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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Jun 07 2010 - 11:03:25 EDT
"The threads of an Israeli case, being leaked selectively in the Israeli
media, argue that 60 to 100 ''hard-core'' activists had been embedded on the
Mavi Marmara. They included Turks, Afghans, Yemenis and an Eritrean,
experienced in hand-to-hand fighting"
http://www.smh.com.au/world/there-was-a-lot-of-blood-in-the-stairwells-and-then-the-sound-of-ammunition-hitting-metal-changed-again-20100604-xknm.html
"There was a lot of blood in the stairwells and then the sound of
ammunition hitting metal changed again..."
PAUL MCGEOUGH June 5, 2010
Mustafa Ahmet, a 33-year-old Londoner, is irreverent as he recollects
events. Having completed his ablutions, he joined a big group engaged in
morning prayers on the aft deck of the Mavi Marmara as it pushed south in
the Mediterranean. But then a cry went up - "They're here! They're here!"
''They'' were Israeli commandos coming alongside the Turkish passenger ferry
in their assault craft. But the imam leading the prayers was unmoved.
Instead of cutting proceedings short, he seemed to go on forever. As Ahmet
observed the commandos' arrival, "it was like a scary movie - their helmets
were shiny, the sea was shiny and battleships sat off on either side. But
the imam just kept on, holding us in position - it was bonkers."
Elsewhere, the ship was being prepared - people were distributing
lifejackets and taking up positions on the rails. Others were preparing to
throw Israeli sound bombs and tear gas canisters back to where they came
from. Groups had been rostered through the night, to sleep or be at the
ready, and electric angle-grinders were brought in - to cut steel bars from
the lifeboat bays along the main decks.
Despite thoughts of what might lie ahead, there was good humour. Matthias
Gardel, a key figure in the Swedish delegation, was getting used to his
lifejacket, unaware that even though it was 3am back home, his 12-year-old
daughter was out of bed and watching a live-feed video from the ship on the
Free Gaza Movement's website. Seeing him in the video, she shot him an
email: "Dad, take it off - you look ridiculous." To which he fired back:
"It's past your bedtime."
Ahmet was perplexed. "We were a convoy of peace. But the Israeli choppers
overhead, the smoke grenades … all the screaming, all the noise. People were
running all ways and there was blood everywhere. But before we could do
anything it was all over."
But it was not all over. Two days before the Israeli assault - in which nine
activists were killed by Israeli gunfire and up to 30 more wounded - the
bullet-headed Bulent Yildirim, head of the Turkish non-government relief
agency IHH, which in effect ran the flotilla, did an interview with the
Herald aboard the Mavi Marmara.
He explained that Israel could not afford to pay the price of the disaster
that he confidently predicted the Jewish state would make in its efforts to
intercept the convoy.
Failure would add to the litany - the Gaza war and the Goldstone report; the
Hamas assassination in Dubai and world anger over the abuse of the passports
of several nations, including Australia. Now there was this high-seas
venture on the eve of a meeting between President Barack Obama and the
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, which was supposed to dilute the
bad blood generated by the recent announcement of settlement expansion while
the US Vice-President, Joe Biden, was in Israel.
It has been a spectacular week in the Mediterranean, with the Israeli
government being the butt of domestic and international criticism for a
botched mission against an unarmed, humanitarian convoy. Inevitably, there
will be an inquiry - domestic or international; perhaps a mix of the two.
European diplomats in Tel Aviv openly scoffed at the government's claim that
the flotilla organisers had ties to al-Qaeda. One told the Herald that if
such a claim was the government's best opening shot, then it had a serious
credibility problem.
Each side is documenting its case against the other. The flotilla organisers
accuse the Netanyahu government of hijacking their vessels in international
waters - killing and wounding in the process; of then taking almost 700
humanitarians and peace activists prisoner and forcibly taking them to
Israel - and then charging them with illegal entry to the country. There
will be hundreds of witnesses.
But, at an inquiry, the organisers will face government allegations that
steel bars were used to beat troops; that weapons confiscated from captured
commandos may have been used against their comrades.
