|
His name was Liberation
Six young men from the village of
Hizma, northeast of Jerusalem, have been killed during the
past year. Even if the promised investigation does take place,
says the family of one of the victims, it will not bring him
back to life.
The members of the Rizq family, of the
village of Hizma northeast of Jerusalem, received the visitors
with polite astonishment. The visit had not been set up in
advance. The first to sit down with them was the grandmother,
Na'ima, Um (Mother of) Mohammed. She is about 70, petite and
thin, and wears an embroidered Palestinian peasant's dress and
a fine white veil that does not entirely hide her hair. She
was joined by her daughter, Muna, Um Tahrir, who is also thin,
but tall. The veil on her head scrupulously covers her hair
and she wears a long, gray garment as is customary among more
observant Muslim women: The outlines of her figure are
completely hidden.
They looked questioningly at the two visitors, who introduced
themselves: attorney Audrey Bomse and Bassem Eid, executive
director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group
(PHRMG). Eid mentions that he had already been in the family's
home or, more accurately, in the mourning pavilion it opened
on January 1, 2001. The eldest son, Tahrir (whose name means
"Liberation"), had been shot the previous day, was
severely wounded in the head and died at midnight, when the
year 2000 made way for the year 2001. Six young people from
the village have been killed during the past year, four of
them in clashes between stone-throwers and IDF soldiers. The
first of these was Khaled Rizq. And two of them were shot and
killed by Israeli civilians, the first of them Tahrir, 21,
Khaled Rizq's cousin. At the end of August, an inhabitant of
another village, 26-year-old Haider Kna'an, was killed. He was
driving with his father and his brother to work in one of the
Jewish settlements beyond the 1967 borders in the area, and
from a passing Israeli vehicle, shots were fired at his car.
Tahrir had been working since he was 15 at the laundry in
Pisgat Ze'ev, which is built on part of the lands of Hizma.
The proprietors were residents of the Jewish settlement of
Ofra who, according to members of the family, called him
affectionately "Johnny." On December 31, Tahrir
returned to the village after work and joined some friends who
were throwing stones at Israeli cars traveling along the
Ramallah bypass road, which is also built in part on the Hizma
property.
The driver of a white Mitsubishi - it is not clear whether or
not he had been hurt by the stones - stopped his car, turned
around, got out of the car and fired several times at the
stone-throwers. He was wearing civilian clothes. Rizq was
wounded in the head. Eid and residents of the village say that
the odds are that the man was a Jewish settler.
The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group follows all
cases in which it is suspected that Palestinians have been
killed by Israeli civilians and keeps track of whether and how
the police investigation into such incidents is progressing.
Eid says that during the past year, 17 Palestinians have been
killed by Israeli civilians. The most recent of these was
Ahman Ibrahim Abiat, a young man who was stabbed to death in
Jerusalem on October 16. Eid is convinced that the
law-enforcement authorities in Israel scorn the obligation of
catching people who murder Palestinians, while it spares no
effort to track down people who murder Israelis.
Delayed response
The killing of Rizq was reported in the Hebrew and in the
Arabic press. In the report by Amos Harel in Ha'aretz on
January 2, it was stated that a check carried out in the army
brigade in the Ramallah area showed that there had been no
actions by the IDF or by the Border Police in the area. That
is, Rizq was not killed by security forces fire. The report
[in the Hebrew version of the newspaper] also stated that:
"The Samaria and Judea district police say that the
incident is being investigated, but the police have very
little information."
On February 6, 2001, Bassem Eid sent a letter to the Samaria
and Judea police asking how the investigations of several
incidents involving the murder of Palestinians by Israelis -
among them, Rizq's murder - were progressing. Based on what
had appeared in the newspaper, he was certain that an
investigation was indeed underway.
On March 26, 2001, he received a reply from the department of
oversight and public complaints at the Samaria and Judea
district, saying that Rizq had been killed in the Jerusalem
district and that the latter should be applied to for details.
On May 7, Eid addressed the same question to those responsible
in the Jerusalem district, asking whether an investigation of
the matter was underway. He received no reply as of October.
An additional letter was sent, this time to Moshe Ariel, head
of the prosecution department. Someone from the department
called back, and said that a case had not been opened: The
family had not filed a complaint; Mukassad Hospital, where
Rizq's death was confirmed, had not informed the police of the
incident.
Audrey Bomse is an American lawyer who heads the legal
department at the PHRMG for following up injuries that
settlers have caused Palestinians. She consulted Israeli
lawyers: Perhaps the law in Israel requires the police to
pursue investigations of cases of murder only if a complaint
has been filed by relatives of the victim? No, the lawyers
assured her. A case must be opened and an investigation must
be pursued even if no complaint is filed.
