Remember the Prisoners

In the light of so much violence across the Middle East from the frontlines of Yemen’s conflict to the pockets of brutal fighting in Syria, there is always the temptation to keep your eyes on where the fire is burning brightest as opposed to the suffering that happens in the darkness.

Arguably there are few places darker than the prisons, both formal and informal, that are scattered across the region’s warzones. Prisons and prisoners can be tools of diplomacy and high politics. Earlier in February Syria released an Israeli woman after Israel returned two shepherds to the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights amid a Russian-mediated prisoner swap. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, had crossed the border into Syria several days ago, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approach Russian President Vladimir Putin in efforts to secure her release.

On the flip side most prisoners don’t have their country’s leaders advocating on their behalf and have to rely on more local and determined campaigns. In Yemen an example of this is the campaign of “The Abductees’ Mothers’ Association” (AMA) which was established by the mothers of those detained in the country. So far, they’ve been able to facilitate the release of more than 940 people by their persistence in front of prison gates, in addition to their meetings with the leaders from all parties.

Tragically not all of the Association’s advocates have been successful and with an awful twist of irony some have actually been jailed by the Houthi authorities. Sonia, a 31-year-old mother of four, has spent nearly a year behind bars in various prisons in northern Yemen for belonging to an organization campaigning for the release of prisoners of conscience in areas occupied by Houthi rebels.

She told La Croix magazine that she was detained for social media use and accused of being a foreign spy, a depressingly common charged used to take peoples freedom away over history. According to the AMA some 146 women have been detained in Sana’a Central Prison in the women’s section, some 40% on ‘moral’ charges.

The stories that emerge from prisons can show humanity at its worst. Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Today arguably nobody has done this better than Amnesty who, together with research agency Forensic Architecture, spoke to survivors of the notorious Saydnaya prison in Syria. Using the memories of those detained to recreate the sounds, beatings and fear of those who suffered there. Wider Amnesty research highlights how since March 2011 over 17,000 people killed in Syria’s prisons at a minimum estimate.

Yet it is notoriously difficult to report regularly as to the conditions within prisons and the potential for legitimate reasons for a sovereign actor to detain people gives an obvious excuse to their actions. Simply put all governments, whether state or non-state actors, detainee people and more often than not have good reasons to do so. In conflict or disaster settings the difficulty is that there is far less transparency and the conditions surrounding the war (e.g that there are various sides) are used as a tool to pursue imprisonment against political opponents as opposed to criminal actors.

Prisons can become iconic or symbolic of wider political issues. Guantanamo Bay epitomised how the ‘War on Terror’ took the Bush Administration beyond traditional rules of law. The de facto detention of families with associations with ISIS in Syria and Iraq is a manifestation of many of the home states of these individuals not wanting to process them through their justice systems. The Israeli prison system has played home to huge numbers of Palestinians at some stage of their lives, and the dual nature of Israeli law and the laws of a military occupation are testimony to the challenge of a prolonged and unresolved conflict.

The AMA published a report last year called “I Am Afraid to Die and No One Knows”, a fitting title to the sense of abandonment people in prisons can feel. Beyond providing an analysis of conditions for female prisoners in Houthi run jails it provided a shopping list of sensible recommendations that were a reminder that even simple and small steps can make a huge difference for detainees. Improving conditions, improving the criminal justice procedures that took people there and of course releasing those unduly detained. If prisons are indeed symbols of a country’s politics then reports like the AMA’s should be a wakeup call for addressing these issues urgently.

James Denselow,

James Denselow,