FEAR AND LOATHING OF THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT

"The situation of human rights in Iraq is worsening and the repression of civil and political rights continues unabated. [....] The prevailing regime of systematic human rights violations is contrary to Iraq's many international obligations."

- Interim report by Max van der Stoel, UN Special Rapporteur on Iraq, 1991-1999, in an address to the 54th session of the UN General Assembly, 14th October 1999

"Gross human rights violations are taking place systematically in Iraq. [....] Whilst the Iraqi government has used every opportunity to publicize the suffering of the population under the sanctions [....] it has excercised a complete news balckout on the attrocities that its' security forces have been committing against suspected opponents."

- Amnesty Internation Report, 24th November 1999

It is no secret that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. One of Saddam Hussein's first political acts was his involvement in the attempted assassination of former Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Qasim in 1959. He helped lead the second Ba'ath revolt of 1968, during which an estimated 3000 political figures were murdered in three days. Saddam even shot one of his own ministers during a cabinet meeting. To quote Robert Gates, former Deputy US National Security Advisor: "This is no agrarian reformer."

The Iraqi government refuses to permit any local human rights groups from working in Iraq, consistently denies entry into Iraq of any UN or NGO human rights groups, and fails to respond to their requests. Iraq is a signatory to the International Covenant on on Civil and Political Rights (January 1971) but fails to adhere to it's principles of law and human rights.

The following information highlights some of the these gross violations. Whilst they are of tremendous concern and condemned by all, the West's reponse remains beligerent to the extreme. Not only do the people of Iraq have to contend with living in such a brutal dictatorship, which until 1990 was heavily supported by the West, they must simultaneously endure the most comprehensive and devastating sanctions regime that has ever been imposed on any country in history.

Have they not suffered enough_ Britain and the US think they have not, and sanctions remain in place. Indeed they attempt to justify sanctions by referencing the governments' human rights abuses. Not only is this astoundingly cruel, it is simply not logical.

The sad and terrible fact of the matter is that when the death tolls attributable to both sides in this conflict are tallied, Saddam Hussein comes in a distant second to the US and UK. Not even at the height of his power could Hussein have managed to kill 1.5 million of his own people in the manner that these two countries have overseen.

1.
In February 1998, towards the end of the Iran / Iraq war, which cost the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, Saddam Hussein ordered the commencement of the notorious "Al-Anfal" campaign. An all out military and terror assault on the Kurds living in the North of the country, as many as 100,000 (some estimates say 200,000) Kurds were killed and 4,000 Kurdish villages were wiped off the map.

5,000 Kurds were arrested in Kirkuk alone. All remaining Kurds (mostly women and children) were expelled from the city. 55,000 - 60,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees were allowed into Turkey to flee from the Anfal Campaign.
[Sources: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, CHARLES BROWN]

2.
After the Kurdish town of Halabja was captured on March 16th 1988 by Iranian forces in league with Kurdish separatists, Hussein ordered the use of mustard gas. An estimated 5000 people were killed, and a further 10,000 injured. It was the single most devastating use of chemical warfare in history.

3.
The day after the cease-fire of the Iran / Iraq war, Iraqi planes dropped chemical bombs on the Kurds. Chemical attacks continued into August 1988, and several thousand Kurds were killed.
[Source: CHARLES BROWN]

4.
In 1989 hundreds of Iraqi children allegedly had their eyes gouged out to elicit confessions from their parents.
[Source: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL]

5.
In April 1990, Iraq hung London Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft as a British spy despite international protests. Bazoft had been investigating a series of explosions reported to have emanated from a factrory outside Baghdad thought to be manufacturing missiles.

6.
Following the surrender and flee of Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait, coalition forces captured half a million documents pertaining to the Iraqi intelligence and command structure. In these documents were evidence of the extreme repression of the Kuwaiti people authorised by the Iraqi government. These included orders to execute owners of houses bearing anti-Iraqi slogans, orders to kill on sight any civilian caught on the streets after curfew or anyone involved in any resistance activity, and orders to use machine guns, grenade launchers and flame throwers against civilian demonstrators.

