former speaker of the National

487 Assembly. While confirming that the al-Sabahs were guaranteed by the Constitution to be the royal family of Kuwait, he said that popular participation based on freedom of dialogue and majority rule was fundamental for the remaking of Kuwait. Popular participation, he noted, was clearly enshrined in the Constitution, which also separates the three branches of government and limits their powers. He also declared that "a free Kuwaiti press is a prerequisite for dialogue, to play the important role of a true medium between the people and the government, to oversee the execution of policy and to express the message of a free Kuwait to the world." And he pointed out that, in the final analysis, the Iraqi invasion itself was a disastrous result of the authoritarianism of the Iraqi regime. In a symbolic gesture, the government accepted that al-Saqer's speech would be considered an official document of the conference.

In closed sessions, according to participants, the opposition complained about the royal family's monopoly on government power, the government's haphazard information policy, and the failure to include qualified citizens more directly in the running of embassies and refugee-welfare programs. The opposition argued that, because of the absence of parliamentary oversight, defense policy was chaotic, public-finance decisions were not subject to scrutiny, and information policy under the Minister of Information -- a member of the royal family -- reflected only the family's views while alienating traditional allies of Kuwait. In response, the government promised to consult with the opposition and others in a systematic way, to improve its information policy, and to make room at the embassies for Kuwaiti professionals.

In the final communiqué, the conference affirmed the political leadership of the al-Sabah family. In its only reference to the Constitution, it also said that Kuwaiti society, after liberation, would be based on "our national unity and legitimate system that we have chosen and accepted, strengthened by consultation, democracy and popular participation and guided by our 1962 Constitution."

After the conference, some in the opposition accepted the government's position that issues of political reform would have to await liberation, while others flatly rejected this position or decided to wait and see whether the government would fulfill some of its promises. While following the conference some opposition figures were hesitant about voicing their disagreements, others were not. They continued to complain that the government -- the royal family in particular -- wielded all the real power, and that there was no mechanism for

488 allowing popular oversight of government policy or holding government officials accountable for their actions. They also complained that the publicly funded media -- even after the replacement of the Minister of Information on November 25 -- reflected only the thinking of the government, especially the royal family, and not the views of the Kuwaiti people as a whole.

Contrary to some oblique references made by the government during the conference to the effect that it would marginalize or even dissolve the National Council, the government decided to keep the Council intact, even though its formation during the summer of 1990 had created a political crisis in Kuwait. However, following the conference, the Council was featured less prominently in the government-sponsored media. A government spokesman said that since the Constitution does not restrict the Emir's power to form, by election or appointment, any council or committee that he sees fit to create, the Council could continue in existence but would not be a substitute for the National Assembly.

On November 21, the Crown Prince announced the formation of a new body, the Supreme Advisory Council, containing 35 appointed members. It is headed by the Crown Prince himself and includes four other members of the royal family, four members of the opposition, a former speaker of the National Assembly, the president of the National Council, five members of the cabinet, other senior government officials, and several pro-government notables. The Advisory Council's mandate is "to help the Crown Prince/Prime Minister by offering advice on all the issues he consults it on, especially as they relate to the liberation of Kuwait." Many in the opposition criticized the Advisory Council as an empty gesture, since it does not have any power to challenge government decisions.

US Policy

The United States maintained close relations with Kuwait during and after the Iran-Iraq war. In 1987, the US provided naval escorts to protect Kuwaiti shipping against attacks by Iran. Apart from its heavy financial cost, the operation took the lives of 37 Americans, according to the US Navy, when the USS Stark was accidentally hit by an Iraqi missile. The US was also one of the main suppliers of arms to the Kuwaiti military, the second largest customer for civilian imports, and the fourth largest customer for Kuwaiti exports.

489

Perhaps because of these close relations, the State Department chose to comment publicly on Kuwaiti human rights issues only once in 1990 before the invasion, and then only in weak terms. On April 24, after the Kuwaiti government had announced plans to form the National Council, a State Department spokesman said that the United States supported reforms that increased popular political participation but that it remained "up to the government and people of Kuwait to decide on the specific types of reform without outside interference."

Even following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Bush administration took care not to criticize the lack of Kuwaiti democracy. In a televised interview with David Frost taped on December 16, President Bush was asked about US support for democratic reform in Kuwait once the nation was liberated. The President responded by noting US support for democracy generally, but carefully avoided any critical reference to Kuwait. He then dismissed the issue, observing that none of the countries in the region was a democracy, and stating that the real issue was Iraqi aggression.

The Work of Middle East Watch

Middle East Watch monitored developments in Kuwait throughout the year. It was in close contact with some of the key figures in the movement to restore parliamentary life, who where either founding or current board members of the Arab Organization of Human Rights, one of the important regional organizations with which Middle East Watch closely cooperates. Given restrictions on speech and assembly in Kuwait, forces involved in the move to revive the National Assembly expressed their need for contact with Middle East Watch.

On May 10, Middle East Watch protested in a letter to the Emir the arrest of members of the dissolved National Assembly and others for peacefully voicing their criticism of the government. It deplored the arrests as contrary to promises made by the government to allow public participation in political life. The same day, Middle East Watch issued a newsletter, "Widespread Arrests in Kuwait."

Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Middle East Watch, in addition to

490 monitoring Iraqi abuses in Kuwait (see chapter on Iraq and Occupied Kuwait, supra), kept in touch with the Kuwaiti government-in-exile, members of the Kuwaiti opposition and representatives of Kuwaiti humanitarian and professional groups. When the Kuwaiti government called for the Popular Conference in Jeddah, Middle East Watch sent a representative. Members of the opposition were especially keen on the presence of neutral observers. In the final communiqué, the conference called upon , among other groups, to monitor human rights conditions in occupied Kuwait and to try to prevail on the Iraqi government to allow human rights observers to enter the country.

491 MOROCCO

Human Rights Developments

Morocco continued to experience major human rights violations during 1990. As in past years, members of certain opposition groups were subjected to prolonged illegal detention, torture, and convictions in courts that showed little inclination to safeguard the rights of defendants. Authorities also cracked down on individuals who called attention to human rights abuses, bringing several journalists to trial and in effect expelling four foreign human rights monitors from the country.

None of Morocco's best-known human rights cases was resolved during 1990. Among them are the prisoners in the secret detention center of Tazmamart, whose existence the government continues to refuse to acknowledge. The fortress in southern Morocco holds under deplorable conditions a group of soldiers who were sentenced in 1971 and 1972 for participating in two coup attempts. Many are being held after the expiration of their sentences, while others have died without their families being informed.

The year 1990 was also one in which a number of developments put human rights in Morocco on the national and international agenda as never before. First, in February, King Hassan II and his Ministers of Interior and Justice held meetings with representatives of Amnesty International. But after Amnesty published a report on Morocco, the government took out advertisements in European dailies to denounce the organization. Partly in response to his sparring with Amnesty, the King announced in May the formation of a Consultative Council on Human Rights to "assist" him on human rights questions. Finally, the publication four months later in France of a biography of the King which focused on human rights abuses in Morocco set off a protracted controversy that kept the spotlight on the subject in both Morocco and France.

Moroccan prisons house more than 300 accused political opponents of the government, according to Amnesty International, many of them held for the peaceful expression of their beliefs. In 1990, the continuing nature of the repression was illustrated by the prosecution of members of the Islamic

492 organization al-Adl w'al-Ihsan (Justice and Charity), which, according to its founder, Abdesalam Yassine, seeks to Islamicize society through nonviolent means.

Arrests of suspected members of al-Adl w'al-Ihsan began in the fall of 1989 and continued until the following spring. At least 40 members were put on trial in five different cities, mostly on charges related to forming or belonging to an unauthorized association and distributing literature connected with the association. Nearly all of the charges were of a nonviolent nature. The courts convicted at least 30 alleged members and gave them prison sentences of up to two years, although on appeal some of the convictions were overturned and some of the prison sentences were shortened.

At the trials, the defense accused the police and prosecutors of various irregularities of criminal procedure. Among the alleged irregularities were some that have long been commonplace in Morocco, including violations of the legal procedures for conducting searches and falsification of the recorded date of arrest to prolong garde-à-vue (preliminary incommunicado) detention without appearing to exceed the legal time limit.

The courts hearing the al-Adl w'al-Ihsan cases were largely unresponsive to efforts by defense teams to raise these procedural irregularities. In this respect they behaved in a manner typical of the Moroccan judiciary, which routinely covers up police and prosecutorial misconduct by refusing to investigate and act upon blatant improprieties.

Reports of torture continued during 1990. Abuses affect not only suspects under interrogation, but also prisoners serving sentences, who have launched numerous hunger strikes to protest physical abuse and other forms of mistreatment. The reluctance of Moroccan courts to entertain defense motions alleging that confessions had been extracted under torture in effect condones the continuation of such abuse.

Morocco's opposition press has been able to describe these and other violations on a regular basis, although at some risk. At least three defamation cases were initiated in 1990 against publishers who had printed articles critical of the judiciary. The Moroccan Press Code defines defamation broadly to include "any allegation or imputation concerning a fact which impugns the honor or reputation of a person or body."

493

Ahmed Bendjelloun, director of the opposition newspaper at-Tariq (The Path), was sentenced to four months in prison in May for publishing an article criticizing a local court of appeals for showing a lack of independence in its handling of a dispute involving the dismissal of two labor officials. The same month, Mustapha el-Alaoui, director of al-Usbu' as-Sahafa w'as-Siyasi (The Week in Press and Politics), was sentenced to three months in prison for "defamation of the courts and tribunals." Both Bendjelloun and al-Aloui filed appeals. In October, the director and editor of Al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki (Socialist Unity), the daily of the leading opposition leftist party, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces, went on trial for a 1989 article describing poor conditions in the Casablanca courts.

