The dungeon on Street 31
In a plain Baghdad house, MARK MacKINNON finds a dark place of terror and suffering
By MARK MacKINNON
Thursday, April 17, 2003
From the outside, it's just another white brick house, indistinguishable from others on Street 31 in Baghdad's leafy Jasiriyah neighbourhood. But the neighbours knew all along something was different at house No. 2. They could hear the screams.
Under deposed president Saddam Hussein's regime, few knew the details of what caused the screams. Yesterday, as a group of Iraqis wandered through the deserted building in search of missing relatives, it became startlingly clear.
Tucked underneath the house with the lemon and date trees in the front yard is a dark and terrifying dungeon, a place where Baathist police threw people away to rot.
Scratched on the walls of the tiny windowless cells are the plaintive messages of those who suffered anonymously here.
"Life is only one hour; make it pay," reads one.
"I wish we can forget before we are forgotten," says another.
"Seven years, five months," is a more common inscription.
Another wall contains hundreds of scratches, likely marking off some prisoner's days in this dank, foul-smelling cell, which has no toilet, sink or bed.
A few names are etched on the walls, but other than that, the dungeon provides maddeningly few clues for the handful of Iraqis who showed up yesterday to explore the jail and find answers to their family mysteries.
"I've been looking for my cousin since 1980," one man, grim-faced, said as he desperately riffled through thousands of green and pink file folders in the offices above the cells.
"I just need a clue to know what happened: if he was hanged, if he's still in prison, if he's been released."
Nearby, Saad Ali Hussein is near tears, looking for a sign that his brother Abdul Kareem is still alive. Abdul Kareem disappeared when he was 17, Mr. Hussein said, allegedly for being a member of the outlawed Dawa political party.
"My mother cried until she died wanting to know what happened to him. She just wanted to know if he's alive or dead," Mr. Hussein said.
The files yield little more than the dungeons, though they do reveal the depths to which the Baathist regime went in order to spy on its own people.
One book, innocently titled "Records for the houses near the department," contains the details of every family living in the neighbourhood.
Another file contains all available information about a barber, from his birthday to the name of his shop to his political affiliation. Attached is a signed piece of paper in which the barber swore to immediately report any gossip he heard while cutting people's hair.
A similar consent form was signed by a car mechanic. Quite literally, anybody could be a spy in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Documents about an economics professor named Ali Hussein Najem say he "had hatred for the Baathist revolution and refused to join the President's party." They add that he had been removed from his teaching post and that further action should be taken "as soon as possible."
Among those in the white brick prison yesterday was Haider Abbas Hamid, who said he was imprisoned here for six weeks in 1994. His crime was getting drunk and cursing the Iraqi president. The police cut off two toes on his right foot and tossed him into one of the cells below.
Tagrid, a young woman living next door to the jail, said "We heard the screams; they were screaming all the time, but we could not do anything about it."
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