http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000-05/fisk200500.shtml
Khiam jail, where torture is routine and by remote control
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, 20 May 2000
Khiam is an awful place. Electrical wires attached to the penis and feet,
constant whipping, cold nights attached to a pole while pails of freezing
water are thrown over near-naked bodies. Are the Israelis likely to leave
this dreadful institution behind when they withdraw from Lebanon? Will
they leave the last 160 prisoners - hostages of Israel for the return of
missing Israeli soldiers - as witnesses to this shameful episode in history?
Or take them away?
Officially run by Israel's collapsing "South Lebanon Army" militia, the
interrogators have been obsessive as well as cruel men. The questions
come from Israel tapped on e-mail from Metulla to a computer screen in
the little torture room in Khiam. And, not so long ago, this question came
over the computer screen: "When he came to your village, did Fisk talk
about forged $100 bills? Did he mention Lubrani's name?"
The man who received these two questions was stunned - so was I when
I heard about them. I had written an article in The Independent on the
circulation of fake $100 bills in southern Lebanon, many of them among
the salaries paid to SLA by their Israeli masters. Lebanese banks think
these bills are forged in Israel. But I had never connected this with Uri
Lubrani, Israel's so-called adviser to Lebanon. So why did the Israeli
interrogators ask this? And why did they also ask - their computerised
questions translated into Arabic by the torturers of Khiam - if I had been
to the village of Jibchit in southern Lebanon and what were my contacts
with Hizbollah?
Stupidity, of course, plays a part in all intelligence wars. My own book on
Lebanon's war is in the Khiam jail library - sent there by the International
Red Cross - and the Israelis had only to glance through its pages to read
that I spent three months in Jibchit during Israel's 1985 occupation, that
as Middle East correspondent of The Independent I had met the Hizbollah
leadership.
Indeed, I knew Abbas Moussawim, the Hizbollah chairman who was
assassinated by an Israeli helicopter pilot who fired an air-to-ground
missile into his car, killing him and his family as they drove back from
southern Lebanon after visiting the village of Jibchit. Hizbollah leadership?
Jibchit? What did those computerised questions really mean?
I still don't know. Nor did the prisoner who was asked them. He was
questioned about other things - if there were spies in his village from the
Lebanese Army, if the Hizbollah used mobile phones to explode bombs.
Then he was taken to a courtyard, stripped, tied to a stake and had
freezing water thrown over him. All night. Then he was locked in one of
three rooms - the "black rooms', the inmates call them - with just enough
space to squat with his knees to his face for day after day. It is routine in
Khiam.
I met one inmate just 10 days after his release, a man who had spent more
than a year in Khiam. "When they interrogated me, they hit me on the
head, then on the back with a Kalashnikov rifle. I fell down. The man put
his boot in my face and broke part of my jaw. I have lost the hearing in
part of my right ear. The ear-drum is broken. He said, 'You are working
with Hizbollah.' I said no. I run a café that sells beer. How could I be
Hizbollah? Now I have bad breathing problems and the doctor says there
is no medicine for it. That this problem will stay with me all my life."
It is all true. The Red Cross, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have all
concluded that these stories are true. The case of Suleiman Ramadan, his
arm amputated after beatings, still imprisoned after 16 years, is among the
best known. What will these men, and a few women, receive by way of
compensation? Nothing. Two hundred dollars a month from the Lebanese
government but nothing from Israel. The American former hostage Terry
Anderson has won millions of dollars in damages from Iran in the US
courts for his false imprisonment for seven years. The prisoners of Khiam
will, of course, get nothing.
Some of them are former Hizbollah guerrillas but many are held because
their families refuse to join the SLA or work for Israeli intelligence or
because brothers and sisters are believed to work for the guerrillas.
Another ex-inmate told me: "They said to me I would be tortured in Khiam
and held there for years if I did not renounce my brother." He refused to
make the denunciation. He was beaten insensible and kept in Khiam for
more than a year.
Needless to say, the world does not call these men hostages - which they
are in reality and also according to the Israeli courts. The world's press and
television, anxious, no doubt, not to offend the Israelis, call them
"bargaining chips", as if the tortured and the untried of Khiam are players
in a large and amusing chess game. We never called the Western hostages
in Lebanon "bargaining chips". Hostages is what they were. And hostages
is what the last Khiam prisoners remain.
Will they come home when Israel ends its almost a quarter-century of
occupation? Or will they be taken off across the border into Israel for
further incarceration? When will Mr Ramadan, who has spent more than
twice Anderson's time in captivity, at last be freed? Khiam is an old French
Mandate fort with its walls still scarred by the tank fire of the Australian
Division in the Second World War. It may have more shrapnel marks in the
days to come.
But at least there will be no more questions about Uri Lubrani. Or Robert
Fisk.
