Tag Archives: 2019

2019: Hervin Khalaf, Rojava politician

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One year ago today, Rojava political figure Hervin Khalaf was killed by summary execution.

A Syrian Kurd whose family counts several martyrs to that people’s long struggle for self-determination, Khalaf (English Wikipedia entry | French was a civil engineer in Al-Malikiyah at the tip of Syria’s furthest-northeast salient wedged between Turkey and Iraq. It’s a heavily multiethnic part of the country; the Assyrian singer Faia Younan hails from the same town.

Amid the ongoing civil war that has fractured the map of Syria, Al-Malikiyah has since 2012 been part of Rojava, a de facto (albeit legally unrecognized) independent heavily-Kurdish polity that has unfolded an appealing secular social revolution featuring women’s rights and democratic devolution. Khalaf personified that vision, fired by the future she was making with her own hands; in an obituary, a friend recalled her rising at 5 in the morning and working until midnight, everything from diplomatic wrangling to teaching mathematics to children. She became the secretary-general of the liberal Future Syria Party.

Rojava has been menaced on all sides throughout its brief existence: initially by the Syrian army, which eventually withdrew amicably to allow both parties to focus on other threats; by the Islamic State; and — of moment to this post — by neighboring Turkey.

Turkey’s long-running conflict with its own Kurdish populace just across the border was of course a concern for Rojava and the Kurdish militias that supported it. When the United States withdrew its forces from northeast Syria in 2019, it laid Rojava open to Turkish invasion — which occurred on October 9, 2019. Days into that attack, an allied local militia of Sunni extremists stopped Khalaf’s armored SUV at a roadside checkpoint and summarily executed both she and her driver, Farhad Ahmed. The murder drew worldwide outrage.

While Rojava’s prospects seemed grim indeed in these days, Russia — stepping into the void as the Kurds’ great power patron — brokered a deal with Turkey that has prevented the region being overrun entirely.

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2019: Nine for assassinating Hisham Barakat

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Last year on this date, nine men purportedly involved in the 2015 car bomb assassination of Egyptian prosecutor general Hisham Barakat were hanged at a Cairo prison.

Barakat had prosecuted thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters of the elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a military coup in 2013.

“A monument to unfair trials in Egypt” in the words of Amnesty International, this case compassed 28 total death sentences,* supported by the exercises of Egypt’s feared torturers. “Give me an electric probe and I’ll make anyone confess to assassinating [the late President Anwar] Sadat,” was the videotaped courtroom quip of Mahmoud al-Ahmadi, who was one of those noosed on February 20, 2019. “We have been electrocuted so much we could power Egypt for 20 years.” Other defendants described being hung upside-down, menaced with knives, forced into stress positions, and coerced via threats to their family members.

Not particularly aggressive with (judicial) executions prior to the Arab Spring that brought Morsi to power, Egypt under his deposer/successor Sisi has warmed up its gallows and now perennially ranks among the most execution-happy jurisdictions in the world. As of this writing we’re still awaiting Amnesty International’s annual review of global death penalty trends, but in 2018 that organization “credited” Egypt with 717 death sentences and 43 executions. Those figures respectively were second in the world (behind China) and sixth in the world (behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and Iraq).

* According to Amnesty International, 13 of the 28 convictions were in absentia (although at least one of these 13 has since been repatriated to Egypt). Of the 15 whom Egypt convicted in the flesh, six had their sentences reduced on appeal.

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2019: Wei Wei

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Japan this morning hanged a Chinese man for a 2003 robbery-murder.

With two other Chinese nationals, Wei Wei robbed and murdered a clothier in Fukuoka Prefecture, along with his wife and two young daughters ages 11 and 8 — scoring ¥37,000 in the process. All four were strangled or drowned, and eventually discovered dumped in Hakata Bay, weighted down with dumbbells.

According to the Japan Times,

The two accomplices fled to China where they were arrested. One of them was executed there in 2005 and the other was given a life sentence.

Wei’s death sentence was finalized in 2011. Prior to the murder, the three had been involved in various robberies.

In a statement released on the same day, international human rights group Amnesty International’s Japanese arm lambasted the execution of Wei, noting that it went ahead while he was seeking a retrial.

“Appealing for a retrial is part of the processes stipulated in the criminal procedure law,” the group said.

“They should have begun a process for suspending the execution while he was demanding a retrial. Failing to do so runs counter to the international human rights law.”

Wei Wei is reportedly the first foreign national hanged in Japan since 2009

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2019: Ali Hakim al-Arab and Ahmad al-Mullali, Bahrain opposition

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The Gulf state Bahrain shot three men this morning, including two young Shia activists whose condemnation became a worldwide cause celebre. (The third man was an unnamed individual convicted of killing an imam.)


Left: Ali Hakim al-Arab, right: Ahmad al-Mullali

The majority-Shia island, home to American and British military bases, has been ruled by the Sunni House of Khalifa since 1783. In those two-plus centuries, this dynasty has achieved Croesus-like wealth for itself and disproportionately directed the country’s vast oil revenues to a class of predominantly Sunni elites.

This simmering grievance exploded during the Arab Spring era in the form of a 2011 uprising; though these protests were violently squelched by troops requisitioned from Bahrain’s allied Gulf petrokingdoms Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, protests and opposition have continued ever since.

Many of the political prisoners arrested in this crackdown or subsequently were housed in Jau (or Jaw) Prison, notorious for overcrowding and torture. This prison in turn has become the target of numerous actual and attempted jailbreaks in the 2010s, with outside supporters trying to help imprisoned Shia dissidents escape.

The most daring and deadly of these was the January 1, 2017 raid by armed regime opponents that (temporarily) freed ten prisoners. The gunmen, who reportedly prepped for the operation by scouting the prison and environs with drones, slew a police officer during the escape.

Throughout the 2010s Bahrain has met every exertion of its opposition by heightened repression. Just weeks after this jailbreak, it extended military tribunals to civilian cases, a chilling threat to every dissident. And it made a massive example of the people who were allegedly involved in the Jau Prison outrage, both the escapees and the outside activists — all bracketed together under the expansive rubric of “terrorism”. (Bahrain judges have ruled that mere “moral pressure” can supply the violence necessary to qualify an act as terrorism.)

The result was a mass trial of 60 alleged jailbreak participants. There were two acquittals and 56 sub-capital sentences; Ali Hakim al-Arab and Ahmad al-Mullali earned the headlines with death sentences for killing an off-duty officer (not the one shot during the jailbreak). Most of those convicted also had their citizenship stripped into the bargain.

Both men submitted “confessions” under heavy torture, including beatings, electric shocks, having nails ripped out, and possibly even moral persuasion.

Human rights organizations around the world raised alarms yesterday with the ominous news that the men’s families had been summoned to visit their doomed relations at Jau Prison; in London, an activist scaled the Bahrain embassy to unveil a banner demanding clemency.

“One of Bahrain’s darkest days,” said Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy director Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei in a statement. “It appears that the Bahraini government planned this meticulously, timing the executions to coincide with US, EU and UK legislative recesses in order to avoid international scrutiny. These crimes only happened because of the unconditional support lent to dictator Hamad by Washington and London.”

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