باللغة الإنجليزية- مقال للأسير المحرر نبيه عواضة عارضا جرائم جزار الخيام ليدحض روايات جرمانوس وابنة الفاخوري
By Nabih Awada – a
liberated detainee from the infamous khiam prison
“Justice for Amer Fakhoury”. What an absurd demand!
For Amer Fakhoury to receive the justice he deserves, he must be committed to prison in perpetuity for the crimes against humanity he committed as the “Butcher of Khiam”, in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Instead, he is left free to roam the world brandishing his de facto immunity.
Justice for Amer Fakhoury is a notion which the Amer Fakhoury Foundation advocates, supported by some Israeli-leaning institutions. In reality, no law-abiding people support it because the man committed major crimes against humanity in the Khiam prison in southern Lebanon to the point he became known as the “Butcher of Khiam.” This prison, resembling a slaughterhouse rather than a detention center, has witnessed no fair treatment of prisoners, under his aegis.
Ironically, Peter Germanos, a legally impeached judge, appeared lately in the media to taunt the collective conscience of the public by claiming the illegality of Fakhoury’s arrest, although he himself ordered it while he was still a prosecutor! Does Peter Germanos think that those who watched him are ignorant of the law? In fact, the Lebanese public knows, as well as the international community, that Lebanon has ratified the Convention against Torture (CAT), which does not recognize the passage of time for crimes thereunder. They also know that international treaties such as CAT, supersede domestic laws if they cannot be harmonized.
Furthermore, ousted judge Germanos falsely claimed that pursuant to the release of Israeli agent Fakhoury the house of the President of the Lebanese Military Court Brigadier General Hussein Abdullah, was burned. Germanos obviously made this false claim in an attempt to justify arresting the “Butcher of Khiam” by implying that he was under threat of harm to do so. What is Germanos’s aim, one wonders? Who is he kowtowing before?
As for the “justice” claimed by Fakhoury’s kin through their alter ego the Amer Fakhoury Foundation, it is axiomatic that it should be denied no one as Fakhoury systematically denied the detainees throughout the twelve years he commanded the Khiam prison in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Justice, being the right of every human being, is indisputable and undisputed in Lebanon. It is indeed a right sought by all religions, and advocated by all international institutions including governments, parties, political and intellectual elites, social institutions, and judiciaries, throughout the globe. In addition, justice is the pillar of the constitutions of all the countries in the world, and remain the aim and hope of humanity entire. But justice for one person cannot be achieved at the expense of denying justice to others, as Fakhoury did by evading punishment. In that sense, justice cannot be achieved through providing injustice to other human beings, as the Fakhoury Foundation slyly demands.
To know who truly is Amer Fakhoury, the subject of the Amer Fakhoury Foundation’s campaign for so-called “justice”, his “rap sheet” speaks volumes.
Who is Amer Fakhoury?
He is Amer Elias Al-Fakhoury, a Lebanese citizen, born in 1963 in Marjayoun, Southern Lebanon. He joined the Israeli-created militia called the “South Lebanese Army” (hereinafter the “Southern Army Militia”) in 1986 as commander of the Khiam prison camp, to be quickly promoted through the torture services he rendered therein to the Israeli intelligence services, to the rank of captain.
This militia, which at one point reached six thousands troops, was originally headed by Saad Haddad, a Lebanese army officer who defected in 1976 to form it at the behest of Israel, mostly from Southern-Lebanon village dwellers and some defecting Lebanese army soldiers. After the Israeli invasion of 1978, known as the “Operation Litani”, the area of control of the Southern Army Militia expanded to include larger parts of southern Lebanon. Nominally, its mission was to “administer” those areas, but in practice it acted as a buffer for Israel by providing local cover for its occupation through confronting those who resisted Israeli occupation, even verbally, in spying on them and even killing them whenever such opportunity arises.