The threads of an Israeli case, being leaked selectively in the Israeli
media, argue that 60 to 100 ''hard-core'' activists had been embedded on the
Mavi Marmara. They included Turks, Afghans, Yemenis and an Eritrean,
experienced in hand-to-hand fighting.
Yesterday, the Israeli navy claimed three commandos had been dragged
unconscious into one of the ship's halls ''for several minutes'' before
regaining consciousness and escaping. It was not clear whether any of them
were among three commandos who the activists on board the Mavi Marmara have
said were beaten, then sheltered and given medical treatment.
However, the flotilla crisis is not just about Israel. The virtual takeover
of what was a coalition of groups from a dozen countries by Turkish
non-government organisations plays into regional politics.
Long an Israeli ally, Turkey is flexing its muscles regionally, bonding with
Syria, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and Hamas - and at the same time awkwardly exposing
the Arab world's about-faces on the Palestinian cause and, by its
demonstrable actions, almost shaming them to do more.
Tucked in under all this is Washington's role in the region. The rest of the
world was quick to criticise Israel in the aftermath of the flotilla fiasco
but the Obama White House lamely called for an Israeli inquiry, the kind of
response that placates Israel but erodes US credibility in the region.
Some on the ship thought the Israelis did not put enough into their opening
shots.
Espen Goffeng, a Norwegian, said: "I looked over the rail and saw the
zodiacs. It seemed hopeless for the Israelis - they tried to lock on their
grappling hooks but they were hit by the fire hoses and their own
projectiles going back to them."
He wondered if the boats had been a decoy to draw passengers to the rails
while helicopters were used to land Israeli commandos higher on the ship.
But that proved difficult, too, with the first two loads of chopper-borne
commandos captured by the activists.
"The first ammunition I heard striking the ship sounded like paint balls,''
Goffeng said. "But some people said there had to be glass in them, because
of the wounds they caused. There was a lot of blood in the stairwells and
then the sound of the ammunition hitting metal changed again - I decided
that was the live ammunition. People were yelling, 'Live ammo! Live ammo!'"
He said people in the television broadcast area on the aft deck were being
targeted.
"I helped to carry one of the dead down to the second deck and as I returned
a man who had been shot in the leg was being carried down. And when I moved
to the press room, one of the men who worked there was dead, with a hole in
his forehead and half his head missing.
''Then there was an announcement on the PA system telling us, 'Keep calm;
it's over … they have taken the ship and we have lost.'"
Soon after, Israeli soldiers smashed the doors to the press room, the Herald
was told, and then called the media workers forward one at a time. "They
searched us," said a cameraman who had unpicked the waistband of his
underpants sufficiently to create mini-pockets in which he successfully
secreted most of his camera's discs - a strip-search revealed just one.
''They took cell phones and hard drives … and anything else that was capable
of capturing or storing images.''
On the open decks and in the saloons lower in the ship, conditions were far
less pleasant than the press room.
Gardel, the Swede with the fashion-conscious daughter, complained of people
being forced to kneel for hours on the open deck area where prayers were
held. An Israeli helicopter hovered constantly, its downdraft spraying the
prisoners with wind and water, in the circumstances a freezing combination.
"Keeping the choppers there seemed to be deliberate, as though they wanted
to enfeeble us by holding us in such unpleasant conditions," he said.
People were not allowed to go to the lavatories - they were made to soil
their clothes. Gardel was especially horrified by witnessing the experience
of a badly wounded man in his late 50s, who the Israeli troops forced to
remain on the open deck. "Suddenly, his right eye exploded in a gush of
blood - and a blob of something fell out of it."
The Israeli troops had come prepared. The Canadian activist Kevin Neish
found a booklet which he believed had been dropped by one of the Israelis -
it contained images of the key leaders, including Yildirim and the
nerves-of-steel Palestinian woman who headed the Free Gaza Movement, Huwaida
Arraf, a 34-year-old lawyer.
On being off-loaded at Ashdod, Arraf was last seen by the Herald being
frogmarched away from the detainee processing centre where her activist
confreres were put through a chaotic maze of bureaucratic and security
checkpoints.
