Speech by Gareth Peirce

Gareth Peirce, lawyer for Samar and Jawad

I think two people who also will be very pleased to be updated on the case are Samar and Jawad. It’s now five years since Jawad was arrested and, he is still waiting for an appeal.

I apologise for being late but I thought I would mention why I was late because it has echoes of Samar and Jawad. I came from Brixton prison and the reason I was late it was the only time I could get a legal visit with a man whose extradition hearing begins on Monday at Bow Street court. The American government is seeking his extradition for allegedly conspiring with Ben Laden to murder Americans. And there is no case against him, but he is completely sure that he will be extradited, and that if he goes to America, he will be convicted. And he is sure because he is sure that the American government and this government and powerful western governments will combine to hide the knowledge that they have, and combine to conspire to condemn him and other people who are called fundamentalists to injustice. Now, perhaps that’s by the by but I was at Brixton Prison at the time I was meant to be there, at 6 o’clock, and then was told that they had no staff, and I could no see him and he could not see his barrister before his hearing on Monday.

Now, that whole situation that he’s experiencing is exactly what Samar and Jawad have been experiencing for five years. I can’t describe sufficiently to you what it is like to be in prison and to be completely impotent, to be able to do nothing to affect your own fate, and to feel, not just as many people many hundreds of people in British prisons know, that they have been victims of injustice. But to know much more frighteningly that it isn’t just the luck of an individual piece of evidence that any citizen could happen upon that might lead to your release, it’s something infinitely more difficult: that the secrets are buried and intended to remain buried, that they are within the knowledge and control of governments. May be one government, may be more than one government. But that those governments are locked into relationships that inevitably mean that you are not going to be told those secrets in your intended lifetime in prison. Someday may be, someone will write his memoirs, or her memoirs, but it’s a very male world that tends to dominate this secrets.

Someone will write his memoirs in 15 or 20 years time, and will reveal exactly who bombed the Israeli embassy in London in 1994. They will. And it won’t be Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh who did it. And the very questions that all of us asked when we first became involved in the case will be answered; what I needed to know, what I needed to understand when I first met Jawad, and soon after when Samar was charged as well. What I needed to know was whose interest did it serve to bomb the Israeli embassy at that time, who did it help, and who did it hurt. There were a range of answers as to whose interests it could have served, and all have them were of governments, or of fairly enormous networks and political organisations. There were competing theories, and there still are as to whose interest it most served. But the consistent answer as to whose interest it least served was the Palestinian community, was Palestine and Palestinians in London. The repeated answer I got: this can only hurt us, this must be done for a reason, and the reason may include hurting us. And so, in that sense, it hurt and continues to hurt Samar and Jawad. But probably in many ways it continues to reach out and hurt the wider Palestinian community as well.

Five years is an extremely long time to wait for an appeal in England. We don’t know why. Nobody has though it fit to explain to us why we are waiting. It’s suggested that there could be a compelling reason; we could be waiting for a European case decided today. We could be waiting for a House of Lords judgement decided last year. We don’t know. The mystery, the enigma, of what’s going on in this case remains as great as it was before.

I am in some ways concerned that Jawad sounded just wonderful on that tape. He sounded exactly Jawad at his most resilient, strong, confidence. But that rather belies how he and Samar are managing. It takes different forms, they are different people. Jawad says to me frequently: I just want it decided, I don’t care anymore if I’m going to loose this appeal, I simply want an appeal date, I want an appeal. If I’ve got to do 10 more years, 15 more years, I simply want to know. Samar is in the limbo of hope, of not being so pessimistic and pragmatic about "no problem if it’s 10 or 15 years I can do it I just want to know". Samar is more open, perhaps, about her inability to go on coping. She says: I am running out of reserves, I am running out of ways of coping with daily life here. And she said that to me once before. And that was when she was in Holloway on remand, in conditions that drove her to have such a complete breakdown that finally, the trial judge, in a very callous way, decided that the better of two evils was to give her bail so that she could become fit again for trial, rather than to keep her in prison but she couldn’t be tried. That’s the history of Samar, and she is in a truly awful prison at Durham, as far away from the family as she could be, as is Jawad in a male prison, not far away. It isn’t torture, they are not being physically brutalised. But it is very grim, and is no way to do justice to anyone.

