assia boundaoui

Yemeni Americans protesting outside of hotel where former president Ali Abdullah Saleh is staying in New York for medical treatment. (Photo: Ali Abbas)

Their message was clear; Saleh, who presided over a crackdown against Arab Spring protesters in Yemen, should be prosecuted at The Hague.

Rabyaah Althaibani, who has family members back in Yemen who continue to protest in Change Square in Sana’a, said giving Saleh a refuge here was a bad move.

“It gives the wrong message to the region, to the revolutionaries in Yemen, these young men and women who have been in the streets for more than a year,” she said, “and the US is granting this murderer immunity, that’s crazy. This is the land of the free, home of the brave and here we are hosting dictators.”

This was not the first time the US has hosted an unpopular head of state whose country was in the midst of an uprising. The Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, also stayed in New York for medical treatment. That was in October 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, which sought the Shah’s downfall.

Protesters in Iran were incensed at the US. A group of Iranian students eventually took over the American Embassy in Tehran and held 54 Americans hostage.

Gary Sick, now a professor at Columbia University, was a primary White House aide on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. He said that when President Jimmy Carter was trying to decide whether to let the Shah into the US for treatment in the midst of the revolution, many members of his administration pleaded with him to do it.

“Jimmy Carter at the end of the session looked around the room and everybody, all his top advisers were saying, let the Shah come in,” Sick said, “and Carter said, well, okay I hear what you’re saying, so we’ll let him come in but what are you going to tell me when they take our people hostage in Tehran?”

The situation in Yemen might be even more galling to demonstrators. The US had always been a staunch supporter of Iran’s Shah, so allowing him in wasn’t terribly shocking. But the Obama administration has supported some Arab Spring demonstrators against their dictatorial leaders. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria, the US has called for leaders to step down.

Charles Schmitz, a professor at Towson University and president of the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, said US foreign policy on Yemen has been incoherent, but at the same time, the administration knows Ali Abdullah Saleh is a wily politician.

“The Saudis, the Europeans and the US wanted him out,” Schmitz said. “He sort of played their cards and turned the tables on them and said I’m going to go for a visit in the United States. He’s showing that he is a power, he’s being received by the superpower that tried to overthrow him, and they have to receive him as a head of state.”

No one really knows whether Saleh will frustrate US officials and return to Yemen to jockey for power with the new government there.

“The guy is really tricky and nobody knows what he’s going to do next,” said Gary Sick. “But a lot of Americans regard him as someone with a lot of blood on his hands, and a potential war criminal and the idea of giving him a nice cushy place to live for the rest of his life probably doesn’t appeal.”

With his departure late on Wednesday, Saleh’s already signaled that he doesn’t intend to just remain in New York.

Despite the US’s attempts to keep Saleh out of Yemen, he has announced that he plans to attend his successor’s inauguration in Sana’a next month.

What role, if any, the ousted president will play in Yemen’s new government, and whether the US will continue to go along, remains to be seen.

Tawakul Karman looks like an average Yemeni woman: petite, unimposing, wrapped in a black abiya, with her husband standing nearby. But Karman has an easy relaxed presence about her; she’s quick-witted and jokes about her broken English and then teases her husband about his. And she’s far from average.

On Saturday, Karma will officially receive the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leyman Gbowee, both from Liberia. The three will be honored for “their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

At 32, Karman is the youngest person ever to win the peace prize.

For years now, Karman has been one of Yemen’s leading grass-roots activists. She’s fought for the rights of women and freedom of speech. Last January, when the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East, Karman and a couple hundred students from Sana’a University began a sit-in at Yemen’s Change Square.

The government publicly slandered her, and Sana’a clerics blamed her for ruining the morality of women.

But within a few months, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis in cities from Aden to Taiz had joined the demonstrations, calling for the overthrow of the regime.

Karman has been dubbed the “Mother of the Revolution,” and when she speaks, people listen.

At a recent protest in front of the United Nations in New York, Karman led a group of Yemenis in chants against the regime. Some came from across the country to see her.

Since being named a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Karman has travelled from Doha to Washington, DC, to generate international pressure on the government of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“I am here to tell the whole world, to tell the people who believe in freedom, my people in Yemen sleep in the street since nine months, this great people deserve freedom,” Karman said. “This is the thing that I will tell people here. Also I want to tell people in Sana’a that you are not alone, there are people here who care about your freedom and their role starts now.”

Saleh recently agreed to step down as president in exchange for immunity. Karman and her followers argue that’s not enough, because Saleh’s cronies – including his son and other family members – remain in power.

