Prison for ex-dictator soothes Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt spent his first full day as a convict Saturday in a 16-by-13 foot cell with a small bed, bathroom and window, after receiving a landmark 80-year sentence for genocide and crime against humanity.

It was a steep fall for the now-86-year-old former strongman who ruled Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983, during the height of a brutal civil war that killed 200,000 people, mainly Indians.

A tribunal on Friday ruled that Rios Montt knew about the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Maya in Guatemala's western highlands and didn't stop it, handing down the first genocide conviction ever given to a Latin American strongman in his own country.

The former general was transferred to prison later that evening.

"He is not comfortable, but as a good soldier he is used to this," said Rios Montt's lawyer, Francisco Palomo, who is expected to seek to have the ex-general transferred to a hospital or to have his sentence be served under house arrest.

Matamoros prison, where Rios Montt is now behind bars, is located on a military base in Guatemala City where the former general spent time as a young cadet. It was built to house high-profile inmates who could be unsafe in normal prisons.

Authorities there say he has the right to spend two hours outside his cell each day, but guarded by officers. He has the right to three daily meals, though family members can also bring him food.

Most in Guatemala feel the sentence prison represents a triumph after a long struggle in a country still recovering from a 36-year-civil war that ended with peace accords in 1996.

"It's very valuable to us, totally refreshing. We deserved it," said human rights activist Helen Mack.

Genocidal massacres occurred before and after Rios Montt, "but the bulk of the killing took place under Rios Montt," said Victoria Sanford an anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York who has spent about 50 months in Guatemala and participated in excavations in at least eight massacre sites.

The long sentence was a message, activists said, that the previously untouchable and brutal military structures need to be held accountable. Guatemala's maximum sentence is 50 years making the 80 years symbolic.

The three-judge panel also ordered prosecutors to continue investigating to bring all those responsible for abuses to justice. Until now, only low or middle-level officials have been prosecuted for war atrocities.

On Monday, the same court will meet to discuss the compensation for the victims.

Indians and activists applauded and some wept after hearing Friday's ruling. But some are wondering if Rios Montt can successfully appeal.

Adding to their worries is the fact that Guatemala's current president, Otto Perez Molina, still refuses to acknowledge that genocide took place.

"It is painful to hear that some are in a state of denial, but admitting it is the first step for the country to heal," Mack said. "It is not over."

Perez Molina's name was brought up during the trial when a former soldier accused him of ordering executions while serving in the military in the Rios Montt regime.

He called the testimony "lies."

In a late Friday interview, Perez Molina told CNN's Spanish-language channel that there was no genocide, despite the ruling being seen as the country's first official acknowledgement that one took place.

"When I said that Guatemala has seen no genocide, I repeat it now after this ruling," Perez Molina said. "Today's ruling is not final ... the decision will not be final until the moment they run out of appeals."

Defense lawyer Francisco Palomo vowed to appeal the ruling, saying it was unjust.

Rios Montt has insisted he never knew of or ordered massacres while in power.

He began his career in the Guatemalan army in 1946 as a cadet. He seized power in March of 1982 through a military coup, and held it for 18 months until he was overthrown.

Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, a Guatemala businessman and son of a military officer, called the trial biased.

"We have found out the Ixiles' side of the story, not the whole truth," he said. "We want to rise up to show the world that this decision is not hailed by everyone in Guatemala."

In Rios Montt's trial, dozens of Ixil Mayas stood up and testified of atrocities, such as mass rapes and killing of children by the military.

Perez Molina said the army was not at fault.

"It was an armed conflict that was internal. The army did not cause this armed confrontation. The army did not declare war on the places where the Ixiles lived. The guerrilla did it," he said.

Military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based. A U.N. truth commission said both state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the killings and human rights violations that it documented.

Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu says Guatemala's moment strengthens the world's powerless. Ixil Mayas, she said, can teach other oppressed groups around the world to stand by their rights and not to rest until tyrants are punished by law.

"This could mean that everyone, all indigenous people all over the planet who have been treated with hatred, who have been branded as liars, could hopefully start living in harmony," Menchu said.

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Associated Press writer Olga R. Rodriguez and John Rice contributed to this report from Mexico City.

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Indian spy on death row hurt in Pakistan prison

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — A top Pakistani prison official says an Indian spy on death row was critically injured when he was attacked with a brick inside a prison in the eastern city of Lahore.

Farooq Nazir said Friday that Sarabjit Singh sustained a serious head injury when he was attacked by two other prisoners on Friday at Kot Lakhpat jail. Nazir said Singh was moved to hospital and was out of danger.

Singh was arrested in 1990 for his role in series of bombings in Lahore and Faisalabad that killed 14 people.

He was convicted of spying and carrying out the bomb blasts and sentenced to death in 1991. The sentence was later upheld by Pakistani superior courts.

Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf rejected his mercy petition in 2008.

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US military defends Guantanamo prison raid

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Top officials at the Guantanamo Bay detention center on Tuesday defended a raid that resulted in a violent clash with detainees, saying the operation was critical and the handful of injuries on both sides were minor.