In any event, 10 months later, the correspondence bore fruit:
Officers at the Beit El police asked the PHRMG to accompany
members of Rizq's family and any other witnesses to the Beit
El police station to file a complaint. They also asked them to
bring along copies of hospital documents from an autopsy.
Rafi Yaffe, the Samaria and Judea district police spokesman,
wrote in response to questions from Ha'aretz: "Following
inquiries by Palestinian elements, an investigation has been
opened at the Binyamin station, and before these inquiries
were made, the incident had not been reported to the district
in any way."
He protests the accusations of scornful neglect, and reports
that during the past year, there "have been hundreds of
investigations of reports of injuries to Palestinians or their
property. However, in order to complete the investigation and
collect evidence, the cooperation of the victims is needed and
a general report is insufficient." The police, says
Yaffe, "firmly deny the claim that ostensibly there is
neglect of incidents in which Palestinians are injured."
A basic lack of trust
Eid and Bomse, who are firmly convinced that the Israeli
authorities are in no hurry to identify Israelis who have
injured Palestinians, have nevertheless experienced, in their
visit to the Rizq family, the difficulties of which Jaffe
speaks. Eid asked why they had not filed a complaint:
"After all, this isn't a matter of a tree they uprooted.
This is about a man who has been killed. By law, the
authorities must bring the murderer to justice."
Um Tahrir, sparing in her words, answered in a voice that was
low and restrained, as if it too were enveloped in a garment
that blurred the feelings inside: "It does not happen
that there is an investigation when someone (Palestinian)
dies." That is, there is a basic lack of trust here,
which makes it altogether impossible to make a special
journey, in such dangerous times, to police stations in
Israeli settlements.
Hizma is located in Area C - that is, it is under complete
Israeli security and administrative control. The Palestinian
police are not allowed to act in the village or in the area
around it, which borders on Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Ze'ev, and
where the smaller Jewish settlements of Adam and Anatot are
located.
Uncle Nazim, who came into the room while the conversation was
going on, said to Eid: If the (Israeli) police come here, we
will tell them what we know. But no one remembers that the
Israeli police have ever entered the village on matters that
serve the public. Representatives of Israeli law do come when
it is a matter of arresting Palestinian suspects.
In June, 2001, a huge force of army and Shin Bet security
services personnel, and perhaps police, came in the middle of
the night and arrested Tahrir's father, about two months after
he had gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca in a delegation of
fathers of intifada casualties. He was suspected of having
enlisted in Hezbollah, relates his brother, Uncle Nazim, who
snorts. He snorts because he is convinced that this is
fabricated information: The fact is that the prosecution is
finding it very difficult to comply with lawyer Naila Attia's
demand that the anonymous informers appear on the witness
stand. And the Hezbollah has denied that the man is connected
to them.
Nazim makes it clear that the family will give neither Eid nor
the police the names of eyewitnesses to the murder of Tahrir
Rizq. Instead of investigating the murder, he believes, they
will arrest the eyewitnesses on charges of having thrown
stones.
And there is the religious prohibition: A police investigation
means an autopsy, especially if the police have not succeeded
in collecting evidence at the scene. Here they all shake their
heads and say firmly: "No, never." They will never
allow an autopsy to be performed on the body. And, in
addition, they argue, why wait for an autopsy?
When Haider Kna'an was killed, on the outskirts of the
village, his father and his brother urged the Israeli soldiers
or police to chase the car from which the shots had been
fired, relates Um Tahrir. But they dallied and the car
disappeared. So there was no need for an autopsy; it would
have been sufficient to have chased the car.
Eid acknowledges that families' refusal to allow autopsies
makes every investigation more difficult, but this does not
mean, he says, that the authorities are exempt from taking the
initiative and pursuing an investigation. He and his team are
prepared to accompany police investigators on visits to the
family, in order to eliminate the need for them to go to
distant Beit El.
But the impression is that Eid is not succeeding in infecting
the family with his enthusiasm for spurring the police to
investigate the murder of Tahrir Rizq, or in cracking their
wall of suspicion even a bit. Nothing will bring Tahrir back
to life, says his uncle. The grandmother gazes for a long time
at the picture of Tahrir and says: He was sweet, the grandson
whose name was Liberation.
By her son's grave, Um Tahrir caresses Bashar, her youngest
son, and asks him whether he remembers how his brother,
Tahrir, bought him clothes and gave him pocket money out of
his wages. And she answers the question of what she had wanted
for Tahrir when he was small, with another question:
"What do you mean what did I want? I wanted him to be a
king."
|
