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Both sides want Khader silenced
Populist politician says PA set him up for Israeli
charges Maverick's arrest and trial getting scant
attention
MITCH POTTER
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU
BALATA REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank—The eyes of the world
were elsewhere one year ago when a company of 50
Israeli soldiers came calling for firebrand
Palestinian politician Hussam Khader.
The big headlines, naturally,
spoke of Baghdad, where the witching hour of
bombardment was fast approaching. And Tel Aviv,
where an 11th-hour scramble for duct tape, plastic
sheeting and gas masks bespoke inflated Israeli
fears of an arsenal we now know Saddam Hussein did
not possess.
Even among Palestinians, the news
that day came from the Gaza Strip, where American
college student Rachel Corrie had just become the
first foreign activist to die in 29 months of
intifada, falling beneath an Israeli armoured
bulldozer while trying to block troops from
demolishing a refugee family's home.
Little wonder then that Khader's
arrest the night of March 16, 2003, made barely a
journalistic blip. Just another Palestinian leader
pulled from his bed; another detainee to join more
than 6,000 Palestinian prisoners already doing time
in jails throughout Israel.
Except for one thing: In
arresting Khader, Israeli troops also removed the
single most painful thorn poking the regime of
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The college-educated Khader, 42,
had long been the Palestinian Legislative Council's
mouthiest, most embarrassing dissident.
Elected in 1996 to represent the
squalid Balata refugee camp at the southeastern edge
of the West Bank city of Nablus, the hard-line
maverick made it his mission to point accusingly at
what he saw as an unholy alliance of corruption and
cronyism clogging Arafat's inner circle.
Where others whispered, Khader
shouted. And unlike most, he showed no reluctance to
call the man he saw as the leading offender by name:
Yasser Arafat.
Today, from his Israeli prison
cell, Khader is making his biggest accusation of
all: that Arafat cronies conspired to silence him by
furnishing Israel with false evidence Khader was
aiding militants. In effect, he accuses Arafat of
using the external enemy to erase one altogether too
close to home.
Whether Khader's accusations are
true may not become clear even after his Israeli
court proceedings, which resume this week.
Unlike the public show trial of
his long-time friend and fellow high-profile
detainee, Marwan Barghouti — the only other
Palestinian politician to be arrested by Israel —
Khader's case has fallen under the considerably more
secretive Israeli military court system.
The process is one in which
prosecutors routinely withhold evidence citing
security concerns, yet still manage a 97 per cent
conviction rate.
According to court documents
obtained by the Star, Khader stands accused of five
counts, including aiding an illegal organization and
failing to stop a deliberate act of terrorism,
relating to activities of a Balata cell of the
militant Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in 2002 and 2003.
A Hebrew summary of the charge
sheet relates the confessions of one Amir Sawalmay,
who told Israeli investigators he was approached by
Khader to arm and activate the cell in early 2002.
Among other acts, Sawalmay said in an affidavit,
Khader financed the purchase of one AK-47, a handgun
and ammunition, and provided as much as $30,000 in
various currencies to offset the cost of attacks.
In his statement of defence, a
copy of which was obtained by the Star, Khader
denied the entirety of the charges as conspiratorial
lies.
Lashing back at his accusers, he
questioned how it was possible that the information
provided by Sawalmay led to his arrest, when
Sawalmay himself wasn't arrested by Israeli forces
until six weeks after the fact.
"These allegations are lies,"
Khader wrote in his statement. "I am a political
prisoner. I am the strongest objector to the
policies of Arafat. Because of my criticism,
traitors inside the Palestinian Authority hired men
to implicate me for a certain amount of money."
Khader singled out Palestinian
General Intelligence Service boss Tawfik Tirawi and
Hani al-Hassan, a prominent member of the Fatah
movement central committee in his statement,
branding the two men, both known Arafat loyalists,
as "traitors" to the Palestinian cause and saying
they played a direct role in engineering his arrest.
Tirawi and Hassan declined
repeated requests for interviews for this story.
Khader's Israeli lawyer, Reyad
al-Anees, says his client presents a unique case.
"I've been a lawyer for 25 years.
He is the first Palestinian ever to come forward and
accuse the Palestinian leadership of setting him up.
