Arrested on 17 December 2011 by the Israeli authorities, Khader Adnan began a hunger strike the following day to protest against his arbitrary detention as well as the mistreatment to which he was subjected by his interrogators. After 66 days without any food, his action became the longest hunger strike ever sustained by a Palestinian detainee. Facing the complicit silence of the world, the Palestinian baker felt he had no option but to starve to death if his demand for justice was not heard. On the edge of death, he shed light upon the use of “administrative detention” by the Israelis to imprison Palestinian dissidents. Administrative detention is a special procedure under which a person can be held up to six months without charge or trial and which can be renewed again and again. The justifications of it are strikingly identical to those used by all the countries engaged in the so-called “War on Terror”. The claim is that the very essence of the threat posed by those people does not allow any room for the classical evidence based approach of imprisonment as the survival of the state is at stake. Thanks to Khader Adnan, the world now knows that 309 Palestinians are officially held without charge or trial by the Israeli authorities...

 

Perhaps, shall we also start wondering what sort of treatment is reserved to other dissidents engaged in an independence resistance in other parts of the world. If we do, we will then realise that the very same methods as those employed by the American administration and its allies in their “War on Terror” are indeed used everywhere.

 

In Kashmir, hundreds of people are held by the Indian state under a Public Safety Act which allows to arrest and detain a person on vague allegations that his or her actions would be “prejudicial to the Security of the State” or “prejudicial to the maintenance of public order”. The detainees are then deprived of any access to a lawyer or their families and can remain in that state for years. This goes without talking about the acts of torture routinely practised by the Indian forces, which include electric shocks, suspension to the ceiling, crushing of muscles by prison officers sitting on a bar placed across the thighs, 180 degrees legs split, water torture and sexual abuses as reported by Wikileaks in December 2010.

 

Likewise, the Russian authorities have been responsible for hundreds of enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings and acts of torture in Chechnya. Over a hundred were sanctioned by the European Court of Human Rights.

 

Like the USA, Israel, India and Russia are superpowers. Like the USA, they claim that a handful of economically challenged people who aspire to self-determination endanger their security. Those people have been designated by them as terrorists and therefore their special nature requires a special treatment. The reality is that those countries are guilty of the same original crime: the oppression of a people. Hence, facing the consequences of their crime, they have to resort to the very same methods in order to maintain their position, adding persecution to their oppression: the same causes for the same effects. The perpetrators are different but the injustice is the same.

 

Oppression can only engender dissidence. Resistance is simply the symptom of a disease inoculated by those who claim to be threatened by it. Perhaps, even discussing the way those symptoms are treated, be it enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention or torture, is a sort of failure in itself as little time is then given to cure the actual affliction...