By the time the ship reached Ashdod, the passengers complained that most of
their cases and other baggage had been strewn on the inside decks.
There was an infectious camaraderie among the protesters on the flotilla -
bound by politics, prayer and song, it was a finishing school for almost 700
new and articulate ambassadors from dozens of countries for the Palestinian
cause. And the Netanyahu government has given them a story to tell. As with
Mossad's assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai in January, halting the
Free Gaza Flotilla was regarded as a tactical success that, in hindsight,
appears to have been a strategic disaster. The cost to Israel's
international credibility and legitimacy is great.
And these new advocates for Palestine are going home prepared - many of the
women prisoners were observed recording detailed accounts of their
experience - with timelines and explanatory graphics.
Launching into their spiel back home, they will be better received than they
might have been last week because of the tenor of the international
trenchant criticism of Israel. The images broadcast around the world,
despite Israel's best efforts, dovetailed with the colourful rhetoric of the
likes of Anne Jones, a former American diplomat and US Army colonel who cut
through efforts by some diplomats to find words with precise legal meanings
to describe what Israel had perpetrated. "The Israel Defence Forces acted as
pirates in shooting at us and stealing our ships in international waters,"
she told the Herald. "They kidnapped us and brought us to Israel; they
arrested and imprisoned us; they paraded us before cameras in violation of
the Geneva Conventions.''
Jerry Campbell awoke at 4am to attend dawn prayers but she had hardly bowed
her head before she was dragged off to a nursing station to help treat four
gunshot victims. Worse was in store for this naif from Queensland's Gold
Coast - "I looked up as I was caring for a wounded Indonesian and saw my
husband being carried in." That was Ahmed Luqman Talib, 20, who had been
shot in the leg. She cut his blood-soaked clothing away but then followed
his instructions to tend to others. "I'm OK," he told her.
She lost count of the number and nationalities of those she tended to - "I
saw two men die out there … the floor was covered in blood and the IV units
were tied to the ceiling with bandages."
Campbell went to and from her husband, who seemed to be deteriorating. "One
man's stomach was opened - his intestines were out and the doctor reached
inside and pulled out some bullets, before pushing everything back in and
wrapping him up," she said. "I don't know if he survived."
Late on the second day in detention, Israeli officials showed 45-year-old
Gigdem Topcuoghe, a Turkish woman, a picture of her dead husband - she
became catatonic. At the Ela Prison in Beersheva, she recounted to her
fellow inmate, the Herald photographer Kate Geraghty, how during the attack
on the Mavi Marmara she had found her husband on the floor. Shot in the
forehead, he was bleeding from his mouth and nose.
"I think of first aid - I need to help him. I checked his breathing … he was
bleeding faster. I gave him some water and started praying for him - I held
him in my arms. He wasn't conscious - I held him tight, but I realised he
was gone when he didn't react in any way, but my husband is not dead - he
will live with and among us."
Several witnesses have recounted in awe how Topcuoghe accepted condolences
briefly - before leaving her husband's body to throw herself into helping
the injured.
Later in Israeli detention, the new widow addressed her tearful friends,
turning to the state of Israel. Describing the assault on the Mavi Marmara
as inhuman, she urged Allah to show the people of Israel the right path, but
added: "May they face more cruelty than we have and when this happens we'll
be there to help them - and to take humanitarian aid to them, just like
centuries back when the Ottoman sultan sent aid and ships to rescue the Jews
from Spanish cruelty …"
Brief as it was, time spent inside the Israeli apparatus was revealing.
Whenever the flotilla prisoners were processed, security and other workers
gathered to gawp - frequently producing mobile phones to shoot happy snaps
of themselves in front of the prisoners.
As a big group of men - your correspondent included - waited in Block 5 at
the Ela Prison at Beersheva for a bus to Ben Gurion Airport for deportation
on Wednesday, a big group of security cadets was wheeled in to stare in
wonderment - licking ice-creams as they did - even as a diabetic among the
prisoners collapsed.
They were looking at the prisoners, but the prisoners were looking at them
and their more senior colleagues who, among themselves, constantly displayed
a brotherhood that seemed to cut across formal institutional structures.