But some long-time Yemeni opposition leaders support the deal, and that’s created a rift in the anti-Saleh movement.

“The opposition parties, opposition leaders, were never the voice of the revolution,” said Raja Althaibani, a Yemeni-American who flew to Sana’a in May to join the youth revolution on the ground; she’s protested alongside Karman.

“The people who are signing the deal those are people who are looking for their own interest,” Althaibani said. “We’ve always seen clashes between the revolutionaries on the ground and those leaders. And the revolutionaries have always made it clear, they aren’t representative of who we are or our demands.”

This popular sentiment could have put Tawakul Karman at odds with demonstrators. While she’s been a leader of the youth movement since the start of the revolution, Karman is also a leading member in the Islah party, the country’s main Islamist opposition party.

Karman has been criticized for this dual role. But Althaibani said Karman has proved herself time and time again. Althaibani recalls one particular demonstration in Sana’a.

“I get a call saying Tawakul is leading the march, and the youth are behind them and we’re running there and then we hear shots,” Althaibani said. She said Karman was taken to a makeshift hospital, and then came right back.

Tawakkol Karman at demonstration in New York, with fellow Yemeni activist Raja Althaibani. 

“She put her life on the line and made enemies of every opposition leader at the Square,” Althaibani said.

Karman has criticized her party for going against the young demonstrators’ demands. She has also defie

d religious and cultural gender constraints to call her own party and the regime for underestimating the role woman have played in Yemen’s revolution.

“Now there is a new century, a new period, women aren’t just victim,” Karman said. “She can save lives, she can be revolution, she can step down the regimes and she can also build her country. So the bad image about women is finished. Now we start a new period.”

Syrian-American Activists and the Shaam News Network

The UN estimates that nearly 3,500 people have been killed in Syria since the revolution began there eight months ago.

Unlike in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the Syrian revolution is not being televised – but it is on YouTube.

A loose knit group of cyber activists made up of Syrian expats from around the world, have smuggled satellite phones, laptops, and high-definition video cameras into Syria and smuggled information and videos out.

 Activists have even launched their own online news channel. They call it the Shaam News Network, after the Arabic name for the Levant region.A loose knit group of cyber activists made up of Syrian expats from around the world, have smuggled satellite phones, laptops, and high-definition video cameras into Syria and smuggled information and videos out.

“Sham News Network was inspired by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. A lot of the founders were from Daraa, the birthplace of the revolution, and our goal was to show the world what the regime was doing,” said Anas, whose last name we won’t use for security reasons.

Muna Jandal (Photo: Assia Boundaoui)

Anas is one of dozens of activists based in Detroit, Washington DC and Chicago who upload and verify videos, host servers, and coordinate and dispatch citizen-journalists on the ground. Another is Muna Jondy, a Syrian living in Flint, Michigan.

In addition to getting satellite phones smuggled into Syria, she’s one of the main curators and moderators for one of the most popular Syrian revolution websites. It gets more then 16 million visitors each month.

“We worked shifts, I had the nine to midnight shift,” Jondy said. Twitter is a big source of information, following SNC members, bloggers, they have links to what was going on. We had to post twice an hour. Fridays are particularly heavy days. Syria is literally the first virtual revolution. We know day to day in each city what exactly is happening, we’re seeing it on a daily basis despite the media ban, because the Syrian revolutionaries are making sure that everything gets out,” she said.

Jondy was born and raised in the US, but her father’s family is from Daraa. She says while she’s had little communication over the years with her family in Syria, things really hit home after a tragic event involving her uncle.

“So they show up to one of my uncle’s house and they came to take his 16 year old son and he was basically begging them, please don’t take him – he’s older he’s 70 year olds, he’s frail – and you know,” Jondy said. “Basically they just beat him, they took their guns and beat him on the head. And I don’t know, they really beat him bad until he was in a coma. Because he was saying to them ‘please my son leave him, I’m as old as your father, have some respect.’ So they just beat him.”

Jondy’s uncle was beaten to death by security forces, and she said his killing spurred her family to become even more active in the revolution. While her cousins back in Daraa are on the ground protesting, Jondy has taken up the role of online activist.

“The reality is that there’s these hundreds of thousands of people that are on the street, and they’re being attacked, they’re limited in what they can do and how they can organize,” Jondy said. “So there are all of these Syrian activists on the outside that are like we have mobility, we have the ability to speak to government representatives, we have the ability to provide finances, so to me the relationship is support of the revolution.”

Many expats have similar stories about the violence – and sometimes tragic death – of family members and activists at the hands of the regime’s security services. It puts into stark reality how relatively sheltered they are, operating from safety in the US.

