SPOTLIGHT
NOVEMBER 6, 2000

The authors of the report were Ahmed karaoud from Amnesty International, Tunisia, Ina Tin Iversen from Amnesty International, Norway, Elizabeth Hodgkin and Claudio Cordone from the International Secretariat. The report appeared in the July 2000 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The following comes from an eyewitness report by an Amnesty International delegation who visited a notorious South Lebanon prison after the Israeli pull-out in May.

We arrived at the Khiam detention center, on a windswept hill overlooking the town of Khiam in southern Lebanon, on May 29, We drove there with a number of former detainees we had visited in the morning in their homes in the villages of Rmeish and Ainata.
Only six days before our visit, this was still a frightening detention center, with its takes of torture, degradation and hoplessness--filthy hoods, relentless interogation through beatings, repeated suspension from an electricity pylon, dousing with water, and electroshocks-one recent addition seems to have gbeen a lie-detector machine.
Only a few months ago detainees were sometimes still taken to Israel from Khiam and back. Detention in crowded, dark and dirty cells followed interrogation. The waiting started, with minimal exposure to daylight, bad food and rare contact with the outside world-and this only in recent years.
Then, all of a sudden, around mid-day on May 23, there was the dramatic liberation. No jailers showed up with the keys to the cells, they actually ran away from the prison to join other (SLA) members streaming to the border to seek refuge in Israel, as Israeli troops themselves rushed to the border.
In a scene almost from another age, we were told that the people of Khiam, acting out of the momentum created by the hurried and confused Israeli withdrawal, went to the detention center demanding the liberation of the prisoners. The SLA jailers negotiated a safe passage for themselves out of the prison and left, leaving much behind, and no one was hurt.
All 144 remaining detainees came out, many left their few belongings behind. For the first time, they could also see without terror the places and some of the instruments of torture that the SLA abandoned in their panicky flight.

Former prisoners accompanied us, as we saw the filthy hoods, many made of thick blue material, scattered around. We also saw a metal grid, roughly built on the face of a wall, in what we were told was the main interrogation room-at the foot of one of the watchtowers.
This was also reminiscent of another age. Prisoners Ni'ma Daqduq and De Gaulle Boutros showed us how they were tied to the grid and beaten. This is where the electroshock machine was apparently kept, although, perhaps not surprisingly, it is no longer there.
They also took us to the electricity pylon placed in a small enclosed courtyard, where so many were tied up, stripped to their underwear and, with a hood over their heads, were beaten or doused with water.
As the former prisoners related this experience to us standing next to the pylon, other visitors gathered around to listen, many clearly moved. The prisoners related this experience to us standing next to the pylon, other visitors gathered around to listen, many clearly moved. The prisoners themselves were being affected, as we saw in the case of Najwa Semhat, who was returning for the first time after her release six days before, with her daughter and husband-himself a former detainee-especially when she faced her cell with memories all too fresh.
But they were all incredibly brave, patiently telling us what had happended to them, and often repeating it to journalists and others from among the hundreds, possibly thousands, of people coming to see the detention center.
Beyond the reality of the prisoners, there is that of former jailers and their masters. The crimes committed in Khiam were of the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law-in shor, war crimes.
Together with the responsibility of the SLA, there is the responsibility of the state of Israel, which is fully accountable for the arbitrary detention, torture and other abuses committed in Khiam. Repeated denials of this never rang true and sometimes seemed more of an attempt to dissociate Israel from the worst excesses officials knew were being committed in Khiam.
Last year Israel admitted, in a high court case to which Amnesty International's information had contributed, that Israel paid and trained the SLA guards, and even that their personel assisted with polygraph tests.