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Demand freedom for jailed PFLP leader

By Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement on the international campaign to free Ahmad Sa’adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). We urge all of our readers to support this effort.

Fight Back! published an important interview with Ahmad Sa’adat, which can be read at: http://www.fightbacknews.org/2003-3-summer/pflp.htm

Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat:

Take action now

Today, Aug. 1, 2007, the military trial of Ahmad Sa’adat, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), is scheduled to begin at Ofer Military Base in Ramallah, Palestine. This trial has been delayed on multiple occasions, and despite Sa’adat's having been held in custody by the Palestinian Authority under U.S. and British Guard, and then by the Israeli military after their attack on Jericho Prison on March 14, 2006, he has never been tried.

Sa’adat refuses to cooperate with the court, pointing out that it is an illegitimate court enforcing an illegal military occupation, and acts as a weapon of the occupation to persecute and prosecute Palestinian leaders and political activists and to undermine the Palestinian people’s political activity.

We are writing to you to express our concerns regarding this case of a Palestinian prisoner of conscience, Ahmad Sa’adat. Sa’adat, elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been imprisoned since January 2002, first in Palestinian Authority jails under the guard of U.S. and British monitors, and now in an Israeli military prison. Sa’adat, with five other Palestinian political prisoners, was kidnapped from the PA prison in Jericho on March 14, 2006, during an armed Israeli military assault on the prison waged in order to abduct these prisoners.

During his entire time in Palestinian Authority prisons, Sa’adat was never tried or charged. Sa’adat was nominally a prisoner of the Palestinian Authority, but was in fact guarded by U.S. and British guards, at the behest of Israel. The Palestinian High Court of Justice ruled that Sa’adat should be immediately released, as did numerous international human rights organizations. Following his election in January 2006 to the Palestinian Legislative Council, despite growing calls for his release, Sa’adat remained imprisoned in Jericho. On March 14, 2006, the U.S. and British guards assigned to Jericho prison abandoned their posts in order to allow for an Israeli military assault on the prison that ended with the capture of Sa’adat and five other Palestinian political prisoners, the deaths of two Palestinians, and the injury of 23 Palestinians.

Following the abduction of Sa’adat, the Israeli military courts admitted they lacked sufficient evidence to try Sa’adat under more serious charges, and have instead charged him with an array of ‘security offenses,’ political in nature: for example, membership in a forbidden organization, holding a post in a forbidden organization, and ‘incitement,’ for a speech harshly condemning the Israeli military’s murder of the man who held his post before him, Abu Ali Mustafa.

Sa’adat joins over 11,000 other Palestinian political prisoners, men, women and children, held in Israeli jails for struggling for the rights of their people. These 11,000 political prisoners represent political activists, organizers and leaders and the systematic imprisonment of Palestinians has been calculated by the military occupation in order to disrupt Palestinian political life and extend the illegal military occupation.

The military courts trying Sa’adat and the other Palestinian prisoners are entirely institutions of the illegitimate military occupation. They function solely as a means of maintaining that occupation and repressing any and all resistance and opposition to its perpetuation. As such, these military courts are illegitimate entities of an illegal military occupation that has been condemned by every leading international body and human rights organization.

I am asking your organization to highlight the case of Ahmad Sa’adat and other Palestinian political prisoners. The situation of Palestinian political prisoners is a human rights crisis. Palestinian parliamentarians and political leaders and activists are routinely subject to detention and lengthy terms of imprisonment for their political work on behalf of their people. In order to shed light on their situation and create the kind of pressure that is necessary to ensure justice, the voices of international human rights organizations are desperately needed.

I am asking you to take up the case of Ahmad Sa’adat, a Palestinian prisoner of conscience, and all other Palestinian political prisoners, in the interests of human rights, self-determination and justice for the Palestinian people.

Thank you,

The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat

P.S. Please check out the website below and take action NOW.

http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org

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