In fulfillment of the above task, the Southern Army Militia arrested and tortured many Lebanese citizens without proper legal authority, effectively committing the crime of kidnapping followed by the crime of inflicting bodily harm through torture and, in many occasions, committing murder, as well as a host of attending crimes.
Amer Fakhoury presided over, not just contributed to, the task of torture, and aided and abetted the rest. He was the warden of the infamous and largest prison camp for the Southern Army Militia, at Khiam. He supervised and personally shared in torturing prisoners arrested by the Sourhern Army Militia, killing many with his own hands by way of the most heinous methods of inflicting pain.
Invariably, human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, accused the Southern Army Militia of acts of torture that violate human rights in its detention centers, repeatedly mentioning the Khiam detention center commanded by Amer Fakhoury.
Consequently, Fakhoury became known as the “Butcher of Khiam”, a title which he flaunted as a badge of honor amongst militia members. Having thus became a prominent figure of the ruthless Southern Army Militia, he was eventually assigned to other commanding posts, in addition to having commanded the Khiam prison camp from 1986 to 1998, rising in the process from lieutenant to captain.
—————-_
It is a structure built by French military forces in 1933 during the French mandate over Lebanon. Located on a commanding hill in the Lebanese town of Khiam, near the border of occupied Palestine, it was originally used as military barracks and headquarters. Situated as such, it overlooked northern Palestine on one side, the Syrian Golan Heights on the other side, and southern Lebanon on the remaining two sides. Later, the Lebanese Army took it over from the French until Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and started using it as an interrogation center. In 1985, after Israel partially withdrew from southern Lebanon but not the area surrounding Khiam, it was turned into a detention center and became known as the “Khiam Detention Center”, although the public mostly referred to it as the “Khiam Prison Camp”.
As a jail and torture center at the time Amer Fakhoury commanded it, the Khiam Detention Center consisted of five buildings, each of which comprising twenty rooms. The area of each of the so-called prison-group rooms did not exceed two meters in length and one and a half meters in width, in which five to six individuals were crowded. The solitary rooms did not exceed ninety centimeters in length, width, and height, each. The jail included five buildings, one of which was used to torture and detain female prisoners, while the other four were used for men. The number of collective cells was sixty-seven while individual cells were approximately twenty. Jail buildings spread around a central courtyard, used among other purposes, for public torture.
At some point during Fakhoury’s tenure, upward of three thousand detainees came to be jammed in the prison’s insufficient space, in another form of torture. They, at times, included four hundred women, many children under the age of twelve, as well as elderly people over seventy. Quite a few of them were killed under torture. Amer Fakhoury was the commander of the Khiam prison camp during most of these atrocities, specifically from 1986 until 1998.
On May 23, 2000, as the Israeli forces hastily withdrew from southern Lebanon to adjacent Israel and most members of the Southern Army Militia tagged along, village dwellers in southern Lebanon stormed the Khiam Detention Center and released the 142 prisoners who were left there in their locked cells, without food and water.
Later, during the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, Israel’s air force bombed the so-called Khiam Detention Center in an effort to erase this modern-day “Auschwitz” from the world’s memory. It failed.]
Biography of a butcher called “Amer Fakhoury”
—————
During his administration of the Khiam Detention Center between 1986 and 1998, Amer Fakhoury either ordered, supervised, or physically and personally committed the most horrific types of physical, moral, and psychological torture.
Under questioning in 2017 at the Directorate General of General Security in Beirut (hereinafter the “Security Directorate”), he readily admitted during interrogation by this Lebanese governmental agency, that he had been the commander of the Khiam Detention Center from 1986 to 1998, and that the torture of detainees was being carried therein throughout that period, pursuant to his orders or under his supervision, including electrocution through a military field telephone that produced bursts of high voltage electricity when its handle was rotated. Fakhoury also admitted having ordered the attachment of detainees from a pole in the courtyard in cold winter nights, confining them in small rooms less than a cubic meter in volume for extended periods, and beating them in various ways all over their bodies, amongst other torture methods. Also, Fakhoury admitted having practiced torture himself on various occasions and in different forms.
