POLTICAL PRISONERS

French court orders release of Lebanese militant held since 1984

By AFP
November 15, 2024

Abdallah had been sentenced to life in prison 

- Copyright AFP Alexander NEMENOV

A French court on Friday ordered the release of pro-Palestinian Lebanese militant Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, jailed for 40 years for the killing of two foreign diplomats, prosecutors said.

The court said Abdallah, first detained in 1984 and convicted in 1987 over the 1982 murders, would be released on December 6 provided he leaves France, French anti-terror prosecutors said in a statement to AFP, adding that they would appeal.

“In (a) decision dated today, the court granted Georges Ibrahim Abdallah conditional release from December 6, subject to the condition that he leaves French territory and not appear there again,” the prosecutors said.

Abdallah, a former guerrilla in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the murders of US military attache Charles Robert Ray and Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimantov.

Washington has consistently opposed his release but Lebanese authorities have repeatedly said he should be freed from jail.

Abdallah, now 73, has always insisted he is a “fighter” who battled for the rights of Palestinians and not a “criminal”. This was his 11th bid for release.

He had been eligible to apply for parole since 1999 but all his previous applications had been turned down, except in 2013 when he was granted release on the condition he was expelled from France.

However the then interior minister Manuel Valls refused to go through with the order and Abdallah remained in jail.

The court’s decision on Friday is not conditional on the government issuing such an order, Abdallah’s lawyer, Jean-Louis Chalanset, told AFP, hailing “a legal and a political victory”.

– Veteran inmate –

One of France’s longest serving inmates, Abdallah has never expressed regret for his actions.

Wounded in 1978 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, he joined the Marxist-Leninist PFLP, which carried out a string of plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s and is banned as a terror group by the US and EU.

Abdallah, a Christian, then in the late 1970s founded his own militant group the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (LARF) which had contact with other extreme-left militant outfits including Italy’s Red Brigades and the German Red Army Faction (RAF).

A pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli Marxist group, the LARF claimed four deady attacks in France in the 1980s. Abdallah was arrested in 1984 after entering a police station in Lyon and claiming Mossad assassins were on his trail.

At his trial over the killing of the diplomats, Abdallah was sentenced to life in prison, a much more severe punishment than the 10 years demanded by prosecutors.

His lawyer Jacques Verges, who defended clients including Venezuelan militant Carlos the Jackal, described the verdict as a “declaration of war”.

There remains a broad swell of support for his cause among the far left and communists in France. Last month, 2022 Nobel literature prize winner Annie Ernaux, said in a piece in communist daily L’Humanite that his detention “shamed France”.

Jailed Russian poet could be ‘killed’ in prison, warns wife


By AFP
November 15, 2024

Russian poet Artyom Kamardin, 34, was jailed for seven years for reciting anti-war poetry. Fellow poet Yegor Shtovba, 23, was sentenced to five a half year for attending the public reading - Copyright AFP Alexander NEMENOV
Anna SMOLCHENKO

The wife of a Russian poet jailed for seven years for reciting anti-war verses said she was afraid he could be killed in prison after he was sexually assaulted with a dumbbell during his arrest.

Artyom Kamardin was arrested in September 2022 after reciting — on a Moscow square where dissidents have been gathering since the late 1950s — a poem that fiercely criticised Russia’s war against Ukraine.

In December 2023, Kamardin was convicted of inciting hatred and undermining national security. Fellow poet Yegor Shtovba, 23, was sentenced to five and a half years for attending the public reading.

Kamardin, 34, lost his appeal last month and is soon expected to be sent to a penal colony to serve his term.

“I am afraid they will kill him,” his wife Alexandra Popova, 30, who is still based in Russia, told AFP during a visit to Paris. “He is being treated a bit like a Ukrainian. Like a Ukrainian captive.”

In a widely-publicised case, both Kamardin and Popova were beaten and humiliated when security forces stormed their apartment the day after he read his poem, entitled “Kill me, militiaman!”, according to them and rights activists.

The reading took place days after President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilisation, the first such call-up since World War II.

Kamardin’s poem from 2015 is peppered with swear words and takes aim at pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

“Kill me, militiaman! You’ve already tasted blood! You’ve seen how brothers-in-arms dig mass graves for the brotherly people,” Kamardin declaimed near the statue of Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

– ‘Fascist dictatorship’ –

In a statement from jail, Kamardin said poetry helped him reflect on “my homeland’s transformation into a fascist dictatorship”.

“I was born in a free Russia,” he wrote. “Now this country no longer exists, it was killed and devoured by the monster that calls itself Russia now.”

During the raid Kamardin was sexually abused with a dumbbell handle, according to Popova.

Security force members used their phones to record the assault, she said. “There was a lot of blood,” Popova added. Kamardin was then told to go on his knees to record an apology video.

The men also threatened to gang-rape Popova. “At one point they locked themselves in a room with me and pretended to start taking off their trousers,” she said. The couple were also called Nazis.

Amnesty International has said that the details of “his arrest and torture are horrific even against the abysmal human rights standards of today’s Russia.”

Russian propaganda has mounted a campaign of harassment against the couple. “Sit tight, or they will kill you,” Kamardin was already told in jail, according to his wife.

Putin has used the war, now in its third year, to radically transform Russian society.

Independent media outlets have been shut, top rights groups dismantled, criticism of the war outlawed, and dissidents jailed, muzzled or pushed out of the country. Putin’s top opponent Alexei Navalny, 47, died suddenly in an Arctic colony in February.

Popova, who is part of a six-member collective supporting Russian political prisoners, said the country had changed since the start of the war.

Many people now justify “the killing of other people”.

Even if Moscow’s war against Ukraine comes to an end, repression in Russia might not stop, she said.

“Society has become cruel,” Popova added. “People inform on each other.”

The head of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council, Valery Fadeyev, said last month there was no repression in Russia, with just “minimal restrictions” against those who he said “are essentially siding” with the West.


– ‘Only chance to save people’ –


Popova urged Western governments to do everything to help free Russian political prisoners.

She praised the release of 16 Russian dissidents and foreign nationals in a prisoner swap on August 1 and said more such exchanges were needed.

“People die in Russian prisons,” she said, calling them “victims of war”.

“These are the people who oppose what is happening now and they pay for their position with their health and lives.”

In July, Pavel Kushnir, a 39-year-old pianist and anti-war activist, died in detention in the city of Birobidzhan near the China–Russia border.

In April, Alexander Demidenko, a 61-year-old volunteer who helped Ukrainian refugees, died in jail in the southern city of Belgorod.

“Artyom has a chance to get out earlier if there are any exchanges of political prisoners,” Popova said.

“The only chance now to save people from Russian prisons is through exchanges.”

While many Kremlin critics have left Russia, Popova said she had no plans to go. She wanted to keep supporting political prisoners, above all her husband.

“My heart is bleeding,” she said. “I have to be near him.”