{"id":1361,"date":"2006-03-23T09:35:11","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T13:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1361"},"modified":"2008-01-24T22:36:45","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T03:36:45","slug":"why-is-dr-kamal-sayyid-qadir-still-in-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1361","title":{"rendered":"Why is Dr. Kamal Sayyid Qadir still in jail?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Committee to Protect Journalists yesterday condemned<\/a> the arrest on March 17 and prosecution of Hawez Hawezi, “a 31-year-old high school teacher who also writes for the independent Kurdish weekly *Hawlati, at his home in Koya, near the city of Arbil, the newspaper’s managing editor Peshwaz Faizulla told CPJ.” Hawezi was seized by Kurdish “security forces affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).”<\/p>\n

Faizulla said the agents assaulted Hawezi while driving him to a detention facility in the city of Sulaymaniyah. The journalist was released on bail March 19 after being questioned by an investigating judge. The judge told the journalist he faced unspecified defamation charges for a recent article criticizing local Kurdish authorities, the editor said. In a column in the March 15 edition of Hawlati, Hawezi criticized the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the two main political parties in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region. The article accused both parties of governing northern Iraq badly, referring to them as Pharaohs. It called for new leadership in Iraqi Kurdistan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

CPJ concludes the alert by revisiting the case of Dr. Kamal Sayyid Qadir, also known as Kamal Karim, the Kurdish academic who returned to Kurdistan in 1991 after Ba’athist forces left the area in the wake of the Gulf War. He left again during a period of civil war “between the dominant political parties” in 1994-95. Qadir is described as “an international legal expert, writer and human rights activist” who says he has “written 100 articles and studies so far”. In October 2005, he was abducted by “the security intelligence service of the ruling KDP”, “exposed to torture and insult” then hauled before a kangaroo court on 19 December for a 15-minute trial and sentenced to 30 years in prison for “defaming the Kurdish cause and the intelligence service of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in articles that he wrote while in Austria, where he has citizenship.” Only after Qadir’s ill-treatment began to draw public criticism was it announced that he would be retried<\/a> in “offences court”, referred to elsewhere as “the Court of Misdemeanors”, “that does not give sentences of more than five years in cases it sees.” There was news in January that he would be released until trial but his freedom never came to pass<\/a>. “He’s a special case,” according to Kurdish officials quoted by RFE\/RL’s Radio Free Iraq, in this transcript<\/a> of an interview they conducted with Qadir on 27 February by the mobile phone he’s been allowed to keep in his cell. Qadir started his 5th hunger strike that day, one he intended to continue until “released either on bail or indefinitely.”<\/p>\n

The new trial was supposed to take place 9 March. Did it? I don’t know. The internet trail seems to go cold after the RFE\/RL interview. Is he still on a hunger strike? It’s been nearly a month. Is he ill? I don’t know. If he still has his mobile phone, why hasn’t RFE\/RL followed-up? If it’s been taken away, why haven’t they followed-up on that?<\/p>\n

The Kurdistan Referendum Movement recently translated<\/a> an article he wrote that was published here<\/a> in April 2005. Is he unable to write something new? I don’t know.<\/p>\n

But one would think that CPJ, an organisation with a mission of protecting journalists and in light of this alert they’ve issued, might have gone to the trouble to find out.<\/p>\n

Don’t count on certain Kurdish bloggers<\/a> to call for an investigation. They’re too absorbed with supporting the freedom to criticise Muslims in the most offensive ways possible to be worried about the fate of Kurdish academics who refuse to tow the implicit line imposed by the ruling families<\/a> of their great new democracy.<\/p>\n

* The English version<\/a> of the independent Kurdish weekly Hawlati<\/em><\/a> seems to be experiencing problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Committee to Protect Journalists yesterday condemned the arrest on March 17 and prosecution of Hawez Hawezi, “a 31-year-old high school teacher who also writes for the independent Kurdish weekly *Hawlati, at his home in Koya, near the city of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-lX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}