Kurdish activist arrested in D.C.

[Rubyg580@xxxxxxx]

A relevant Item I recieved from the Free Mumia mailing list:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 96 06:48:41 -0700
From: AKIN <akin@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Multiple recipients of list <ats-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: David Korn: "A Washington Arrest"

A Washington Arrest

By David A. Korn

First came the sound of shattering glass. Then the office door burst
openand a dozen beefy men, several with shotguns at the ready,
charged throughit. As he turned from his desk to learn what was
happening a command rangout: "Freeze!" He was grabbed, thrown
face first against the wall, searched, then cuffed and led off to jail.

The date was Friday, April 12,1996. The place was Washington, D.C.,
asmall commercial and office building on upper Connecticut Avenue,
but hemight have imagined himself back in Ankara, or in any city of
his native Turkey. Still, one reassuring thought ran through his mind:
This is America. I won't be tortured.

He was known as Kani Xulam and he was the Director of the
American KurdishInformation Network. In the three years since
he had taken up residence inthe nation's capital and set up AKIN,
as it became known, as a legally registered non-profit organization,
he had become a highly effectivespokesman for the cause of
Turkey's Kurdish minority.

He had come to Washington from Los Angeles, where his parents
and brotherwere established amid a small but prospering Kurdish-
American community. He was tall and slender and though
exceedingly polite and slightly reserved had a warm friendly smile
and a firm handshake. His wire rimmed glasses marked him as
the intellectual his friends knew him to be; if you gave Kani Xulam
abook, they found, he would actually read it and then want to talk
with you about it. He had worked for the Kurdish cause since his
student days onscholarship at the University of Toronto where he
was the most active Kurd on campus, and he represented Kurdistan
at a model U.N. session.

The task he assumed in the nation's capital was far more ambitious.
It wasto make known to the American public and to the United States
government, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the vast
and intricate executive branch, the oppression inflicted by the
government of Turkey upon its millions of Kurdish citizens, the denial
of cultural and political rights, the arrests, the torture and the killings.
It was to argue for a political solution to the conflict between the
Turkish government and the Kurds, instead of the military one that
was being persued by the Turkish army. And to plead and cajole for
a change, even a small one, in the U.S. policy of massively arming
Turkey with the helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks and armored
personnel carriers that were being used in the wanton destruction
of Kurdish villages and the devastation of the Kurdish countryside
in southeastern Turkey.

Kani Xulam's arms were the modem and the fax machine. He
bombarded histargets with press releases, petitions, and newsletters.
At the start he hada lot to learn about how things get done in
Washington, but he learned fast. His was basically a one man
operation and certainly not that of the typical Washington lobbyist.
He didn't sport expensive suits or alligator shoes or Gucci briefcases.
He couldn't afford them. He worked eighteen hour days, lived on next
to nothing, and walked the two miles each way between his office
and his small downtown apartment. He was totally dedicated to the
cause.

He found few friends in the foreign policy bureaucracy of the
executivebranch, ruled, as he discovered, by a long-entrenched
and stubbornlypro-Turkish policy. But he made headway on the
Hill, established wideranging contacts there, even got passed a
Sense of Congress Resolution calling on the U.S. government to
withhold arms supplies and press Turkey to observe international
human rights standards and guarantee democratic political rights to
its Kurdish minority. He joined enthusiastically in the work of
Washington human rights organizations and became a respected
member of that community.

He became a formidable competitor of Turkey's lavishly financed
propagandamachine, a David pitted against the Goliath of high-priced
Washington and New York public relations and law firms hired by
the Turkish government to cast a rosy glow over Turkey's dismal
reality. The Turkish Embassy didn't like it at all. It considered Kani
Xulam dangerously effective. It put out word that AKIN was an
operation run by the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which
since 1984 has been leading an armed rebellion against the
government of Turkey and which the State Department - at Turkish
government instigation - has labeled a terrorist organization. The
Turks claimed that Kani Xulam was the PKK's chief representative
in the united States and, therefore, a terrorist.They wanted AKIN
closed down and Kani Xulam removed from the scene.

Ever since he opened AKIN, the Turks had watched him closely.
Their reviewof his records apparently led them to believe that he
was using an assumed name. Human rights advocates and AKIN
supporters are persuaded that the Turkish Embassy passed this
and other more serious allegations against Kani Xulam to the State
Department's Office of Diplomatic Security and that it was at Turkish
government urging that the Department began secretly to investigate
him. On February 22, 1996 he was put under FBI surveillance. On
April 11, the day before his arrest, the FBI sent an agent in disguise
to his office, an attractive blond woman in her thirties who claimed to
be visiting from Boston and seeking information on the Kurds for a
term paper her nephew was writing.

But the arrest warrant that State Department security officers
produced asthey handcuffed Kani Xulam's hands behind his back,
as though he were aviolent and dangerous offender, spoke only of
his having made false statements on U.S. passport applications.
For someone with no criminal record, like Kani Xulam, the charge
carried a recommended maximum penalty of six months in prison.
For that, federal law enforcement agencies would hardly send a
dozen heavily armed agents to break down doors. What else was
it then that the Turkish Embassy told U.S. authorities they should
expect to find at AKIN's offices? A cache of arms, explosives, or
drugs? Discovering none of those things, federal agents carted off
the organization's computers, files, and even petty cash on hand.