Morocco also struck out against foreign human rights monitors. In March, two delegates of Amnesty International were effectively expelled from Morocco. The action came one month after Amnesty had infuriated Moroccan authorities by publishing a critical report on detention procedures shortly after its delegates had met with King Hassan and top government officials to discuss Amnesty concerns. The government complained that Amnesty's report failed to incorporate adequately the comments and promises made by officials in those meetings. The government then took out advertisements in European newspapers to denounce Amnesty for publishing its report so soon after the meetings with officials. (Amnesty explained that "[t]he government's responses...failed to address Amnesty International's concerns or indicate a commitment to make the necessary changes in the penal system and practice to end widespread and serious human rights violations.")

The following month, the government expelled two representatives of the Paris-based human rights organization the Association for the Victims of Repression in Exile. The authorities accused the two of entering the country on false pretenses by using tourist visas. On a previous trip that one of the two had made in 1989, airport police searched her belongings as she was leaving the country and confiscated documents and photographs of victims of ill-treatment in detention.

Neither incident aroused as much controversy as Morocco's furious response to the publication in Paris in September of journalist Gilles Perrault's Notre Ami Le Roi (Our Friend the King), an unflattering biography of King Hassan that described in detail some of the human rights abuses endemic to his 30-year reign. In an orchestrated fashion, the Moroccan government, and many private

494 Moroccan citizens, denounced what they described as an anti-Morocco campaign being waged in France. The government protested to the French government about the publicity that the book was receiving in the French media, and canceled the elaborate "Temps du Maroc" festival in France that had been long in planning. Rebroadcasts in Morocco of French TV-5 were blocked for a while, as were sales of French newspapers and magazines.

Obviously concerned about the effect of human rights reports on the image of Morocco, King Hassan announced in May the creation of the Consultative Council on Human Rights, a body composed of members of the government, opposition parties, human rights groups and labor organizations. Members of two of Morocco's independent rights organizations agreed to participate, while the third declined to join the body on the grounds of its official sponsorship.

In announcing the Council's formation, the King charged it with determining the accuracy of allegations about human rights abuses in Morocco. At the same time, the King signaled that certain acts would fall outside the Council's definition of human rights abuse, although those acts clearly would seem to be prohibited by internationally recognized human rights instruments. For example, in a reference to the disputed issue of sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the King said,

If we some day learn or read that a Moroccan has said such a region is no part of Moroccan territory, it can but be a case of a renegade, an outlaw who could not be considered as a detainee or a .

Other types of speech were also to be considered unprotected:

He who, through a poster, a newspaper or a speech, calls for a regime other than the constitutional monarchy, I think it is not a political act he is undertaking, but rather a subversive act he is committing against the people's will and the Constitution.

Through the end of 1990, the Council had shown few signs of independence from the government. In its inaugural sessions, it created committees to look at police and preventive custody, as well as prison conditions; at year's end it formed a commission to investigate the riots that erupted in several cities on December 14 and 15, in which security forces killed a disputed

495 number of civilians. However, the Council's deliberations were not made public, and it had yet to issue any report to indicate how seriously it intends to investigate allegations of abuse.

US Policy

The United States is in a unique position to encourage Morocco to improve its human rights practices. While France has the closest ties to Morocco of any Western country, Morocco remains highly sensitive to perceived interference on human rights matters by its former colonizer. The United States, meanwhile, sends Morocco $120 million annually in aid, and maintains a friendly relationship with the King, whom it considers to be an Arab moderate and an ally in the region.

Yet, as is commonly the case with its allies outside the public limelight, the Bush administration exerted no public pressure on Morocco to improve its poor human rights record in 1990. Middle East Watch is aware of no occasion during the year when an administration official took a public stand on human rights abuses in Morocco. Meanwhile, private bilateral discussions, to the extent that they have taken place, have singularly failed to ameliorate Morocco's human rights performance. The sole -- and important -- exception to the administration's public silence was the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, published in February. The chapter on Morocco observed that "the human rights situation did not improve significantly in 1989, and appears to have deteriorated in several areas." It noted that the number of reports of torture remained "high," and that "[t]he government often ignores guarantees of procedural due process." The report was particularly critical of attacks on freedom of speech and the press: "The constitution provides for freedom of expression; however, political meetings are closely watched, criticism of the monarchy and Islam is not tolerated, and, in the opinion of most observers, neither foreign policy nor domestic politics is fully open to free discussion."

Morocco stands to receive approximately the same $120 million package in fiscal year 1991 that it received in fiscal years 1989 and 1990. That includes $80 million in economic and development assistance, divided in equal parts between loans and grants, and $40 million in military assistance. The

496 package makes Morocco the third largest recipient of US aid in the Middle East, trailing, distantly, behind Israel and Egypt.

King Hassan is notoriously stubborn in the face of international pressure. He has resisted international campaigns to resolve well known human rights cases, such as the plight of the family of Gen. Mohammed Oufkir. Eighteen years after the general reportedly led a coup attempt -- after which he died in suspicious circumstances -- his widow and six children remain under house arrest merely because of their relation to him. In 1987, King Hassan had even promised French President François Mitterand that the Oufkir family would be released within a few weeks.

While the King has so far declined to improve Morocco's human rights image by reducing the severity of abuses, 1990 saw him more determined than ever to improve that image by waging battle on the level of public relations, including, as noted, his exchanges with Amnesty International, his formation of the Consultative Council on Human Rights, and the campaign against Notre Ami le Roi.

