NGO Report Details Human Rights Abuses by Saddam Hussein
(Iraqi Women Are Among the Regime's Victims)
Washington -- Two human rights groups based in France have released a joint report, accusing the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein of committing "massive and systematic" human rights violations, particularly against women.
The report, "Iraq: An Intolerable, Forgotten, and Unpunished Repression," said in June 2000, the Iraqi regime began a campaign of public beheadings of women accused of being prostitutes, of opposing the regime or of being related to an opponent of the regime.
The report was researched and written by the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights Leagues and the Human Rights Alliance (France)/Coalition for Justice in Iraq. Investigators working for the two groups gathered the information for their report during fact-finding missions in July 2001 to Jordan and Syria where they interviewed dozens of recently arrived Iraqi refugees, who gave eyewitness accounts of atrocities.
Eyewitnesses told the investigators that the beheadings of women took place in front of family members, including children, and the heads were publicly displayed over signs reading, "For the honor of Iraq," the report said. The report documents about 130 women who have been victimized in this campaign, but warned that the actual number may be higher.
The report was published in French on December 14, 2001. The English version was released on February 6, 2002, as Andreas Mavrommatis, Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights for the situation in Iraq, prepares to travel to Baghdad in February at the invitation of the regime in Baghdad.
Mavrommatis is the first U.N. human rights rapporteur to visit Iraq in a decade. Since 1991, when the Commission established the mandate of a special rapporteur on Iraq, Iraq has accepted only one visit. That mission was conducted in 1992 by the former Special Rapporteur Max van der Stoel.
In addition to atrocities against women, the report described the Iraqi regime's military training and indoctrination of children, arbitrary arrests and detentions, ethnic cleansing, and imposition of Saddam Hussein's personality cult.
"In Iraq, not a day passes without us hearing that someone from a family we know has been executed," one refugee is quoted as saying.
"For example, my neighbor's son was shot outside her house and no one could save him. When he died, the special security forces came and asked her to pay 50,000 Iraqi dinars per bullet to be able to recover the body. She sold everything she had and paid to be able to bury him, on her own, with two police cars accompanying her, and the police buried him. Three days later they came to demolish her house and she was left on the street with her three daughters. I saw that with my own eyes," the refugee added.
Human rights violations are also directed against children, according to the report. It describes how children, as young as five, are recruited into the "Ashbal Saddam," or "Saddam's Cubs." Indoctrinated to adulate Saddam Hussein and denounce family members, they are also subjected to military training, which includes cruelty to animals.
"From the age of nine, children are put through proper military training. A firearm is a physical part of the child's body," a mother was quoted as saying.
The report gives accounts of children being subjected to arrest and imprisonment because of the opposition of one or both of their parents to the regime. For example, a woman from Najaf, whose husband had been executed for refusing to preach in favor of the war against Iran, said that her two children, aged eleven and thirteen, were imprisoned for three and six months, and that she had to pay to get them released.
Another witness said that the imprisonment of women and children is used to pressure opponents of the regime.
"In 1999, while I was under arrest in Abu Ghreb, I saw a group of women brought into prison with children of between three and five. It became standard practice to arrest women and children to put pressure on husbands, brothers, and father. They were kept from one to three months and released only if they confessed," the witness said.
"We children were between four and twelve in 1981 when we were taken to prison with my mother and my aunt. I can remember the hunger that I felt. When we ran to embrace my mother, who had instruments on either side of her head and was screaming, we felt pain because she was full of electric current," another witness quoted in the report said.
The human rights report provides detailed about the Iraqi regime's activities in ethnic cleansing and forced population removal, known as Arabization, which is responsible in large part for the roughly one million internally displaced people in Iraq.
Under Arabization, many members of the Kurdish, Turkmen, and Assyrian populations have been forced to leave their oil-rich regions in the north and relocate to other areas. Under this policy, non-Arabs are prohibited from inheriting or buying businesses or real estate. Their farmland is confiscated, and they are routinely subject to harassment, arrest, torture, and expulsion, according to the report.
An estimated three to four million Iraqis have fled their country, making Iraqis the second largest refugee population in the world, after Afghans, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Iraqi exile community, according to the report, lives in fear, and high-profile Iraqi exiles have been assassinated in their countries of refuge.
The report says many Iraqi exiles expressed bitterness and despair at the silence surrounding the large-scale repression by the Iraqi regime.
"The terror in Iraq is ubiquitous," the report says. "Every Iraqi, man, woman and child is a potential enemy -- of the party, of the regime, of the leader Saddam Hussein -- and must be dealt with accordingly."
The full report, published in French by the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues and the Coalition for Justice in Iraq, is available at www.fidh.org/magmoyen/rapport/2001pdf/iq315f.pdf.
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