Kani Xulam's faith that, in America, he wouldn't be tortured turned
out to be justified. But he also learned that, even in America, the
rules aren't followed scrupulously and the courts don't automatically
protect the rights of the accused. When he asked to call an attorney
he was told he could do so at the police station where he was to be
taken. At the police station he was told he could do so at the District
of Columbia jail. And at the D.C. jail he was put straight into solitary
confinement. It wasn't until the next day, some 18 hours after his
arrest, that he was able to talk to a public defender attorney and get
her to notify his family in California.

In Federal Court hearings the following Monday and Wednesday,
judges denied his request for release on bail, disregarding both the
fact that he had no previous criminal record and character witness
testimony given by three highly respected members of the
Washington community.

Turkey's ambassador to Washington, Nuzhet Kandemir, exulted
over the arrest and the court's action in denying bail. At a lunch
with reporters on April 17, Kandemir called AKIN a terrorist group
and expressed the hope that U.S. authorities would close it down.
He added: "We have been very unhappy with a lot of activities of
AKIN on a daily basis which were very harmful toTurkish interests
and this administration knows (that) quite well."

Kani Xulam found that prison conditions in America could be as
bad as what one might expect in Turkey. His solitary cell was full
of cockroaches. The bed was a metal frame with no mattress or
pillow (though later he was given a foam rubber matting half his
height). He wasn't allowed to make phone calls or receive mail,
and the jail had no library to draw on. He sat for seven days looking
at the walls and talking with cockroaches that came to eye him
inquisitively.

Still, he was a little apprehensive when released from solitary "into
the general population" (as the prison expression goes). He had
heard stories about prison violence, and the reputation of the D.C.
jail was far from reassuring. His first cellmate was a disturbed
young man in his late teens who at times muttered incoherently
and at other times loudly described the details of making love to
his girlfriend. But a subsequent cellmate, also in his late teens,
turned out to be a follower of Louis Farrakhan. Kani instructed
him in Islamic prayers and in reading the Koran in Arabic and
the young man held him in reverence.

A little over two weeks after his arrest, Kani was packed off to
Los Angeles, where he had filed his passport applications and
where he was to be tried. The trip there was the worst of his time
in jail. It lasted ten days and it turned out to be a kind of grand tour
of the American prison system, a crazy odyssey that took him from
the D.C. jail in turn to more than half a dozen federal and state
prisons in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada and
California before ending up at the federal penitentiary in Los Angeles.

It consisted of long bus and airplane rides shackled to a seat
alongside dozens or sometimes hundreds of other prisoners.
Travel from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma was by Boeing 747; the
Oklahoma prison had its own airstrip and the plane taxied right
up to the prison gate to disgorge its passengers into the care of
waiting guards. At each stop prisoners were searched, fingerprinted,
and photographed. They were routinely awakened at 2 or 3 a.m. to
be "processed" for travel that did not begin until late morning. At
the federal prison in Las Vegas, Kani was put in solitary confinement
after speaking up to calm cellmates near riot in their frustration at
not being fed and allowed to sleep. Unlike the D.C. Jail, however, the
Las Vegas prison had a library. He  read through two thick volumes
and considered his brief stay there almost a pleasure.

But the most memorable leg of the trip came near the end. It was
a six hour bus ride without rest stop or on board access to a toilet.
Prisoners urinated in their seats and the urine sloshed up and
down the floor of the vehicle as it wound its way along the road.

While Kani Xulam was being shipped back and forth across the
country like a piece of lost luggage, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia was considering an appeal filled by his
attorney, Daniel Alcorn, of the lower court's denial of bond. The
Court's ruling was unambiguously sharp. Judges Patricia Wald
and David Tatel wrote: "We cannot but conclude that a serious
error has been made here. A first time offender accused of a
nonviolent crime with strong community ties and respected
members of that community willing to supervise his release in
any manner the court finds necessary...is incarcerated pending
trial, despite the fact that his entire lifestyle and mission strongly
suggest he will stay in place, and his charged misdeed (if, indeed,
he is found guilty) was to falsify information on a passport in order
to remain in this country."

Kani Xulam was released from Los Angeles federal prison on
$50,000 bond on May 15, 1996 and he was taken into custody by
the Immigration and Naturalization  Service (INS) and set free days
later after filing an application for political asylum.

His Los Angeles attorney, Peter Schey, President of the Center
for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, summed up the defense's
view of the government's actions: "...the United States Government's
criminal and deportation charges against Kani Xulam are politically
motivated and were encouraged by the Turkish Government. The
United States Government is more concerned with its strategic
relations with the undemocratic Government of Turkey than with the
human and democratic rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey..."

Even before Kani Xulam's release, AKIN was back in business under
volunteer management. It is still waiting, however, for the government
to give it back its files, computers, and petty cash.

AKIN can be contacted at the following address:

American Kurdish Information Network
2623 Connecticut Avenue NW #1
Washington, DC 20008-1522

Tel: (202) 483-6444
Fax: (202) 483-6476
E-Mail: akin@xxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~akin









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