Khalid Saleh lives in Dearborn, Michigan. He was appointed by the revolutionary council of his hometown of Deir Azzor to be one of their representatives.

“I think some of the activists working outside don’t necessarily feel the pain of the revolutionaries on the inside,” he pointed out. To them its like 10 people died today, 20 people died after. It’s a lot different for me when I talk to someone at night, and I try to call him in the morning and he is gone.”

And that’s why a lot of the activists – in and outside of Syria – keep their identities secret. Cyber activist Anas says he’s well aware of the danger the citizen journalists put themselves in every day to get him information.

“It wasn’t an easy commitment to commit and say okay I’m going to send you pictures and videos and tell you about what’s going on,” Anas admited. “At least 8 to 10 people lost their lives, some of them were captured and were on Syrian TV admitting their relationship with Shaam News Network.”

Despite this, Anas says the time for fear and anonymity is over. He says sharing his own identity openly for the first time is indicative of a turning point in the Syrian Revolution.

 LISTEN TO AUDIO STORY HERE: http://bit.ly/owrAHT

By Assia Boundaoui

Defying U.S. and Israeli opposition, Palestinians asked the United Nations on Friday to accept them as a member state, sidestepping nearly two decades of failed negotiations.

The Palestinian leadership hopes this dramatic move would reenergize their quest for an independent homeland.

But in New York City, Palestinian-Americans are on the fence about whether a state of Palestine will ever exist and are worried about what statehood would actually mean.

At the Bayridge Café on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, Palestinian-American Yousef Jadallah sips his coffee as he watches experts on Al Jazeera discuss the statehood bid. And he did not look too optimistic.

“It’s a good step, but useless. It’s all politics,” he said. “We’re not gonna get full membership in the UN so what’s the use. My opinion: waste of time, it is 64 years past due.”

Down the street at Badran Halal meats, owner Mamoun Hammouri is equally pessimistic about the possibility that the UN will grant membership for Palestine.

“I hope, of course I hope,” he said, “but I don’t think it is going to happen or exist.”

Habib Joudeh runs the pharmacy next door to the butcher shop. He said what he wants to happen and what he believes is going to happen are two different issues. In fact, he said, the bid for a Palestinian state will be futile.

“Though I know it is not going to pass, though I know even if it passes what we are given is nothing,” he said. “But you know what, anything is better than having this conflict, anything that will bring peace to the region, to the world, that will be much better than what we are living now.”

While the lack of hope that the UN will ever recognize a Palestinian state is pervasive, some Palestinians in Bayridge are outright hostile to the bid for statehood. On Twitter, the hash-tag #fakestate has become a trending topic among Palestinian activists who think that the bid for statehood at the UN will do more harm than good.

“I’m not supportive of the bid, I don’t think it’ll actually lead to statehood, and I don’t think that statehood will actually lead to Palestinian rights,” said Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian-American poet.

Kenazi has written about the Palestinian situation and the frustration many feel with stalled negotiations.

“If there are still these restrictions, if there’s still the cutting off from West Bank Palestinians to West Bank Palestinians, never mind East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, then you really have a structure of the status quo,” he said. “It’s just a formalized situation where you would have statehood but no real rights, no real autonomy, no control over your territory, no functioning body that could actually exercise the fundamental rights of Palestinian people.”

Some Palestinians say the division over whether to support or oppose the UN bid is generational: younger Palestinians are opposed to the move while the older generation is looking for something, anything to change.

Others say the divide is a geographical one, with Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza generally in support of full membership in the UN, and Palestinian refugees and those who live in Israel are opposed to a recognized state that would not include them.

Dr. Ahmed Jaber, a Palestnian-American who runs a gynecology practice in Brooklyn, says whether you are for, or against the UN statehood bid, the fact is that it has raised more questions than answers. Questions no one can answer now.

“Is it going to make problems on the street in the West Bank and Gaza? Will there be a third intifada? What is really the 1967 border, does that exclude the Palestinians who were inside the Green line in 1948 Palestine? What will happen to them? Are we abandoning them? How about the right of return?” Jaber asked. “Whether this step is good for the Palestinians or not, I don’t know, we have to wait and see.”

[LISTEN TO AUDIO STORY HERE]

By: Assia Boundaoui

In his long career as an international human rights law attorney, Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni has investigated four wars, and exposed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity. From the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, Bassiouni has born witness to some of the decades most atrocious crimes. He presided over contemporary times biggest rape investigation in the former Yugoslavia and was instrumental in proving that rape was used as a matter of policy during that war. Most recently Bassiouni was asked by the United Nations to investigate the conflict in Libya. His 92 page report to the UN found that the Gaddafi regime had engaged in crimes against humanity and numerous war crimes against Libyan civilians.

