Introduction

On 25 May 1998, I arrived home to find a mob of armed Palestinians inside my house, including members of the Palestinian security forces. All my belongings were scattered in the yard outside, and a bulldozer had leveled part of my bedroom walls and roof (pictured right). In this diary section you will find resources and statements related to this event. No "traditional" diary entry with story and photos, was ever published in the Diary.

Statements

• 26 May 1998 - Birzeit University press release: "Birzeit Community gravely concerned by partial demolition of home of Birzeit Webmaster Nigel Parry."
• 26 May 1998 - Birzeit University press release: Press Update (not available)
• 27 May 1998 - Birzeit University press release: "Birzeit University community unites with residents of partially demolished house, while tensions continue."
• 29 May 1998 - See "For the record" below.
• 1 June 1998 - See "How it ended" below.
• 30 June 1998 - See "This wasn't the last time the perpetrators did it" below .
• Relevant articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Photographs

• One of the doors and walls of rooms damaged with a sledgehammer.
• Same room seen through the living room.
• Fence destroyed when mechanical digger drove over it.
• Bulldozed part of room seen from outside.
• Graffitti "god after non" (good afternoon) on living room wall.
• Living room. Hi-res version.
• Living room floor.
• Smashed and damaged window.

For the record

• We were not breaking the law or doing anything unusual by being in dispute with our landlady. On the contrary, we had hired legal representation around a year before the events and had assumed the matter would be dealt with by the law. There were 400 such disputes in Ramallah at the time of the demolition.
  
  
• No legal proceedings had taken place prior to the demolition. No court order was given to permit the demolition. No warning of any kind was given before the demolition.
  
  
• There were two issues here: (1) the tenant-landlord dispute and (2) the demolition of the home and violence. The two should be considered separately. The second rendered the first irrelevant in my mind.
  
  
• Despite the above facts, LAW - the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, claimed at the time that, despite the clear violation of the law, this is a "civil matter" and refused to recognise the case as a human rights issue. Two years later, LAW offered to take up the case against the Palestinian Authority in the Palestinian courts. If this offer had stood while the death threats were happening, this might have actually been useful. At the time, legal proceedings were abandoned for a variety of reasons including the safety of my housemates still living in Ramallah.
  
  
• I do not believe the demolition, death threats, etc., had anything to do with any work on the Internet that I did for Birzeit University. Various reports about "giving webserver space to the Islamic Bloc at the university" are misleading. All student blocs are allowed equal space and the university gives it to them, not Nigel Parry.
  
  
• The Palestinian Authority did not seem to be initially involved in any overt official way, although it is true that some members of its security forces were involved in a personal capacity at the beginning of the events and later in a capacity that remains cloudy. Having said that, Palestinian policemen both drove past the scene and also delayed help while the demolition and destruction of property was going on, despite members of the house running to the police station (300 meters away) and demanding help. The Palestinian Authority was never held accountable for either of these things and no official apology was ever received for its non-involvement (some would say 'tacit involvement') in the events.
  
  
• The Fatah (Arafat's faction) student bloc at Birzeit obediently obeyed the instructions of their friends in the security services and "politically" opposed university involvement in our case. This included printing and distributing a leaflet with a characature that portrayed the events of the demolition as an argument taking place between a husband and his wife, i.e. a domestic matter. This was to be expected, as I myself never held back exposing their corruption and nepotism in student elections (see the election reports in the Birzeit section of this diary, and involvement with the Palestinian security forces. That those reports were the truth, as opposed to their characature, which wasn't, naturally doesn't make any difference.
  
  
• The Israeli government was not involved in any way.
  
  
• Initially, I did not believe that the demolition, accompanying death threats, etc., had anything to do with any writing I have done. I believed that this had been an issue solely about money, investment, and who has the power in Ramallah.
  
  Later on, it became clear that the events were convenient for the Palestinian Authority, which only sporadically got members of the security forces to back off as pressure from the outside world came in. Preventative Security head Jibril Rajoub told one staff member at Birzeit, while he was meeting with him to intervene during the events, that I had "an eight inch thick security file," as if that were somehow relevant to anything. The one cited example report I heard from this file was actually bogus, and was so meaningless that it was a little sad it was included at all.
  