It's shocking, really."
Anees says he was also struck by
the "flimsiness" of the charge sheet. In the case of
Barghouti, Israeli investigators assembled multiple
confessions and supporting documents alleging to the
West Bank populist leader's role as a mastermind of
a string of attacks that killed 26 Israelis.
Khader, by contrast, stands
accused of aiding a single attack that appears not
to have resulted in fatal injuries, based on
testimony of a single informant, says Anees.
`They are squashing Hussam like a bug to shut
him up . . . Hussam is taboo'
Ghassan Khader, Politician's brother
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He and others point out that
Israel's interests are also served by Khader's
imprisonment, if only because he proved himself a
formidable and hard-line advocate for the rights of
Palestinian refugees.
Though he is best known for his
criticism of Arafat, Khader is by no means a
moderate. He views as inviolate the concept that all
Palestinian refugees must win the right to return to
their native villages inside Israel in any eventual
peace settlement.
With a diaspora of more than 4
million registered Palestinian refugees spread
across camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West
Bank and Gaza, any such return is widely seen within
Israel as a recipe for destruction of the Jewish
state. And, as such, a deal-breaker.
Khader's credentials as a
populist leader were sealed in the first intifada,
when he was jailed 23 times. Between incarcerations,
he earned a double major in business administration
and political science from An-Najah University.
In 1988, he became the first
Palestinian activist deported from the territories
by Israel. In exile, he found his way to Tunis and,
for a time, became one of Arafat's most favoured
young leaders.
The eventual falling out between
the two men might not have been exclusively about
Khader's accusations of corruption, according to one
highly placed Western diplomatic source in Ramallah.
"Khader wasn't given any
particularly high position when Arafat and the
Palestinian Authority arrived in the territories on
the heels of the (1993) Oslo peace accord," the
diplomat said.
"Once it became clear he was out
of the loop, that's when the criticisms began. And
they never stopped. They just got louder.
"He made so many people angry
over the years, it could be a reason why everyone is
silent now. He had such a big mouth, maybe there are
no friends left to speak on his behalf."
In his home camp of Balata,
however, Khader's supporters say the Palestinian
silence since his arrest amounts to censorship.
Though the PA-controlled Palestinian press continues
to cast Barghouti as a heroic prisoner, journalists
are forbidden from writing a word about Khader.
"They are squashing Hussam like a
bug to shut him up," says Khader's brother, Ghassan.
"All of the Palestinian reporters
know he is like poison for them. They have no
freedom. Hussam is taboo."
Khader's supporters say the chill
around his name is consistent with similar threats
he received in recent years.
They point to a forged August,
2001, leaflet purporting to be from Al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigades, which accused Khader of working as a
collaborator with Israeli intelligence.
The day after the bogus handbill
appeared throughout Balata, a second handbill, this
time with the mark and logo of the real Al-Aqsa,
made the rounds through the camp, denouncing the
previous leaflet as a fake.
And the summer before his arrest,
the Star was witness to an overt attempt at muzzling
Khader in the middle of an interview at his Nablus
home.
Khader was in the midst of
comparing the PA to George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Arafat, he said, was Napoleon, "the pig."
But Khader was interrupted in
mid-rant by an emissary from Arafat and furtive
whispers in Arabic ensued. When the messenger left,
Khader announced he had just been warned against
speaking to foreign journalists.
"And I don't care," he laughed,
before resuming his story.
But with the looming invasion of
Iraq overshadowing his arrest, and the shroud of
Israeli military court cloaking its legal aftermath,
Khader's supporters know they are fighting an uphill
battle just to be heard.
"Hussam got buried by the war,"
says Ghassan Khader. "We just haven't been able to
make enough noise for him.
"The Barghouti family, they are
big, with 15 villages to their name. They made the
noise for Marwan."
In fact, Khader's wife Nadwa was
born a Barghouti. But for the past year, her efforts
have been preoccupied with caring for their three
children — Amani, 12, Amira, 9, and Ahmed, 6.
The eldest of the three seems
older than her years. When asked what she thinks of
her father's arrest, Amani responded with prideful
determination.
"He always speaks his mind," she
said. "He always speaks the truth. Not many people
have this kind of courage. I am proud of him." |