The trial was an extremely difficult and complex trial. I suspect everybody in this room is someone who has political awareness, has knowledge of history, of Palestine and Israel, and comes to it from a high plateau of comprehension of Samar and Jawad. I was not at that plateau, and in order to do what defence lawyers have to do- which is to teach a jury to understand, I had to learn, and I had to learn an enormous amount. The trial was very didactic in lots of ways. The jury saw programmes about the Intifada, television programmes. They saw a range of witnesses who were quite exceptional in their understanding not just of the two defendants, but of the background they came from. They saw photographs, they saw photographs of the village where Jawad grew up which no longer looks (he’s been away from the West Bank for 10 years), it no longer looks as it looked when he left it. The hills around are now covered by settlements, Israeli settlements. The jury learned a great deal, but they did not learn enough, we didn’t teach them enough. We didn’t know enough for them to make that quantum leap of understanding what the previous speaker talked about, of being a young person who dreamt of taking acts that would liberate their homeland. The jury couldn’t understand how two people could be intelligently but in very many ways, naively, trying to do their bit, to play their part, to assuage their guilt, to free their conscience, that here they were comfortably in England and what part of the struggle to achieve a Palestinian state. The jury could not get beyond seeing the actions they were taking, and understanding that that did not mean that they were complicit in bombing the Israeli embassy in London. They couldn’t do it.

But throughout the whole trial, we were dealing with Samar and Jawad and their context. We were completely unable to deal with the context of who did do this, for what purpose, who did it help. And we are still equally five years later, unable to answer that. But by chance, by complete chance, a renegade spy, David Shayler, has actually lifted a tiny veil, there may be seven more veils to take off; we will see in reality if we ever do. But he has lifted one veil or two, and told us that there was credible evidence that he saw while he worked for MI5, that there was a serious warning from a creditable source, that the embassy would be bombed, and it was. That could not have come from anybody who had contact with these two young people, who were said by the prosecution to be a tiny English group onto themselves, that no one ever heard of before and since. That does not fit with a credible source known to MI5, it does not fit. Equally, David Shayler has told us that an MI6 officer wrote a memorandum that he believed that on the basis of all he knew, that it was the Israelis who bombed their own embassy. We have no idea the basis on which those memoranda were written. We have no idea what went into it. But what we do know is if we had known either at the time of trial, we would have cross-examined uphill and down dale on that basis. We would have followed each theory to its conclusion and beyond. We would have presented to the jury a different understanding that there may have been forces beyond these two defendants that could have been achieving results in London for their own ends. We did not know that, and we still do not know it. We are still being refused the information; we may continue to be refused it for sometime.

But there is slight hope in that, yesterday, the European Court said that it was unlawful for a trial court to be unaware of information that the state had, and at least not consider if the defence should have it, or if they did not have it, should the trial be stopped. The European Court yesterday said that that constituted an unfair trial. And that’s precisely what happened in relation to Samar and Jawad. So it’s on that basis that we now go forward to an appeal. What happened to them has had the endorsement of the European Court; that means that under English procedures, a defendant that that has happened to, has not had a fair trial

Now I asked the family: was there much point a defence lawyer speaking at this meeting when she would inevitably say what everybody knew anyway. And I was told there was one thing I should and I could say, if I felt I could say it. Because apparently it has some meaning if the lawyers says it. What I was asked was if I felt that Samar and Jawad were innocent, could I please say it publicly. And I have no problem, no hesitation, what I have been saying for 5 years, which is I am sure as it is possible to be, that these two are totally innocent of the crimes of which they’ve been convicted. Until they are acquitted, they will be a serious, worrying, terrible miscarriage of justice. We all should continue to try to overturn. I am deeply grateful to some many people for coming, particularly to our two guests from Palestine. I am very very grateful. Thanks you.

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