Here in this case, the UAE authority cowardly committed cruelty and discrimination against a victim of police brutality. On the other hand, both the courts in Abu Dhabi, including Supreme Court, the legal court of appeal, were fully satisfied and praised the conduct of the victim throughout the judicial proceedings.

A businessman from India, Jabir’s office was ransaked by the police and  money and documents werer looted. Jabir was chained and tortured and later confined to an underground police station where his rutheless torture continued. Later he was taken to central prison of Abu Dhabi. There he was arbitrarily detained for a year.

The crucial part of this case, as recognized by the court, it was the handiwork of a police officer for personal gain. The police officer accepted his guilt in the court. The other two policemen involved in the case declared, that they were misguided by the police officer. The court instructed the authorities to take steps against the police officer who was guilty.

In the wake of the judicial findings by the Court, all the assets illegally taken away should have been restored to the victim; his former status and position should have been restored and he should have been adequately compensated for the mental agony and suffering as well as pecuniary losses and loss of his dignity.

Unfortunately, the police officials acted in total defiance of the findings and the verdict of the UAE Courts. They resorted to high handed behaviour by deporting Jabir back to India in total disregard of the pronouncements made by the highest Court of the land.

Jabir endeavoured to seek justice against the high-handed action of the police officials and the Government of UAE under which they were functioning. No relief whatsoever has been given despite all the efforts taken for obtaining justice.
The gruesome details are narrated in Jabir’s Testimonials.
(http://www.uaeprison.com/jabir_case_justice_on_trial_updates.htm)

AN EXCERPT FROM THE JUDGMENT :

Verily the Islamic Law and the entire Positive Laws have honoured man and protected his freedom, his honour, his property and his soul. Hence, if a man was killed, while protecting these, he is considered to be a martyr. And limitation of his freedom without any rights is an unforgiving crime and the same is mentioned in the provisions of articles 2 and 3 of the Penal Procedures Code. And it is proved in this case that the policeman along with the plaintiff went to arrest the accused and to limit his freedom…

Legal Court of Appeal, Abu Dhabi, UAE (Full Text)
(http://www.uaeprison.com/english.htm)
Legal Court of Appeal, Abu Dhabi, UAE: Judgment – Arabic (Full Text Arabic)
(http://www.uaeprison.com/arabic.htm)

So it’s particularly odd that I’ve just received a text message welcoming me to the United Arab Emirates. “Enjoy the best network coverage and other unmatched services only with Etisalat,” it says. “Enjoy your stay in the UAE!”

The explanation lies just over the hill, at a place the locals call “Arabiya”. It is a safari camp complete with a mansion, a runway capable of taking large jets, a fleet of off-road vehicles and, evidently, a branch of the UAE phone network. This is the field headquarters of Ortelo Business Corporation (OBC), a safari company that does not advertise in brochures or on a website. Set up in 1993 by a UAE defence minister close to the Dubai royal family, it exists so that Gulf sheikhs and millionaires can play in the north Tanzanian wilderness, over an area, Loliondo, that is larger than Hampshire.

This sweep of low hills and savannah is just one of many tracts of land that the dollar-hungry Tanzanian government has pawned to foreign investors. The country’s “development strategy” says there must be a million tourists by 2010 – and it seems that officials will do anything necessary to make that happen. One quarter of the country has been earmarked for “conservation”. Generally this means development for safari tourism, with the people who live on the land in question often forcibly excluded by the government.

A few miles across the hills from Arabiya is a new enterprise, run by a different, rather more high-profile safari company. The Enashiva Nature Refuge is to be a hotel and camping development on 12,000 acres, planned by an award-winning US eco-tourism company, Thomson Safaris. While Thomson (which is no relation to the British holiday company) boasts of its philanthropic credentials, locals claim it has banned the Masai and their herds from their traditional grazing and watering grounds. Thomson denies this. “Pastoralists have always been given access to a spring during the dry season,” it says. But more important, according to the semi-nomadic herders, is the right to move cattle through the land to seasonal grazing grounds. Thomson discusses these issues with a committee of local elders, but for two years the Enashiva border has seen shootings and violent confrontations between herders, Thomson guards and the police.

Liz McKee, the British general manager of Thomson’s Tanzania operations, told me that the project would conserve the lands and the animals. Personally, she didn’t think the local pastoralists would be able to go on living as they have for centuries: “There ain’t enough land,” she says. “I don’t see that the Masai can continue just grazing hundreds and hundreds of cattle till the end of time.”

McKee has little respect for some aspects of Masai tradition. She particularly objects to their polygamy and their attitudes to women, such as marrying-off 12-year-old girls.

“It’s very hard,” she says. “I don’t see any reason to uphold their way of life.” Yet Thomson’s website, like every safari company brochure, features the Masai in their red and purple robes, as part of the $6,500-a-fortnight experience.

Here in the heart of Tanzanian Masailand, you can also see what looks like the systematic destruction of the culture and livelihoods of Africa’s most iconic tribe. Elegant, clever and maverick, the Masai have fascinated adventurers since the mid-19th century. With Egyptian cheekbones and chivalric warrior codes, the nomadic Masai have been the backdrop to a bookshelf-full of white person’s fantasies of Africa, from Ernest Hemingway to Peter Beard. But now they are being turned into a ghetto race, unwanted in Africa’s new Disneylands. Some of the many foreign-owned tourist companies have been complicit in the Tanzanian government’s parcelling up and flogging off of the lands over which the Masai roamed, evicting families in their hundreds from parks. In July and August, according to NGOs, hundreds of Masai farms were burnt by policemen in Loliondo, after herdsmen hit by drought had moved cattle on to the land leased by OBC. “A Masai is good for a tourist’s photograph, useful to carry your bags to the camp, or even to guide you to see the animals,” says Moringe ole Parkipuny, a grand old Masai rights campaigner, and Tanzania’s first Masai MP. “But in the end the animals are far more valuable than people.”

If proof were needed of his gloomy verdict, it comes in north Tanzania’s honeypot destination, the mountains of Ngorongoro. Here, the Masai are faced with eviction by the government in their tens of thousands, for the sake of the 25 rhino that are the star attraction of the Ngorongoro crater.

