Abou Jahjah comments تعليقات أبو جهجه

Before heading  to court today i was reading the Belgian newspapers and I could only notice that the media was trying to redeem itself by posting some columns denouncing the political process against us. Also some Opinion articles were published written by opponents and supporters of the AEL but all agreeing that the whole thing is a political process.

 In this atmosphere we entered the court room, to be present at a trial that in a democracy should not even take place. The session was opened with some technical communications and the court agreed on hearing the defence witnesses and watching the uncut TV footage of that night.

First the footage was played and it showed clearly that:

1- You could not really speak of real riots and that the situation was rather tense at the scene but not more than that

2- The AEL militants were clearly calming the youth and trying to create a buffer between them and the police

3- My arrival did not have any escalating effect on the crowd

4- we tried to negotiate calmly with the police but the response was individual pepper-spray deployed against me and others around me.

5- after the pepper-spray incident we kept our composure

After the tape was played came the turn of the witnesses,

the first witness was Luc Lamine, the chief of police of that time with whom I had a verbal confrontation after I was attacked with pepper-spray.  Lamine had been cited saying that my role was aggressive and negative. Later he declared the opposite of that in an interview. Today he was confronted with this contradiction in his story, he said that he didn’t sign the declaration that was accusing me of incitement, and that it doesn’t represent the complete truth as he knows it. He said that before my arrival the police was ready to intervene and the situation was extremely tens, and that upon my arrival I asked the crowd to sit down and recite a sort of a prayer for the murdered brother, and that helped in calming the situation. Lamine added that during the verbal confrontation we had he could clearly see that my eyes were red and the symptoms of pepper-spray were visible on my face, he said that pepper-spray was used before the confrontation I had with him. He was asked by the Judge if he felt insulted by my words he denied that he felt insulted and said that me and him understood each-others function.  He finally said that, after the verbal confrontation, I helped in calming down the situation and lead the demonstration into a nearby mosque.

An interesting detail is that when Lamine was saying that he wasn’t insulted by me, the judge was trying to convince him that he was. The judge was telling him that he must have been insulted as police-chief and he kept repeating that while Lamine did not say that. At that moment our lawyers intervened and made it clear to the judge that he has no right to put words in the mouth of the witness. This is a very disturbing indicator.

However, the testimony of Lamine came close to the truth and destroyed the case of the public prosecutor on incitement completely.

After Lamine, Jef Lambrecht a journalist that is known to be a critic of our movement testified that my role there was not negative and that he was following me the whole evening and did not see any incitement from my part at any moment.

Then came Ludo De Witte who testified as second hand witness in the name of the anonymous officer who also was observing me and said that i played a calming role the whole evening and that the other officer that testified against me was lying and was not even in the neighborhood. The officer testifying in our favour wants to stay anonymous out of fear, this alone says enough about the whole matter.

After the witnesses, and due to a surrealistically dumb court-clerk that can not type and can not print and needs an hour to understand and report a testimony of 10 minutes, the court was out of time. So we had to adjourn the process till September. So because of the incompetence of a clerk I have now to take the plane again in September and come to Belgium and lose  more of my time on a political scandalous process that should not even be there from the beginning.

After seeing its amateur and tendentious way of working, I am strengthened in my distrust of the judicial system in Belgium, and I believe that they are after a conviction, maybe one without a prison sentence in the light of the partly shifting public opinion, but either way they are looking for a conviction in order to give the establishement a way out. I hope I will be proven wrong by this court, but I doubt it. Either way we will fight any conviction and take it all the way to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 1:09 am and is filed under AEL: Ideology, struggle and allies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.