Al Jazeera World

Al Jazeera World

By Al JazeeraNews
Download on the App Store

Al Jazeera World episodes

  • Who Killed Robert Kennedy? | Al Jazeera World
    Filmmaker: Bahiya Namour
    Fifty years ago, United States Senator Robert F Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just moments after he'd won California's Democratic presidential primary.
    Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship, was arrested at the scene of the shooting in what the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) thought was an open-and-shut case.
    Sirhan was tried and jailed for Robert Kennedy's murder. But since the 1970s, there have been calls for a new investigation into the assassination, based on differing witness accounts, the number of shots fired and distance of Sirhan from Kennedy when he fired.
    "We're trying to prove there was a travesty of justice in 1969 at Sirhan's trial. We're trying to prove that there was no way that he could have shot the senator, let alone have killed the senator," says Laurie Dusek, a member of Sirhan's defence team.
    Kennedy's wounds suggest his assassin - or assassins - stood behind him, but eyewitnesses place Sirhan about a metre away and almost in front of him. This has led to suggestions that a second gunman may have fired the fatal shot, a theory supported by Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner for the County of Los Angeles, Thomas Noguchi, who stated in his report that the shot that killed Kennedy was fired at the point-blank range next to his right ear.
    "The only way to explain this that there was a second gunman in a position behind Kennedy, but the prosecution never proved that Sirhan was behind Kennedy or was able to shoot him point blank," says eyewitness Paul Schrade.
    Witness accounts and more recent forensic analysis support the view that more bullets were fired at the scene than Sirhan could have had in his gun.
    Sirhan's .22 Iver-Johnson revolver could only hold eight bullets, yet as many as 13 shots may have been fired at the scene. Two FBI investigators who attended the crime scene right after the assassination stated that they had discovered two bullets in a door frame - bullets that were not mentioned in the LAPD's report.
    "If a second gun is not firing, there cannot be any bullet holes in the wooden door frames," explains William Klaber, a journalist and writer who has studied the case extensively. "So the police take those door frames down and they bring them to the police station to do work on them. It turns out these bullets represent too many bullets. Sirhan's gun holds eight bullets."
    Robert Kennedy's death, like the 1963 assassination of his older brother, President John F Kennedy, has been the subject of many conspiracy theories.
    One suggests that if Bobby were ever elected president, it's almost certain he would have ordered a fresh investigation into his brother's assassination, unconvinced as he was by the official version in the Warren Commission report. Other theories include had Robert Kennedy been elected president, he would have taken steps to end the war in Vietnam.
    RFK was a principled politician, a New York senator who cared about poverty in the south and racial segregation everywhere. His ideals of a more equal society were never realised but the scale of grief following his death showed how much people appreciated him.
    After his body had been flown from California to New York, it was put on board a train to Washington, DC for burial next to his brother John at Arlington National Cemetery - and the railway line was lined with millions of mourners. The journey, however, to establish clearly how he died is still incomplete.
    More from Al Jazeera World on:
    YouTube - http://aje.io/aljazeeraworldYT
    Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AlJazeeraWorld
    Twitter - https://twitter.com/AlJazeera_World
    Visit our website - http://www.aljazeera.com/aljazeeraworld
    Subscribe to AJE on YouTube - http://aje.io/YTsubscribe
    - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
    - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
    - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
    - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/
    47 min
  • Abraham Serfaty: Morocco's Mandela | Al Jazeera World
    Filmmaker: Mostafa Bouazzaoui
    For almost his whole political career, Abraham Serfaty was a thorn on the side of authorities in Rabat, both during the days of French rule and later, under the reign of King Hassan II.
    Described by his closest supporters as "the Moroccan Mandela", Serfaty endured 17 years of imprisonment, torture and 13 years of exile for his political views, including his opposition to Morocco's position on Western Sahara.
    Part of the minority Jewish population in Morocco, he never embraced Zionism. After the 1967 war, he distanced himself from Israel and became a vocal advocate for the Palestinian resistance movement, a burning issue that dominated discussion on Arab streets at the time.
    Serfaty once famously told the media: "Conveying the image of a democratic Israel is a fantasy. You cannot be a democrat while oppressing another people. Zionism goes against democracy. I was 10 in 1936, when my father told me at the synagogue that 'Zionism goes against our religion.'"
    His unique identity allowed him to break taboos and inspire others, according to those who met him. "He established a new concept of the Arab Jew who didn't renounce any element of his origins as a Moroccan and an Arab Jew," explains university teacher Michelle Fay. "One can be a hundred percent Jewish and a hundred percent anti-Zionist."
    Together with Abdellatif Laabi, Serfaty developed an artistic journal called "Souffles", meaning "Breaths". Printed in Arabic and French, it was a creative space for political expression that its authors felt had been silenced for so long by politicians and the monarchy.
    "It gave a new orientation to both journalism and creativity in an era that was giving birth to new ideas in Morocco, Palestine and the world," says Noureddine Saoudi, a former prisoner and teacher.
    As a champion of universal human rights and democratic principles, Serfaty sits alongside the likes of Che Guevara, Martin Luther King and Patrice Lumumba. A product of his environment, he belonged to the freethinking era of the 1960s and 70s; and of the post-independence period when many Arab countries were freed from colonial rule. There was a global movement to end authoritarian rule, war, poverty, racism and the nuclear threat in which primarily young people inspired by left-wing Marxist ideology, saw spreading political awareness as a duty.