Ololosokwan is also to be found in northern Tanzania. A backwater village six hours’ drive from the nearest tarmac road, it is a Masai trading post, and humming with gossip when we arrive. Rumour has it the Sheikh of Dubai himself is expected to arrive at the Ortelo Business Corporation’s ranch in the next few days – which accounts for the hard-looking Arab men in a numberplate-less 4×4 we saw in a roadside café. Also visible are the red berets of Tanzania’s feared Full Force special police. When important visitors arrive in Arabiya – according to local gossip – a carpet is rolled out all the way from the runway to the palace. We want to photograph this – but locals are nervous. “People are arrested when they go near the place. OBC have guns.”

The Sheikhs and their friends drive Japanese off-road vehicles at high speed through the bush and they shoot at the animals. No living thing, it appears, is safe, even in Tanzania, a country that sells itself to the ever-growing safari market as an eco-tourism destination, where “harassment of animals is avoided”. A district councillor in Ololosokwan, the nearest village to Arabiya, told me that OBC’s licence permits only five lions to be killed per season. But then, who’s counting? He cannot. The area is closed to journalists and NGOs, and the locals have been warned by the police that even to speak about OBC will get them into trouble. A request to OBC’s local agent for an interview was not answered. Discreetly, people in the villages tell us about “the Arabs” and their bizarre colonisation of Loliondo district. For six months every year, they say, they have to submit to the Arab managers’ orders about where and how they take their herds. If there are disputes with OBC over the land, Tanzanian policemen punish the villagers with beatings. A Masai herdsman told me that he’d seen traps set to catch leopards alive, which is apparently allowed under OBC’s unique deal with the government. An Arab tourist gave another herdsman a cola and then shot the guinea-fowl gathered around his cows. It took him and his cousins all night to round up the frightened cattle. Other accounts tell of OBC using helicopters to round up wildebeest for the guns, and of wounded animals being left in the forest.

These things are terrible to the Masai: they despise people who kill wild animals for pleasure. To keep livestock on the dry, unyielding lands they range as wide as possible. That is not easy in what becomes a free-for-all shooting gallery. Last summer a 29-year-old Masai died, run over accidentally by an Arab tourist’s vehicle, according to the authorities. But the herdsmen with him insist he was shot first, and then the vehicle ran over his body deliberately. There is no evidence to support the allegation, but the Masai are highly suspicious of the autopsy report.

OBC does some good work: in May, it donated sacks of maize towards a famine relief effort in Loliondo. It pays several villages 25m Tanzanian shillings (about £14,000) each for the disruption caused by the hunting. In Ololosokwan they refused the money. “We weren’t consulted when the Arabs were given the hunting bloc,” said Kirando ole Lukeine, one of the elders. “So this village wants nothing to do with it. We were told we must obey the government but it’s just another trick to take land from us.” Another Masai elder told me: “We feel like refugees in our own country.”

Along the gouge of the Great Rift Valley, through Kenya and Tanzania, lie arid lands and great grass savannahs – home to the biggest concentration of large wild animals in the world. The Masai, leading their goats and cattle from one area of grazing to another as the seasons shift, fit in well with the life cycles of big game. But Masai don’t eat wild animals – they don’t eat much except goat, beef, milk and blood. They only kill the great predators for ritual purposes, or when threatened by them.

But this symbiosis, long recognised as efficient by ecologists, doesn’t fit with modern development strategies. In Tanzania particularly, the pastoralists have been pushed out of their richest grazing lands to make room for tourists – often with disastrous results, both for the landless people and for the ecology of the new parks. Governments, or some government officials, have got rich: Tanzania, which in 2008 ranked joint 102nd out of 180 countries on the list of the world’s least corrupt countries, earned $9.3m in 2002 from hunting licences alone. (Repeated attempts to get the Tanzanian government to comment on this story were ignored.) Very little of that money appears to have been spent on the communities that host the hunters: the poverty levels are among the worst in East Africa and much of the main road to Ololosokwan seems to be not indistinguishable from a river bed.

In Tanzania, the process of removing pastoralists from the plains started in 1959, when the British colonial government made the great grass sea of the Serengeti – in Masai the name means endless plain – a human-free wildlife reserve. They did a deal with the Masai, a fairly honourable one, it seems, compared with what was to follow. The clans agreed to leave the plain and take possession of the adjacent volcanic highlands of Ngorongoro, famous for its enormous rhino-haunted crater. Here, the colonial administrators ruled, the Masai clans could live in perpetuity, with full rights to the grazing and water.

Then, in 1961, a Tanzanian government took over. More national parks were created, and evictions followed. In 1973 the government of Julius Nyerere went back on the deal the Masai had done with the British, and excluded them from the crater of Ngorongoro. At the heart of Nyerere’s socialist view of land ownership was a belief that all land must be productive. The pastoralists, although responsible for producing almost all the nation’s beef, were not productive in the modern agricultural sense. They were shiftless, ungovernable and “uncivilised”. The government banned their language (it is still forbidden in schools, which may account for the high level of Masai illiteracy) and their clothes, the famous shukas in red, purple and blue. Nyerere even ordered the women to put on underwear.

The Masai in the Ngorongoro conservation area cling on to the remains of the land the British promised them for ever, but in droughts they have to beg for water for their cattle from the luxury hotels that have been built on the crater rim. More of these are planned, despite objections from the international conservation bodies who monitor the area. Kempinski is the latest luxury hotel brand hoping to join the Serena chain, and others. The Masai have been told to make room; so far, 2,000 people have undergone forced eviction.

Very few benefits of tourism have flowed to the people who own the land. No management job in the Ngorongoro conservation area has ever gone to a Masai. But they may sell beads, and dance for the tourists at the Serena. Today, 70% of the people live below the poverty line, and 15% of children do not survive to the age of five. But a third of a million tourists visit their land every year, earning the government-run park authority $10m.

The huge plains and hills of Ololosokwan and Loliondo are one of the world’s most remote places – eight hours in a 4×4 from the nearest tarmac. They look vast enough for everyone. But the reality is that the Masai are painfully squeezed between national parks and tracts of land owned by foreign investors. The Dubai concession, unsafe for grazing for the six months of the hunting season, is just a few miles from the Serengeti national park, where any cows that stray will be seized by the authorities. And beside that is the land that the American owners of Thomson Safaris have renamed the Enashiva Nature Refuge. The word means “happiness”, in Maa: the locals smile at the irony of that.