In this atmosphere, the Bush administration should use the leverage provided by its aid package and cordial relations to pressure King Hassan to shift his efforts from the public-relations domain to that of actual improvements in human rights practices.

497 The Work of Middle East Watch

Middle East Watch conducted a preliminary fact-finding mission to Morocco in March 1990. In April, it released a newsletter revealing newly corroborated details about the deplorable conditions under which at least 58 prisoners have been held in a secret detention center in Tazmamart. Many of the original group, who were sentenced for involvement in two failed coup attempts in the early 1970s, have died in Tazmamart or continue to be held beyond the expiration of their sentences. None of the prisoners sentence to three years or more has been released.

Middle East Watch will publish a full report on human rights in Morocco during 1991.

498 SYRIA AND SYRIAN-OCCUPIED LEBANON

Human Rights Developments

Celebrating his twentieth anniversary in power, President Hafez al-Asad of Syria strengthened his ties with the United States, restored relations with Britain, broadened his control over Lebanon, won large amounts of new aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and even met in November with President Bush. Once seen as an enemy of the West, Asad became a Western ally when he sent his troops to join the US-led campaign against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. For human rights advocates, however, neither President Asad's anniversary nor his diplomatic successes were cause for jubilation: Syria's long-standing and serious rights violations continued unabated. Expectations that President Asad might relax his harsh rule were quashed in the spring, when a major speech affirmed an uncompromising line and defended the national State of Emergency which has suspended legal and constitutional protections since 1963.

At least twelve different security agencies -- including Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, General Intelligence and Political Security -- continued to keep tight screws on Syrian dissent in 1990. Arresting suspects mostly singly or in twos and threes (in previous years there had sometimes been big roundups), security forces interrogated at least 1,000 people and took several hundred into long-term custody for their nonviolent association and expression. Virtually none of those arrested were formally charged, tried or sentenced, and many remained in indefinite incarceration.

Some 7,500 political prisoners continued to languish in Syrian jails at the end of 1990. Of these, at least 2,500 were held in Tadmur Military Prison, notorious for its bad conditions and the harsh treatment that prisoners must endure, and over 2,000 were in Syrian detention facilities in Lebanon. (By year's end, some two- thirds of Lebanon was effectively under the control of Syrian troops, which had maintained a large presence in the country since 1976. Hundreds of other prisoners, including some abducted from Lebanon, were jailed in al-Mezze Military Prison, al-'Adra Prison, Saydnaya Prison, Kafr Sussa Detention Center, the Military Interrogation Branch's prison and other facilities in Syria.

499 At least 21 persons, including former President Dr. Nur al-Din al-Atassi, have been locked away for over 20 years and at least five others for 18 years or more. Hundreds of others have been imprisoned since the early 1980s, including 90 doctors and 70 engineers.

Syrian interrogators continued regularly to torture and severely mistreat prisoners. Munir Fransis, a 30-year-old engineer taken prisoner in early April, died of internal bleeding in Muwassa'a Hospital of Damascus on about April 14 after an extremely severe beating. Authorities reportedly later arrested a doctor at the hospital because he refused to sign a certificate that the prisoner had died of natural causes. Security forces had arrested Fransis along with 14 others in late March in the town of Yabrud, north of Damascus, after slogans apeared on town walls comparing Asad with Nicolae Ceausescu, the fallen Romanian dictator. Among those arrested was Samir Haddad, 33, also an engineer from Yabrud. Shortly afterward he was reported in critical condition due to kidney failure and other physical damage, almost certainly resulting from torture.

Syrian prisoners sometimes have died soon after release or suffer permanent injury from mistreatment while incarcerated. Khidr Jabr, a former Syrian army officer, died on March 23, one week after his release from custody, apparently as a result of injuries sustained during his 12-year imprisonment for allegedly belonging to the League for Communist Action. Security forces have regularly tortured Riyad al-Turk, a lawyer and general secretary of the opposition Communist Party-Political Bureau, since he was imprisoned in 1980, breaking his bones, impairing his hearing and eyesight, and weakening his heart. The torturers have so systematically ruined his body that they had to rush him to the hospital on at least six occasions when he was on the verge of death, most recently in 1988. Many rights organizations have taken up his case, but Syrian authorities have refused out of hand even to consider his release.

Needless to say, Syrian citizens continued to be denied freedom of association and freedom to form political parties. In fact, the mere possession of opposition publications has been grounds for arrest and imprisonment. The government and the ruling Ba'th Party still control all "private" organizations, including trade unions, professional societies, cultural associations -- even sports and recreational clubs.

The Asad regime has also imposed tough censorship on mass media and book publishers as well as restrictions on imports of books, magazines and all

500 other written or visual materials. For example, the authorities have banned Nujum al-Nahar, an international prize-winning film by Syrian director Osama Muhammad, as well as a number of other books and films by distinguished Syrian intellectuals.