Army soldiers with riot helmets and shields swept into recreation yards and met with resistance from several dozen prisoners, the leadership of the detention center said in an interview with journalists visiting the U.S. base in Cuba for the first time since Saturday's clash.

The confrontation ended within minutes, but not before two guards were struck in the head by prisoners and five of the prisoners were injured, including one struck by rubber pellets from what the military calls a "less-than-lethal" round fired from a modified shotgun.

"The appropriate amount of force was used for the situation," said Navy Rear Adm. John W. Smith, the commander of the detention center.

The guard force raided Camp 6 because the prisoners had for several weeks covered up 147 of the 160 security cameras, making it impossible to monitor them amid an ongoing hunger strike. Smith and members of his leadership team said they were concerned a prisoner might try to commit suicide and there were two attempted suicides since the protest began around Feb. 6.

To restore control, prison officials decided to move the prisoners in Camp 6 out of a communal area, where they eat together and freely associate for most of the day, into single cells from which they are released for two hours a day for recreation.

The troops who carried out the raid trained for three weeks to carry out the raid and were "prepared for any level of potential resistance," said Army Col. John Bogdan, who is in charge of the guard force. Prisoners had makeshift weapons, including broomsticks and batons made of plastic bottles and other materials.

Two guards were struck in the head during the confrontation but neither was seriously hurt and both have since returned to duty.

Five detainees were injured, including one who was hit by rubber pellets. Navy Capt. Richard Stoltz, who is in charge of the detainee hospital, said "there was no significant blood loss," and the prisoner was treated at the scene.

Another prisoner cut his head by banging his head on a cell door in what the military officials said was a self-inflicted wound. Stoltz said he was given about three stitches. Three others were scraped as guards secured the area and moved the men into the cells.

The communal holding areas of Camp 6 had once been held up as a model in Guantanamo. Military officials had said prisoners had grown compliant as they were able to lessen their isolation, watch satellite TV and take classes. But prisoners in February started the hunger strike to protest their indefinite confinement and what they said were intrusive searches of their Qurans for contraband.

Smith said prisoners may later be allowed to return to the communal holding areas if they follow prison rules.

The hunger strike, meanwhile, goes on, with 45 prisoners refusing meals and 13 being force fed.

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Afghan women in Kabul prison over 'moral' crimes

KABUL (AP) — Lost and alone in a strange city Mariam called the only person she knew, her husband's cousin. She worried he wouldn't help her because she had left her home in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province, fleeting to the capital Kabul to escape his relentless and increasingly vicious beatings. But he promised to help. Too busy to come himself he sent a friend who took her to "some house", held a gun to her head and raped her.

Finished with her he settled in front of a TV set, the gun on a table by his side. Choosing her moment, Mariam picked up the gun shot her assailant in the head and turned the gun on herself.

"Three days later I woke up in the hospital," she said, slowly, shyly removing a scarf from her head to reveal a partially shaved head and a long jagged scar that ran almost the length of her head where the bullet grazed her scalp.

From the hospital Mariam was sent to a police station and from there to Badam Bagh, Afghanistan's central women's prison where she told her story to The Associated Press. For the past three months Mariam has been waiting to find out why she is in jail, the charges and when she can leave.

"I haven't gone to court. I am just waiting."

Hugging a ratty brown sweater to protect her from the damp cold of the prison, Mariam is one of 202 women living in the six- year- old jail. The majority of the women packed are serving sentences of up to seven years for leaving their husbands, refusing to accept a marriage arranged by their parents, or choosing to leave their parent's home with a man of their choice __ all so-called "moral" crimes, says the prison's director general Zaref Jan Naebi.

Some of the women were jailed while pregnant, others with their small children. Naebi says there are 62 children living with their imprisoned mothers, sharing the same grey steel bunk-beds, napping in the afternoon hidden behind a sheet draped from an upper bunk, oblivious to the chatter and the crackling noises from the small fussy television sets shoved off to one side of the rooms.

The Taliban were thrown out 12 years ago ending five years of rule and regressive laws that enforced a tribal tradition and culture more than religious compulsions denying girls schools, ordering women to stay indoors unless accompanied by a male, and in some of the more severe cases even blackening the first story windows so prying eyes could not see women within. Women were forced to wear the all- encompassing burqa or suffer a public beating.

In the first years after the Taliban's December 2001 removal strides seemed to be made for women, schools opened, women came out of their house, many still in the burqas but appearing on television and getting elected to Parliament.

But women's activists in Kabul say within a few years of the Taliban's ouster the ball was dropped, interest waned and even President Hamid Karzai began making statements that harkened back to the Taliban rule saying women really should be accompanied by a man while outside their home. A new law was enacted called the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW), but its implementation is erratic and rare, says the United Nations Assistance Mission on Afghanistan, whose human rights arm monitors such things.

