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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Israel / Palestine : Nukes : Peace |
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Vanunu's Opponents Turn Violent as Nuclear Whistleblower is Freed |
Current rating: 0 |
by AFP
(No verified email address) |
21 Apr 2004
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Shortly after Vanunu's departure, the scenes of jubilation soon turned ugly as a group of his more volatile opponents began lobbing stones and eggs at those celebrating his long-awaited release, forcing scores of police to come running to the scene.
Until then, the police had largely turned a blind eye to the violent ranting of Vanunu's opponents, allowing them to get much closer to the prison gates than the well-wishers. |
SHIKMA PRISON, Israel - Jubilant cries of "hero" were mingled with hate-filled threats of violence as Mordechai Vanunu walked to freedom after 18 years in prison for lifting the lid on Israel's nuclear program.
Leaping up on the bars of the prison gates, the 49-year-old nuclear whistleblower flashed the victory sign at the emotional crowds, drawing a rousing cheer from his supporters and a hail of foul-mouthed curses from his enemies.
Addressing assembled journalists just inside the prison compound, Vanunu said he was proud of having exposed details of Israel's atomic arsenal to the outside world.
But once through the gates, Vanunu was quickly hustled into a waiting car, frustrating many who had hoped for a brief glimpse of the man whose fate they had championed for so long.
"Vanunu has won, Vanunu is free!" chorused his supporters, throwing flowers at the car and waving posters bearing his picture.
As the white car pulled away, a furious tumult of onlookers broke through the police barriers and gave chase, many screaming murderous threats of revenge.
"You dirty bastard, you will die, traitor!" yelled one man in his 30s, voicing a threat made by many waiting outside the prison.
Shortly before making his getaway, Vanunu admitted he was "proud and happy" to have blown the whistle on Israel's nuclear program.
"I am proud and happy that I did what I did," he told reporters at the prison compound in southern Israel.
Speaking in English, he described his treatment in prison as "cruel and barbaric" but insisted he had "no more secrets" to tell.
Vanunu, who worked as a technician at the Dimona nuclear facility in southern Israel, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 1986 after giving details about Israel's secret weapons program. to Britain's Sunday Times.
Shortly after Vanunu's departure, the scenes of jubilation soon turned ugly as a group of his more volatile opponents began lobbing stones and eggs at those celebrating his long-awaited release, forcing scores of police to come running to the scene.
Until then, the police had largely turned a blind eye to the violent ranting of Vanunu's opponents, allowing them to get much closer to the prison gates than the well-wishers.
With many Israelis denouncing him as a "traitor" and a "spy", many of Vanunu's international supporters fear that the more extreme elements will try to harm, or even kill him.
"I feel really joyful that he's out, but the future is very worrying," said 38-year-old Ben Inman, a caretaker from London. "I just hope he is allowed to leave Israel and live in peace where he wants."
Shortly before his release, friends and well-wishers released a flock of doves into the air and handed out flowers, largely ignoring the verbal racket kicked up by anti-Vanunu protestors, who bombarded them with racist slurs.
"You're not Jewish, you have no right to be here," shouted an elderly Israeli, carrying a placard saying "Death to Vanunu".
Although many of the 100 or so internationals had traveled half-way across the globe to be present at Vanunu's release, it was not clear whether they would get a chance to meet with him, given the restrictions imposed on him.
Israeli officials confirmed Tuesday that Vanunu would be subjected to an unprecedented set of stringent security restrictions which would bar him from leaving the country, from approaching any port or airport or making contact with foreigners without prior authorization.
Nick and Mary Eoloff, a couple from Minnesota who adopted Vanunu in 1997 after he was disowned by his real parents, said Tuesday that the prospect of his release was tinged with regret, as it was still not clear whether they would be able to meet their "son".
"We were all hoping that he would walk out and we could all go home together but because they have imposed these cruel, cruel restrictions, we don't know whether we can see him or not," Mary Eoloff told AFP.