The Asad regime also continued to discriminate against several minorities, while filling its ranks with an inner-circle of privileged 'Alawis, the President's minority group. Officials continued to block the free expression of Kurdish language and culture, and to deny tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds their citizenship rights. Bars on travel and emigration for Syrian Jews remained in place. And an estimated 2,500 of Syria's 30,000-strong Palestinian population continued to be imprisoned and mistreated for non-violent political expression.

There were some small cracks in this system of repression and political control. In December 1989 for the first time in over a decade, a small number of mothers and wives of political prisoners and the disappeared assembled in protest in front of the Presidential Palace. In an unusual act of restraint, security forces did not interfere, nor, according to available information, were the participants later arrested or victimized. On December 10, 1989, International Human Rights Day, a new Syrian human rights group, the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria (Lajan al-Difa' 'an al- Hurriat al-Dimoqratia wa Huquq al-Insan fi Suria), issued a communiqué announcing its formation. The new group, said to be composed of committees in a number of Syrian cities, remained clandestine in 1990. On March 8, it issued a second communiqué on the 27th anniversary of the State of Emergency, followed by others during the course of the year, including an open letter to members of the new People's Assembly in late September. Committees also formed in Paris and other cities abroad.

According to various sources, including the French weekly L'Express, Syrian women held another demonstration on February 19, demanding the release of political prisoners. As many as 100 women, from several Syrian cities and various political orientations, assembled in front of the Presidential Palace and asked to see Asad. When officials denied their request, the women refused to disperse and some cried out in protest. Police then violently broke up the demonstration, and three women had to be taken to the hospital with injuries.

According to Damascus radio, the Syrian cabinet in January abolished all requirements "except those relating to state security." As a result,

501 martial law no longer applied to those committing economic crimes, such as smuggling, official corruption, hoarding scarce goods and speculating on the currency black market -- offenses which previously had brought the death penalty in some cases. But most applications of martial law remain unchanged, including those directed to expression and association deemed to threaten state security. In a similar move in March, the government restricted the application of State of Emergency regulations to "security" issues, again leaving the most objectionable parts of the law in place.

Two Communist Party leaders belonging to the official National Progressive Front made statements in February revealing that pressure for democratization has developed within the ruling coalition. In an interview with the Kuwaiti publication al-Watan, Yusuf Faisal called for a "party system based on pluralism and allowing public freedoms," while Khaled Bakdash stated that "martial law must be lifted and the supremacy of the law respected in every area."231

On March 4, President Asad announced special new courts to investigate cases of abuse of authority by civil servants, principally corruption, though theoretically abuses of human rights as well.232 Well informed sources in Damascus reported that the government had also given the go-ahead to several new political parties, including a Nasirist party, a "moderate" Islamic party, and a liberal pro-business party.233 By the end of 1990, however, no new party had become visibly active. Nor had the courts tackled serious governmental wrongdoing.

On March 8, President Asad gave a long-awaited speech on the anniversary of the Ba'th Party's seizure of power in 1963.. While some observers expected some democratic initiatives, the speech contained nothing new. In fact, President Asad gave a lengthy justification for the State of Emergency and its

231 al-Watan, February 9 and 11, 1990. Communist deputies apparently made the same point in the People's Assembly, the Syrian parliament.

232 Radio Damascus, March 4, 1990, in FBIS, March 6, 1990.

233 See al-Watan, February 4, 1990.

502 continuation in force.234

Since the previous term of the People's Assembly (the Syrian parliament) expired in the spring, the government held new elections on May 22. It also increased the number of assembly seats from 195 to 250 "to provide more seats for independents." Syria has not seen free elections since the 1950s and the Assembly has been largely a rubber stamp, but some observers thought Asad would use the balloting to broaden his political base and encourage a modest increase in political pluralism.

Decree No. 5, issued in March, granted most Syrian citizens of voting age (without a criminal record) the right to present themselves as candidates.235 In practice, they could only run as individuals -- independent of any party affiliation -- unless they were running under the banner of the ruling National Progressive Front, whose parties alone retained the right to field candidates.

Over 9,000 candidates ran for office during the three-week official campaign period, including (in addition to Front candidates) many business figures and professionals, members of well known families, and traditional leaders. Because opposition parties could not run candidates, relatively few politically controversial candidates -- for example, those known as human rights advocates or as sympathetic to opposition candidates -- presented themselves. In addition, the authorities weeded out some of the more controversial candidates by forcing 43 independents to withdraw. At least one person who put forward his candidacy -- Faisal Kheir Beik -- ended up in jail. An independent candidate from Jabla, an 'Alawi area south of Lataqia on the Mediterranean coast. Beik was arrested just before the elections, and by the end of 1990, more than seven months later, had still not been released. He had not been charged or tried.

Campaign posters, including many by independents, covered walls and lampposts throughout Syria's cities. Although only the Front could hold legal campaign rallies, candidates held receptions in private homes and some wealthier ones gave banquets. Many candidates criticized corruption, shortages, inflation and the lack of democracy, but not in ways that challenged the regime.

234 Radio Damascus, March 8, 1990, in FBIS, March 9, 1990.

235 Only those who had been citizens for over five years could run.

503 Expressions of fidelity to President Asad were commonplace campaign rhetoric, among independents as well as Front candidates.

