November 14-15, 2009
The Internationalt Forum – Denmark held its 2009 Congress, issuing a statement of support for Ahmad Sa’adat and the Palestinian prisoners. The statement is below:
Free Ahmad Sa’adat and the 10,000 other Palestinian Prisoners!
Stop Torture and Isolation in Israeli Prisons!
At present, approximately 10,000 Palestinians are detained in Israeli prisons, the “occupation jails,” in the words of the Palestinian prisoners.
One of them is Ahmad Sa’adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Ahmad Sa’adat is, like the majority of the imprisoned Palestinians, imprisoned only because of his political opposition to and struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
On December 25, 2008, Sa’adat was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment by an Israeli military court. Before his imprisonment in Israeli prisons, Sa’adat was imprisoned in a Palestinian Authority jail in Jericho – according to a “dirty deal” between the PA and Israel. He was kidnapped from the PA jail on March 13, 2006 by Israeli military forces and taken to an Israeli prison.
For over 6 months, Sa’adat has been confined in total isolation in the Ramon prison in the Naqab desert, without contact with other prisoners, without visits from family or friends and without access to newspapers and TV. He has only one hour of access daily to the prison yard, handcuffed and shackled.
Ahmad Sa’adat wrote the following letter to the international campaign to free Ahmad Sa’adat and all Palestinian prisoners:
“The policy of isolation is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian and human rights law and the law of prohibition of torture. This policy is a systematic killing and destruction of the human personality and in some cases a mechanism for carrying out a living death sentence against freedom fighters.”
Ahmad Sa’adat ended his letter with the following statement:
“The struggle of the prisoners for freedom is part of the ongoing struggle of our people which will end only with the defeat of the occupation across all the land of Palestine.”
Ahmad Sa’adat, the PFLP general secretary, is an internationally highly respected Palestinian freedom fighter. We, the International Forum, Denmark, demand the immediate release of Ahmad Sa’adat and all the Palestinian and Arab political prisoners in Israeli prisons.
We demand: End the Occupation!
We support the struggle for a FREE PALESTINE!
Internationalt Forum, Copenhagen, November 14 and 15, 2009
www.internationaltforum.dk – info@internationaltforum.dk