Your article concerning the September 22 meeting between Major General Al-Dhahabi and Human Rights Watch (September 24) attributes to me comments I never made. I never “promised to refer to the GID before writing any report on human rights in Jordan.” Al-Ra’i could have avoided such errors by contacting me, as four other Jordanian journalists did after the meeting.
Submitted October 1, 2006
Your article concerning the September 22 meeting between Major General Al-Dhahabi and Human Rights Watch (September 24) attributes to me comments I never made. I never “promised to refer to the GID before writing any report on human rights in Jordan.” Al-Ra’i could have avoided such errors by contacting me, as four other Jordanian journalists did after the meeting.
Your account also badly distorts key elements of our discussion and our long-standing efforts to meet with GID officials. Human Rights Watch on four different occasions had sought a meeting with Maj.Gen. al-Dhahabi over the past year, starting on September 17, 2005. We never received a reply. On September 11, 2006, we sent the GID and the Prime Ministry a five-page summary of the report: “Suspicious Sweeps: The General Intelligence Directorate and Jordan’s Rule of Law Problem.” In addition, I gave Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh our travel dates to Jordan and personally briefed him on the outlines of the report on June 25, 2006. We received no written or verbal comment from either party.
Then on September 17, 2006, Nasser Judeh told me that if I did not postpone our press conference planned for September 19, the GID might cancel meetings scheduled for September 18 with senior GID officials and September 22 with Maj.Gen. al-Dhahabi. I refused to postpone the event, but said that if the meetings with officials went ahead, I would reflect their responses to our findings in the press conference. The September 18 meetings with GID officials did go ahead and I did reflect their responses in the press conference the following day.
At our September 22 meeting, I found the GID director friendly and open to discussion. He did not, however, raise a single one of the cases discussed in our report. GID officials also did not provide me, as promised in our September 18 meeting, with a written reply to the report and details on the cases of four detainees that I had given them.
Mr. al-Dhahabi seemed eager to publicize our meeting and I offered to state publicly that he had explained to me his vision of the role of the GID in protecting national security and unity, which necessitated occasional arrests. He also saw the possibility for more openness and oversight and insisted his officers worked in full compliance with the law. Articles in al-Arab al-Yawm reflected these comments, and I repeated them on al-Jazeera on the evening of September 22.
What “stunned” and “surprised” me – to use your words - in my two meetings with senior GID officials was their complete denial that arbitrary arrests and torture had taken place. This is simply not credible, given the detailed allegations presented in the report.
As I explained to Mr. al-Dhahabi, my research initially did not include torture. It was only after a number of former detainees mentioned that “the interrogation at the GID was a little harsh,” and reluctantly recounted their experiences, that I determined this was a serious problem. I spoke with each one separately, in repeat visits, asking them to specify timelines and provide physical descriptions that could be checked for consistency. As we wrote in our report, the GID had released all but three of the detainees we interviewed so they had no incentive to claim abuse that did not happen. Since completing the report, moreover, seven persons or their relatives have come forward and provided me with serious allegations of arbitrary arrest and torture at the GID.
We welcome Mr. al-Dhahabi’s offer to Human Rights Watch to visit the GID detention facility at any time. We look forward to being able to make such a visit in the near future.
As Jordan’s most widely read newspaper, Al-Ra’i should conduct its own independent investigations into these consistent and credible allegations of abuse, rather than respond with a knee-jerk reaction of blind faith in the security services “crystal clear” record. As I said in the press conference: “It is, unfortunately, normal for any state to have human rights violations. What is not normal, is when those violations are denied and not investigated,” as in Jordan.
Christoph Wilcke is a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch
