Iraqi govt is complicit in murders

HRW: “The government has contributed to an atmosphere of fear and panic fostered by acts of violence against emos,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of claiming that the accounts are fabricated, Iraqi authorities need to set up a transparent and independent inquiry to address the crisis.”

So now Iraqi authorities are saying the accounts of murder are fabricated? How sad and embarrassing for Iraqi Shia!

Norway is a wonderful socialist country

In light of the horrible news about a right wing extremist who mass murdered his fellow Norwegians, including children, I wanted to post this clip from "Sicko", a documentary by Michael Moore. I haven't seen the documentary. I know it got great reviews (except from the right wing media owned by Rupert Murdoch) and I wanted to see it, but I forgot about it. I think tonight I will see it on Netflix, and soon I want to visit Norway!



Thank you Kirk Richards for posting this on facebook!

About the killer: "Another Norwegian news account, as translated by Google, indicated that Breivik harbored anti-Islam sentiment. The report said he identified strongly with nationalism and posted on an anti-Islam right-wing website, where he expressed views in opposition to multiculturalism and internationalism. He also expressed admiration for controversial Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’s party."

U.S. Puts Ally Bahrain on List With Human Rights Violators Iran, Syria

Bloomberg: 'The United States has put Bahrain, a Persian Gulf ally, in the company of Iran, North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe on its list of human rights violators to be scrutinized by the UN Human Rights Council.

“The Bahraini government has arbitrarily detained workers and others perceived as opponents,” U.S. Ambassador Eileen Donohoe said in a statement to the council yesterday in Geneva. “The United States is deeply concerned about violent repression of the fundamental freedoms of association, expression, religion and speech of their citizens.”

Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has tried to crush protests that have wracked the country since February, as the Shiite majority population has agitated for the Sunni Muslim monarchy to allow greater economic opportunities and freedoms.'

A chance to support a new beginning

Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter: 'Gen. Wesley K. Clark argues that “Libya doesn’t sell much oil to the United States” and that while Americans “want to support democratic movements in the region,” we are already doing that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Framing this issue in terms of oil is exactly what Arab populations and indeed much of the world expect, which is why they are so cynical about our professions of support for democracy and human rights. Now we have a chance to support a real new beginning in the Muslim world — a new beginning of accountable governments that can provide services and opportunities for their citizens in ways that could dramatically decrease support for terrorist groups and violent extremism. It’s hard to imagine something more in our strategic interest.'

Thanks Mona for posting on fb.

UN concerned about human rights violations in Iraq

'The United Nations says it's concerned about reports of human rights violations during nationwide protests in Iraq.

U.N.'s Special Representative to Iraq Ad Melkert said in a statement on Wednesday that reported violations included "disproportionate" use of force by security forces against protesters.'

Iraqis not happy with their democracy

"The circumstances in Egypt and Tunisia are very different from those in Iraq. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled by a foreign army, not a popular revolt, and the deep sectarian divide that triggered widespread internecine bloodshed in the wake of his fall persists, precluding the emergence of a unifying Iraqi point of view.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is beginning his second four-year term after elections judged largely free by the United Nations, in which multiple parties and a clear majority of the electorate participated.

Yet all the ills that provoked Egyptians and Tunisians to take to the streets are thriving in Iraq, too, demonstrating that it is possible to have both democracy and human rights abuses, an elected government and chronic corruption, and constitutional guarantees of freedom alongside intimidation and fear."

Some Arabs begin moving mindset out of 7th century

By "7th century" I don't mean to imply that honor killing is an Islamic practice. It is a backward Arab practice that should have ended centuries ago.

"Honor killings have long been tolerated in Muslim countries, but movements are underway to both punish murderers and bring an end to the bloodshed Something is finally beginning to change. The Syrian parliament, for example, last month canceled the clause that permits a judge to show leniency toward a person who kills "for reasons of honor."

Honor can no longer be used as a defense by lawyers when presenting their client's case, and contrary to the previous law that did not state a minimum punishment, now the judges will be forced to imprison murderers for at least two years.

In Jordan the law has not yet been amended, even though the government has twice submitted it to parliament, but the courts themselves have begun acting as if the issue of family honor is no longer valid.

The punishments they have imposed recently for honor killings have been far harsher than what Jordanian citizens are used to.

Official statistics about honor murders are nonexistent, since police refrain from classifying them as such. However, a study carried out by the National Center for Social and Criminal Studies in Egypt indicated that some 70 percent of murders against women were carried out by their husbands, 20 percent by their brothers and 7 percent by their fathers.

The most unpleasant finding in the survey is that more than 70 percent of these murders were perpetrated on the basis of unfounded rumors and remarks from neighbors or friends about the victim's behavior.

The Egyptian human rights organization says the government itself encourages murders of this kind since the law in Egypt still regards family honor as a rationale for lenient sentencing.

Paragraph 237 in the Egyptian penal code reads, "Anyone who comes upon his wife at a time when she is committing adultery and kills her together with the person with whom she was fornicating on the spot, will be punished with imprisonment instead of the punishments stipulated in paragraphs 234 and 236." Those paragraphs contain sentences of life imprisonment, imprisonment with hard labor or death.

There is no plan in Cairo to amend the law and a petition on it has not yet been dealt with by the constitutional court.

However it is not merely the punishment of honor killings that is undergoing renewed scrutiny in Arab states. The public discourse is also beginning to change. Dr. Maan Said, for example, wrote this weekend in the Palestinian Internet newspaper Dunia al-Watan that, "It is surprising that the honor is always masculine but it is masculine from one aspect only. We do not hear, for example, that a young woman killed her sister or her mother in order to cleanse the shame. Could it be that our daughters do not feel the need to wash the shame? On the other hand, the washing of the shame is always done through the blood of women. Is a woman's blood the only blood that is suitable for cleansing of this kind? Let us once more discuss matters that we thought always were part of our basic values but that have become customs that shame us."

The Syrian writer Yassin Rafaiya also chimed in.

"The murder for family honor is one of the ugliest crimes, but the criminal, the murderer, is freed from jail after only a few months while he boasts to the judge that 'that was a defective finger and so we amputated it,'" he wrote. "The family honor murder is an indication of the degeneration and decline even of religious values which grant women respect and status. However these rights have become very wanting in our days."

This discourse, which has traditionally been dominated by voices from Arab women journalists, researchers and feminists, has now moved over to the men's purview."

Uday's Penalty Kick

I just watched this clip of a documentary about how Uday treated the Iraqi soccer team during the 1990s. The documentary must have been filmed shortly after the 2003 invasion. I can't believe I just saw it for the first time.

One player said "Thank God, today I feel we have the freedom to express ourselves with soccer."

I hope all the people filmed in the documentary are still alive and well.

"While Uday Hussein and his brother Qusay are now dead, they will never be forgotten by the people of Iraq - certainly not by the Iraqi soccer team. Uday was their chief patron - a key position in this soccer-mad country - and, as Olivia Rousset reports, no soccer fan was madder than Uday Hussein."

Saddam was a monster the World helped create

A few days ago I found and posted an article about the western countries that sold weapons to Saddam.  I called it "Saddam was a monster the West helped create".  Today I thought more about who helped Saddam become powerful and I remembered that Russia also sold weapons to his regime, as did China.  I searched my blog for "Russia" and found some interesting posts, but none about Russian arms sales to Iraq. The discussion about Russian arms sales took place in the comments (haloscan) section, and RhusLancia of IBC wrote a post in January 2007 titled "Where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?"  That was a good post, and in it RhusLancia pointed out the following:

• All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin.
• Around 21% of Iraq’s international chemical weapon equipment was French.
• About 100 tons of mustard gas also came from Brazil.
• The United Kingdom paid for a chlorine factory that was intended to be used for manufacturing mustard gas
• An Austrian company gave Iraq calutrons for enriching uranium. The nation also provided heat exchangers, tanks, condensers, and columns for the Iraqi chemical weapons infrastructure, 16% of the international sales.
• Singapore gave 4,515 tons of precursors for VX, sarin, tabun, and mustard gasses to Iraq.
• The Dutch gave 4,261 tons of precursors for sarin, tabun, mustard, and tear gasses to Iraq.
• Egypt gave 2,400 tons of tabun and sarin precursors to Iraq and 28,500 tons of weapons designed for carrying chemical munitions.
• India gave 2,343 tons of precursors to VX, tabun, Sarin, and mustard gasses.
• Luxemburg gave Iraq 650 tons of mustard gas precursors.
• Spain gave Iraq 57,500 munitions designed for carrying chemical weapons. In addition, they provided reactors, condensers, columns and tanks for Iraq’s chemical warfare program, 4.4% of the international sales.
• China provided 45,000 munitions designed for chemical warfare.

I was surprised to see India and Singapore on the list.  One of the Wikipedia pages that RhusLancia linked to mentions that Saudi Arabia loaned or gave $20 billion to Iraq between 1980 and 1982.  Other Gulf countries also loaned Saddam money in the 80s, including Kuwait.  

Many countries and international companies did business with Saddam, but today the most controversial  support, the support that most people talk about, was the support the US gave Saddam.  In 2005 NPR diplomatic correspondent Mike Shuster answers answered an important question:

CHADWICK: Can you say--is there any sense that the US created Saddam Hussein, that the United States essentially was responsible for the rule of Saddam Hussein?


SHUSTER: Well, certainly not created Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein came to power in the late 1960s in Iraq. He created Iraq's secret police and intelligence, and he became the number one strongman of Iraq in 1979. But after that, the United States did play a key role in all of his actions, military and political, in the Middle East. In effect, the United States chose Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, to be its surrogate for policy in the Persian Gulf region and to counter the actions of Iran, which the United States, the Reagan administration, saw as the biggest threat. And the fact that it supported Saddam Hussein in all these clandestine ways, a man who had been the pariah to the United States in the decade earlier, it seems to me could not have helped encourage Saddam's grandiosity about his role in the Arab world. He was meeting with senior US diplomats. They were looking the other way when he was using chemical weapons and developing other unconventional weapons. He couldn't have helped but to think that the United States was behind him.

The US did not create Saddam, but in the 80s the world's powerful countries helped make him a powerful dictator.  After 8 years of senseless war and a decade of ethnic cleansing, torture, and murder, in 1990 Saddam finally violated the rules of the west by invading Kuwait and thus drew the condemnation of the American President, who drew a line in the sand.  In 1991 the West, along with a few key Arab allies, destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure and its military and forced Saddam to withdraw the Iraqi army from Kuwait.  

After the 1991 Gulf War the West, led by the US, sought to destroy the remainder of Saddam's WMD via UN sanctions and inspections, ensuring that Saddam would not be able to threaten his neighbors.  They did not, however, destroy Saddam's ability to mass murder and imprison innocent Iraqis.  Iraqis not only suffered through another 12 years of murder, torture, and imprisonment, but they endured through sanctions that crippled the country's economy.  As a result of the sanctions and government neglect, ordinary Iraqis struggled to survive as Saddam built 81 palaces in the 90s. I have said many times that Saddam should have been overthrown in 1991, but I was still happy when it happened in 2003. Kan'an Makiya summarized my feelings in a 2006 interview:

It is very sad for me that Europe, which is a bastion of so many of the highest ideals to which I aspire, sat back and was happy to let the Iraqi people live under that inhuman regime of sanctions, which were killing people in vast numbers. And [Europe] allowed this situation of abuse and tyranny of the regime to continue, and did not think it morally necessary -- forget practically, maybe it's not practical -- to get rid of that kind of institutionalized abuse on that kind of scale.

Now, the United States chose to act, for whatever reason. From my point of view as an Iraqi, that decision was a thousand times better, morally speaking, than the inaction of the Europeans. The complicity of so many people in the United Nations, for instance, with the former regime. We now know so much about that because of documents that were discovered inside Iraq after the fall of the regime.

It wasn't just the Europeans who wanted Iraqis to continue to suffer under Saddam.  So did the Arabs. The Arabs who continue to defend Saddam are simply stupid. 

Saddam's Killing Fields

I'm reposting this documentary because the YouTube clips I linked to in this post have been removed.



PS: I'm glad I found this video, the entire documentary, which was made in 1993. If you want to understand how the Iraqi Kurds and Shia felt about Saddam's regime before 2003, this is a must see documentary. Even Sunni Arabs might be enraged, as they should be, because many Iraqi Sunni Arabs were murdered by Saddam's regime.

A few parts are untranslated, like the interviews with Iraqi Shia who fled to Kurdistan. At 14 minutes into the video, survivors of the 1991 massacre in the south tell of relatives who were tortured and then killed in front of them. At 25 minutes there is incredible footage of the southern marshes that was taken in the 70s, and then footage of how it looked in the 90s, after Saddam's regime drained them.

Ahmed Chalabi has his faults, but he is undoubtedly brilliant.

"In 2006, Wood [the historian who made this documentary] joined the British School of Archaeology in Iraq campaign, aiming to train and encourage new Iraqi archaeologists, and has lectured on the subject."

"Human Rights" Groups Shocked

President Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has for now denied terror suspects the right to trial. Human Rights groups are shocked. Angry Arabs are naturally angry.

Iraqis are not as outraged. Iraq Pundit writes in "Pity the Poor Murderer":

Look, I agree Gitmo should be closed. But I could not be more sick and tired of this argument that these guys are turned into killers as a result of their incarcertation. So very many men of my family and friends of my family and even a few women were imprisoned by the Baathists in Iraq. Okay, I have never been to Gitmo, but I will take a wild guess and say that the conditions in Iraq's prisons were at least as bad as Gitmo's and most likely dramatically worse. (According to a recent Pentagon report prepared at the request of the Obama White House, Gitmo satisfies Geneva Convention standards.) My relatives who were jailed did not shoot anyone. They were arrested for thinking the wrong thing by Baathist standards. I can't say this clearly enough: None of them turned into a murderer upon release from prison after years--in at least one case, more than a decade.

Needless to say, I agree with Iraq Pundit. Human Rights groups did not raise the same fuss about the rights of Iraqi civilians before 2003.

In other news that relates to human rights, Abu Ghraib has been reopened. Our Arab "brothers" do not seem happy about this bit of news either. The BBC article that Ustath As3ad linked to states that Abu Ghraib "became notorious for detainee abuse by US forces in 2004." I guess the BBC is just being honest, since Abu Ghraib did not gain notoriety for abuse of Iraqi innocents prior to 2003. Thus far I have read only one article that mentions torture and murder at Abu Ghraib before 2003: "Under Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Iraqis were thrown behind bars here. There were horrific stories of torture, abuse, execution without trial."

Amnesty International was one of the few human rights groups that published extensively on crimes by Saddam's regime, but the media and our Arab "brothers" never paid attention, never seemed as shocked as they are by the "abuse" at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo by Americans. The pre-2003 lack of attention will no doubt be blamed on Ronald Reagan, naturally.

Anfal

"Anfal" alone should have been reason enough to overthrow Saddam's regime in 1991 and try them for crimes against humanity. Thanks Molly.

Witness to Genocide

Volume 62 Number 1, January/February 2009

by Heather Pringle

"In May 1988, a prison guard checked Taymour Abdullah Ahmad's name off a list and directed him to a bus idling in the Popular Army camp in Topzawa, southwest of Kirkuk. The camp was one of Iraq's grimmest prisons. During his month-long internment there, the 12-year-old Kurdish boy watched guards beating male prisoners senseless with lengths of coaxial cable. He had seen four children weaken and then die of starvation. He stood helplessly as a guard stripped his father to his undershorts and led him off to his death. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa. He did not know that the paper in the guard's hand was an execution list.

The buses idling in the prison courtyard looked like ambulances. But this, Taymour soon discovered, was a cruel illusion; inside, they were squalid mobile prisons. The boy, his mother, and two younger sisters were forced into a dark air compartment that reeked of urine and feces. There was no toilet, no food, no water, no way out. The only ventilation came from a small, mesh-covered opening. By the time the bus pulled out, 60 or so frightened passengers--mainly Kurdish women and their young children--were crushed together in the stifling heat.

After more than 12 hours of travel, the bus bumped to a halt in the desert near the Saudi Arabian border. Taymour stepped into the cool night air and noticed at once that their bus, along with the 30 others in the convoy, had parked next to a large, shallow pit. Before he could take this in, however, a soldier pushed Taymour and his mother and sisters over the edge. Gunmen began firing. "When the first bullet hit me," Taymour later recalled, "I ran to a soldier and grabbed his hand." He had seen tears in the man's eyes, and instinctively reached toward him, hoping he would pull him out. But an officer watching nearby issued a command in Arabic, and the soldier shot Taymour. This time the boy fell to the ground, wounded in the left shoulder and lower back. He played dead until the gunmen moved away, then crawled out of the open grave and set off into the darkness. Several hours later, he reached a camp of Bedouins who took pity on him, hiding him in their tents.

Taymour told this story in 1992 to Human Rights Watch, which was investigating the treatment of Kurds in Iraq. Ethnically and linguistically distinct from the country's Arab majority, the Kurds have long sought independence from Iraqi rule. Moreover, a small number of Kurds follow an ancient religion known as Ezidi. To advance the separatist cause, some Kurds sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988. Their defiance infuriated Saddam Hussein, who feared losing control over the rich oil fields of northern Iraq's Kurdish region. So in 1988, Hussein's government publicly announced a campaign to crush Kurdish resistance. They dubbed it Anfal--The Spoils of War--the title of the eighth chapter of the Koran, which records revelations received by Muhammad after his first victorious battle over non-believers. By characterizing the Kurds as infidels, Iraqi officials hoped to rouse support in the Muslim world for their genocidal campaign.

Anfal proceeded with terrifying precision. Iraqi aircraft first dropped conventional bombs and chemical weapons on unsuspecting Kurdish villages; ground attacks followed, driving the survivors to collection points situated near main roads. Paramilitary and military forces waited in secret to gather up the terrified families and bus them to army camps and temporary holding centers. Seven months later, in September 1988, the Iraqi government announced the end of Anfal and declared a general amnesty for anyone who had sided with Iran during the war. By then, however, some 100,000 Kurds had vanished without a trace and around 2,600 Kurdish villages lay in ruins."

continued

Shia Women in Saddam's Iraq

By Robert Fisk - 23 January 2004

'The women's faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims. And their terrible fate - their vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions - should place their deaths on the list of barbarities for which Saddam Hussein could be tried, although almost all were put to death when the United States was supporting Saddam's regime.

For only now has a newly formed "Documentation Centre for the Female Martyrs of the Islamic Movement" at last produced the chronicle of these women's suffering. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samarra believed to be making chemical weapons.

Their names - along with the names of their torturers and executioners - are at last known. One man, Abu Widad, once boasted that he had hanged 70 female prisoners in one night at the Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad. In many cases, women were put to death for the crime of being the sisters or wives of a wanted man. Most were associated with the forbidden al-Dawa party, whose members were routinely tortured and killed by the Baathist government.

A typical entry in Imprisoned Memories: Red Pages from a Forgotten History - compiled by Ali al-Iraq in the Iranian city of Qum - reads as follows: "Samira Awdah al-Mansouri (Um Iman), born 1951, Basra, teacher at Haritha Intermediate School ... married to the martyr Abdul Ameer, a cadre of the Islamic movement military wing ... member of Islamic Dawa party ... Torturers: Major Mehdi al-Dulaymi who tortured while drunk, Lieutenant Hussain al-Tikriti, who specialised in breaking the rib cages of his victims by stamping on them ... Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Lamee who beat victims on their feet ... Um Iman was beaten ... hung by her hair from a ceiling fan and and suffered torture by electricity. Having spent two months in the prison cells in Basra without giving way, al-Dulaymi recommended she be executed for carrying unlicensed arms and belonging to the al-Dawa party."

In fact, Um Iman was transferred to the Public Security Division in Baghdad, where further torture took place over 11 months. She subsequently appeared before the Revolutionary Military Security Court, which sentenced her to death by hanging. She spent another six months in the Rashid prison west of Baghdad, until - when she might have hoped that her life would be spared - she was, on a Sunday evening, transferred to Abu Graib and executed by Abu Widad.

There are frequent accounts of women and children tortured in front of their husbands and fathers. In 1982, for instance, a Lieutenant Kareem in Basra reportedly brought the wife of an insurgent to the prison, stripped and tortured her in front of her husband, then threatened to kill their infant child. When both refused to talk, the security man "threw the baby against the wall and killed him".

Ahlam al-Ayashi was arrested in 1982 at the age of 20 because she was married to Imad al-Kirawee, a senior Dawa member. When he refused to give information to the security police, two torturers - named in the report as Fadil Hamidi al-Zarakani and Faysal al-Hilali - attacked Ahlam in front of the prisoner and his child, torturing her to death. Three of Ahlam's five brothers were executed along with her husband, and another brother was killed in the insurrection that followed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But her child Ala, who witnessed her mother's torture, was taken to Iran, where she married and is now about to enter university.

Awatif Nour al-Hamadani, 21, was betrayed by her own husband, who - under extreme torture - named his wife and several colleagues as gun-runners.

Awatif was pregnant but was set upon by a man called Major Amer who beat her with a metal chair and then sexually abused her. At her trial, Judge Mussalam al-Jabouri suggested that "a miniature gallows should be found for her baby daughter because she had sucked on her mother's hate-filled milk". Awatif was taken to be executed for the first time with two female colleagues and forced to watch the hanging of 150 men, 10 at a time; as their corpses were taken away, she recognised one of them as her husband. She was then returned to her cell. She was later executed in an electric chair.

Maysoon al-Assadi was an 18-year-old university student when she was arrested for membership of a banned Islamic organisation. During her interrogation, she was hanged by her hair and beaten on the soles of her feet and then sentenced to hang by Judge Awad Mohamed Amin al-Bandar. Her last wish - to say goodbye to her fiance - was granted, and the two married in the prison. But while saying goodbye to other prisoners, she made speeches condemning the leadership of the Iraqi regime, and the prison governor decided that she should be put to death slowly. She was strapped into the jail's electric chair and took two hours to die.

Salwa al-Bahrani, the mother of a small boy, had been caught distributing weapons to Islamic fighters in 1980.

She was allegedly administered poisoned yoghurt during interrogation by a doctor, Fahid al-Dannouk, who experimented in poisons that could be used against Iranian troops. Salwa died at home 45 days after being forced to eat the yoghurt.

The 550-page report is no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women's martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor is this a work which will make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. The book repeatedly states that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries. But the detail is compelling - the names and fates of at least 50 women are recorded, along with the names of their torturers - and the activities of the "Monster of Abu Ghraib", Abu Widad, have been confirmed by the few prisoners who survived the jail. He carried out executions between 8pm and 4am and would hit condemned men and women on the back of the head with a hatchet if they praised a murdered imam before they were hanged. In the end, 41-year-old Abu Widad was caught after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. He was hanged on his own gallows in 1985.'

Copyright: The Independent

Reminder: Saddam's regime tortured and murdered political opponents

Maybe I'm the only Iraqi American who likes to remind people that things were not well in Iraq before 2003.  I'm not trying to whitewash crimes committed in Iraq today, but I've seen too many people saying lately that things were fine in Iraq before 2003, or that Iraqis killed by the regime deserved it.  One poor guy was tortured to death because he didn't notice the car used by assailants who tried to kill the mass murderer and rapist Uday Hussein.  This may also explain the culture of fear and death we see in Iraq today.  A society that was treated like this for 24 years cannot heal completely overnight or within a year or two. Of course Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have made it very difficult for Iraqis to reconcile. I really don't understand why Iraqis blame Americans for sectarian tensions today. 

