The Capital Times, February 21, 2005
Israel stops policy of destroying houses of Palestinians involved in attacks
By Karin Laub
AP Writer
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel will
abandon a decades-old policy
of demolishing the homes of
Palestinian suicide bombers
and gunmen, accepting an army
panel's assessment that the
practice does not deter attacks
and should be stopped, the
military said Thursday.
The decision means an end
to a policy that has led to the
destruction of more than 1,800
Palestinian homes as punishment
since Israel captured the West
Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967
Mideast war, including 675 during
the past four years of fighting,
the Israeli human rights group
B'tselem said.
The destruction of Palestinian homes were put on hold after Israeli and
Palestinian leaders Sharon and Abbas recently declared a truce.
Prison overcrowding forces Mexico to revive penal islan•
By Mark Stevenson
AP Writer
MEXICO CITY (AP) - Bedeviled
by killings, escapes and scandals
at Mexico's prisons, authorities
are trying a number of novel steps
to regain control, including using
soldiers in armored vehicles to
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Human rights groups have
condemned the demolitions as
collective punishment and have
demanded for years that they be
halted. B'tselem says the policy
violates international law.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul
Mofaz ordered the demolitions
stopped on the recommendation
of Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe
Yaalon, the military said, referring
to the tactic as Israel's "legal
right."
"The chief of staff clarified that if an
extreme change in circumstances
takes place, the aforementioned
decision regarding the policy will
be re-examined," the statement
added.
The committee found that house
demolitions generally inflame
hatred, citing only 20 cases in
Photo courtesy of www.chinadaily.com
guard the country's top-security
prison.
But perhaps no measure is as
striking as the decision to revive
a once-dreaded island penal
colony at a time when other
nations are converting such
prisons into nature reserves or
tourist attractions.
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which the threat of demolition
deterred potential attackers or
pushed their families to turn them
in. Militant groups compensate
families of attackers and help
them rebuild, which weakens any
possible deterrent effect.
House demolitions, along with
other army practices such as
targeted killings of Palestinian
militants, were suspended after
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
and Palestinian leader Mahmoud
Abbas declared a truce earlier
this month.
Yaalon concluded that "when
there's more quiet, it's not the
time to use this policy," a military
official said on condition of
anonymity.
Punitive demolitions during the
last four years have left 4,239
Palestinians homeless, most of
them in the West Bank, B'tselem
said. Since 2000, more than
1,000 Israelis have been killed in
bombings and shootings.
The human rights group says
the Israeli military has destroyed
more than 4,000 Palestinian
homes during the current conflict.
Most were razed in operations
to clear away buildings used by
militants as cover for attacks or
to widen security roads. Those
practices were not included in
Thursday's decision.
Palestinian legislator Hanan
Ashrawi said the change in
policy was part of the package
of measures Israelis and
Palestinians agreed to earlier
this month during their Egyptian
closed the only other penal
colony remaining in the Americas,
Mexico announced it would
spend $2 million to revive its Islas
Marias jail.
Island penal colonies have been
used around the world since the
1700 s as remote, escape-proof
places to "rehabilitate" inmates
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summit, where they declared an
end to four years of bloodletting.
The package, Ashrawi said,
was meant to end not only the
demolition of homes, but Israeli
military raids and assassinations
of wanted men as well.
"We think this is the
implementation of one part of
the deal, and we hope they will
implement all the other parts,"
she said.
The three-story home belonging
to the family of Ala Sanakra,
local leader of the violent Al Aqsa
Martyrs' Brigade in the West
Bank refugee camp of Balata,
was demolished last fall after he
recruited a 19-year-old woman
from a nearby camp to blow
herself up at a busy Jerusalem
junction, killing herself and two
Israeli policemen.
Sanakra, a bachelor, had his
own apartment in the family
compound, which was home to
nine people. He said the army
could have demolished his
rooms and spared the rest of the
house.
The demolition "motivated me
to send more people on missions
and gave more motivation to
our fighters," Sanakra said in a
telephone interview Thursday.