Lesingo Ole Nanyoi’s enkang, the little village of cow-dung huts and thorn-fenced paddocks where his extended family is based, lies right beside Enashiva. For as long as he can remember – and he was born here, 34 years ago – his family grazed and watered their 200 cattle on the stretch of land. It was, as far as they understood, common land, a watering place and a route for the migrating cattle herds that existed long before anyone established land rights in Tanzania. For a couple of years the government-controlled national brewery company had grown a little barley on a small area of the grassland. No one ever objected to the cattle herds.

But in 2006 they found that the brewery had sold the farm to Thomson – one of the longest-established luxury tour companies in Tanzania. Thomson came up with a plan for a hotel, safari camps, shops and, of course, the “nature refuge”. The award-winning Thomson sells encounters with the Masai and other “Tanzanian friends”, but at the beginning of 2008 its guards, reinforced by armed police, began turning the herds away from their tribal pastures.

Liz McKee, told me there would be jobs available on Enashiva, which is expected to begin operations next year. Thomson also plans to set up an independent not-for-profit organisation that will assist communities on conservation and development efforts. McKee reminded me that Thomson was widely praised by conservation groups for its brand of ethical tourism; indeed, earlier this year it was named by National Geographic as one of the top 10 “Best Adventure Travel Companies on Earth”. Thomson has also co-sponsored a conference on philanthropic tourism.

McKee invited The Observer Magazine to visit Enashiva and interview its local manager, Daniel Yamat. Before going, I asked Lesingo Ole Nanyoi if he would like a well-paid job in the hotel. “No!” he said. “That would not be possible.” Lesingo’s speech is slow and slurred, the result of a police bullet that shattered his jaw during a confrontation at Enashiva, in April last year, when guards and the police tried to confiscate the family’s cattle. He sounds like someone who has had a bad afternoon at the dentist, but the injury left him with a mess of ugly scars beside his chin, and his jaw is still so weak he cannot chew. “The life of a Masai is his cattle. It gives us all we need, our food, our shelter. To stop me keeping cattle would take my breath out.”

Lesingo is a tall, very dark man, solemn and still. He is a junior elder, and the father of four young children by his two wives. He wears a beaded necklace with a disc of mother of pearl, bracelets, and beaded bands above his knees. The great distended hoops of his earlobes are looped for convenience over the top of his ears. Lesingo had to sell five of his best bulls to pay for his hospital treatment, at 300,000 Tz shillings each (£160). Seven of his family were arrested in the same fight.

Angry confrontations occur with the unarmed Thomson guards all the time, Lesingo and other herdsmen told us. Often cows are confiscated for a day. If the police are called the herdsman are arrested and have to pay bribes to be released. In Soitsambu village, a fear-filled place, old Masai men beg for change to buy alcohol alongside spies working for the American tourist company.

Other stories emerge from the three remote villages bordering Enashiva. Two herdswomen claim they were beaten in one fracas last year; both were pregnant and both lost their babies. We set off one morning with a local NGO, Women Pastoralists Committee, to interview them, but halfway down the track the officer was called on his mobile by his boss and told to turn back. “It’s too dangerous for our work, and dangerous for you, too,” she explained.

James Lembikas, the chairman of Soitsambu village, told me that Thomson’s enforcement of the boundary – and closure of the traditional pathways the Masai would use to access other grazing – had destroyed life in the three villages closest to the land. Up to 4,000 people had been affected: children were unable to get to school and 1,000 families had moved their cattle to other over-crowded grazing, close to the border of the Arab hunting camp.

“Thomson did employ 12 local men as guards, but half of them left when the trouble started,” said Lembikas. (Thomson says it now employs 11 unarmed Masai as wildlife scouts, who would be sacked if they became violent.) Lembikas supports the idea of development, “but the Thomson people and the government have to discuss together how to best use this land. This idea cannot work unless they agree to share the grass and the water.”

Lembikas agreed to accompany us to visit the three blighted villages, but he changed his mind after a phone call from Daniel Yamat, Thomson’s manager at Enashiva. So we rang Yamat and arranged to meet at the disputed “Refuge”. It is a gorgeous rolling plain of grass and acacia trees, framed by low hills, and amazingly empty compared with the bush outside it, where red-cloaked Masai with goats or cattle are visible most of the time. On the ranch we saw only a few zebra and a herd of grazing wildebeest. Yamat told us he could not show us anything or answer any questions. The reason for his invitation became clear 10 minutes after we left the site, when we were stopped on the road by the Tanzanian police. We were sent to the District Commissioner, who took our passports and ordered us to be escorted out of the region by an armed policeman and taken to Arusha, the regional capital, for investigation. The DC’s secretary told us they were acting because of a complaint from Thomson about our questions.

Two days later, in Arusha, an immigration official finally gave us our passports back, and apologised. “Those officials up there, they don’t know the law and everything they do is because of politics,” he said.

We weren’t entirely surprised. A brave Arusha-based journalist who has covered the Thomson and OBC stories told me the only way to visit was in secret and to work only after dark: Masai activists are regularly arrested and threatened. After the death at the hands of the police of a Masai leader who had protested to the Tanzanian president about the Thomson development, a New Zealand journalist, Trent Keegan, interviewed Masai victims of Thomson’s policing last year. He was murdered a few days later in an apparent robbery in Nairobi. His friends believe his death is linked to his investigations, but there is no evidence to support that. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists is soon to issue a report on its investigation into his death.

When I told McKee about our expulsion from the district, she told me categorically that Thomson does not pay the police or the authorities. “It’s not in my budget,” she said. And while she agreed there was a regrettable dispute, she said the violence was all coming from the other side – poisoned arrows were shot at visitors by the Masai, she claimed.
Lesingo Ole Nanyoi and others hotly deny this. (Thomson has since invited me to revisit the site. I said I would consider doing so if I could bring local journalists and activists, a request they said they would consider.)

McKee did admit that there was reason behind the Masai’s grievances over the rights to the land – but that the dispute dates from the original acquisition of the ranch and was therefore the government’s problem. Thomson had acquired the ranch legally (paying a reported $1.2m in 2006 for the 12,000 acres). “We’re stuck in the middle of clan warfare and politics,” groaned McKee. What would be best, she said, was for the Tanzanian government to pay the Masai compensation. “We could take the government to court, but we’re not going to do that. We have to stay on the right side of them.” Compensation, though, is not how the Tanzanian government works with the pastoralists. Notoriously, eviction and bullying has long been their preferred way of dealing with troublesome natives.