 

Systematic torture of political prisoners  (Amnesty International Report on Iraq, 2001) - just an excerpt:

3.2 Other suspected political opponents

B (name withheld), a Kurdish businessman from Baghdad, married with children, was arrested in December 1996 outside his house by plainclothes security men. Initially his family did not know his whereabouts and went from one police station to another enquiring about him. Then through friends they found out that he was being held in the headquarters of the General Security Directorate in Baghdad. The family was not allowed to visit him. Eleven months later in November 1997 the family was told by the authorities that he had been executed and that they should go and collect his body. His body reportedly bore evident signs of torture. His eyes were gouged out and the empty eye sockets were filled with paper. His right wrist and left leg were broken. The family was not given any reason for his arrest and subsequent execution. However, they suspected that he was executed because of his friendship with a retired army general who had links with the Iraqi opposition outside the country and who was arrested just before B. 's arrest and was also executed.

Salah Mahdi , a 35-year-old traffic warden in al-Mansur district in Baghdad, married with three children, was arrested together with scores of people following the attempted assassination of 'Uday Saddam Hussain, the eldest son of the President, in December 1996. He was accused of neglect because he did not notice the car the assailants used. He was held in the Special Security building and was severely tortured. He died, reportedly as a result of torture, in around June 1997. His family was told that he had died but the body was never returned to them for burial despite their repeated requests and to date his burial place reportedly remains unknown to the family.

'Abd al-Wahad al-Rifa'i , a 58-year retired teacher, who was executed by hanging after he had been held in prison without charge or trial for more than two years. On 26 March 2001 his family in Baghdad collected his body from the Baghdad Security Headquarters. The body reportedly bore clear marks of torture including the pulling out of toe-nails and swelling on his right eye. 'Abd Wahad al-Rifa'i, married with nine children, was arrested on 8 March 1999. Initially he was held in the headquarters of the General Security Directorate in Baghdad then transferred to the Baghdad Security Headquarters. He was believed to have been arrested because the authorities suspected that he was in contact with the Iraqi opposition abroad through his brother, 'Abd al-Rahim al-Rifa'i, an active anti-government opponent living in Europe. 'Abd al-Wahad al-Rifa'i's wife and children have reportedly had their food ration card withdrawn from them as a punishment and the authorities also stopped pension payments which 'Abd al-Wahad was receiving before his execution.

Hundreds of army and security officers have been arrested in recent years and many have been executed. Charges against them have included plotting to overthrow the government or having contacts with the opposition abroad. Many were subjected to torture. A former Iraqi General Intelligence officer C (name withheld) told Amnesty International that he was arrested in mid-1990s on suspicion of having contacts with the opposition. He was held in solitary confinement for two years at the headquarters of the General Intelligence in al-Hakimiya in Baghdad. During the two years of detention he endured prolonged and repeated torture in the interrogation room. He was left suspended for long hours from a horizontal rod. His hands and feet were tied behind his back and was suspended from the upper arms. He was also beaten with a cable on different parts of the body, especially on the back of his head. Electric shocks were applied to various parts of the body and a wooden stick was inserted into his anus. He was held in solitary confinement all this time. The cell he was held in was painted entirely in red, including the ceiling, the floor and the doors. The light was red too. It is often referred to as the ''red room'' by former torture victims. He was released at the end of 1997. However he was rearrested again two years later also on suspicion of establishing contacts with the opposition and was held in the same detention centre. He was subjected to the same forms of torture as described above. C has now been left with permanent physical damage.

A number of former Iraqi political detainees were forced to undergo surgery to have a leg or arm amputated because they had been tortured for long periods of time and had developed gangrene for which they did not receive medical treatment. They had no choice but to sign statements in hospitals to the effect that it was solely their decision to have the amputation carried out.

Saddam's Killing Fields

Update (May 26, 2009): The clips below have been removed by YouTube. Watch the documentary here.

I posted a clip of this documentary a few months ago - that clip is from Part 1 below. These six videos (Parts 1-5 are each 10 minutes long) comprise the full length documentary titled Saddam's Killing Fields, which was made two years after Gulf War I, and is a must see if you haven't seen it. It's too bad that not all conversations with victims were translated. In an interview with a Washington analyst in Part 3, she explains that the head of Iraqi military intelligence told the Kurds in April, 1991 that they had killed 300,000 people in the south of Iraq during the uprising there. Part 4 briefly discusses the Sunni Arab victims of Saddam's regime. This is the first time I have seen this documentary in its entirety, and even I was shocked. I am still surprised when people tell me that there was no sectarian violence in Iraq before 2003.

Part 1: George Bush Sr. encourages Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam's regime, the Shia rebellion in March, 1991


Part 2: A visit to free Kurdistan, interviews with Ahmed Chalabi and Shia victims of Saddam's terror.


Part 3: Interview with Washington analyst Laurie Milroy on why the US did not help the Shia, and how many Shia were killed in the south. A review of the Anfal Campaign and a recording of Ali Hassan al Majeed talking about hitting the Kurds with chemicals, review of documents found in Erbil that reveal Majeed's plan for the Marsh Arabs. Discussion about the Marsh Arabs.


Part 4: Destruction of Marsh Arab villages and the draining of the southern marshes. Interviews with Shia victims and an Iraqi Shia exile who compiled documented evidence of atrocities and the plan to drain the marshes.


Part 5: Discussion about western governments and companies that sold weapons and equipment to Saddam's regime. Interviews with Marsh Arabs.


Part 6 (credits):

In My Country There Is Problem

Too often I have heard Arabs and Muslims blaming their problems on 'the Jews'. I think that these prejudices about Jews stem largely from the way Palestinians have been treated by Israel since 1947 (I will write about this subject in more detail in another post), and I still believe that Arab nationalism only became popular because of the Palestinian Diaspora, but so many Arabs talk about Jews as if all Jews are evil, and in some countries like Saudia Arabia, the demonization of Jews is bizarre. Even in Iraq, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace for thousands of years, to call an Iraqi a Jew is insulting, as in 'le tseer Yahoodi!' (don't be a Jew). But it's not just Arabs who do this. Americans also have stereotypes about Jews, as in 'I got Jewed' – meaning 'I got ripped off'. I cringe when I hear an Arab say that this war benefits 'the Jews', but it doesn't help when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that the Iraq war was good for Israel. Many Arabs are unable to differentiate between Jews and Israelis, or between Israelis who fight for Palestinian rights and Israeli settlers who attack olive-harvesting Palestinian farmers or human rights workers who help Palestinians.

Not all Jews think or act alike, just as not all Arabs think or act alike. I am impressed with the Arab governments that have protected their Jewish citizens. Tunisia has gone to great lengths to ensure that their Jews are safe, and if Synagogues in Tunis are damaged, the Tunisian government repairs the Synagogue. During the holocaust when the King of Morocco was asked to supply a list of Jews in his country, his response was: 'We have no Jews in Morocco, only Moroccan citizens.'

Someone recently told me about a a mosque that sheltered Jews during the holocaust.

In an account written by Annette Herskovits (today she is a champion for Palestinian human rights) she says that Algerian Muslims hid many Jewish children in their mosques. One sad message that those Muslims distrubuted amongst themselves after the Nazis arrested many Jews went as follows:

"Yesterday at dawn, the Jews of Paris were arrested. The old, the women, and the children. In exile like ourselves, workers like ourselves. They are our brothers. Their children are like our own children. The one who encounters one of his children must give that child shelter and protection for as long as misfortune - or sorrow - lasts. Oh, man of my country, your heart is generous."

Making fun of simple minded people who have prejudged all Jews can be a dangerous thing to do, and maybe only a Jew can get away with it. Two years ago I saw this skit by Sacha Boren Cohen on the Ali G Show, and I think it's his funniest. He does a good job of making fun of people who have silly preconceived notions that all Jews are bad people. Every Arab should watch it. Notice that the audience in the video is American - the skit was filmed in Tuscon, Arizona. I don't think that everybody in that crowd really believe in 'throwing the Jew down the well'. I like to believe that most people in the audience, like most people who have seen this skit, were laughing at the satire itself, and don't actually agree with what Borat was singing. I guess this is the important question: who laughs at this skit because of the satire and who laughs or ponders it without laughing because they believe it has any truth to it?


Throw the Jew down the well...

Torture, Rape, and Murder By Saddam's Henchmen

I linked to this Amnesty International report in my first post. It's a reminder that not all torture carried out by Arab regimes can be blamed on the US.

'Women too have been tortured, ill-treated and in some cases extrajudicially executed in Iraq. Su'ad Jihad Shams al-Din, a 61-year-old medical doctor, was arrested at her clinic in Baghdad on 29 June 1999 on suspicion that she had contacts with Shi'a Islamist groups. She was detained without charge or trial and was released on 25 July 1999. She was initially held in Baghdad Security Directorate and then was transferred to al-Ambar Security Directorate (also in Baghdad) on 5 July. Su'ad Jihad Shams al-Din was tortured frequently during interrogation by security men. Methods of torture included mostly beatings on the sole (falaqa) with a cable.

Some women have been raped in custody. They were detained and tortured because they were relatives of well known Iraqi opposition activists living abroad. The security authorities use this method to put pressure on Iraqi nationals abroad to cease their activities. For example, on 7 June 2000 Najib al-Salihi, a former army general who fled Iraq in 1995 and joined the Iraqi opposition, was sent a videotape showing the rape of a female relative. Shortly afterwards he reportedly received a telephone call from the Iraqi intelligence service, asking him whether he had received the "gift" and informing him that his relative was in their custody.

In October 2000 dozens of women suspected of prostitution were beheaded without any judicial process in Baghdad and other cities after they had been arrested and ill-treated. Men suspected of procurement were also beheaded. The killings were reportedly carried out in the presence of representatives of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi Women's General Union. Members of Feda'iyye Saddam, a militia created in 1994 by 'Uday Saddam Hussain, used swords to execute the victims in front of their homes. Some victims were reportedly killed in this manner for political reasons.

Najat Mohammad Haydar, an obstetrician in Baghdad, was beheaded in October 2000 apparently on suspicion of prostitution. However, she was reportedly arrested before the introduction of the policy to behead prostitutes and was said to have been critical of corruption within the health services.

A woman known as "Um Haydar" was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown.'

Memories of an Iraqi American

1975-1982

I was born in Baghdad, Iraq. My family moved to the USA in 1975, and we moved back to Iraq in 1980, after my father got his degree. It was June, 1980 when we flew from Denver to London for an extended visit with many relatives there. That summer in England my father learned that two of his nephews (older cousins of mine) had been murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime earlier that year. They were both very religious and active in politics, and they were probably recruited by the Da'wa party, which was inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran the previous year. When Saddam took over as Iraqi President he and his cronies exterminated Da'wa in Iraq and anybody who dare mention the Islamic Revolution. Upon hearing this news, my mother, who wasn't keen on returning to Saddam's Iraq anyway, tried to convince my father to stay in the UK for a while longer. My father, who won a scholarship from the Iraqi government in 1974, insisted on returning to Iraq. He felt obligated to work for the Iraqi government - in fact the agreement was that he would work for them for at least two years after receiving his degree. He was also looking forward to working with his best friend (an educated Sunni Arab from Sammarra), who had already risen to a high rank at the Oil Ministry. My father was also convinced that Saddam would not last long in Iraq. So in late July we boarded a ferry with our new Volvo, filled with our belongings and all of us, crossed the English Channel and began our long drive from Belgium to Baghdad. Two weeks after we moved into our home, Iraq invaded Iran.

When the war began, Saddam's government immediately restricted travel outside of Iraq to government employees who were assigned to travel abroad and to people with medical emergencies. The Iraqi army began drafting young men shortly after the war began. Many of my cousins and uncles were drafted, and although they did not believe in the war, they had no choice. The alternative was prison, death, or desertion. One of our cousins, on my mother's side of the family, decided to desert after being deployed to near the Iranian border. He disappeared in 1981. His parents did not know of his plan to desert, and when he didn't show up for his leave they thought he was killed, so they went to the army headquarters in Baghdad to inquire about their son. The army's response was that he deserted, and that his family was therefore responsible for treason. One of their other sons had been branded an Islamic a few months earlier - he was arrested and murdered in jail, so the family was already suspected of breeding Islamics. That same night men from the Mukhabarat showed up at their home and arrested all of them - everybody in the immediate family - three boys aged 4, 7 and 10, two teenaged girls, two college aged men, the parents, and the 80-year old grandmother. They were taken to a jail (more like a concentration camp) outside of Baghdad. The grandmother died there three months later. The rest spent four years there with hundreds of other people. My parents visited them in jail twice, and both times my parents could not believe what they saw. They saw kids sucking on bottles - babies in JAIL. The two teenage girls spent their high school years in jail, but at least they got to study there. In Saddam's Iraq, it was common for the Mukhabarat to take substitute prisoners - if the suspect could not pay his crimes, his relatives would. We still see this kind of thing today - just last week the brother of the chief judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein was murdered. It is intended to discourage people from committing such grievous acts as being a member of an Islamic party that does not agree with the government and may even talk about how foolish it is to war with a Muslim neighbor. This practice of taking substitute prisoners continued up until 2003, and many times the prisoners paid for their relatives' "crimes" "with their lives (scroll down about half way down to section 4 to read about what happened to Um Haydar in 2000)

In the summer of 1982 my sister was diagnosed with diabetes, and although my parents were devastated by this news, they saw it as an opportunity to leave the country. My parents asked the Iraqi government if they could take the family to England, where my sister would receive better medical care. We were allowed to leave without my father. Later that year my father was sent to Vienna to represent Iraq in an OPEC meeting. On the last day of the meeting, instead of boarding the plane to Baghdad, he flew to London. We were reunited. We were very lucky.

We were lucky again to get Visas to the US, and eventually we were back in Colorado. It was surreal when I woke up that October morning and looked at the Rocky Mountains. We were very lucky to be out of Iraq and lucky to be in the US, but we still had to secure Green Cards, and that is not an easy thing for immigrants to do. My father already had Amensty International reports (God bless them for reporting on Saddam's crimes early on) on torture and murder committed by Saddam's regime against political opponents, and he figured that political asylum would be the easiest way to get Green Cards, so he hired a lawyer to help us. The lawyer studied the reports and the entire case and advised my father that applying for political asylum would be a waste of time, because Saddam was an ally of Washington at the time. We wanted to stay in this great country inspite of Washington's screwed up foreign policy, so we found another way to get our Green Cards, and eventually we became US citizens, and here I am today writing about what happened to us in Iraq without fear of being killed, tortured, or imprisoned.'




The Monument of Freedom mural in Baghdad inspired by Picasso's 1937, Guernica painting which depicted the Nazi bombardment of Guernica, a Basque village in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936. This picture was taken by my father in the 70s.


Update Oct 24, 2011: I had to update the link to a website describing Picasso's Guernica and I found this: "Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. "