No Free Speech on Palestinian Campuses

From:
Palestine Report Online
Keeping the peace

by Mary Abowd

LAST SEPTEMBER, when a 21-year-old Bethlehem University
student assumed the podium during a campus commemoration
of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, he ended
his speech with a scorching indictment not of Israelis or
Phalangists, but of his own classmates. "We have no freedom of
speech at this university," he thundered. "Not while some of you
are spying on your own people!"

A week later, the student (we'll call him C.G.) says he was
approached by two plain-clothed Palestinian security officers
and arrested. At a security office in Bethlehem, he was
interrogated for two hours and accused of inciting an overthrow
of the Palestinian Authority. "They put words into my speeches,
things I never said," he recalls. "They said if I kept talking like
this, they would cut out my tongue."

After giving another speech a month later, C.G., who is active
with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was
arrested again. This time, the questioning was more personal.
"They asked me how my girlfriend was doing, and they knew her
name," he says. "Then I knew that somebody on campus was
watching me."

C.G. is one of several students interviewed for this article who
testified to the widespread undercover monitoring of students
and professors on Palestinian university campuses by the
Palestinian security forces. Though officially barred from most
campuses, security officers rely on a network of student
informers to monitor class discussion and campus activities,
spy on their peers and teachers, then file reports with the
security services.

"Their most central task is to inform on nonconformist students,"
says journalist and former Hebron University lecturer Khaled
Amayreh. "Not only on Hamas and Hamas followers, but also on
nonconformist Fatah students."

According to the students, informers may try to infiltrate Hamas
or Islamic Jihad, for example, or they will monitor their activities
from afar. In exchange for their services, they are paid monthly
stipends or promised promotions in the ranks of the security
services.

Their information sometimes leads to illegal arrests, most of
which are targeted at those who oppose the Palestinian Authority
and the Oslo peace process. According to the human rights
organization LAW, 52 students are currently being held without
charge in Palestinian jails, despite court orders calling for their
release. By comparison, Israel has 57 Palestinian students in
detention.

(These figures do not include Saturday's crackdown at Birzeit
University after angry students pelted French Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin with stones (see 7 Days). Tens of students have
been questioned by security officials, and at press time at least
39 were in detention.)

Although monitoring of this sort is rampant throughout
Palestinian society, it is felt most bitterly on university campuses,
historic bastions of free expression, activism and resistance to
the Israeli occupation.

On a sunny Saturday in mid-February, the student council office
at al-Najah University in Nablus is tense. Student council
president, Qais Udwan, and his predecessor, Muhammad
Khader - both Islamic bloc members - had been arrested without
charge the night before, in connection with a botched car
bombing near Nablus earlier that day.

The Islamic bloc, ardently opposed to the Palestinian Authority,
holds half of the 82 student council seats at al-Najah, and during
the past two years, 20 students from its ranks have been
arrested without charge, according to statistics from al-Najah's
student affairs office.

Two students from the Islamic bloc say they believe these
arrests are based on information gathered by other students.
"There are lots of students who inform on other students," one
explains. "Some you know; some you don't. In the classroom,
people think twice before they say something. There's a lot of
self-censorship."

Al-Najah political science professor Abdul Sattar Kassem
agrees. He says he has students in his classroom working for
the preventive security services. "They are required to detect
who's with Oslo, who's against Oslo; who's with Arafat, who's
against him, that sort of thing."

Kassem says some of the campus spies attempt to intimidate
other students and professors if they speak out in class. "They
are acting in the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian model," he says. "It's
no different than any other Arab country."

Kassem should know. In 1979, he was fired from Jordan
University for his political outspokenness, after a colleague, a
professor of law, informed on him. On November 28, he was
imprisoned for 40 days by the Palestinian Authority for signing,
and some say designing, the Petition of 20, a manifesto signed
by 20 intellectuals and public figures that castigated Yasser
Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for corruption.

He nonetheless maintains a sense of humor. "When I want to
speak up in class, I tell my students, 'OK, I'm going to tell you
something important. Write it down, so you can report it. But
make sure you share the money with me!"

The jokes sometimes ring true. At this writing, Kassem was
again being held in detention in Jericho without charge. He was
arrested at his home on Friday, February 18, by the Palestinian
police criminal department.

Just how much do student informers make per month? Kassem
said his students make about NIS 1,000, or nearly $250, a
month; others volunteer in hopes of being promoted in the future.

At Bethlehem University, student informers are paid $200 a
month, maybe more, according to a fourth-year student who has
resisted six attempts at recruitment by the security services. "If
they write a particularly excellent report about Hamas or military
attacks against Israel, they will receive a nice bonus," he says.

In Gaza, where salaries are generally lower, the informers earn
about $50 per month, according to Bassem Eid, executive
director of the Palestine Human Rights Monitoring Group, which
issued a sobering report in August on the state of academic
freedom in Palestinian universities.

In both the West Bank and Gaza, the vast majority of the
informers are unknown. They are not supposed tobe seen
entering security offices, and, according to the fourth-year
student at Bethlehem University, they meet secretly with official
security officers to file their reports.

So who exactly are the informers and on whom do they inform?
Khaled Amayreh makes no bones about it: "The PA seeks to
recruit informers from among Fatah supporters. I'm not saying
all pro-Fatah students work as informers, but it's a matter of fact
that hundreds of them work as informers."

