I shudder to think of the atrocities in Iraq the west knows nothing about. I heard a report on the radio that Saddam pours gas down the throat of political opponents and then sets them on fire.
Murders and mutilation in Iraq revealed
guardian.co.uk
New Iraqi abuses revealed
Special report: Iraq
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Friday November 3, 2000
The Guardian
Barbarous acts perpetrated on Iraqi political prisoners and women persist under Saddam Hussein's regime in spite of a decade of international economic sanctions engineered by the west to topple him, according to restricted Foreign Office documents obtained by the Guardian.
These state that in the last few weeks President Saddam and members of his inner circle have signed orders for executions and other acts of brutality.
The material in the documents is said to have come directly from informants in Baghdad and, indirectly, from exiles. It will help Britain and the US in their efforts to shore up the sanctions - imposed on Iraq for igniting the Gulf war by invading Kuwait in 1990, but now under challenge.
They will argue that the world must go on trying to force such a monstrous regime out. Opponents will argue that the abuses show how ineffective sanctions have been in weakening the dictatorship.
The Foreign Office papers, classified as restricted, provide details of the extensive prison network in Baghdad and on individual cases that confirm the regime's reputation as one of the cruellest in the world.
Among many incidents, the documents say that:
More than 50 mental health patients were executed in place of prisoners with the means to bribe their way out.
Eight prisoners were executed in October for defacing murals of Saddam Hussein.
Thirty prostitutes were beheaded in a "clean-up" during the last month and their heads were left on the doorsteps of their homes.
A man's tongue was cut off in September under a new decree making slander of President Saddam an amputation crime.
While the international debate has gone on in recent years about the sanctions imposed on Iraq, and the bombing of its capital and missile sites by Britain and US, the regime's abuses have tended to be overlooked, partly because information is so hard to get.
One of the Foreign Office papers says that the Iraqi government is obsessive about cataloguing its abuses. "Each execution or torture order is signed by an immediate member of Saddam Hussein's family or his closest advisers." It adds: "The orders allow the signatory to record how they want the victim to be tortured or to die." The torture and execution orders are said to be held on the eighth floor of the ministry of interior's main building in Baghdad. "None of the normal lifts in the building stop at the eighth floor. This is only accessible by its own special lift."
Among the signatories are President Saddam, his two sons, Uday and Qusay, and various relatives including the president's half-brothers. A former minister of the interior, Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan, is said to have "had every execution videoed. Copies of the videos were kept in a vault in Hassan's office on the second floor of the ministry".
Among the many prisons dotted round Baghdad, the Mahjar (Sanctuary), near Palestine Street, holds about 600-700 political prisoners, according to the documents. To maintain the fear factor, and give an impression to the public of impartiality, the president has imprisoned relatives of his inner circle there to show that no one is immune.
"These high-level prisoners were held in the cells for detainees rather than in the prison itself and were only there for a number of days," one document says. Among those held was Ziyad Aziz, son of the deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. The document describes the layout of the prison in detail. "The execution area, the hadiqa (garden) is located near the women's [part of the] prison. The hadiqua is an open area with a sandbank covered by an awning" where prisoners were killed by machine gun. Between 1993 and 1998 about 3,000 prisoners were executed there, it says.
At another Baghdad prison, Abu Gharaib, death-row inmates are said to have been able to buy their freedom from the governor for $5,000: "To meet the quota of people executed, and to avoid this scam being uncovered, someone would need to be executed. The prison governor devised a scheme whereby he would take a patient from al-Sha ma'eel mental hospital to be executed in place of the released prisoner." About 50-60 people died in this way until both the governor and the director of the hospital were transferred in July, it is alleged.
One of the groups carrying out the recent drive against prostitutes - the Fedayeen Saddam militia set up by Uday - is said to have "beheaded about 30 prostitutes in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. The ... heads were left on the front doorsteps of the prostitutes' homes as a deterrent."
Another paper reveals that last month "the Iraqi authorities executed eight prisoners on charges of forming an opposition organisation and defacing several murals depicting Saddam Hussein.
"Muhammed al-Naji, an engineer from Baghdad province, was the first to be charged with leading the organisation. His body, together with those of three of his companions, were handed on to their families on October 2."
When in September the authorities began cutting off the tongue of anyone slandering the president or his family, an early victim is said to have been driven around his home suburb, New Baghdad, "with a loudspeaker announcing the crime and the punishment". |
