 songs & lyrics Treasure (Unreleased) They took you to a cold, dark room And tied you to a wall With only concrete Left and right In front and behind Above and below So no one could hear if you called You slept for maybe an hour a day In the space between their tongues and fists You learnt the lines of evil in those nights and days They learnt what it means to resist Al-Qaysi, I suspect that in those 53 days Your mind went through a whole lot of things Did he reach down from on high, lift you up to see his eyes Did he give you the treasure that only real darkness can bring? Lisaan at-tajriba asdaq Some die to water the land with their blood And rise again to watch over the day And some live to understand the edges of the human land And die and rise in a different kind of way. Christmas 1995, Ramallah, Palestinian West Bank RELATED INFORMATION 'Abd a-Nasser Isma'il Hussein al-Qaysi, a student at Bir Zeit University, was reportedly arrested on 10 August 1994 and held without charge for 51 days* at the GSS interrogation facility in Ramallah. During the course of interrogation he was allegedly seated for prolonged periods in a small chair bolted to the ground with his hands tied in a painful position, deprived of sleep and food and beaten severely in the chest. He was also kept in a variety of contorted positions, including being hooded and tied to a pipe with his hands behind the pipe and the palms of his hands facing outward. He suffered medical difficulties and lost 10 kilogrammes during his ordeal. --From the "Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Mr. Nigel S. Rodley." (Reference: E/CN.4/1996/35/Add.1, 16 January 1996) *Editor's Note: I was working at Birzeit University at the time, often with the Human Rights Action Project, and I'm pretty sure he was in there for 53 days, but haven't yet found a Birzeit reference as the university took its archived human rights information offline a few years later. |