These are my prison diaries, meray aziz humwatno. You will learn what it is like to survive with as much dignity as possible in acute discomfort, isolation, humiliation and hostility, including abusive neglect of medical facilities. You will learn how captivity does not dilute the spirit of our resistance to the usurpers of our rights, but on the contrary how this resistance is intensified.
You will hear my voice in the words of other fighters for causes. Here I quote a jailed Palestinian sister, a mujahida of the resistance to Israeli occupation. She had heard that her family had been spared the demolition of their family home, and she described the ordeal of her interrogation in poetic language, “ … the anger of the interrogators was like snow and peace to me (an Arabic saying that conveys the sense of being ‘soothing’). I felt the pride of the Palestinians, the glory of Muslims, and the brightness of honesty. I knelt to Allah, thankfully. My tears fell on the floor of the cell, and I am sure they dug a path which those later imprisoned will be able to see.”
Praiz Rashid Saab also brought me a book, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, who was sacked after the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Book pinpoints meeting held at Deng Xiaoping’s home in May of same year, a few weeks before suppression of Tiananmen protests. Here Zhao said that government should ease tensions with protesters and officials criticized him. Deng then announced he would impose martial law. Zhao wrote, “I refused to become the premier who mobilized the military to crack down on students”. In the last chapter, Zhao praises Western system of parliamentary democracy and says it is the only way China can solve its problems.
And now I will end with saying of most famous prisoner of all time, Nelson Mandela, “I learnt that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear.”
You will hear my voice in the words of other fighters for causes. Here I quote a jailed Palestinian sister, a mujahida of the resistance to Israeli occupation. She had heard that her family had been spared the demolition of their family home, and she described the ordeal of her interrogation in poetic language, “ … the anger of the interrogators was like snow and peace to me (an Arabic saying that conveys the sense of being ‘soothing’). I felt the pride of the Palestinians, the glory of Muslims, and the brightness of honesty. I knelt to Allah, thankfully. My tears fell on the floor of the cell, and I am sure they dug a path which those later imprisoned will be able to see.”
Praiz Rashid Saab also brought me a book, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, who was sacked after the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Book pinpoints meeting held at Deng Xiaoping’s home in May of same year, a few weeks before suppression of Tiananmen protests. Here Zhao said that government should ease tensions with protesters and officials criticized him. Deng then announced he would impose martial law. Zhao wrote, “I refused to become the premier who mobilized the military to crack down on students”. In the last chapter, Zhao praises Western system of parliamentary democracy and says it is the only way China can solve its problems.
And now I will end with saying of most famous prisoner of all time, Nelson Mandela, “I learnt that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear.”