Welcome to BASE21

by Christian/Base21 Media Activist
dvs-b@t-online.de

Members of Jordan's trade unions on Sunday urged the government to release from custody three activists who campaigned for boycott of US and Israeli products.

Ali Abu-Sukar, Badi Rafayaah and Maysarah Malas were detained Oct. 7 for distributing leaflets urging school children to boycott American and Israeli goods.

A day later, the military prosecutor charged the three with affiliation with an unspecified "illegal" body, which officials later identified as the Anti-Normalization Committee. The prosecutor has so far refused several bail requests.

The committee was founded four years ago by Jordan's 14 professional syndicates, dominated by Muslim and leftist hard-liners opposed to the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty and Washington's Mideast policy, which they regard as biased in favor of Israel.

Information Minister Mohammad Affash Adwan said the committee had violated the law.

On Sunday, speakers at an indoor rally organized by Amman's professional unions called for severing ties with Israel and for the expulsion of Israeli Ambassador David Dadonn.

One speaker, Azzam Hineidi, urged the government to release the three detainees, saying they have devoted themselves "to fight normalization with the Zionist enemy."

Hineidi, head of a council grouping all 14 syndicates, also criticized the United States for what he described as its "double-standard policy" toward Iraq and Israel.

Palestinian detainees in Negev desert suffer slow death

The Palestinian prisoner’s club has said that Palestinians imprisoned in the Zionist occupation’s Negev concentration camp (Ansar-3) were mainly suffering from deterioration in health conditions as a result of intentional medial negligence.

The club’s lawyer, Faten Al-Oseibi, who visited that prison recently, said that there was a real danger threatening lives of those prisoners if they were not moved to hospitals.

She appealed to the Red Cross and all international legal and human rights organizations to act quickly to save the sick and wounded patients in the Negev detention camp.

Prisoners complained to the lawyer that they were suffering from bullet wounds while others complained of serious diseases but no surgeries or proper medication was given to them.

They said that Zionist jailers gave them sedatives, adding that they were facing slow death as a result of that treatment.

Some of them said that they were always beaten on their way to court hearings.