In the malarial badlands by the Kenyan border, beneath the mountain called Oldonyo Sambu, I met a Masai with a hoe, an unusual sight among a people who usually look down on agriculturalists. But when these people were moved, over the last two years, their cattle did not last long in the alien land. Food was immediately a problem.

In one hut I met Habo Gidagurja, bent over a large flat rock in her twig and mud hut – doing something straight from the Stone Age. With another piece of granite she was slowly grinding dried maize ears, turning them into a rough flour. She let me try – it was back-
aching work, and in a couple of minutes my forehead was wet with sweat. Habo’s hands were blistered from her hand-milling. A widow, it is the only way she can earn a few shillings and feed her two children and baby. They are among 1,200 former residents, mainly Masai, of the Ngorongoro conservation area. In the past two years the Tanzanian government has been serving them with letters ordering their removal to Oldonyo Sambu, a process that the government has assured worried observers from the international community is voluntary. It is not. The people we met said the government had promised each adult two acres to cultivate, financial compensation, a police post, water, tin roofs for their huts, a health clinic and a school. All they got was the latter – but since there is no means of earning money here, hundreds of miles from the tourist trail, few can afford the fees demanded by the teachers. They are 10km over rough tracks from the nearest village.

Most of the younger men have returned, illegally, to Ngorongoro. One of the oldest, a Masai named Merinyeki Leina, shook my hand, grateful for our visit and pathetically hopeful of my power to help. “We miss Ngorongoro. If they told us we could go back, we would now. We could work there. We could grow food. Please tell everyone that if we stay here we will die.”

But if anything, more people from Ngoron-goro will be sent to this harsh place on the north Tanzania steppe. Some 4,000 more people have received eviction letters. The government authority has proposed a reduction of the population of the conservation area from 65,000 to 25,000. There are plans being considered for 14 more luxury tourist hotels, so people can access “the unparalleled beauty of one of the world’s most unchanged wildlife sanctuaries”, as a Tanzanian government brochure puts it. Unchanged, that is, except that 40,000 people will have made way for 25 rhinos and hundreds of thousands more tourists.

“What is the answer?” one young Masai activist asked me in despair. (I cannot name him for his own safety). “People say to me, ‘What has brought so many bad things on us? Are we being punished for our friendship with the British?’ Could the British government persuade Tanzania to respect the agreements made 50 years ago?” I said I thought that was unlikely. “So what shall we do?” asked another activist. “Tourism is a curse to us now. Shall we poison the waterholes? Shall we kill all the animals so this bad time goes away?”

Alex Renton
‘Tourism is a curse to us’The Masai have been herding cattle across the great plains of Tanzania for generations, their nomadic lifestyle helping to preserve the wildlife of East Africa. Now, they are being forcibly evicted so that tour operators can turn their homelands into vast “nature refuges” for wealthy holiday makers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/06/masai-tribesman-tanzania-tourism

UAE Hunting Blocks Maasai, Tanzania.

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Human beings have always enjoyed a privileged position among God’s creations or as the finer products of evolution. They are not always associated with strength. The saying “To err is human” is an acknowledgement of weakness. When the weak are in larger proportions, law enters with its protective correctness. That is implicit in a statement which portrays the law’s visible representative in favourable colours.

The orthodox view has it that the police brought universal benefits, especially to the weaker sections of the society. ( See ‘The Politics of Police’, Robert Reiner- P.53) A more enduring solution for protecting the weak is to empower them. To confer rights on them. When human beings are conferred diverse rights, some rights stand in the forefront.

Many appellations are given to those more important rights. Some of the more basic have been identified now. They are classified as ‘Human Rights’.

The efforts started seriously, soon after the second World War. ‘The founders of the United Nations realized that the denial of human rights and appalling violations that had occurred in Germany and elsewhere were some of the main concerns following the second World War’. That led to the setting up of the ‘Commission of Human Rights’ (’Human Rights for the Twenty First Century’ – P.86).

The passage of time has witnessed assignment of seriousness in the theme and systematic and periodic evaluation of performance in the field. It is no longer doing ‘lip service to human rights in high sounding language’. Doing little or no service in terms of actual decisions is not easily forgiven. That is a healthy sign.

In the process of protection of human rights it is the entirety of people that is to be involved. Members of Parliament and Judges of Courts, no doubt, play their useful part. That is not adequate. This feeling is aptly, expressed with reference to a group which would not generally bother about carping comments. Robert Blackburn states: “Constitutional reform cannot be left to politicians alone – who are essential but not sufficient”.

Freedom from torture was considered as an important aspect of human rights. The immediate background of the orgies of torture which fascist forces unleashed might have been the immediate cause of such a strong reaction. Other rights were also treated as dear and near to a refined soul. ‘Man does not live by bread alone’. He has cultural aspirations. Comforts of a clear conscience and the ecstasy of joy in giving expression to one’s views (it does not matter whether they are obscene or objectionable) were also regarded as prominent.

Exploitation of the weak arising from physical disabilities, social oppression or economic greed was also frowned upon. Human rights, therefore, recognized protection for women and insulation of the child against exposure to evils. The horizon of human rights was expanding slowly but steadily.

Modern life gave many comforts to the fortunate people. Telephone for talking to others by defeating distance, enjoying entertainment in glossy publications or in numerous channels of the electronic media and the like. They were, doubtless, luxuries initially. They have almost become necessities in later times. Interface with such facilities, whether it would be intrusion into privacy or the tapping of the telephone, was treated as unlawful, and enjoyment of uninterrupted and un-interfered experiences was treated as human rights.

Maylong Vs United Kingdom is a classic instance where the court projected the human rights under Article B, even when he had been charged with offences relating to dishonest handling of stolen goods. The march of human rights picked up speed. Earlier the aspiration was only to protect people against destruction. It soon took to other fields like the projection of universal values “which are not less significant to man than that of mere survival”.

Sometimes one may wonder whether human rights had not strayed beyond the boundary marks. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is an old adage. “There will be many among the older generation who did suffer, birched by the strict school master. It is now a violation of human rights. The punishment is treated as a ‘degrading one’. That is clear from a decision rendered in 1978, Tyrer Vs United Kingdom.

