washingtonpost.com

Palestinian Activist Faces Jail Again
Ex-Howard Teacher Balked at Grand Jury

By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A03

CHICAGO, Sept. 4 -- A former Howard University professor and Palestinian activist with alleged ties to the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, is scheduled to be jailed for the second time in five years for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the terrorist group's finances and activities.

Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who taught at Howard for three years, gained national attention for a six-month hunger strike in 1998 while he was jailed for not cooperating with a New York grand jury. In a separate case last month in Chicago, Charles P. Kocoras, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, again held Ashqar in civil contempt for refusing to talk to a grand jury even after he was granted immunity.

Unless he wins an appeal, Ashqar said he will fly to Chicago on Friday to go to jail rather than participate in what he called a "witch hunt" against Palestinians fighting Israeli oppression.

"They have been making my life a misery or a hell, forcing me to surrender, to become a traitor, a collaborator against my people," he said in a telephone interview today from his home in Alexandria. "I would rather die than do it."

Grand jury testimony is secret, and federal authorities would not confirm that the case is pending. "There is no public court record regarding any such matter," said Randall Samborn, a spokesman here for U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

But in court records from previous cases, authorities have alleged that Ashqar organized meetings with activists from the Islamic Resistance Movement in Philadelphia in 1993 and Oxford, Miss., where he was a graduate student, in 1994. Hamas was declared a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel in 1995. In a District of Columbia case involving an Islamic charity, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in 2002 that Ashqar was "a senior Hamas activist." He has never been indicted or charged with a crime.

The FBI since last November has intensified investigations into the alleged supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, two Middle Eastern groups with support in Arab and Muslim communities. The renewed effort is the result of a federal court ruling last fall that allowed government agents to use decades worth of classified wiretaps and intelligence reports from foreign security agents that previously had been off limits. Wiretaps of Ashqar from his home in Mississippi were among them.

Ashqar, 45, came to the United States in late 1989 to study at Ole Miss as part of a fellowship program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. He received his doctorate in production operations management from the University of Mississippi's business school in 1997. While there, his apartment was bugged.

He said he never hid the fact that he was an activist for Palestinian causes while he was in the West Bank and once he came to the United States.

But Ashqar said his real trouble began when his exchange visa expired in 1998 and he applied for political asylum, claiming that his outspoken views on Israel would make him a target if he tried to return home. There, Ashqar said he was never a member of Hamas, but he was active in Palestinian causes. He edited a university magazine and was director of public relations at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he said his job was "exposing atrocities against institutions of higher learning and the Palestinian people."

Since he left, Ashqar said, his family members have been harassed and asked about when he intends to return. Instead of being asked about those issues in his asylum petition, however, Ashqar said he was repeatedly questioned about Palestinian activists and organizations in the United States and abroad. When he refused to talk, he was jailed and released six months later when a judge determined that he was not going to cooperate.

In the interim, he worked as an assistant professor at Howard University, teaching three undergraduate courses both fall and spring semester of last year, in what school officials described as a "temporary" position; they declined to renew his contract this year.

Howard spokeswoman J.J. Pryor said she did not believe Ashqar had been on a tenure track at the university, saying that "he was not conducting research." She declined to say why the university did not renew his contract.

Ashqar maintains that his dismissal from Howard is part of an effort by federal officials to force him to help them build cases against Palestinians in the United States and the Middle East. He has refused to assist the efforts.

His asylum case and immigration status have remained in limbo. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, he said, authorities sought to use hundred of pages of documents in an attempt to bring immigration charges against him and have his asylum case rejected. Ashqar in June withdrew his application.

On the same day, he said he received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in Chicago. His scheduled deportation for mid-August was postponed until its completion.

In two appearances in Chicago, he did what he had done before: refused to talk. He was held in contempt of court and since the middle of last month has had to check in twice daily by phone with federal marshals in Chicago, visit his local immigration office twice a week and agree not to leave Virginia.

Ashqar said he no longer plans to stay in the United States and will leave for another country once his current case is settled. But for now he expects to spend time in jail. He said groups have formed to raise money to help free him from jail.

"I think it's alarming and an abuse of my civil rights," he said. "I think they are going to arrest me tomorrow. I am going to fight back within the legal system."

Staff writer Amy Argetsinger in Washington contributed to this report.