    It's ironical, on reflection, that several figures who wrestled their countries away from foreign influence later used oppressive styles of government against their own people - like Hafez al-Assad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
    Years after Abraham Serfaty's death in 2010, the Arab Middle East is still grappling with many of the major issues that preoccupied him - searching for forms of government acceptable to people and politicians, free from outside influence, without media restrictions or powerful instruments of state.
    - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
    - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
    - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
    - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/
    48 min
  • Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Rendition and the West | Al Jazeera World
    Filmmaker: Bashar Ghannam
    Nearly seven years after the death of Muammar Gaddafi, the British government apologised for handing over a Libyan dissident and his wife to Libya's intelligence in 2004, knowing that as an opponent of the government, they would be likely to be imprisoned and tortured.
    Fatima Boudchar was pregnant when she was tortured and kidnapped in Thailand in 2004, in a process that has become known as extraordinary rendition. It was carried out by MI6 and the CIA in collaboration with the Libyan External Security Organisation, the ESO.
    Her only "crime" was that she was married to a Libyan opponent of the Gaddafi regime, Abdelhakim Belhaj. Belhaj was the former leader of an opposition group called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which Gaddafi accused of having links to al-Qaeda.
    He and his wife were planning to seek asylum in the UK. However, they were abducted in their transit in Thailand and taken to a CIA detention centre where they were tortured and later handed over to Libyan intelligence.
    "I refused to be interrogated by them … and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or any organisation outside Libya. My problem was with the Libyan security services" says Belhaj.
    This was not an isolated case and the subject of rendition is one that Western governments need to be accountable for.
    Until 2003, Gaddafi had been labelled by the West as the "mad dog of the Middle East". But after the US-led invasion of Iraq failed to unearth Saddam Hussein any weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi seized an opportunity, not simply for redemption but complete rehabilitation, by claiming to possess WMDs and offering to surrender them.
    Sanctions against Libya were lifted, lucrative oil deals struck and collaboration between the CIA, MI6 and Libya stepped up in the so-called "fight against terrorism". This led directly to the rendition of Gaddafi's opponents like Belhaj and many others.
    After the US-led invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi sought better relations with the West [Michel Euler/AP]
    None of this may ever have come to light were it not for a large cache of documents found in Tripoli after the Libyan revolution in 2011.
    Thousands of papers were discovered in what looked to journalists and human rights organisations like the abandoned office of the former head of Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa.
    One of the most revealing finds was a letter from Sir Mark Allen, then head of MI6 counterintelligence, to Moussa Koussa.
    "I congratulate you on the safe arrival of [Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya," it read. Belhaj and another former member of the LIFG, Sami al-Saadi, were released from prison in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
    In 2012, the two men and their families decided to sue the British government for what they believed was its role in their arrest, imprisonment and subsequent torture. Al-Saadi accepted an offer of compensation by the British government of 2.2 million British pounds ($2.5m). But Belhaj rejected a financial settlement, maintaining that he and his wife instead wanted a full apology.
    Six years later, on May 10, 2018, the British government apologised for its role in their rendition and the couple's suffering.
    Human Rights Watch published a report in 2012 called, Delivered into Enemy Hands, which details the rendition process and cites a number of cases. Among them was that of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi who was rendered to Libya by the US in either 2005 or 2006. In 2009, he was found dead in his prison cell after allegedly committing suicide. But Human Rights Watch said al-Libi died because he was tortured.
    Human rights lawyer Cori Crider believes that despite the British government apology this isn't the end of the rendition issue.
    "Right now, as we speak, in Yemen", she says, "the United Arab Emirates is running black sites in which detainees are tortured and in which rape is used as a technique of torture; and these are people with whom the US and the UK are in coalition."
    Editor's note: Al Jazeera wrote to the CIA to ask it to comment on allegations made in this film but did not receive a reply.
    It's also important to note that although the British government apologised for rendering Abdelhakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar to Libya, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and the former head of counter-intelligence at MI6, Sir Mark Allen, have not accepted any personal responsibility or admitted any wrong-doing in the case of Abdelhakin Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar.
    More from Al Jazeera World on:
    YouTube - http://aje.io/aljazeeraworldYT
    Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AlJazeeraWorld
    - Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe
    - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
    - Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera
    - Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/
    48 min

About Al Jazeera World

From the publisher's feed

A weekly showcase of one-hour documentary films from across the Al Jazeera Network.