But while figuring out what is or isn’t a war crime may seem relatively straightforward, international criminal law is complex. Bassiouni says you have to sift through some of the most horrific personal stories and listen with a calculating – legal – ear. He says the key is knowing where to start.

“We started at the hospitals because it meant that we would deal with people who were injured and people who were injured would be either in the front lines or they would be the most likely victims of an abusive regime,” says Bassiouni. “Then we had also two person teams on the border of Egypt and on the border of Tunisia, to talk not only to the refugees but refugee organizations to get a feeling and an understanding for what was happening.”

War investigators do what journalists do; they interview people and collect stories in an attempt to get at the truth. Bassiouni says that while he listens to every person’s story with empathy, he takes everything he hears with a grain of salt – because even victims sometimes lie. And sorting through the embellishments, falsehoods and fallibilities of human stories is the investigators primary job.

“Any historian will tell you, you never get the full picture, you get a sampling and from the sampling you write a bigger narrative,” says Bassiouni.

Bassiouni and his team interviewed some three hundred people who had been involved in the war – from victims, to prisoners, to rebels, to government officials – in an attempt to piece together the bigger narrative in Libya. But Bassiouni says some of the smaller stories are what stayed with him, and there’s one scene in particular that still haunts him.

“The scene of a ditch were there had been nine bodies and the nine bodies were all burned up and the nine bodies looked like they had all been children, they were five feet something each body. And as I started looking closer to the pictures and talking to the doctors who had done the medical reports, it turned out they were adults. Apparently these adults had been killed by a phosphorus bomb, and the phosphorus bomb basically burns everything in a person, it burns the skin, but it also burns the bones, it takes the liquid out of everything. And here are persons who had shrunk and were just a heap of burned ash. Horrible, horrible scenes. They weigh very heavily on one, after doing two years of interviewing victims and witnesses in the former Yugoslavia I wind up with a quadruple bypass because it was just too much emotionally to listen to.”

After listening to a number of stories of unconscionable atrocities in Libya, Bassiouni concluded that crimes against humanity had been committed there. I asked Bassiouni to give me an example of one of the specific crimes he tracked down and how he was able to prove that a crime against humanity was committed.

“For example you go to a hospital and in the bed there is a little girl, four years old, who is injured, and there is a father sitting next to her and you say, “how was your baby injured?” And he said, “well I was standing in front of the house and my baby was playing next to me and suddenly out of nowhere a mortar shell came and mortar shrapnel hit my baby.”

Bassiouni says after listening to a victim’s story you must immediately corroborate whether its true. “So you go to the location and you see whether there was a trace of a mortar shell falling,” says Bassiouni, “and you say okay where is this house from lets say the front. And you say well the front is several miles. Why would somebody be bombarding a civilian area, you’re targeting a civilian population which is non-combatants, and that becomes a war crime. And when that pattern becomes repeated many times, this is not an occasional shell that somebody fired by mistake you know that there is a policy.”

While Bassiouni’s investigation may eventually be used by the International Criminal Court to prosecute members of the Gaddafi regime and military, its primary purpose was not to prosecute any crime. Rather, Bassiouni says the purpose of the investigation is set a historical record of what happened in Libya, and of equal importance, what didn’t happen.

What made headlines recently was the charge that Gaddafi’s troops were using rape as a weapon of war. But Bassiouni says during his investigation he found no evidence to prove this was true. And this friction between the sensational allegations that make headlines and the hard and sometimes unpopular truth, complicates the job of the war investigator. Bassiouni says when the dust settles, knowing and accepting what actually happened, is the Libyan people’s only chance at reconciliation.

“You never can have reconciliation without having the truth established, says Bassiouni. “The problem is that you sometimes also have to debunk many of the allegations that are made which are exaggerated. For example recently there’s been all sorts of allegations that there is a policy of mass rape that the Gaddafi regime has established. Well we don’t know that, we found no basis for that. As people get so attached to well was there or wasn’t there a policy of mass rape, we are ignoring the fact that 15,000 people have been killed. We’re ignoring the fact that some of these crimes are still ongoing. Not to say that its not important, it is important if its there. But it’s not important if it’s made up.”

Bassionui says that while his job is primarily a legal one, he hopes that his investigation will serve something of a spiritual purpose as well. “A society must have closure,” he says, “and you can’t have that without knowing truth.”