During the campaign, the controlled press predictably avoided controversial issues, such as any hint of criticism of the security services, the armed forces, Asad, or Syrian foreign policy. However, the editors of two official newspapers, Tishrin and al-Thawra, provided space to the two Communist Parties, as members of the Front, to make electoral commentary. The parties used the opportunity to call for freedom of the press and an end to martial law. The demand for freedom of the press was particularly appropriate since the party's own newspaper, reportedly deprived of newsprint by the government, could publish only sporadically during the election campaign.

The results of the polling presented no great surprises. A high Ba'th Party official, Dr. Sulaiman Qaddash, had announced well before the elections that independents would win a third of the seats and the Front two-thirds. The official tally reflected these proportions almost exactly -- 84 independents and 166 Front candidates. The Ba'th Party won 134 seats, giving it a comfortable majority even without its allies in the Front.

One independent elected from Damascus had close ties to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a right-wing Lebanese party favoring the incorporation of Lebanon into Syria. In addition, three independents elected from the Kurdish regions north of Aleppo were identified with the left-wing Kurdish Worker's Party of Turkey. Both parties, though allies of the regime, had no previous access to the Assembly. Given these results, and the many traditional leaders and business figures entering the new parliament as independents, Asad seems to have cautiously broadened his base, while making few real concessions to democracy.

Only a handful of cases of obvious fraud in the vote counting came to light. The President's brother, Jamil al-Asad, was elected in Lataqia with more votes than there had been voters. When the error was discovered, officials felt obliged to organize a second election.

Possibly in partial response to a campaign by barred parties for a boycott by voters, turnout was sparse, forcing elections to be extended to a second day. According to official figures, the turnout was 40 percent of the eligible voters. Those who observed empty polling stations in Damascus and other Syrian cities guessed that the turnout was considerably lower -- probably 10 to 20

504 percent.

In late August, international newspapers carried stories of popular discontent with the Asad regime's support for the United States, Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states opposing Iraq's annexation of Kuwait. Especially at issue was the dispatch of Syrian troops to Saudi Arabia. Many Arab newspapers, including the Saudi newspaper al-Hayat, reported demonstrations on August 25 in Deir al-Zor and other towns near the Syrian-Iraqi border. The Syrian government was also said to have reinforced its military units in the areas of unrest, dispatching 5,000 troops that had been stationed near Homs.236 Damascus promptly denied these reports. With very tight security in eastern Syria, Middle East Watch has been unable to confirm these reports, except the dispatch of troops to the border area. Security forces made tens of arrests in late August, but it appears that no large and organized demonstrations took place.

As in previous years, many of Syria's worst rights abuses in 1990 occurred in Syrian-occupied Lebanon. There, Syrian troops and Syrian-supported militias attacked unarmed civilians, carried out summary executions, and abducted Palestinian, Lebanese and other nationals. Two Syrian security forces -- Special Forces and Military Intelligence -- operated extensively in Lebanon, and the head of Military Intelligence, Gen. Ghazi Kana'an, was widely considered to exercise paramount authority.

Syrian security personnel detained and arrested hundreds, normally without charge or trial, and routinely mistreated and tortured prisoners during interrogation. In addition to a number of local interrogation centers, including al- Mafraza in West Beirut and Madrasa al-Amrikan in Tripoli, Syrian security forces maintained a large center for interrogation and detention in the Lebanese town of 'Anjar, near the Syrian border.

By transporting important prisoners to Damascus, Syrian forces routinely violate the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, a treaty ratified by Syria, which sets forth standards governing an occupying power. Once in Syria, the prisoners face further interrogation and detention in such grim facilities as al-

236 Al-Hayat, August 30, 1990; see also Clifford Krauss, "Protests in Syria Reported Halted, New York Times, August 30, 1990; "Scores Said Killed in Pro-Iraq Demonstration in Syria," Mideast Mirror, August 30, 1990.

505 Mezze Prison and the Military Interrogation Branch's prison. Syrian security forces also reportedly seized property, extorted protection money and used violence to settle private scores with inhabitants of the areas of Lebanon under their control. They also were deeply involved in Lebanon's increasing opium cultivation and heroin production.237

On October 13, Syrian forces, along with elements of the Lebanese army under the authority of Lebanese President Elias Hrawi, attacked the forces of rebel Gen. Michel 'Aoun and his predominantly Maronite Christian supporters in East Beirut and a surrounding enclave. The Syrians and their allies defeated the 'Aoun forces in a major assault that day. Widespread reports suggested that during and immediately after the offensive, on October 13 and 14, Syrian forces and a pro- Damascus Christian militia headed by Elie Hobeika executed at least 240 prisoners, including civilians, in the area of 'Aoun's headquarters in Ba'bda and in the nearby towns of Dahr al-Wahash, Bsous, Houmal and Beit Meri.238

By the end of 1990, according to many reports, Syrian forces had largely withdrawn from the Metn area where they had committed the worst abuses. They installed in their place two pro-Syrian militias -- the forces of Elie Hobeika and those of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The return of these forces, which had been ousted from the area by local residents several years earlier, stirred fears of further reprisals against those considered anti-Syrian. (Hobeika's forces earned a grim reputation in 1982 as authors of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.) Although the Lebanese government set up a joint Syrian-Lebanese commission of inquiry into the events of October 13 and 14, few thought that it would produce anything

237 See Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Syria, September 1990, Appendix VI, pp. 194-97. The US State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report documents the growth in opium cultivation and draws links to the Syrian government. When asked about Syrian drug connections, even for background only, State Department officials tended to respond with a brisk "no comment."

238 Amnesty International expressed concern at "over thirty" cases of extrajudicial executions. The international press as well as Lebanese and other private sources suggested that the toll of executions was in the range of 240, including women, children, priests and other noncombatants. These reports also included allegations of looting and sexual abuse.

506 other than a cover-up.239

Syrian forces were also said to have abducted 14 high-ranking Lebanese military officers loyal to Gen. 'Aoun. One was released into the custody of the Lebanese authorities and the remaining 13 were said to be in detention in various Syrian prisons. Among those held were: Gen. Fouad 'Aoun, Col. Amer Shehab, Col. Karam Moussaba', Lt. Col. Fouad Ashkar and Lt. Col. Fayez Karam.

At year's end, Syrian forces controlled the Greater Beirut area and were extending their occupation to areas in the north and south. All of Lebanon, with the exception of the Israeli "security zone" in the south, was believed likely to fall under Syrian authority. The international media generally greeted this as a welcome end to sectarian strife and rule by the Lebanese militias. But Syria's long record of rights violations in Lebanon, including those that took place in 1990, gives cause for grave concern.

US Policy

The Bush administration's relations with Syria warmed rapidly throughout 1990, although US sanctions based on Syria's "evident support for international terrorism" remained in place. Among the reasons were reduced Soviet support for the Syrian regime, and a US desire to pursue the Mideast peace process, reduce the anarchy in Lebanon, and seek release of the Western hostages being held there. As ties improved, the administration remained largely silent on Syria's human rights violations, with the exception of a forthright catalogue of Syrian abuses published in February in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

As in the past, the State Department claimed to be expressing human rights concerns privately to the Syrian government. Off the record, US officials said that public diplomacy would only be counterproductive in the Syrian case; they talked of a "major démarche" to Syria on rights issues.

239 See Le Monde, October 21-22, 1990.

507 Had the US government chosen to defend human rights in Syria, it would have been in a strong position to do so. With declining support from the Soviet Union and a weak domestic economy, Syria keenly pursued closer ties with the West, an end to sanctions and renewed economic assistance. President Asad, a longtime enemy of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, needed no coaxing to join the international coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait. In light of the gravity of Syrian abuses which the State Department's own Country Reports amply documented, the lack of serious public diplomatic efforts revealed the low priority that the Bush administration gave to Syrian human rights.

In contrast to 1989, when closer ties met opposition among US lawmakers, members of Congress and other well known political figures joined in the parade of visitors to Damascus in 1990. Senator Arlen Specter traveled to Damascus as leader of a delegation on January 14-15, returning with Senator Richard Shelby for more talks on January 30.240 On March 14-16, former President Jimmy Carter visited Damascus, followed on April 8-9 by another high-level congressional delegation led by Senator Robert Dole.241 And on May 24-25 a delegation led by former Senator Charles Percy also stopped off in Damascus.

All delegations met President Asad and Foreign Minister Faruq Shara'. Middle East Watch learned that closer US-Syrian ties were typically on the agenda, as were Syrian hopes for broadened economic links and renewed economic aid. On April 9, Damascus Radio reported on President Asad's meeting with the Dole group and affirmed that the President was seeking better relations with the United States.242

Meanwhile, the State Department conducted its own intense diplomacy with Damascus, led by US Ambassador to Syria Edward Djerijian. One positive

240 Senator Specter, a strong supporter of Israel, urged other Republic senators to talk to President Asad as well, according to sources in Senator Robert Dole's office. Senator Specter also wrote letters to several major newspapers, including the New York Times, urging more dialogue with Asad in the interest of the peace process.

241 Accompanying Senator Dole were Senators Charles Grassley, James McClure, Frank Murkowski, Howard Metzenbaum and Alan Simpson.

242 "Assad Tells Visiting Senators He Wants Better US Ties," New York Times, April 10, 1990.

508 result was the release in late April of two US citizens held hostage in Lebanon. US officials, including President Bush, publicly thanked President Asad for these releases. In late May, veteran journalist Patrick Seale said talks between Washington and Damascus were of "unprecedented intimacy."243 Rumors began to circulate that relations would soon be normalized and sanctions abandoned. Damascus gave further sign of its good will by appointing its first ambassador to Washington in several years. The new envoy, Walid Mu'allim, took up his post in Washington on June 14.