He has the money to rebuild
but will not do so because he
fears the army will raze any new
construction, he said. For now,
he rents a room nearby for $lBO
a month. His mother often visits
the pile of rubble that was once
her home and drinks her morning
through hard labor. Most also
tried to be self-supporting and
help settle remote territories.
Almost all gained reputations
for harsh conditions, and almost
none survived.
In the Americas, France
shuttered its notorious Devil's
Island off Guiana in 1946. Chile's
Santa Maria prison closed in the
late 1980 s, Costa Rica's Isla San
Lucas in 1991 and Brazil's Isla
Grande in 1994. Peru dramatically
ended its El Fronton island prison
in 1986: Gunboats blew up most
of the buildings to put down a riot,
killing more than 100 inmates.
Panama is converting its Coiba
Island penal colony into a nature
reserve, exactly what many
Mexican environmentalists had
wanted to do with the four Marias
islands, which lie 70 miles off
Mexico's southern Pacific coast.
Buildings on the Marias colony
were being closed, 80 percent
of the prisoners were shipped
back to the mainland and a
cleanup was under way. But in
December, Mexican officials did
an about-face and sent 150 new
prisoners.
"Given the problems of
overcrowding, underfunding and
corruption, we have to urgently
restructure the country's prison
system," said Public Safety
Secretary Ramon Huerta. "The
first step will be to revive the Islas
Marias penal colony."
The decision reflected Mexico's
struggle with jail overcrowding
and inmates who continue
criminal activities from prison.
On Jan. 14, hundreds of soldiers
and federal police surrounded
La Palma Prison, just west of
Mexico City, after investigators
determined drug lords were
conducting business from the
inside.
The problems have even
touched the remote Islas Marias:
Three inmates disappeared from
the island in January, apparently
escaping with help from a boat or
aircraft.
The revival of the Islas
Marias colony was a blow to
environmentalists like Ramon
Ojeda Mestre, who spent
several years helping direct
the complicated ,cleanup of the
islands, which are home to unique
yellow-headed parrots and brown
hummingbirds.
But while Ojeda called the
decision "infinitely sad," the
prisoners weren't mourning.
The odd truth is that many didn't
coffee there, he said
The policy of hpuse demolitions
is a holdover from the British rule
of Palestine and has been used
intermittently in the West Bank
and Gaza since 1967, peaking
during the first Palestinian
uprising from 1987-1993 and in
the current round of violence.
Legal efforts by human rights
groups to halt the practice have
failed.
B'tselem said that in many of the
demolitions since 2000, adjacent
buildings also were damaged
or razed. In half the cases, the
army never claimed the houses
it demolished were home to
Palestinians directly involved
in attacks, the group said. In
97 percent of the demolitions,
residents received no warning,
the group said.
Boaz Ganor, an Israeli
counterterrorism expert, said
the policy has been applied too
indiscriminately during the past
four years but should not be
halted entirely. The military should
keep razing houses if relatives
of an attacker were involved in
violence or if an attack led to large
numbers of Israeli casualties, he
said.
Ganor acknowledged that
effectiveness was not the
military's only consideration,
and that demolitions are a way
of settling scores and appeasing
public opinion. The army revived
the policy in October 2001 after a
three-year lull.
want to leave. Despite its history
of violence, disease and forced
labor, the colony is a place where
inmates can roam free, build their
own houses, grow food, even
distill liquor.
Ojedarecalled hearing complaints
as the colony's population was
reduced from 3,000 a few years
ago to 600 today. "When we told
some they were going to leave,
they would often cry, or go hide in
the hills," he said.
Panama saw the same thing at
Coiba Island despite a fearsome
past, including the decapitations
of five inmates by other prisoners
in 1998. Many of the final 27
prisoners didn't want to leave, said
Lider Sucre, an environmentalist
who hired one former inmate to
stay as a park ranger in the new
nature reserve.