An UNAMA report issued in December last year says it is difficult to even get information about violence against women from the authorities partially because they don't want to look bad if it showed that little was being done and little, if any, official documentation on violence against women exists.

While it might not be against the law to run away or escape a forced marriage, the courts routinely convict women fleeing abusive homes with "the intent to commit zina (or adultery)" which are most often simply referred to as "moral crimes," says the report.

"Perceptions toward women are still the same in most places, tribal laws are the only laws followed and in most places nothing has changed in the basics of women's lives. There are policies and papers and even laws but nothing has changed," said Zubaida Akbar whose volunteer Haider organization fights for women's rights and sends lawyers and aid workers to the women's prison to defend the inmates in court.

In the overwhelmingly male dominated legal system, Akbar said even when an inmate gets in front of the judge, "he says 'it is her husband, she should go back and make it work. It is her fault and not her place to leave him __ not in our society.'"

Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative society, where men dominate and tribal jirgas still hand out rulings that offer girls and women to settle debts and disputes.

Surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire, there is one small patch of open space where children being kept with their mothers in Badam Bagh prison play. Nearby women hang out their laundry. The two story building is only six years old but already it is grimy and neglected looking. On balconies obscured by mesh and steel bars women sit and smoke.

Naebi said inmates attend a variety of classes during the week, ranging from basic literacy, to crafts and sewing, with the intention of giving the women a skill once they leave the prison.

Inside the stark building, six people often share a small room that is their cell. Three sets of bunk-beds line the walls. In some of the beds infants tucked under grimy blankets sleep while their mothers tell their story.

Nuria, dressed in maroon colored clothes from head to toe, quieted her infant boy as she told of going to court to demand a divorce from a husband she was forced by her parents to marry. Defiant even in prison, Nuria said "I wanted to get a divorce but he wouldn't let me go. I never wanted to marry him. I loved someone else but my father made me. He threatened to kill me if I didn't."

Nuria had pleaded with her father before her marriage, begging to marry another.

"When I went to court for the divorce, instead of giving me a divorce, they charged me with running away," she said. The man she wanted to marry was also charged and is now serving time in Afghanistan's notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, one of the country's largest prisons, overcrowded and with a reputation over the last several decades of maltreatment.

At the time she went to court Nuria didn't know she was pregnant. She gave birth to her son in jail. Although the baby is her husband, who has offered to have the courts set her free if she returns home, Nuria said she has refused.

"He wants me to come home now because I have his son but I said 'no. I will wait until my sentence is up,'" in eight months, she said.

Twenty seven year old Adia left her husband, a drug addict, seeking shelter with her parents. They wanted her to return to her husband, who followed her demanding she return.

"Instead I escaped with another man but it wasn't a romance. I was desperate to get away and he said he would help me but he didn't he just left me. I went to the court. I was angry. I wanted him charged and my husband charged but instead they charged me and sentenced me to six years. I went back to court to appeal the conviction and this time I was sentenced to seven and a half years."

Seven months pregnant, Adia will have her baby in jail. Fauzia isn't sure of her age. She looks to be early 60s. She stares out of the prison bars. Already seven years in jail, Fauzia will serve a 17 year sentence for killing her husband and her daughter in law. Expressionless she tells her story, rolls up her sleeve to display a mangled elbow where her husband had smashed her with a stick. She was his fourth wife.

"I was in one room. I came into the next room and they were there having sexual relations. I found a big knife and killed them both."

Zubeida, the women's activist, said despite what she calls a veneer of change, little is different for most Afghan women.

"We have the appearance of everything, but when you dig in deep down below the surface nothing fundamentally has changed. It has been tough. It has been really tough," she said.

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Kathy Gannon is AP Special Regional Correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan and can be reached at www.twitter.com/kathygannon

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US to hand prison over to Afghans

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. military is handing over to the Afghan government the only detention facility in the country that was under American control. The transfer comes a year after the two sides initially agreed on the handover.

A transfer ceremony was scheduled for Monday at the Parwan Detention Facility, which is next to the U.S.-run Bagram military base north of Kabul.

The U.S. was supposed to fully hand over the facility last September after signing an agreement to do so a year ago.

But the transfer was held up pending a final deal between the U.S. and the Afghans over the release of dangerous prisoners.

That deal was struck late last week and under it, prisoners considered dangerous would not be released from the detention center.

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Karzai complains of delay in US prison handover

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president is warning that any further delay turning over a key U.S.-run detention facility to full Afghan control would harm relations.

Hamid Karzai's statement comes after he and U.S. commander Gen. Joseph Dunford met Wednesday but failed to resolve the impasse that derailed a scheduled handover last Saturday.

NATO released a statement after the meeting saying both parties pledged to continue constructive dialogue to resolve the remaining issues.

The facility has an Afghan administrator but is still U.S.-run. The Americans also have the power to veto the release of detainees they feel present a continuing threat — a right they want to keep.

Karzai pledges that even after Afghans take over, they will keep anyone who is a security threat in custody.

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