US-Syrian relations warmed still further after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Bush administration enlisted Syrian support and military forces for the campaign to roll back Iraq, securing Syrian agreement for an initial contingent of 3,000 to 4,000 Syrian troops and up to a full division later. From that time forward, US-Syrian relations edged toward an overt alliance. In late August, Ambassador Djerijian told a visiting journalist: "The US-Syrian relationship has really evolved. We have built up a dialogue, a relationship in which both sides have interests in common ground."244

In mid-September, Secretary of State James Baker paid a visit to Damascus which included a four-and-a-half hour meeting with President Asad followed by an airport press conference. In conversations with a reporter before his official meetings, Secretary Baker admitted that President Asad's record was something of an embarrassment, commenting that "we are not embracing Syria and everything it has done." However, he emphasized the many advantages of dealing with Asad, noting that "Syria has been very supportive" of US policy goals.245 The Baker visit was followed on November 7 by a visit by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly.

These meetings -- and the general climate of relations between the two countries -- produced a remarkable lack of official commentary on Syria's human

243 Mideast Mirror, May 24, 1990, quoting al-Qabas.

244 John Kifner, "Syrian Gains are Seen in the Shift Toward US," New York Times, August 25, 1990.

245 Thomas Friedman, "Baker will got to Syria for Help against Iraqis," New York Times, September 11, 1990.

509 rights record. At most, the State Department mentioned Syrian "support for terrorism" as a barrier to normalized relations and economic assistance. Even that did not stop Syria from benefiting from a large new aid package rumored to be $1 billion or more given by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait's government in exile -- aid which was unlikely to have been given without US agreement.246

Many observers believe that Syria's greatly expanded occupation in Lebanon was another payoff for closer relations with the United States. Although the State Department has denied any prior US approval of the Syrian move to oust Gen. 'Aoun, knowledgeable sources agreed that Syria could not -- and would not -- have extended its position in Lebanon without at least tacit US blessing.247 Not surprisingly, Syria's rights violations in Lebanon were downplayed in most official US commentary, which referred to Syria's "presence" in the country rather than its "occupation" and which spoke in such upbeat phrases as, "this ends a sad chapter of Lebanon's history." After the reported October 13-14 execution of at least 240 civilian and military prisoners following the defeat of Gen. 'Aoun's forces, a State Department spokesman said the US had told Syria that it had a special responsibility to ensure that such abuses did not take place in areas of Lebanon which its forces control.

The culmination of this rapproachment took place on November 23, when President Bush met with President Asad on the way home from a Thanksgiving visit to US troops in the Persian Gulf. While the meeting was a clear plum for Asad, the Bush administration took steps to limit the political damage. The meeting took place in Geneva, not Damascus -- a sign that Bush did not want to identify himself too closely with the Syrian leader. By announcing the meeting only two days beforehand and holding it just after Thanksgiving, the White House was able to minimize publicity, and avoid some of the inevitable embarrassing comparisons between Asad and another nearby rights violator: Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.

246 Thomas Friedman, "Assad Assures Baker of Support in Gulf," New York Times, September 15, 1990.

247 On October 16, the Washington Post reported on the complex diplomatic charade by which the US agreed to the Syrian offensive while denying it had agreed to anything. Nora Boustany, "Lebanon Says US Approved Syrian Move Against Aoun," Washington Post, October 16, 1990.

510

The Bush-Asad meeting, after at least two years of nego-tiations, marked a historic turn in US-Syrian relations. More than 13 years had passed since Asad had last met a US chief executive. In the meantime, Syria had often been castigated by Congress and the White House. Now, in the midst of smiles, hand- shakes and expressions of mutual support, Syria was Washington's friend, and human rights violations passed unmentioned.

The Work of Middle East Watch

On September 9, Middle East Watch published a major report entitled Human Rights in Syria. Based on a three-week clandestine visit to Syria and extensive interviews with exiles and other sources outside the country, the report documented the sorry history of rights violations under Assad's rule -- the routine torture, deaths in custody, disappearances, family hostages and collective punishment. It named and described the major security services, prisons and interrogation centers, and gave a detailed estimate of the number of political prisoners and their places of incarceration. The report also discussed the legal system, the state of emergency and the special courts, as well as the widespread practice of detention without charge or trial. And it provided information on the persecution of minorities, restrictions on all forms of association and broad censorship. The report concluded with an analysis of US-Syrian relations, raising questions about the emerging alliance and its impact on Syrian human rights practices.

An op-ed article in the Washington Post later that month, on the eve of Secretary Baker's visit to Damascus, drew attention to the charges inherent in the US policy of establishing close ties with Syria without exacting a price in terms of improved human rights for Syrians themselves. The parallel drawn with the US experience with Saddam Hussein in Iraq proved to be a thesis which found a strong echo in Congress and elsewhere in the US media.

Middle East Watch has now embarked on researching Syria's record of human rights violations in Lebanon. Some two thirds of Lebanon -- historically claimed as part of "Greater Syria" -- has been controlled by Syrian forces for the past 15 years. The consolidation of Lebanese President Hrwawi's authority, following the surrender of the rebel Christian, Gen. 'Aoun, in the fall served also to

511 strengthen Syria's own grip on the country's institutions. In the aftermath of 'Aoun's surrender, we documented the murder of dozens of captured soldiers and civilans loyal to the Christian leaders.

512