The children, however, need not be totally complacent about total insulation from pinpricks, even when sphere thrusts have been averted. That was the view taken fairly recently in 1993. Costello-Roberts Vs United Kingdom. Three whacks on the buttocks on a seven year old boy did not measure up to the level of severity. It was held that the headmaster did not violate Article 3.

Sometimes convictions are rendered in some courts, violating Article 6. That led to a strong reaction from enlightened democracies. Now it has emerged that foreign convictions which violate Article 6 must not be enforced in convention states.

Possibly it is time to have a serious thought about certain countries having economic or material leverage, but totally flouting some of the basic rights. The conscience of the world has not yet reacted effectively, in view of apprehended economic embarrassments. It is high time to think about it with equal enthusiasm as is shown in the areas of gender discrimination or child abuse.

It is possible now to illustrate with specific factual data how such important and essential basic rights are violated with impunity by certain countries. A total deprivation of a person’s property by an arbitrary official or state, is not a lesser violation of human rights than the tapping of the telephone or the stopping of a speech. Right to property, at least in specific situations can be treated as human rights. That has been the concept in important democracies.

It has been observed that the British were “taught by Locke and Blackstone to regard property as the best guarantee of social security”. John Pemble refers to the travel of that concept to India in his book, ‘The Raj, the Indian Mutiny and the Kingdom of Outh’,1809-1859, page 145.

The courts have always been sympathetic towards property rights. Bran Gold stated in 1989 that judges are…. “likely to be more familiar with value of property rights than with social security, more sympathetic to individual acquisitiveness than to community responsibility”.

Yet, even the records of the case of the Delhi High Court would expose one of the worst violations of those human rights in an oil rich country. And that too, inspite of the judiciary of that very state, proclaiming the innocence of an Indian, who toiled in those desert lands, but had been tortured by a wily policeman, to leave the country, but without even a single Dirham from his many million savings of 18 years duration.

Curiously the Indian bureaucrat was fiddling even when an Indian citizen’s house was burning. Thanks to the vision and dynamism, the Human Rights Commission of India sensed the tragedy, and asked the Government of India to explain. It is yet to obey the direction of the Commission to furnish an explanation for the continued inaction. To make matters worse, the Government acted most perversely and in total ignorance of the existence of human rights, when ultimately and belatedly it acted.

The incident is indicative of the illiteracy on human rights even with the ‘think-thank’ in the External Affairs Ministry. It is therefore, appropriate, that an educational exercise on that behalf is undertaken now. Earnest endeavours are bound to bear luscious fruits!

Source: http://www.uaeprison.com/horizons.htm

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(Source: A representation submitted by Jabir P.K., to the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India on Nov.28, 1997)

A bilateral extradition treaty is on the anvil with the Government of India and United Arab Emirates (UAE). At this juncture, this article is relevant and throws some light on its consequent repercussions. It is common knowledge that, hardcore terrorists and narcotic dons after committing grave offences take asylum in these states. Apparently, a treaty of this sort is necessitated to barter the fugitive criminals for proper punishment. But it is regretfully commented that, there is more to it than that meets the eye.

Given the history of extradition and its use with criminal justice system of countries antithetical to ours, it is inevitable that we exercise some caution. It would be unfortunate if the Government is to ignore the plight of its citizens in these countries, while entering into a treaty of this kind. Innocent citizens have been like flies to wanton boys for these oil gods who flog them for their sport rather than faith and therefore the Government should not fail to foresee the consequences of signing such a treaty.

Once a person is extradited, the country receiving the fugitive or the criminal is not bound under law to return the accused. Extradition is not allowed for trifling cases. Even though, it permits any crime carrying the sentence of 12 months or more in either country. Keeping these in view that we should not have any standing extradition arrangements with countries with deplorable Human Rights records and whose criminal justice systems lack confidence.

Many articles and editorials have appeared in various newspapers depicting the land of Arabia as a desert of injustice. Instances of antique terror unleashed on Indians in the Gulf are innumerable. But, unfortunately, many in the media hesitate to publish these tragic episodes due to varied personal considerations. Likewise, many official news stories have been suppressed and what finally scoops up in the front pages of newspapers are unofficial personal experience of those who have lived through it.

Awful treatment meted out to Indians under- trial in the Gulf countries, for no fault of theirs, are increasing over the day. The law and order in relation to the export of labour has always been ignored.
 
Hundreds of Philipino-girls who sought job as housemaids have disappeared in these Gulf states. To make matters worse, their Arab sponsors simply close the chapter by merely publishing in news papers about their disappearance as absconded. When the stories of these unfortunate girls, who were fragmented to small quantities of bones at remote desert land, appeared in the Press of Philippines, this small country stood up against UAE in preventing the execution of a Filipino maid, who was sentenced to death for having killed her Arab sponsor. The stratagem worked dramatically and indeed effected her release.

Abu Dhabi central jail is overcrowded with over three thousand prisoners. In the scorching heat of the desert, within concrete cages, prisoners are made to live in inhuman conditions without the basic necessities of life. These prisoners sustain their life with fermented camel meat and wormy food grains. The heartening fact is that many innocents are made to languish here under the banner of criminals, which cast a stigma on them for life. Though these accomplishments seems incredible, a message rings loud and clear for those who are conscious of any violation of Human Rights. For those who don’t, these sentiments would be like pearls of wisdom, quite un oblivious of good things.

With a particular pattern of administration in these countries, it is extremely difficult to escape the clutches of policemen who act in collusion with bigwigs and the resultant prison life. Many fall prey to these, particularly Indians and those belonging to the weaker sections of southern states, who have sacrificed their entire youth and health for the prosperity of that nation and in equal measure helped in earning foreign exchange for this country.

Abu Dhabi the capital city of UAE is abundant with Pubs and Bars. An Indian who consumed alcohol will have to face bitter punishment while westerners committing the same never face any charges. An Indian will be dragged to laboratory with shackled and manacled and cuffed both hands and legs, to test the alcohol content in his blood. What follows subsequently is a prolonged trial and imprisonment, and finally ends in deportation. If in the circumstance the accused is a Muslim, the punishment will be reduced to eighty flogging instead of deportation.

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia many Indians have been executed. Public beheading and shooting are common and therefore ignored by the media. The bodies of those executed are never returned to the relatives even for religious services for the dead. Invariably they hardly informed in time to the Indian consulate, when an Indian national is executed. The consulate personals, who are responsible remain indifferent, without questioning the propriety and attitude of these officers.