An estimated 4000 - 6000 people were killed or went missing during the occupation. The fate of 600 Kuwaiti detainees, many of whom were known to have been taken to Iraq, remains unknown. The Iraqi government continues to refuse to meet with the Tripartite Commission, tasked with resolving outstanding cases of missing persons, and hinders the efforts of the International Red Cross to ascertain their whereabouts or whether they are still alive.
[Sources: IRAQI NATIONAL CONGRESS, BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE]

7.
The Ba'athist Sunni Moslem minority has consistently repressed the majority Shi'a population, particularly the Marsh Arabs in the South. After the Gulf war, state terror intensified, with regular military incursions into the area to shell and burn villages and fields. As recently as 1998 the local population has been intimidated through hundreds of arrests, forcible expulsions and the shutting off of water supplies. In September 1998 the US government released aerial photos that it said substantiated opposition reports that the Iraqi forces had razed 160 homes in the village of Al-Masha on June 29th, following protests over the failure to deliver food and medicine. The marshes have additionally been extensively drained, forcing thousands to flee into Iran.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, IRAQ.NET]

8.
In the mid 1970's, Iraq had the sixth highest murder rate in the world, with 12 murders per 100,000, approximately twice that of the US average. It was, however, still more dangerous to live in Washington DC than in Baghdad.
[Source: INTERPOL CRIME STATISTICS]

9.
In 1994 the Revolutionary Comman Council of the Iraqi government issued a series of decrees that established severe penalties for crimes such as theft, corruption, currency speculation and military desertion.

DECREE 59 introduced amputation of the right hand for first time offenders convicted of theft of property with a value of over 5000 dinars (approx. $15 dollars at market rate.) A second conviction would result in the amputation of the left foot. Armed robbery would merit the death penalty.

DECREE 91 introduced the death penalty to any 'state worker' or armed forces member using their posts to take part in committing a crime. A civilian convicted of the same level of offence would normally receive 15 years imprisonment.

DECREE 115 initially introduced amputation of the hand for military deserters. Veterans of the Iran / Iraq war protested that their wounds may be mistaken for signs of convictions for crimes. The government conceded and introduced branding of the forehead and the cutting off of an ear instead, with the other ear cut off for a second conviction.

An Iraqi soldier arrested with five others and taken from Kirkuk to Mosul told the Iraqi National Congress the group spent five days in a prison where they were beaten and tortured before being taken to a hospital where he was tied to the bed and given anesthesia before the doctors amputated his ear. According to this man, the amount of anesthesia an individual received varied inversely to the amount of trouble that the person caused the government. Therefore, a person who escaped more often and remained absent for longer periods received less anesthesia.

The decree was vague as to exactly how much of the ear should be removed. Iraqi doctors attempted to take advantage of this ambiguity by removing as little of the ear as possible, and in some cases surgically re-attaching it and disguising brandings. In response the government introduced DECREE 117, which made it illegal for doctors to perfom corrective surgery. The penalties for doctors refusing to perform amuptations ranged from prison terms, having their own limbs or ears amputated, and in some cases receiving the death penalty.

Iraqi Ambassador to the UN Nizar Hamdoon attempted to justify these decrees to HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH in 1994:
"The measures were not human rights abuses [....] They are temporary measures that have to do with the current circumstances. When the economic sanctions are lifted (by the United Nations), there will be no need for such measures."
[Source: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH - 'IRAQ'S BRUTAL DECREES' by BRIAN OWSLEY, 1995]

10.
Between 1997 and 1999 a campaign of 'prison cleansing' took place which saw the arbitary excecution of an estimated 2500 prisoners. Hundreds of these executions took place at the Abu Gharib and Ar Radwaniyah prisons in October and November 1998. In February and March 2000 an additonal 122 prisoners were executed in Abu Gharib.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, referencing reports by UN Special Rapporteurs Max van der Stoel and Andreas Mavrommatis]

11.
Repression of the civilian population continues in the form of forcible expulsions, arrests and detainments of men, women and children suspected of political opposition or religious activities, or for simply being related to such persons. They are afforded no access to lawyers, detained without charge for long periods of time, and their relatives not informed of their whereabouts. In two detention facilities in Baghdad, prisoners were kept locked in coffin-sized metal boxes which were opened for only 30 minutes each day.

In April 1998 a forcible expulsion programme began with 1468 families from Kirkuk being moved to the Northern provinces, with their property and ration cards confiscated. By May 1999, at least 15,000 families had been deported. Simultaneously correspondence dated 7th January 1998 from the Governer of Diyala to the local Ba'ath office stated:
"Punitive action is to be taken against any local officials who fail to stem the flow of Kurdish families into their territory, and that any citizen providing employment, food or shelter to a newly arriving Kurd is to be arrested."

Over 94,000 people are reported to have been expelled from Kirkuk since 1991.

Following a civilian demonstration in Basra on 17th March 1999, 21 people were allegedly arrested, tortured, and later executed by firing squad, and their bodies buried in a mass grave near the town Az Zubyar.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, referencing a report by UN Special Rapporteur Andreas Mavrommatis]

12.
Religious persecution continues unabated. The Iraqi government is suspected of being behind many staged car accidents and assassinations of religious leaders. One such case was Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr who, with his two sons, was killed on 19th February 1999. During a peaceful demonstration that follwed this incident, security forces allegedly fired into the crowd killing hundreds. Eight Shi'a clerics were allegedly excecuted in early 1999, and the fate of 100 Shi'a clergy arrested in 1991 remains unknown.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE]

13.
Direct political opposition even outside the country is met with extreme measures. In June 2000 General Najib al-Salehi, an opponent of the regime living in Jordan, received a videotape showing the rape of a female relative. His family in Iraq had long been subjected to arrests and harrassment. Ten days later he recieved amessage from the Iraqi Intelligence Service who told him they were holding another female relative. He was then urged to stop his activities.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE]

14.
Harsh measures are also forced upon military personnel. Five army army officers were excecuted in December 1998 for an attempted mutiny, and the commander of the 11th Mechanised Division and some of his staff were allegedly excecuted for refusing to attack Shi'a civilians.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE]

15.
Whilst the UN consitently reports that the food ration is equitably distributed and that 93% of all goods are succesfully delivered to the intended end-user, the regime has at times exploited the ration system to coerce sections of the civilian population, and diverted medicines to hospitals for privileged officials.
[Source: BRITISH FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE, referencing a report by UN Special Rapporteur Andreas Mavrommatis]

16.
Iraq remains the country with one of the highest numbers of 'disappearances.' Of the 16,496 people reported missing to the UN Commisioner of Human Rights, most are Kurds who vanished during the Al-Anfal campaign.

Given the horrendous crimes perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath regime, you would think that the West would consider supporting and arming such a government the absolute height of irresponsibility. Not so, as the following article reveals the extraordinary lengths to which the West accomodated 'The Butcher of Baghdad.'

THE INDEPENDENT (UK)
30th December 2000

SADDAM HUSSEIN - THE LAST GREAT TYRANT
by Robert Fisk

When the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal visited Iraq during the early years of Saddam’s rule, he met the minister for industry. Heikal was impressed by the intense, hard-working, intellectual man running Iraq’s dynamic industrial output. So on his next visit, Heikal asked to meet him again. Officials explained that they had no information about the minister and all enquiries should be addressed to His Excellency the President. So when at last Heikal turned up for his interview with the dictator of Iraq, he asked about the minister for industry.

"He’s gone," Saddam said. "Gone_", asked Heikal. There was a pause. "We scissored his neck - he was suspected of being a traitor." But was there any evidence of this, the appalled Heikal asked. Was there any proof_ "In Iraq, we don’t need proof," Saddam replied, "suspicion is enough." In Cairo, he went on, Egyptians might have a white revolution. "In Iraq we have a red revolution." Heikal was horrified. But should he have been surprised_

There is about Saddam Hussein a peculiar ruthlessness, an almost calculated cruelty, perhaps even an interest in pain. It wasn’t enough to order the murder of his sons-in-law after their return from exile in Jordan. They had to be dragged away with meat hooks through their eyes. It wasn’t enough to order the hanging of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990; Bazoft was to be left unaware of his fate until a British embassy official turned up at the Abu Ghorraib prison to say goodbye. At Abu Ghorraib, women prisoners are allowed a party the night before one of them is to be hanged. Women are dispatched on Thursdays. Families are asked to bring their own coffin when a relative has been executed.