Fakhoury further admitted that he used to periodically meet with Israeli officers and officers from the Southern Army Militia members (also called the “Antoon Lahad Army”, Lahad being the commander who succeeded Saad Haddad), at the Militia’s Marjayoun barracks, and that he used to visit occupied Palestine for various purposes, including for weekly shopping.
Amer Fakhoury also admitted that after the Israeli army completely withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, he fled to Israel and from there traveled to the United States of America with Israeli identification papers.
In addition to the crime of dealing with an enemy state of Lebanon, namely Israel, Amer Fakhoury raped a female member of his extended family for which he was indicted in 1992 by the Lebanese judiciary but is yet to appear in court for trial. In that regard, Fakhoury argues that the matter was settled “familially” within the “unified family”!
By way of specific examples although not exclusively, Amer Fakhoury bears full responsibility for the killing of 11 detainees while he was in charge of the Khiam Detention Center, starting with Bilal Al-Salman from the town of Markaba and Ibrahim Abu Azza from the town of Bint Jbeil, during Fakhoury’s suppression of an uprising in which detainees requested improved conditions in terms of food and visits. Also, another unnamed Lebanese citizen was transferred to Marjayoun Hospital after the uprising, where he died as a result of inhaling gases from the smoke bombs used in the repression.
As for Ali Abdullah Hamza from the town of Al-Jumaimah, Fakhoury personally tortured him by attaching him to a pole in the courtyard of the prison, where he beat and flogged him throughout the night until he died at dawn. In the morning, Fakhoury ordered Hamza’s body to be transferred to the trunk of his own car and he alone transported the body to a place still unknown to the children of the deceased after decades. ln fact, Fakhoury’s driver later deposed before Lebanese authorities, that Fakhoury had contemporaneously confessed to him that he killed Hamza and transported his body, per above.
Moreover, Fakhoury’s personal bodyguard deposed before Lebanese authorities that Fakhoury tortured the Lebanese activist Soha Bishara, which deposition supported the details she had published in her memoirs regarding the torture she received in Khiam’s prison.
Additionally, many former detainees in Khiam’s prison have provided international organizations in Geneva and elsewhere in the world, with details of the human rights’ violations to which they were subjected during the tenure of Amer Fakhoury. In these testimonies, they described in detail the various methods of torture that Amer Fakhoury personally, as well as through his underlings, practiced on them, not the least of which was depriving them from eating and drinking for extended periods. These victims of Fakhoury still suffer today from the effects of the physical, moral and psychological torture to which he subjected them.
In fact, Fakhoury’s cruelty raised so much international concern at the time that it prompted the Israeli authorities to repeatedly disavow and publicly condemn it, but without taking any action to put an end to it.
During his stay in the United States of America, Fakhoury applied three times through the Lebanese Embassy in Washington to renew his Lebanese passport, but the Security Directorate, charged amongst other legal duties of issuing passports, refused to renew it. Instead, he was offered by the embassy’s staff, in accordance with the law, a “Laissez Passer” document allowing him to enter Lebanese territory in order to settle his legal and personal affairs. Fakhoury, however, preferred to later enter Lebanon on September 4, 2019, weeks after he became a US citizen using his newly issued US passport, believing, perhaps, that possession of an American passport would erase his criminal record and protect him from legal procedure. Immediately upon Fakhoury’s entry into Lebanon, the staff of the Security Directorate, also charged with border admissions, detained his American passport due to the fact that he did not have an exit document from Lebanon having illegally left to the U.S.A through Israel in May 2000, per above.
After interrogating Fakhoury in accordance with Lebanese law, the Security Directorate’s staff arrested him pursuant to a judicial warrant issued by non-other than Judge Peter Germanos, thus legally surrendering him unto the custody of the judicial authorities in order to be later tried in accordance with the laws of the Lebanese Republic.