  This diary, printed out is almost 6 inches itself, but somehow I suspect that this was not part of it this wonderful security file! If anyone in the Palestinian Security forces wishes to send me a copy of my 'security file', I would be glad to cover postage costs and offer you a bonus for your troubles. It would certainly make entertaining reading.
  
  At the conclusion of the events, at which we met with the perpetrators of the bulldozing (largely members of the Fatah Tanziim organisation), one made a final comment that "We forgive you for the things you wrote about Fatah on the Internet." Thinking that he was referring to the various press releases about the incident (available above), I told him, puzzled, that "I didn't write anything about Fatah on the Internet." He looked puzzled in response. Later, I realised he was referring to several articles I had written, including about corruption in Birzeit student elections and the Palestinian Authority's assassination of Muhyideen Al-Sharif, which implicated the Preventative Security Service and therefore the mostly Fatah faction whose members it is comprised of. So, in retrospect, the people that demolished my home were -- at least partly -- motivated by my writing about the conflict.
  
  
• Yes, there are several aspects of the events that I still do not feel free to write about, even two years later, for several reasons. This fact remains a new experience for me.

Above: My belongings scattered across the front yard.

How it ended

• On Saturday 30 May 1998, an agreement was reached with the landlady and her representatives to enable resettlement, those directly involved in the violence apologised to us, and we vacated the house.
  
  
• This did not reflect any change of heart. On the day of the evacuation, one of the landlady's agents who was present (a lawyer who was participated in the demolition) remarked to one of our friends (who arrived not knowing that we had already left) that "the settler has gone".
  
  
• Those of us who were at the receiving end of the violence against person and property, and subsequent intimidation, particularly those who remained in the demolished house from Monday 25 May until Saturday 30 May, are not the same people we were before this happened. Many of those who 'merely' witnessed the events - members of the university community, friends of those involved, members of the community in Ramallah, and even passers-by - received the same message of intimidation that was originally intended for a small circle of people.
  
  
• The overwhelming feeling of the majority of residents in the house was that the whole matter, from beginning to end, was handled in a way that did not help the initial trauma of the event.
  
  
• Myself and the other members of the house do not know how to begin to thank all those who sent the 500+ e-mails expressing support for us during this very disturbing time. In addition, your many letters and faxes of concern and protest made a positive difference, visible on the ground, in the process of ensuring our physical safety, restoring our dignity, and enabling a more civilised resolution to the tenant-landlord aspect of the dispute.
  
  
• I left the West Bank the week after these events, to take an extended break. I hadn't had a good holiday for quite some time. In early 2000, I decided I did not wish to return to the West Bank for a variety of reasons, the key one being that there is no real freedom to undertake the kind of project you are reading, and the proposed national expansion of the diary project to a multi-correspondent, person in each town format, would have possibly jepordised the safety of the various people who had ended up working on it, which was something I was not prepared to see happen.
  
  
• Watch "What's New" for news of developments with the material in this diary.

This wasn't the last time the perpetrators did it

Unfortunately, this wasn't the last time Ramallah witnessed such an attack on tenants, as the account below from one month following our experience involved exactly the same perpetrators. Nor was it the last time the Palestinian Police in Ramallah stood aside and allowed it to happen. Nor was it the last time the Palestinian Authority's Governor's office in Ramallah was linked to this kind of event:

"Arafat loyalists trying to force US Arabs out of Al-Bireh house", By Steve Rodan, The Jerusalem Post, 30 June, 1998.

JERUSALEM (June 30). Fatah activists loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat sprayed gunfire and hurled firebombs at the Al-Bireh home of a Palestinian-American family over the weekend in an attempt to drive them away, eyewitnesses said yesterday. PA police did not intervene and Fatah militants later threatened to retaliate against neighbors who reported the attack, witnesses said.