And yet we loved him. In the days when Saddam clawed his way to power, personally shot members of his own cabinet, or used gas for the first time on his recalcitrant Kurds, we loved him. When he invaded Iran in 1980, we gave him Bailey bridges and Mirage jets and radio sets and poison gas - the Mirages from France, the poison gas, of course, from Germany - and US satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Iranian front lines. I once met the Cologne arms dealer who personally took the photos from Washington DC to Baghdad. The Russians poured in their new T-72 tanks. Saddam’s war against Iran - the greatest mass killing in modern Middle Eastern history until the UN sanctions of the last decade - was designed to appeal to both Arabs and the West. For the Arabs who tamely poured their millions into his armoury, Kuwait among the most prominent, his Iraqi sons were wading through anharr al-damm - literally "rivers of blood" - to defend the al-bawwabah al-sharqiyah, the "Eastern Gateway" to the Arab world and Saudi Arabia. To the West, he was fighting off Khomeini’s Islamic hordes. Asked why the Iraqis used gas against their enemies, one of his senior confidants replied: "When you weed the lawn, you have to use weed-killer."

Blundering, ignorant of Western (though not Arab) history, largely uneducated, an original Tikriti corner-boy whose first political act was an attempted assassination and an escape, wounded, into the desert; how did he do it_ How come the man who defied George Bush senior is still there to defy George Bush junior_ How come, 10 years after the "mother of all battles" - a phrase typical of Saddam - and 10 years after UN sanctions that have killed at least a million Iraqis, Saddam is still enjoying his palaces and cigars_

The French are a clue. They idolised Saddam in the late Seventies. He was feted on his arrival at Orly, dined out by the Mayor of Paris (a certain Monsieur Chirac), swamped with champagne as he watched a bull-running circus in central France. For the French, he was a kind of Jacobin, the reformer-turned-extremist whose reign of terror had a power all its own. Saddam’s "red revolution" was always rubber-stamped by the democratic mockeries of Iraq - he asked the Kurds of a northern Iraqi town if he should hang Bazoft and their cries of affirmation doomed the correspondent - but somehow, in a crazed way, it was modern and progressive. Iraq’s hospitals and medical care were on a par with Europe, women’s rights were rigorously enforced, religious insurrection was suppressed in blood.

And he was - and is - a very intelligent man. When I first saw him, in 1978, he was espousing the merits of nuclear power, of binary fission (technology courtesy of his beloved France). Self-confident, quoting from Arab poets and writers, replying to foreign journalists who snapped at him, with humour and history. Asked, in view of his little speech, about the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation, he replied: "Ah, you must not ask me about Israel’s 250 warheads in the Negev desert - you must ask the Israelis!" He always wore a massive wrap-around jacket with too many buttons, but his shirts and shoes were always the latest in Paris fashion.

I visited his abandoned palace in Kurdistan in 1991, one of the series of massive, fortified royal residences he continues to build across Iraq, evidence, according to Madeleine Albright, that sanctions haven’t yet brought him low and thus must continue. In truth, they are evidence that sanctions clearly do not work - because they don’t touch Saddam - and thus should not continue. But what was so evident about his northern palace was its' tawdry nature, the poor quality of the concrete round the swimming pool, the cracked pseudo-Grecian columns in the dining-room, the under-weeded flower beds. In Baghdad, the palace lawns are better tended, but the same sense of spent taste and vulgarity pervades the president’s imagery. Saddam on horseback, in Kurdish clothes, embracing babies and war heroes, riding on a charger in medieval armour to confront the Persians at the Battle of Qaddasiyeh, dressed as Nebuchadnezzar, he who conquered Syria and Palestine, sacked Ashkelon and subdued all the tribes of the Arabs. Like the king of Babylonia, Saddam decided to rebuild Babylon; and so the ancient city was ripped apart and reconstructed, Disney-style, in the image of the great man.