Today, as part of its demand for justice, the Foundation that bears Fakhoury’s name claims that he suffered from malnutrition and torture at the hands of the General Security’s staff, then headed by Major General Abbas Ibrahim, and that his confessions in its so-called “prison” were made under torture.
In reality, there are no “prisons” per se in the Directorate General of General Security, but rather a detention center supervised in cooperation with Caritas and the International Red Cross. These two international organizations conduct a daily “patrol” through the center. Also, every detainee is subjected to a physical examination by Caritas immediately after his or her arrest.
In further response to Fakhoury’s allegations that his confessions were taken under torture in the Security Directorate, come to mind the contemporaneous forensic doctor’s report that mentioned none; the internationally documented testimony of his prisoners; as well as the confessions Fakhoury had made to his driver years before, per above; which all prove, individually and in the aggregate, that Fakhoury’s confessions are true and the allegations that he was tortured in the Security Directorate are nothing but fabrications.
In more detail, Fakhoury spent only 21 hours in detention at the Security Directorate. After these 21 hours, he was physically transported to the military court’s prison, a legal action also based on a decision by the same Judge Germanos. Before transferring him to the military court’s prison, Fakhoury was again examined by the doctor assigned by Caritas to the Security Directorate’s detention center, who again did not indicate any signs or complaints of torture in his report. As the military court’s prison’s staff took physical and legal custody of Fakhoury, the handover was supervised by a forensic doctor who completed a medical report confirming that Fakhoury had not been subjected to any type of torture at the hands of the Security Directorate’s staff, contrary to all the current claims of the Fakhoury Foundation.
In November 2017, the military court transferred Fakhoury to the Military Hospital’s prison. From there, and at the request of his lawyers, he was at one point transferred to the Hotel Dieu Hospital, under police guard. In January 2018, he was transferred to Our Lady of Lebanon Hospital, where he stayed for several months, during which his wife, his lawyers, his family, and the US embassy visited him and constantly reviewed his health file, as documented in the hospital’s records.
Given the above, why does the Amer Fakhoury Foundation so brazenly misleads the American public by falsely claiming that Amer Fakhoury was subjected to torture in the Lebanese Directorate General of General Security, while all the above evidence which proves the opposite was provided to the American embassy in Lebanon a while back?
Additionally, the Amer Fakhoury Foundation currently glorifies the judge who took the decision to arrest Amer Fakhoury in 2019, namely Peter Germanos, who disingenuously now hints, almost five years later, that he was under media pressure to do so back then!
At any rate, “justice” for Amer Fakhoury, even of the distorted type pursued by the so-called Amer Fakhoury Foundation, cannot be achieved by abusing the Lebanese Directorate General of General Security through leveling accusations of torture and malnutrition on it. The Lebanese General Security Directorate is an institution known to the Lebanese public and the international community for integrity and trustworthiness of its members of all ranks.
Moreover, during his tenure, the former Director General of General Security, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, contributed to the liberation of many imprisoned Lebanese, Arabs, and foreigners, including the kidnapped nuns of the Maaloula Monastery and American citizens Adam Basma and Sam Goodwin. Major General Ibrahim was granted the James Foley Award by the U.S. government for being one of the most prominent hostage advocates. He also received the Grand Star Award from Albania as a token of gratitude for his success in freeing through negotiations numerous children and women from captivity thus returning them to their country, as well as for many other successful humanitarian undertakings. How can there be summer and winter in one institution, one cannot but ask?
Therefore, justice for Amer Fakhoury must be the justice worthy of a ruthless torturer, and nothing but, because otherwise, justice itself will wonder how can there be justice for the torturer before there is justice for his victims?
Finally, a troubling question remains: Why did the United States of America, the superpower that is the guardian of democracy and peace and the bearer of the flag of justice in the world, grant its citizenship to an avowed criminal like Amer Fakhoury who bears the blood of so many innocents on his hands?