Last year, after writing an article about torture in Palestinian
prisons, Amayreh was arrested by some of his former Hebron
University students. "When a 20-year-old guy is given carte
blanche to insult, humiliate and beat a professor, something is
terribly wrong in society," he says. "If the Israelis do this to you,
OK. You do not expect anything good from the enemy. But when
your own people do this to you, it is enough to break your
psyche."

Some members of Fatah's youth movement, Shabiba, defend
the student arrests. "Hamas has objectives that are contrary to
the objectives of the Authority," says Amira al-Ghusein, a
second-year law student and student council member at Gaza's
al-Azhar University, a Fatah stronghold. "But these people are
arrested because of their involvement in military operations
against Israel, not because they are members of Hamas."

In terms of the Authority's pattern of making arrests without
charge, al-Ghusein hesitates, then says, "We consider
ourselves to be in a state of war, not peace, so the Authority is
forced to resort to emergency regulations."

Her friend Wafa Mahdi, a 1998 al-Azhar mathematics graduate
and the former president of the Women's Student Council, has
yet another take. "I do not believe the Authority arrests anyone
without the prior existence of an Israeli order to do so. Let's be
clear. The Israelis control everything, and the Authority is forced
to comply."

Both women say they haven't heard of any politically motivated
arrests at al-Azhar, and at press time, no definitive numbers on
al-Azhar student arrests were available.

There is, of course, the high-profile case of Dr. Fathi Subuh. In
July 1997, the professor was arrested and thrown in jail by
preventive security forces after posing two final exam questions
to students in his "Educational Problems" course: describe
corruption in the Authority and describe corruption in al-Azhar
University. Although Subuh was eventually released from his
four-month detention, he was never allowed back at al-Azhar.

You can't venture more firmly into Fatah territory than the offices
of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). Once a
vibrant part of the PLO, GUPS now has 15 representatives in the
Palestinian National Council's executive committee. Even so, its
leadership maintains a critical stance in regard to student
arrests.

"We take a clear position on this issue," says general director
Mahmoud al-Habil, who is based in Gaza. "We are against
arrests for expression of political opinions and against the
presence of security forces on campuses."

Al-Habil offers the example of Islamic University student council
president Ayman Taha who was arrested without charge late last
year and has been held in detention ever since. "We visited
Ayman in prison, and we've requested that the preventive security
make clear why they want him and why they arrested him. We
sent letters, but we haven't had any response."

In 1994, when Yassar Arafat swept into Gaza at the helm of the
newly christened Palestinian Authority, he wasted no time in
establishing a vast array of security forces, a web of some 14
apparatuses - maybe more - including the police force,
presidential security, preventive security, military intelligence and
general intelligence.

In May 1995, Arafat established the University Security
Administration with the stated goal of protecting students from
violence and keeping order on campus. But the specific job
descriptions of this and the various other apparatuses are
largely unknown, and numerous sources confirm there is much
vying for power among them.

"There is huge competition over who gets to monitor the
universities," says Bassem Eid. "Every security force can do what
it likes. Everybody arrests. Everybody investigates. Everybody
holds people in jail without charge or trial. So what is the
difference between the general intelligence and the preventive
security? I have no idea."

Eid and others also confirm, however, that the Israeli
intelligence, with which the Palestinian Authority must cooperate
according to signed agreements, favors working with the
preventive security force, rather than, say, the Palestinian police
or the general intelligence.

No matter who was doing the arresting, the tone was set from
the beginning. In March 1996, seven Birzeit University students
were the first to be arrested by Palestinian security forces.
Accused of engaging in illegal activity on behalf of Hamas, the
students were never formally charged with a crime, and despite
a high court order calling for their release that August, they
remained in prison until Arafat released them in October.

"There is a serious problem with the judiciary system, in that
there is no implementation of high court rulings," says Hanan
Elmasu, coordinator of the Human Rights Action Project at Birzeit
University, which provides legal assistance and advocacy for
student detainees. She cites the case of Birzeit student Ghassan
al-Addassi who has been held without charge since March 1998,
despite high court rulings calling for his release.

Despite the Authority's apparent disregard for human rights, Eid
says the international community, especially the United States,
continues to provide Arafat "huge support" by funding security
force salaries. It's in keeping with the 1998 Wye River
Memorandum that calls on the Palestinians to keep the United
States abreast of its attempts to stamp out organizations of a
"military, terrorist, or violent character."

A source within the Palestinian intelligence service, however,
rebuffed the notion that the Palestinians are working for anyone
but themselves. "There's no plan to arrest the opposition in the
universities or in any institutions," he says. "It is normal to arrest
illegal groups; no one in a Palestinian jail is a member of a legal
organization."

About the issue of arrests without charge, he offers this
explanation: "We are working to secure our own society, and we
cannot permit any disturbances," then as if to explain the
massive arrests, he adds, "Thirty years under occupation
changed many things inside us. We were revolutionaries,
fighters with guns. We fighters have become peacemakers. This
is a big change, and it will take time."

Meanwhile, at least according to this former fighter, as long as
the Palestinian Authority remains in its infancy, it cannot tolerate
criticism. "We are still a baby," he says, "and we need to take
care of this baby." -