The violence capped a year-long effort by Fatah to expel the Sumrean family from its three-storey house and replace it with the Fatah-aligned Marde family, one of whose members is suspected of killing a Jewish settler several years ago. "They told us, 'You go back to America. This house belongs to us," Nidaq Sumrean said. Members of the Sumrean family, as well as their neighbors, asserted that on Friday night and Saturday morning, Fatah militants hurled firebombs and fired shots at the Al-Bireh house. They also hurled canisters of tear gas.

"We heard shots all night," a neighbor of the Sumreans said. "The tear gas prevented the family from escaping the house. The Fatah people wouldn't let anybody leave. Meanwhile, they were shooting at the house and the roof. Later, they came to us and warned us not to tell anybody what happened."

Eyewitnesses and members of the Sumrean family said PA Police failed to respond to phone calls to stop the shooting. The police did arrive when they were summoned by an officer at the nearby Ramallah headquarters of Arafat's Force 17 praetorian guard who heard the shooting. The police later left on the orders of the Fatah activists. Human-rights activists and a senior Fatah activist confirmed the clash.

"We have examined the issue and obtained testimonies and details from the families, which we have corroborated," said Bassam Eid, director of Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

Tariq Marde said he was not at the house during the attack. He said his family was not trying to drive out the Sumreans and insisted the feud had been resolved. The feud between the Sumreans and Marde families has lasted for at least a decade. The Sumreans built the house on their land off the Jerusalem-Nablus highway in 1962, but seven years later, while the family was abroad, the Mardes, refugees from the 1967 Six Day War, moved into it.

The Sumreans allowed the Mardes to stay and built additional floors to accommodate both families. Last year, two Fatah representatives arrived at the Sumrean home and demanded that they leave the house, family members said. They said that the Mardes deserved the rest of the building because one of their children, Omar Mustafa Marde, was a member of the Fatah gang that murdered Beit El settler Haim Mizrachi in October 1993 and fled to Jordan, which the Fatah representatives said made him a national hero.

On May 14, the two families came to blows. PA police took complaints from both families and a hearing was scheduled for the Ramallah District Court on June 16. But the Mardes didn't appear and the court and police said they did not have copies of the complaints. The court also failed to address charges by the Sumreans that the Mardes had refused to pay rent for seven years.

Members of the Sumrean family maintain that PA Police and the Ramallah military governor's office have refused to act on their complaints against the Fatah attacks inspired by the Marde family. Instead, two of the Sumreans, Nadir and Nadiq, the first a US Defense Department employee and the other a US Air Force member, have been accused of being troublemakers and have been threatened with long prison sentences.

Nadiq quoted deputy Ramallah military governor Saeb Nassar as telling him on June 26, "You Americans are making problems. I can throw you in jail for one year." Nidaq was forced to sign a pledge that he would be fined 2,000 Jordanian dinars, about $3,000, unless he stopped harassing the Mardes. The Mardes did not sign a similar pledge.

The Sumreans said they appealed to Palestinian Legislative Council member and West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti to end the attacks by his men. Barghouti was said to have pledged to help. But Barghouti said yesterday he did not know of such an appeal, although he confirmed the weekend attack on the Sumrean home. The Sumrean family also appealed to the US Consulate in Jerusalem. A consulate spokeswoman said last night that federal privacy laws do not allow her to discuss the case.

Eid said the episode is one of a growing number of incidents in which families connected to the centers of power use PA gunmen to carry out their will. He said in cases in which one party is close to PA or Fatah officials, neither Palestinian police nor the prosecutor will intervene. Instead, authorities recommend mediation, usually by the very same PA official or organization connected with one of the feuding parties.

Relevant articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

1998 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a time for taking stock of the status of respect for these rights around the world. The following articles from the UDHR would seem relevant to the events described in this section of A Personal Diary, as a reminder that they are for all people, at all times.

• Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
• Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
• Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
• Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
• Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
• Article 7. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
• Article 8. Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
• Article 10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
• Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
• Article 13. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
• Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
• Article 29. (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
• Article 30. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.