Friday, July 11, 2008

Do no harm: A torture victim remembers


Naji Ali writing from San Francisco, US, Live from Palestine, 10 July 2008

(Naji Ali is the producer and host of Crossing The Line: Life in Occupied Palestine. He is the son of a Black South African resistance fighter. Ali spent 550 days in detention in South Africa and was subjected to repeated torture by the security police. He also lived and worked in Palestine in the Old City of Hebron from 2002-2004.)

"I wasn't really surprised by the watchdog group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel's (PHR-I) latest intervention to Israel's health ministry, in which they accused Israeli doctors of complicity in the torture of Palestinian detainees in Israeli interrogation centers. Indeed, it sounded all too familiar to what I experienced during 550 days of incarceration in a South African prison from 1990 through 1992.

PHR-I reached its conclusion based on the testimony of two Palestinian prisoners who were tortured during interrogation and developed trauma-related symptoms including hearing loss, panic attacks and incontinence. The doctors who treat Palestinian detainees conduct medical checkups on the prisoners during and after interrogation but they fail to report the findings and symptoms, which make them an actor in the torturing of detainees, PHR-I said......."

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