|
Syria: Concern at prison unrest reports
17.4.2008 |
|
|
|
April
17, 2008
Reports of unrest and a fire at the Saidnaya
military prison underscore the need for more
transparency about the conditions in Syrian prisons,
human rights activists and family members of
prisoners say.
Numerous reports surfaced this week of disturbances
at the jail, northeast of Damascus, where many
political prisoners are held, but few details have
been confirmed.
Families were barred from visiting prisoners from
late March until last week. The parents of prisoners
who visited them earlier this week said they looked
well and the situation appeared normal. At the
supervised meetings, the prisoners told them there
had been a fire but did not provide any more
details.
Family members of people convicted by the State
Security Court are allowed visits, but those who are
standing trial are not allowed visitors. Defence
lawyers are not allowed in to the Saidnaya prison.
In 2005, visitors were barred for about a year after
one prisoner killed another.
About 20 relatives of Kurdish prisoners were
detained for an hour on April 6, after protesting
when their relatives did not show up for trial at
the State Security Court in Damascus. The court
postponed all trials scheduled for that day until
May.
The government has not commented on or released any
information about the reports of unrest.
Human rights activist Mohammad al-Abdullah, whose
brother Omar is serving a five-year sentence in the
prison for his affiliation with a democratic youth
movement, said, "The policy in dealing with this
prison is to always darken what is going happening
there."
Abdullah, who spent two months in solitary
confinement in Saidnaya in 2006 and now lives in
Beirut, said activists and family members had a the
right to know what went on at the prison.
“Just because it is a facility for political
prisoners doesn’t mean that it needs to be a prison
of secret and mysteries. They have rights as
prisoners under international conventions," he said.
The prison, which opened in 1987, holds an estimated
1,000 prisoners, according to rights groups,
including Kurds, Islamists and democratic activists.
A Syrian human rights observer said the lack of
information “is not unusual”,www.ekurd.net
as the government
usually remains tight-lipped about human rights
issues and does not acknowledge that it has
political prisoners.
The observer, who is investigating the reports by
talking to families and human rights groups, said
details of events in the prison were murky, although
more were likely to emerge from visitors in the
coming weeks and months.
He dismissed as “exaggerated” a report by the
opposition Movement for Justice and Democracy that a
“massacre” had occurred in which prisoners were
burned alive by guards.
The Kurdish website Roj reported on April 8 that
Kurdish and Arab prisoners declared a “popular
rebellion" after
three people were killed
during a Kurdish new year celebration on March 20.
In a statement released earlier this week, lawyer
Muhammad al-Hasani, head of the Syrian Organisation
for Human Rights, said his group could not confirm
the reports it had received that conditions were
deteriorating in the Saidnaya prison.
(Syria News Briefing, a weekly news analysis
service, draws on information and opinion from a
network of IWPR-trained Syrian journalists based in
the country, whose identities cannot be revealed for
security reasons.)
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
iwpr net
** Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria
making up 10% of the country's population i.e. about
two million.
Kurds in Syria often speak Kurdish in public,
unless all those present do not. Kurdish human
rights activists are mistreated and persecuted. No
political parties are allowed for any group, Kurdish
or otherwise.
Suppression of ethnic identity of
Kurds in Syria include: various bans on the use of
the Kurdish language; refusal to register children
with Kurdish names; replacement of Kurdish place
names with new names in Arabic; prohibition of
businesses that do not have Arabic names; not
permitting Kurdish private schools; and the
prohibition of books and other materials written in
Kurdish.
More about Kurds in Syria - (Kurdistan-Syria)
From Wikipedia
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 