Staffer says U.N. abandoned him during 9 years in Syrian prison

By Rick Mitchell

Mahmoud Tarjouman was a United Nations official when he was arrested in Syria, without charges, apparently because his U.N. activities annoyed the government.

'There was no trial, no court--you don't have to have a reason to detain someone," said Tarjouman, who worked for the Economic Commission for Western Asia at the time of his arrest in 1976. He languished in a prison cell for nine years.

"I used to pray day and night...hoping to see the U.N. flag come to rescue me."

But nothing came. "On the contrary," he said, "the U.N. administration took very negative steps." He was fired and his paycheck stopped.

"There was no financial support to my wife and children," said Tarjouman. "This resulted in divorce. She wasn't able to wait nine years."

When he finally got out, his two daughters called him "uncle."

Tarjouman said political pressure from member states keeps the U.N. from taking action on cases like his. Upon his release, he discovered that no one on the U.N. staff knew about his imprisonment.

"Many people thought I had been on vacation. They asked me, 'How was Hawaii, how was Japan?' It was a dark vacation. I had to leave the 20th century. I feel deep in my heart that I am still in prison."

Tarjouman addressed a gathering of U.N. staff members and reporters convened to observe the U.N. Staff Committee's International Day of Solidarity with Detained U.N. Staff. On the podium with him were Marc Manirakiza, a staffer who was detained in Africa, and Charles Glass, an ABC television reporter who was kidnapped in Beirut in 1987 and escaped two months later.

According to Staff Committee statistics, more than 100 U.N. staff members are being detained worldwide and over 700 have been killed in the line of duty.

"The combined efforts of U.N. member states, the Secretary-General and the Staff Union have yielded little in ending this violence against the U.N.," said Ron Hewson, the committee's president. "Some of our colleagues have been brutalized and tortured. Every day of illegal detention is another day of outrage."

Hewson demanded that the Secretary-General revitalize his Task Force on the Security and Independence of the International Civil Service, improve the system for for reporting violations against U.N. staff and increase the number of reports of such abuses from annually to quarterly.

"Prompt and unrelenting action [is imperative] when staff are robbed of their freedom and suffer other abuses of their human rights," he said.

Glass, who recounts his own kidnapping in his book Tribes Without Flags (Atlantic Monthly Press), warned that U.N. staff are likely to face more and more anger as a result of recent U.N. policy, especially during the Persian Gulf war. He offered the experience of the United States as an example.

Before 1982, no Americans had been kidnapped in Beirut, but in that year, Israel invaded Lebanon with American approval.

"American partisanship in Lebanon...created fertile ground for the hatred of Americans that had not existed before," Glass said.

The kidnappings started soon after.

"The Iranians did not care that they were kidnapping people with no power, often people who were opposed to American policy in Lebanon. They were the only Americans they could get their hands on. This could be a lesson to the United Nations," Glass said.

"In the Third World, the U.N. is increasingly seen as providing an international seal of approval to American policy. In their view, the U.N. is another arm of U.S. foreign policy--like the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank."

The U.N.'s handling of the Gulf crisis exemplifies this, he said. The U.N. illegally ceded its right to wage war from the Military Staff Committee to the United States.

"This was a case of violating one law to enforce another of the U.N. charter. The charter requires negotiation," he said.

He said that on his recent visit to Iraq he saw babies dying of gastrointestinal disease and starvation--a result of American bombing and U.N. economic sanctions.

"All this suffering is being laid at the feet of the United Nations," he said.

Hewson appealed for the release from house arrest of Burma's Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who received the Nobel Peace Prize this year. She was employed by the U.N. from 1969 to 1971.

The Secretary-General reportedly met with Burma's ambassadors in New York and Geneva. According to a U.N. statement, he "noted the widespread anxiety over the state of her health, not least since the special rapporteur of the Human Rights Commission had not been allowed to see her."

The Myanmar [Burmese] ambassador to New York stated that Mrs. Suu Kyi was in good health and was free to leave the country, if she went into exile.