"While Coiba was a hell for
some, for others it represented
a sort of paradise because here
they had freedom of movement,"
Sucre said of the island 20 miles
out in the Pacific. "They could
hunt, farm, play basketball, do
things they couldn't in a normal
prison."
Prisoners on Mexico's Islas
Marias must contend with
scorpions, snakes, mosquitoes
and, at one time, hard labor on
the salt flats. But Ojeda said a
school, a clinic and church make
it somewhat homey.
Only inmates with good behavior
are sent to the colony. They have
to show up for roll call, but some
are allowed to live with their
families. Others openly brew
moonshine. Children also have
been born on Islas Marias, but
they are sent to the mainland at
age 11, to avoid being corrupted.
Ironically, the penal colonies
sealed their own fate by long
keeping developers at bay.
A penal colony allowed an island
"to remain in its natural state,"
said Panama's tourism chief,
Ligia Castro. In the modern era
of mass tourism, that made them
more valuable as tourist sites or
nature reserves than jails.
Huerta, Mexico's prison boss,
thinks keeping the Islas Marias
penal colony will be compatible
with creating a nature reserve
there.
"We're going to send prisoners
there who have experience in
farming," he said. Though many
of the "farmers" in Mexican jails
are there for growing marijuana, a
crop rumored to grow abundantly
on the Islas Marias.
World
View
By Osman Abdalla
Staff Reporter
oaalo6@psu.edu
Hello world viewers. I recently
saw the quote, "Technology
changes not only what we do,
but how we think."
Do you agree with this?
Think about changes in how we
communicate. Do the advances
in information technology change
us (personally or socially) by
changing how we communicate?
Technology has created a
faster pace of life and changed
the presentation of the scene.
Technology has also added new
properties by which it increases
accuracy and has also eliminated
many hassles. Many people call
today's era the computerized
era.
Now, when I say "computer,"
people might think home or office
PC. However, computers are
included in most everyday tools
you use at home, work, services,
or recreational sites. Think about
your home appliances, your cell
phone, your MP3 player, rides
you enjoy at Hershey Park, the
escalator at the mall, your doctor's
office, and many other things you
see and use everyday.
Just as information technology
has improved effectiveness in
medicine,finance, manufacturing,
and numerous other sectors of
society, advanced computing
and telecommunications have
the potential to help students
to master complex 21 st
century skills. All this has been
accomplished by humans being
machinery. What is ironic is that
humans can invent tools to ease
their life but hardly implement
social values to have an intact
society.
In order to make any statement
about whether technology
changed the way we think, let
us look at the way we learn. The
question is, when a person first
starts to learn things, in the very
beginning when he or she is very
young, was that person able to
argue things or spontaneously
believed what was told? How
long is it going to take for the
person to free the mind of certain
beliefs he or she was told when
he or she was young? Can you
envision earlier generations
and today's teachers' fault by
defining hypotheses as absolute
facts, when young people do not
have the right tools to argue?
Somehow, there are a lot of
adjustments our brains adapted
due to the introduction of the new
technical processes to our life.
Technology changed the way we
think and accordingly changed
the way our society is.
This new world is centered
on multinational corporations,
multidisciplinary researches,
global financial markets, and
the highly concentrated system
of technological research and
development. All these very
modern aspect and terms have
been spawned by globalization
of economy and have completely
depended on the technical
advancement we have
accomplished. Can you imagine
what social changes are going
to occur due to any of these new
aspects and due to technology?
Many theorems that led to
such technical accomplishments
are still hypotheses. Some of
them have been refuted, and
some of them have not. Simply,
because people did not uncover
everything about their own nature
before they decided to advance
technically, we don't have a
perfect society.
What has been accomplished
so far regarding societies since
humans first emerged? The
process of advancing technology
has its losses in the human's
society. If human societies would
progress at the same acceleration
as technology, people would not
need laws to rule their behavior
and no governments to regulate
their freedom by now!
What is wrong? What is the
acute operation we the people
need? When people reach the
point at which everyone is ideal
(supportive, not violent, loving,
and loveable), we will not have
any wars, troubles, controversies
or negative competitions.