Consulates of western countries proclaim their glories in Gulf States within the customary rules of diplomatic agents. They observe and negotiate attentively every occurrence which affect the interest of their home states. Moreover they protect the person, property and interests of their home states. Seldom are their citizens charged under penal provisions even if they committed grave offences in the Gulf.

Able and sincere workforce are lavishly available in India unlike any other country in the world. Naturally they have been more attracted to the construction activities that taking place in Gulf countries. Advertisements in Indian dailies are prime example of it. But this is only a temporary phenomenon. These Indian labourers will be mercilessly thrown out after their requirement. In October 1996, a law was passed by Saudi Arabia to the effect that, no employment would be given to non-Muslims. Later, when many projects in that country were stalled due to lack of certain workforce, they had to do away with this piece of xenophobia.

It is explicitly clear from the attitude and actions of Gulf states, that they consider Indians in a slavish manner. Indians employed here belong to varied sections of the society, many of them work-men, quiet often skilled work-men, who have given the Diwans (Rulers) and the opulent, good quality cheap labour to build their multi-storied mansions. Every segment in the society of that country has benefited and utilized in profusion the expertise and sincere services of Indians.

It should be noted that they work under compelling conditions of life in the hot desert land. Despite these goodwill intentions of Indians the basic freedom cherishable to humanity are deprived to them.

In short, the truth can be summed up as Extradition is possible only between ‘commendable’ states, that is, towards countries in which the minimum standards of the state of law are respected. If ignored it would be like the Aspidistra, a plant which requires no attention till it breaks its pot, and when done, it needs to be put in a fresh compost. The innocuous extradition treaty would crave attention only when it breaks human sensibilities.

A government which hesitate to observe even the basics of natural justice, a police department together with the public prosecution promoting extortion and an upper class society which ridiculously disobeys the Court verdicts, represent a totally uncivilized legal system, which prevails in United Arab Emirates.

The bitter experience of the writer’s life and his first-hand knowledge of the realities are ample illustrations that go into the very heart of the matter.

The writer was a General contractor in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. When a court favourably proceeded in his civil suit of a building contract, a local who was the opposite, in collusion with police-officials trespassed into his office premises and threatened him to withdraw the civil suit. The writer refused to yield such a demand. Consequently, his entire office was ransacked and valuables looted.

Thereafter, the writer and his brother were framed under false criminal charges and taken to the central prison. He and his establishments suffered huge losses for not allowing him to have meetings with any person or communicate with the outside world. His case was taken up in trial only after five months.

The Court listened to the evidences of eye-witnesses saying as to a policeman was holding an iron bar of one meter length in his hand, threatening anyone who came near the office premises of the accused and was shouting “Indian, Pakistani and Bengalis all are thieves and procurers ”

The judges were much moved by the massive evidences before them which established beyond doubt the orchestration of the police and the dishonest deals of the local man. The Court acquitted the writer and his brother and ordered an investigation into the crime committed by the local man and the police.

To avoid embarrassment the prosecution filed an appeal, and on the same day the writer and his brother were granted bail. However, despite the acquittal and the bail they were not released from prison. Later, a full bench appellate court affirmed the decision of the trial court. It further reiterated the condemnation of the prosecutor. An excerpt from the appellate judgment as follows :-

” Verily the Islamic law and the entire positive laws have honoured man and protected his freedom, his honour, his property and his soul. Hence, if man was killed while protecting these, he is considered to be a martyr. And limitation of his freedom without any right is an unforgiving crime and the same is mentioned in the provisions of articles 2 and 3 of the penal procedure code. And it is proved in this case that the policemen along-with the local went to arrest the accused, without any right and curtailed his freedom”.

The good number of witnesses from different nationalities who did not care the threat of local police and public prosecution dared to explain the facts, were unusual occurrences in their country and this indeed helped the court. But since the opportunity to protest is not permitted in their judicial system, all these efforts remained in vain. This writer and his brother continued languishing in jail and after a period of one year they were deported back to India.

There is no room for doubt that, this was a blatant violation of Human Rights. It is a country where its own judicial pronouncement is treated as worthless sand.

Mr. Justice V.S. Malimath, member of the NHRC said recently, “Human Rights are inherent, universal and inalienable and a human being is born with these rights, each country needs to work on itself more and bother about the rest a little. He added that, “The source of Human Right violation is the vicious human mind and the behavior and the thinking and value system of the people needs to be changed”.

It appears that, these ideas were not part of the so-called experts in foreign affairs department. However, it should be remembered, the observation of the Courts that the man does not survive solely on for bread. It is when the culture accomplishment, blissful knowledge and artistic values are there to support his life to attains completeness.

(Source: A representation submitted by Jabir P.K., to the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India on Nov.28, 1997)

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The UAE has more than two million camels and camel races are among the most popular sports events in the country. The camel races take place every winter, from October to April on various tracks throughout the UAE. His Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, along with other rulers of the emirates, attends most of the races.

Camel owners are continuously encouraged by Sheikh Zayed, which includes financial incentives, prizes that include luxury cars, four-wheel-drives, mansions, yachts, cash and gold sword. One of the major events, the Zayed Grand Prize camel races, is being held at Al Wathba race track, a large 10km track, about 45km from Abu Dhabi city. Major races are also held at the Nad Al Sheba Camel Race Course in Dubai.

The jockeys are usually young boys, two to seven year olds chosen for their light weight. The beginning of the races marks a festive season for the UAE’s people who are usually accompanied by traditional music and singing to the Arabian drum beats. The green, red, black and white national flag of the Emirates flutters atop high poles that line the road leading out from town.

Human rights organizations (Not permissible in the UAE) continued to express concerns that in the UAE, the lives of young boys are being put at risk for the entertainment of spectators at camel races. Information provided by them stated that very young boys would continue to be used in camel racing despite the fact that this was illegal.

The new rules published by Emirates Camel Racing Federation (ECRF) in June 2003, stipulated that any camel jockey must be aged 15 years or more and weigh at least 35kg. Although, the rules are being ignored and the allegations remain that the Emirate government has acknowledged that many racers are too young and weigh too little but avoid stopping the traffic of slaves because they themselves are camel and slave owners.

