UNITED STATES: Hamas Chief Prepares to Leave, but Remains Detained

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 7 1997 (IPS) - The U.S. detention of Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook, which has lasted nearly two years, is winding down, but his lawyers say there is still no clear end in sight to what they call a “Lewis Carroll meets Franz Kafka tragedy.”

Marzook, who has admitted to leading the political wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas (‘Zeal’), won a key victory last week when the government of Israel, which accuses him of terrorism, reversed its previous request that he stand trial in Israel.

That reversal in turn has meant that Marzook will no longer be held in detention while fighting extradition to Israel. But, although he asked U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote Monday for immediate release, he will likely remain in immigration detention while the U.S. government decides whether, and where, to deport the 15-year U.S. legal resident.

As Marzook’s lawyer Michael Kennedy puts it, that means that a man “who is not even suspected — let alone accused — of violating any U.S. laws and regulations,” continues to be detained 20 months after he was arrested in New York upon returning from a trip to the Middle East.

In one of the key ironies of Marzook’s case, the Hamas leader, who only concedes to raising funds for the Islamists’ peaceful activities, has now openly asked for his own expulsion from the United States, so that his detention can end. But to achieve that goal, he may have to admit to being a terrorist.

“The ever-resourceful U.S. Justice Department will now say that Dr Abu Marzook can only consent to exclusion if he admits that he is a terrorist — which, of course, he is not,” Kennedy says. “If he dares to refuse to admit to being a terrorist, the U.S. government will happily assume the burden of trying to prove that he is.”

Kennedy, and a growing number of Arab-American leaders, are worried that the immigration proceedings will obscure the desire by both Israel and the United States to keep the Hamas leader in prison during a fragile phase of the Middle East peace process. That is the reason that Israel first demanded that Marzook be extradited to stand trial for terrorism there, although the Israeli government never had enough evidence to try him, Kennedy claims.

When Marzook “called the bluff of both Israel and the United States” in January by ending his legal attempts to fight extradition, Kennedy argues, Israel immediately dropped its own attempt to win the extradition.

“One can only conclude that Israel never wanted Dr Abu Marzook brought to Israel, that the extradition was a clever, cynical ploy to detain and isolate an effective political opponent, and that the U.S. government knowingly allowed, and continues to allow, its processes and laws to be subverted to another country’s political agenda,” Kennedy contends.

“Israel’s request should never have been made,” says James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, a Washington- based lobby. “Did they have the proper evidence? No. Would this (proposed trial) have endangereYH:4e peace process? Yes.”

Sources familiar with the Marzook case say that some of Israel’s key evidence may not have fared well in a trial. Its key Palestinian witness against Marzook, they say, later recanted his testimony and claimed it had been extracted under torture; he also claimed he could not read a confession written in Hebrew that he had signed.

Israel maintains that it has had solid evidence against Marzook but was unwilling to face the risks — including the possibility of Hamas retaliation — if he were to be tried there.

“There is no doubt that Abu Marzook deserves to spend many years in jail until the end of his life,” Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said in announcing the dropping of the extradition request in Washington last week. “On the other hand, we are aware of the dangers and the significance of the project called Abu Marzook.”

Already, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rightist government is confronting a growing crisis over its continued settlement activity in the Palestinian West Bank. As Netanyahu arrived here Monday to discuss the widening rift with the Palestinians over the 1993 Oslo Accords — which Netanyahu wants replaced by new peace agreements — the last thing the Israeli leader wants is new confrontation with Hamas.

Although Marzook has not been accused of any specific crimes in the United States, where he holds a “green card” for permanent residency, U.S. Judge Kevin Duffy last year ruled that he was a part of “the conspiracy called Hamas,” and had granted Israel’s extradition request.

Israel in turn said it would plan to try him for the Islamic group’s terrorist activity, including a wave of suicide bombings that killed dozens of people in early 1996, when Marzook was in U.S. detention.

Despite Duffy’s ruling, few believed Marzook would ever stand trial in Israel. “We knew the last place that he or Israel wanted to be was on trial in Israel,” Zogby says. Israel’s decision last week, he argues, was merely its overdue recognition of that fact.

The question now is where the Hamas leader will go, even if Washington quickly grants his exclusion. Under U.S. immigration law, he could be sent back to the place of his birth (Gaza City, which is now part of the semi-autonomous Palestinian National Authority) or his point of departure before he re-entered the United States in July 1995 (the United Arab Emirates).

Marzook himself believes he will be sent to Jordan, where he has often done Hamas work. Jordanian officials grudgingly conceded last week that they would consider assisting any U.S. request for Marzook to be extradited there. Significantly, one of Netanyahu’s stops in the United States this week is to the Minnesota hospital where Jordan’s King Hussein is staying for a medical examination.

But Jordan may still be a long way off, particularly if Marzook fights any U.S. contention that he is a terrorist and thus delays his own expulsion. “I don’t understand why they haven’t let him go already,” Zogby says.

For some Islamic activists, the case has become absurd in its stubborn lack of a conclusion. “The way I understand it is that he’s begging to leave the country,” says one U.S. activist, speaking on condition of anonymity. But the U.S. government, he notes wryly, is fighting now to keep him in detention here for at least a little longer, even though it has made it clear it no longer wants Marzook in the country.