Even the giant egg-shell monument to the Iraqi war dead of 1980-88 is a personal museum to Saddam’s family. Visit the crypt and beside the names of half a million dead you find a photograph of the young, revolutionary Saddam, on the run from the royal family, of Saddam studying in Cairo (his hero was not Hitler but Stalin), of Saddam with his first wife. Now there is a second wife - the feuding between the wives’ two families is one of the causes of the ferocious bloodletting within the family. His son Oday, partly crippled in an assassination attempt while on his way to a nightclub, murdered a bodyguard at a party. "My son must be tried like any other Iraqi," Saddam announced. Then the family of the dead man - surprise, surprise - forgave Oday. Unpunished, he continued to run the highest security apparatus of the state, all the while enjoying the title of head of the Iraqi Olympic committee.

Greatness, for Saddam, is a simple affair. Victorious in war, the people love you. Strength is all. In an Arab world that sadly admires power more than compassion, he was a hero for millions of Egyptians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Lebanese, even Syrians. "He may be ruthless," a Lebanese journalist remarked to me in 1990, "but you have to admit he’s strong. He stands up to people." In reality, Saddam walks tall when his enemies are beaten. He dreams like a sleepwalker. I recall huddling with Iraqi commandos in a shell-smashed city in southern Iran in 1980 when an officer announced a personal message from Saddam to all his fighting forces. They were participating, he announced, in "the lightning war". There was even a song that played continuously on Iraqi television: "The Lightning War". Like the "Mother of All Battles", it was a mockery of the truth.

There were other hints in his war with Iran, had we but known it, of Saddam’s behaviour in Kuwait. In 1983, after proclaiming the Iraqi-occupied Iranian city of Khorramshahr a bastion to be defended to the last man - Saddam’s personal Stalingrad - he simply ordered his thousands of troops to abandon the fortress and march back to Iraq, just as he ordered his men to abandon Kuwait the moment the Western armies broke into Iraq in 1991. If his behaviour seems irrational, it is certainly consistent. He believed that a strong Iraq must be self-sufficient. It must make its own weapons, its' own tanks, its' own bullets.

A year to the day after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, I was prowling through the wreckage of the Iraqi army along the Basra highway when I came upon an upturned ammunition truck whose cargo of battalion and brigade notebooks had been scattered across the desert, partly buried in sand. "Message from the Supreme Commander," it said in one. And there, page after page, was the text of a secret Saddam speech to his high command. Iraq, he said, must abandon its' traditional confidence in other nations; it must set up its own arms factories, invent its own secret weapons. There it all was, in blue Biro, the authentic voice of Saddam speaking from beneath the very floor of the desert.

It is not so difficult to struggle into the mind of Saddam when you read this. He had invaded Iran and the West loved him. Why should they object - or fight him - when, threatened by Kuwaiti demands for the billions of dollars in "...loans..." used to pay off the Iran war and with the Kuwaitis apparently "...stealing..." Iraqi oil from beneath the Rumailah field, he invaded Kuwait_ Only four months earlier, just after Bazoft’s hanging, a group of American senators visited Saddam in Baghdad and assured him that "...democracy is a very confusing issue - I believe that your problems lie with the Western media and not with the US government." (This from Senator Alan Simpson). Senator Howard Metzenbaum, announcing himself "...a Jew and a staunch supporter of Israel...", went on to tell Saddam that "I have been sitting here and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware that you are a strong and intelligent man and that you want peace."

So what had Saddam to fear from the US_ In that last fateful interview with US ambassador April Glhtmlie, less than a month before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam told Ms. Glhtmlie that Kuwait’s borders were drawn in colonial days. Saddam had always been an anti-colonialist. "We studied history at school," the luckless Glhtmlie replied. "They taught us to say freedom or death. I think you know well that we... have our experience with the colonialists. We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." In a post-war press interview, as the writer Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Glhtmlie gave the game away. "We never expected they would take all of Kuwait," she said.

The Americans were going to let Saddam bite a chunk out of the Kuwaiti border. Saddam thought he had permission to gobble up all of Kuwait. And so we went to war with the Hitler of the Euphrates. And so he lives on in his palaces and bunkers while his people die for lack of clean water and medicines under the UN sanctions that are supposed to harm Saddam. We still bomb him every day - our war with Saddam has lasted 10 years now - and slowly, the Arabs, dismayed by the bloodshed in the Palestine-Israel war, are warming once more to the man who never gave in. Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia - almost all of them America’s allies in 1991 - are now breaking the air embargo by flying into Baghdad.

Saddam lives.

INDEX