CAMEL KIDS

Children, usually abducted or sold voluntarily from, where else, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to camel racing syndicate in the UAE. The weight of the jockey is crucial to the success of the venture, so young boys; even two year olds are imported! South Asian boys in particular are recruited because they tend to be the cheapest, weigh less and tend to scream louder at a higher pitch than most adults, causing camels to run faster.

The tiny riders are bound to a camel’s back, often using Velcro fastenings. But sometimes the kids slip off and either get trapped underneath the camel or are trampled. It is not uncommon for children to fall off or get dragged along, sometimes to their deaths, according to a report from the London-based human rights group Antislavery International.

A Pakistani boy who worked five years as a camel jockey, starting at age 4, remembers the race as noisy and dangerous, where more than 50 camels with screaming children strapped onto their backs would run. He personally saw about 20 children die, and more than a dozen injured every week. He recalls: “There was this one kid whose strap broke at the beginning of the race. His head was crushed between the legs of the running camel. Once the race has started it cannot stop.

Many of these under-aged riders have been left to die from the appalling injuries suffered on the desert race courses without any medical treatment. The camels are valuable assets worth millions of dollars, instead the children are viewed as cheap and expendable.

Read More on The Shocking Violations of Children’s Rights

http://www.uaeprison.com/child_rights_news.htm

http://www.ansarburney.com/childSlavery.htm

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The news media in the UAE, the sole Internet service provider (ISP) Etisalat and Internet based content providers, all face stringent legal controls on  expression and access to information. A study report, OpenNet Initiative notes that UAE relies on American software (SmartFilter) to implement its filtering, and points out that UAE’s system suffers from considerable over-blocking that prevents its citizens from accessing a significant amount of Internet content on a variety of topics.

Professional hackers are employed to deface websites

The repressive regime in the UAE supports predatory, private companies for their hacking activities.  In Phrack magazine, Dr. Crash explains that computer technology is being misused not by hackers but by governments and corporations.

UAE Hackers Assaulting Websites

The coordinated hacking attacks against human rights content sites, which would probably be supported by the UAE (Abu Dhabi) regime is a great concern.

These hired goons are taking on a bigger role to invade server farms, breaking into more secure networks than ever before, mainly to deface websites.

Several sites of Western, Israeli and Asian Web sites have been defaced last year, this includes attack against ‘uaeprison.com’ Web server and it’s networks.

See a photo image of inserted file at: UAE Hackers Assaulting Websites

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Abu Dhabi  Emirate is primarily a vast desert area (It occupies 67,340 square kilometers or 86.7% of the total area of the UAE) with about two dozen islands in the coastal waters, including the island where the city of Abu Dhabi (Previously called Milh or Salt) is located.

The Emirate was poor and undeveloped and its economy was based primarily on fishing and pearl diving along the coast and on date plantations and camel herding in scattered oases inland with part of the population being nomadic.

In 1939, Sheikh Shakhbut, the then ruler of Abu Dhabi, granted the first of several oil concessions on his territory. When oil was discovered in Abu Dhabi in 1958, economic matters began to improve. The first commercial field entered production in 1962. And Abu Dhabi was on its way to become very rich.

On August 6, 1966 Sheikh Zayed succeeded his eldest brother, Sheikh Shakhbut Bin-Sultan Al Nahyan, the traditional ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1926, after the latter was deposed in a bloodless palace coup and proclaimed itself in power.

Earlier from 1946, Shaikh Shakhbut assigned Shiekh Zayed to govern Al Ain as governor of Al Ain, Abu Dhabi’s eastern province until he deposed his brother to become the emir of Abu Dhabi. In 1953 Sheikh Zayed made his first visit abroad, accompanying his brother, Sheikh Shakhbut to Britain and France.

When Britain announced in January 1968 that it would withdraw its military presence in the Gulf, Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoom, the then-ruler of Dubai, held a meetings and discussed on border disputes and co-operation with its tribal neighbors.

On the 2nd of December 1971, a federation of six emirates (Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain) formed the United Arab Emirates [UAE]. Sheikh Zayed was elected president and Sheikh Rashid was elected vice-president. Shortly afterwards, Ras Al Khaimah decided to join the federation, which officially took place on the 11th of February of 1972. Two of the Trucial states, Bahrain and Oman, chose not to join the federation.

Sheikh Zayed had been re-elected as president at every five-year intervals by the Supreme Council Members. These elections were not by popular vote, there is no democratic institutions exist in the UAE., he infact appointed by the other six ruling Sheikhs that sit with him on the Supreme Council. To make this as a ‘federal statutes’ of the country, Zayed utilized the oil revenues of Abu Dhabi to fund projects to the other six emirates as well.

Sheikh Zayed was considered one of the wealthiest men in the world. Zayed’s fortune estimated at around US $30 billion a year. The source of this wealth could be almost exclusively attributed to the immense oil wealth of Abu Dhabi Emirate,  that he accumulated for himself and his family.

He invested part of the wealth into projects to transform Abu Dhabi into a major city. One of his weddings landed in the Guinness Book of Records for being the most expensive in the world. Sheikh Zayed’s critics point out that it was not his own wealth that he was distributing, but the nation’s.

Sheikh Zayed advocated dialogue as the means to settle the row with Tehran over three strategic Gulf islands (Abu Musa) which Iran seized from the UAE in 1971. The islands remain solidly in Iranian hands, despite over three decades of UAE diplomatic initiatives.

Zayed had played a major role in the formation of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, (GCC) grouping the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman, was founded at a summit conference held in Abu Dhabi in 1981.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the UAE was identified as a major financial center used by al-Qaeda in transferring money to the hijackers (Two of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE citizens) the nation immediately cooperated with the United States.

On 3rd November, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was appointed as the new President of the United Arab Emirates to continue in the footsteps of his late father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

Sheikh Zayed had more than forty-five other children, although most of them were not involved actively in politics.

Read More at:  Sheikh Zayed an Anti-Hero or Villain? 

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The caliphate’s military strength was concentrated at Hormuz (The Strait of Hormuz). Strategically sited at the mouth of the gulf, its authority extended over ports and islands of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The strategic importance of Hormuz, however, did not survive the appearance of Western powers, initially the Portuguese who came to the gulf in the late fifteenth century after Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the route to India via the Cape of Good Hope. The Ottomans and the Iranians also tried to dominate the gulf but faced opposition from local tribes in Bahrain and Muscat, reluctant to cede authority over their territories, which by then were the most important areas on the coast.