Several Europeans were distressed by the clear distinction the Israelis made
between their ''white'' and ''brown'' prisoners.
The Norwegian activist Randi Kjos, a woman of some refinement, was genuinely
shocked by what she observed. "They treated us with hatred - the old were
made to kneel for long periods and women had to sit with their arms crossed.
Some of the wounded were naked to the waist … many were in shock.
"Palestinians and Arabs were treated very differently to Europeans or
Westerners. Palestinians who asked for anything were belted, pushed around
or treated with contempt. People warned me of the hatred I would see - but
still, I was shocked."
The Norwegian observed that many of the women prisoners were denied a phone
call on the grounds that a functioning telephone ''was broken''' Others were
furious on behalf of many Turkish women who were denied a call home because
they could not satisfy their guards' demand that they converse in English.
At Ela Prison it quickly became clear that the guards were under strict
instructions not to inflict physical violence on the prisoners. In a system
that has thrown up a steady stream of human rights reports on abuse, the
Arab prisoners quickly realised that here was a rare occasion on which they
were almost untouchable. In the circumstances, it was inevitable that the
detainees would taunt the guards. "We're all Palestinians," one of the
prisoners delighted in telling an officer, over and over; while another
guard became visibly upset when one of the prisoners told him, when he
already was upset about another matter: "You're not really cut out for this
job - you should have been a schoolteacher."
Whenever a prison officer clenched his fist in such exchanges, a colleague
would move in and take him away.
But amidst much taunting by prisoners, the refusal to lash out could last
only for so long and at the airport a brawl erupted between deportees and
their keepers, with several of the activists getting on the planes bruised
and banged-up. And as they left a detention system in which some had been
subjected to more than half-a-dozen body searches, many were still subject
to a humiliating, painfully slow strip-search by smirking airport staff as
they quit the country.
At the airport it became clear that the Israeli security forces could keep
themselves on a leash only for so long.
As the Israelis continued to hold Yildirim, the head of the Turkish agency,
until late into Wednesday night, a group of 15 detainees still being
processed through the airport staged a protest when they observed Yildirim
being put in a cell - "so the security guys just attacked us", said Mohammed
Bounoua, an Algerian who complained that he had been beaten three times
during less than 72 hours in Israeli custody.
The ice-cream-licking cadets were seen late in the day at the airport -
roughly dragging a deportee down a flight of stairs, after which they then
celebrated with high-fives, back-slapping and smiling.
The 10-hour wait on the Ben Gurion tarmac and then the late-night flight to
Istanbul were joyous.
Three Turkish aircraft were parked adjacent to Terminal 1 and, as the
Israeli authorities processed passengers at snail's pace, each arrival was
welcomed onto the aircraft with clapping, cheering, crying. There was a
festive, party mood as friends were reunited. There were pensive tears for
those waiting for husbands, siblings, friends who had not been seen for
days.
After several hours on the tarmac, the pilot announced that the Turkish
Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had insisted that none of the aircraft
would leave until all the Turkish activists and the bodies of the dead had
been loaded.
There were bursts of song. One in particular was a chant of praise for the
Turkish leader and the Damascus-based head of Hamas, Khalid Mishal, the
refrain to which was: "Peace and blessings be upon Muhammad."
Sailing south towards Gaza last week, hopping between the boats in the
flotilla, I wondered whether anyone in the Israeli establishment would have
the smarts and influence to draft a response more substantive than the
setting to sea of the Tel Aviv chardonnay set, which was back in the marina
before sunset.
What if Israeli ships met the flotilla at the edge of the Gaza exclusion
zone and escorted it to Gaza City, then stood back as the locals offloaded
its 10,000 tonnes of emergency supplies? Israel could have announced an
easing or even an abandonment of the Gaza blockade and instead found other
ways to deal with its security concerns.
It would have stuck in Netanyahu's craw for a few days but the boil of a
failed policy would have been lanced, and there would be no need for further
flotillas to cause bloodletting at sea. Instead, Israel is keeping the
blockade and the Prime Minister and his ministers are not sure what sort of
inquiry should investigate the flotilla disaster.