Β© Copyright 2004 AFP
http://www.afp.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Nuclear Hero's 'Crime' Was Making Us Safer |
by Daniel Ellsberg
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
21 Apr 2004
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Mordechai Vanunu is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He consciously risked all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of the true extent of the nuclear danger facing us. And he paid the full price, a burden in many ways worse than death, for his heroic act β for doing exactly what he should have done and what others should be doing.
Vanunu's "crime" was committed in 1986, when he gave the London Sunday Times a series of photos he had taken within the Israeli nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician.
For that act β revealing that his country's program and stockpile were much larger than the CIA or others had estimated β Vanunu was kidnapped from the Rome airport by agents of the Israeli Mossad and secretly transported back for a closed trial in which he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
He spent the first 11 1/2 years in solitary confinement in a 6-by-9-foot cell, an unprecedented term of solitary under conditions that Amnesty International called "cruel, inhuman and degrading."
Now, after serving his full term, he is due to be released today. But his "unfreedom" is to be continued by restrictions on his movements and his contacts: He cannot leave Israel, he will be confined to a single town, he cannot communicate with foreigners face to face or by phone, fax or e-mail (purely punitive conditions because any classified information that he may have possessed is by now nearly two decades old).
The irony of all this is that no country in the world has a stronger stake than Israel in preventing nuclear proliferation, above all in the Middle East. Yet Israel's secret nuclear policies β to this day it does not acknowledge that it possesses such weapons β are shortsighted and self-destructive. They promote rather than block proliferation by encouraging the country's neighbors to develop their own, comparable weapons.
This will not change without public mobilization and democratic pressure, which in turn demand public awareness and discussion. It was precisely this that Vanunu sought to stimulate.
Not in Israel or in any other case β not that of the U.S., Russia, England, France, China, India or Pakistan β has the decision to become a nuclear weapons state ever been made democratically or even with the knowledge of the full Cabinet. It is likely that in an open discussion not one of these states could convince its own people or the rest of the world that it had a legitimate reason for possessing as many warheads as the several hundred that Israel allegedly has (far beyond any plausible requirement for deterrence).
More Vanunus are urgently needed. That is true not only in Israel but in every nuclear weapons state, declared and undeclared. Can anyone fail to recognize the value to world security of a heroic Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian or North Korean Vanunu making comparable revelations?
And the world's need for such secret-telling is not limited to citizens of what nuclear weapons states presumptuously call rogue nations. Every nuclear weapons state has secret policies, aims, programs and plans that contradict its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1995 Declaration of Principles agreed to at the NPT Renewal Conference. Every official with knowledge of these violations could and should consider doing what Vanunu did.
That is what I should have done in the early '60s based on what I knew about the secret nuclear planning and practices of the United States when I consulted at the Defense Department, on loan from the Rand Corp., on problems of nuclear command and control. I drafted the Secretary of Defense Guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the general nuclear war plans, and the extreme dangers of our practices and plan were apparent to me.
I now feel derelict for wrongfully keeping secret the documents in my safe revealing this catastrophically reckless posture. But I did not then have Vanunu's example to guide me.
When I finally did have an example in front of me β that of young Americans who were choosing to go to prison rather than participate in what I too knew was a hopeless, immoral war β I was inspired in 1971 to turn over a top- secret history of presidential lies about the war in Vietnam to 19 newspapers. I regret only that I didn't do it earlier, before the bombs started falling.
Vanunu should long since have been released from solitary and from prison, not because he has "suffered enough" but because what he did was the correct and courageous thing to do in the face of the foreseeable efforts to silence and punish him.
The outrageous and illegal restrictions proposed to be inflicted on him when he finally steps out of prison after 18 years should be widely protested and rejected, not only because they violate his fundamental human rights but because the world needs to hear this man's voice.
The cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state have endangered humanity and continues to threaten its survival. Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be joined worldwide.
Daniel Ellsberg, a former State Department and Defense Department official, released the 'Pentagon Papers' to the press in 1971
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com |
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