CubaMinrex. Sitio del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba

Reporters sans frontières maintain silence over journalist tortured in Guantánamo

By Salim Lamrani
Taken from Granma International
February 6, 2006

THE silence maintained by Reporters sans frontières (RSF), the "freedom of the press" organization, on Sudanese journalist Sami al Haji raises many questions as to the impartiality of the association headed by Robert Ménard. Always quick to stigmatize – often in an arbitrary way – certain countries in Washington’s sights like Cuba, Venezuela and China, the RSF has completely ignored the Calvary suffered by Al Haji, who works for the Qatari television network Al Jazeera.

On September 22, 2001, Al Jazeera sent a team of journalists, including Al Haji, to investigate the conflict in Afghanistan. After 18 days of reports, the group withdrew to Pakistan. In December 2001 Al Haji returned there with his colleagues to cover the investiture of the new Afghani government. But, before he reached the border, the Pakistani police proceeded to arrest the Sudanese journalist, while releasing the other members of the Qatari team.

Handed over to the U.S. authorities installed in Afghanistan, Al Haji was about to live through a veritable nightmare on the Bagram airbase. "They were the worst (days) of my life," he testified.

He confided that he suffered sexual abuse and threats of rape on the part of U.S. soldiers. He was also badly tortured for long months, and suffered all kinds of maltreatment. He was forced to kneel on the floor for hours on end. He was constantly chased and attacked by dogs. The Sudanese journalist was also shut in a cage and put in an airplane de-icing hangar. He explained how his tormenters pulled out strands of his hair and beard one by one. The guards beat him regularly and refused to let him wash for more than 100 days while his body was covered in lice.

On June 13, 2002, Sami al Haji was sent to Guantánamo. During the flight he was kept chained and tied up with a bag over his head. Every time sleep overcame him, his guards woke him up violently with blows to the head. Before his first interrogation he was not allowed to sleep for more than 48 hours. "For more than three years, the major part of my interrogations were aimed at making me say that there is a relation between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda," he told his lawyer.

In the Cuban territory illegally occupied by the United States the Sudanese reporter received no medical attention, not even for a throat cancer he suffered in 1998 or his rheumatism. They hit him on the soles of his feet and intimidated him with threatening dogs. He was the victim of racist humiliation and never allowed to enjoy the recreation periods on account of the color of his skin. He was also witness to the profanation of the Koran in 2003 and, with his imprisoned comrades, went on hunger strike. The U.S. army’s reaction to the protest was extremely violent: they hit him and threw him down the stairs, seriously wounding him in the head. Then he was put into isolation before being transferred to Camp 5, the harshest of all the Guantánamo detention centers, where he was classified at security four level, a category synonymous with the worst brutalities.

This testimony, overwhelming for the Bush administration, which is still refusing to grant prisoner of war status to the Guantánamo detainees, is compounded by two equally accusatory statements to Amnesty International from other victims. However, they merely constitute the tip of the iceberg. In Guantánamo, the crime is a double one: the United States is inflicting the most inhumane barbarities on persons kidnapped without any formal evidence, and is occupying by force a part of Cuba’s sovereign national territory.

The collusion between the RSF and Washington has already been illustrated by the case of Spanish cameraman José Couso, killed by the coalition forces. In a report, the Paris-based agency exonerated the U.S. armed forces of all responsibility, despite flagrant evidence to the contrary. The connivance between RSF and the U.S. State Department was such that the journalist’s family condemned the report and asked Ménard to withdraw from the matter. Its complicity is also evident in the case of Cuba, where RSF is transforming U.S.-subsidized agents into "independent journalists," while information on this issue is available and incontestable.

The U.S. authorities are delighted with the RSF’s tendentious reports and have even used them in their propaganda war on Cuba. Michael Parmly, head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, affirmed that 20% of imprisoned journalists in the world "are in Cuba." RSF recently established a classification of 164 countries in terms of press freedom; Cuba was classified the penultimate, just ahead of North Korea.

Placed in the dock by its stigmatization of Cuba on the basis of erroneous factual elements and for its alignment with the U.S. point of view, RSF attempted to respond to the charges. But the lack of coherence of its communiqué as well as the contradictory language observed only reinforced suspicions. In fact, Ménard has not given any explanation of his organization’s dubious links and various meetings with the Cuban extreme right in Florida. The RSF general secretary has even made public his admiration for Frank Calzón, president of the Center for a Free Cuba, an extremist organization funded by the U.S. Congress. "He is doing a fantastic job for Cuban democrats," he assured in that context. Subsequently, RSF had to publicly confess that it had received money funding from that very center.

Similarly, RSF has received emoluments from the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressional agency responsible for promoting U.S. foreign policy. This funding is occasioning a conflict of interests in the heart of the French organization, which is not inclined to expose the outrages committed by one of its sponsors, namely the U.S. government. Before the publication of the Amnesty International testimony, Ménard could have pretended not to know of the existence of Sami al Haji. But, despite the strong international media coverage of these new cases of torture on the U.S. Guantánamo naval base, the RSF has still not deigned to interest itself in this scandal and has taken refuge in a revealing muteness.

The censoring of this new case of serious violation of the freedom of the press committed by the Bush administration merely confirms the double discourse of Reporters sans frontières. While the organization takes pains to vent itself in an unbridled manner against Cuba, although the cases evoked are far from being convincing, it is remaining silent over a flagrant attempt on the integrity of a journalist, imprisoned and tortured solely because he works for the Qatari Al Jazeera network, which has much influence in the Arab world and little indulgence for Washington. The credibility of Ménard’s organization, already heavily cracked by its partial treatment and its links with the U.S. government, is becoming constantly weaker given that such omissions compared to its obsessive recurrence to certain issues like Cuba cannot be pure coincidence.

(Taken from Rebelión)

 

 

 

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