Increasing British involvement in India beginning in the late eighteenth century quickened British interest in the gulf region as a means of protecting the sea routes to India. Before British intervention, the area was notorious for its pirates and slave trade and was called the Pirate Coast.

The principal challenge to Britain arose from the ‘Al Qawasim’ (Qasimi forces) a tribal confederation originating in the area of the present-day United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The ‘Qawasim’, who amassed a fleet of about 900 vessels, demanded tribute for the passage of merchant vessels and were regarded as pirates by the Europeans. Between 1809 and 1820, British sea power gradually brought about the destruction of the ‘Qawasim’ fleet.

The British defeated the Qawasim’ in 1819, burning their ships and the town of Ras al Khaimah. This in turn led to the signing of agreements with Britain by the ‘Qawasim’ and other Sheikhs which suppressed the piracy and slave trade in the gulf region.

In 1820 a peace treaty with the British government, followed by other agreements such as the Perpetual Maritime Truce of May 1853. Under the Exclusive Agreement of March 1892, the Trucial sheikhs agreed not to enter into any agreements or correspondence with other powers, receive foreign agents, or cede, sell, or give any part of their territory to another government and to abstain from piracy.

In return, the British government assumed responsibility for the foreign relations of the emirates and promised to protect them from all aggression by sea and to lend its support against any land attacks. Before the end of the century, Britain extended protection to Bahrain and Kuwait; Qatar entered the system after it repudiated Ottoman sovereignty in 1916.

The strategic importance of the Persian Gulf became increasingly apparent as the oil industry developed in the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran all claimed some of the territory of the gulf states during the years between World War I and World War II, but Britain’s firm resistance to these claims enabled the emirates to maintain their territorial integrity without resort to arms.

Except for a small force of the British Indian Navy to ensure observance of the treaty conditions and maintain maritime peace in the gulf, Britain abstained from direct military involvement. As the wealth of the gulf’s oil resources became clear, the size of the British military establishment expanded.

By the end of the 1960s, Britain had about 9,000 men in Oman, Sharjah (an emirate of the UAE), and Bahrain, where British military headquarters was located. The Trucial Oman Scouts, a mobile force of mixed nationality that Britain supported and British officers commanded, became a symbol of public order in the UAE until Britain’s withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971.

When Britain announced that it would withdraw from the Persian Gulf, the Foreign Office assumed that the UAE would include the Trucial Coast as well as Qatar and Bahrain. Those later two emirates, however, refused to join the UAE and became independent states when Britain left in 1971.

Ras al-Khaimah also sought independence, but it lacked the resources and the international support to survive on its own. (Ras al-Khaimah joined a few months later.)

During 150 years of British rule, (After World War II the British granted internal autonomy to the sheikhdoms. Discussion of federation began in 1968 when Britain announced its intended withdrawal from the Persian Gulf area by 1971.) the sheikhdoms of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain and Fujairah merged to form the UAE on December 2, 1971, under President Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi, one day after Britain ended its military presence in the area. Ras al-Khaimah joined the federation in 1972.

Unlike any other Middle Eastern state, the United Arab Emirates is a federation, consisting of seven tribally-based (The UAE has six principal tribes spread throughout the federation: the Bani Yas, the Manasir, Al Qasimi, the Al Ali, the Sharqi-yin and the Nu’aim. ) emirates that controls the southeastern portion of the Arabian peninsula south of Bahrain and Qatar.

Today the UAE is composed of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al Khaimah, Fujairah, Umm al-Qaiwan and Ajman.

Source:  UAE History

(http://www.uaeprison.com/history.htm)

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The United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its permissive business environment, has emerged as an important locus of criminal activity. It’s also becoming a more important transit avenue for drug shipments from Southwest Asia on their way to Turkey, Europe, and Africa.
 
Drug traffickers, terrorist groups, and organized crime groups have established their criminal and money-laundering networks in the UAE and conduct major financial transactions. The UAE is also a major center for underground banking hawala networks and drug trafficking tied to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

There is extensive smuggling of contraband through Dubai, into whose ports more than half of the containers shipped to and through the UAE arrive.

According to the international shipping industry, UAE seaports are handling nearly 5 million containers per year, 2.8 million in Dubai alone. More than 70 percent of containers arriving in UAE ports are in transit and are not inspected by customs officials, making them an attractive shipping option for criminals trafficking contraband through the region.

Dubai is believed to have been one of the most important conduits for Iran’s nuclear technology acquisition program, according to U.S. court cases and interviews with experts in the field.
According to sanctions experts and numerous U.S. court and regulatory cases, Iranian front companies uses Dubai to evade U.S. economic sanctions on Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. The UAE doesn’t recognize those sanctions.
Osama bin Laden’s operatives still use Dubai, United Arab Emirates as a logistical hub. The recent arrest of an alleged top al-Qaeda combat coach is the latest sign that suspected members of the terrorist organization are among those who take advantage of travel rules that allow easy entry.

In 2004, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a Pakistani suspected of training thousands of al-Qaida fighters, was arrested in the UAE and turned over to officials in his homeland.
The father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has acknowledged heading a clandestine group that, with the help of a Dubai company, supplied Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and
North Korea.

UN officials have accused Victor Bout (A Russian Smuggler Victor Vassilyevich Bout) of using the United Arab Emirates as a permanent base using many “flags of convenience” and sub-contracting arrangements for his aircraft to facilitate illegal arms and diamond smuggling activities.
UAE has many ties to 9/11. About half the $250,000 spent on the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to al-Qaida terrorists in the United States from Dubai banks, authorities said. Al-Qaida money in Dubai banks also has been linked to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Half of all applications to buy U.S. military equipment from Dubai are from bogus front companies, officials say. “Iran,” adds one U.S. official, “is building a bomb through Dubai.”
Although the UAE was aware that terrorists and other international criminals had laundered money through the UAE, and that it was the center for terrorist operations, it did little to address the problem despite, providing material support to Al-Qaida, Hamas and other designated terrorist organizations.

Full Report Available at:-
 
http://www.uaeprison.com/spying_issue_stop_port_deal_uae_connections_terrorism.htm

(Human rights are given prime importance in our socio-political life. It would be proud privilege and primary duty of the Governments, press and responsible persons to come to the rescue of innocent citizens against a mighty state repressing every human rights and depriving the victim of his/her very sustenance).

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