Source : The Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2010
Between the Israeli blockade and the capricious imprisonments, torture
and arrests for ’morality offenses’ by Hamas police, the people of
Gaza are prisoners twice over.
by Bill Van Esveld
The slim owner of Gaza City’s Gallery cafe has sharp eyes and a sharp
tongue. It’s easy to imagine him conversing with artists and actors —
he is also a theater director — far into the night. But he crossed a
line. He allowed female patrons at his cafe to smoke hookah pipes and
to talk with men. He ignored demands by plainclothes police to rein in
"immoral" behavior. In early May, police interrogated and accused him
of having extramarital affairs. To persuade him to confess, they beat
him with a 2-inch-thick, leather-covered bamboo rod for 50 minutes,
and later forced him to stand on one leg for two hours.
The blockade of the Gaza Strip — brought into focus by Israel’s deadly
interception of blockade-busting ships May 31 — is not the only
problem faced by that territory’s besieged and impoverished
population. As Human Rights Watch documented during a trip to Gaza in
May, severe violations of personal freedom and repression of civil
society groups that defend that freedom appear to be sharply on the
rise. The Hamas government, trying to shore up its image as an Islamic
reform movement in the face of challenges from more radical Islamist
groups, is consolidating its social control by upping its efforts to
"Islamize" Gaza.
A notorious example is the expanded role of Gaza’s "morality police."
Last summer, these black-uniformed police began to patrol the beaches
to ensure that men and women are dressed "appropriately" — there is no
written rule but a woman was punished for swimming in a T-shirt and
jeans — and that unrelated men and women are not mingling. They make
sure clothing stores display only modestly dressed female mannequins
in their windows. They have enforced bans on women riding motorcycles
and on male hairdressers working in women’s hair salons. Couples
walking down the street are routinely stopped, separated and
questioned by plainclothes officers asking whether they’re married.
"You basically have to carry a copy of your marriage license on you at
all times, or risk being humiliated," one young couple told us. And
parents say their daughters are under pressure to dress more
conservatively for school.
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But the problem goes beyond such invasions of privacy. In some cases,
the security services use "morality offenses" to expand their
authority, including punishing people for breaking rules that are not
on the books. The cafe owner and several other residents, for
instance, told Human Rights Watch that plainclothes detectives had
targeted his cafe during the month before his arrest and torture.
Waiters told us that business was down sharply after two detectives
repeatedly questioned customers, particularly women, grabbed their
cellphones and wrote down contact information, in an apparent effort
to discourage them from patronizing the cafe. A police spokesman was
unable to point to any legal authority for these actions. Detectives
whom Human Rights Watch spoke to refused to give us even their names,
or any other information.
Although the morality code’s enforcers enjoy impunity for their
abuses, several inmates of Gaza’s central prison appear to be guilty
of nothing but bad luck. We met a mother of three children who
couldn’t produce a marriage certificate, was accused of committing
adultery — with her husband — and was jailed despite her testimony
that her family has prevented her from obtaining the necessary
documents because they disapprove of her marriage. A 19-year-old man —
whose father won’t hire a lawyer to defend him — has been in jail
without trial for more than a year because he is gay.
Human Rights Watch also documented the case of a young couple whose
parents refused to grant their wish to marry. The young man, a lanky,
soft-spoken 21-year-old, was so desperate that in an attempt to shame
their parents into agreeing to their marriage, the couple "confessed"
to having had premarital sex — a crime under the penal code but rarely
enforced before Hamas came to power — and turned themselves in to
police. More than four months later, they were languishing in jail —
the same jail, though prison authorities prevented them from seeing
each other. The young woman, veiled and wearing a head-to-toe black
chador, shyly asked us to pass on a message to her beloved: "I love
you. I will never let them separate us, no matter how long I have to
stay in jail. I miss you very much."
It is on the backs of young people like these that the Hamas
government, facing discontent from militant religious groups that
think it is failing to attack Israel and enforce Sharia, or Islamic
law, is seeking to bolster its Islamic credentials.
The Gaza government, led by Ismail Haniyeh, is also reducing the
infrastructure for a civil society, including organizations that
defend personal freedoms. Internal Security Service officers closed
down six organizations in Gaza City and Rafah, including a women’s
health society and the Woman and Child Development Assn. Hamas has
denounced United Nations summer camps that allow boys and girls to
play together, and set up competing gender-segregated camps. Although
it criticized an unknown armed group’s attack on May 23 against a U.N.
summer camp — the attackers tied up the camp guard, vandalized
buildings and left a note threatening U.N. officials, along with three
bullets — police prevented human rights groups from holding a sit-in
the next day to protest the attack. That same day, the Interior
Ministry prevented the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human
Rights from holding a workshop about its annual human rights report.
The people of Gaza are now prisoners twice over. From the outside,
Israel and Egypt have locked down Gaza’s borders, forcing at least
900,000 people into poverty and dependence on food handouts, although
Israel recently announced it would allow in more goods, and Egypt
formally relaxed the closure of Rafah this month. And within Gaza,
Hamas is forcing people to live within the confines of a harsh moral
code, and punishing those who try to exercise their few remaining
rights and liberties. The world is rightly focused on Gaza’s Israeli
prison guards, but it shouldn’t forget the confinement enforced by
Gaza’s own Hamas.
Bill Van Esveld is a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
