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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (5726)	1/22/2003 9:00:40 AM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

IOC probing torture charges By JAMES CHRISTIE Tuesday, January 21, 2003 The International Olympic Committee is "duty bound" to investigate accusations that Saddam Hussein's oldest son, the head of Iraq's national Olympic committee, tortured and jailed athletes, says Dick Pound, Canada's senior IOC member. "The allegations have been made and the IOC appears to me to be duty bound to investigate them," Pound said after a member of the IOC's ethics commission confirmed yesterday that the Olympic body is seriously examining charges that Odai Saddam Hussein, 38, had a private prison at the national Olympic committee's offices in Baghdad where athletes and journalists who fell into disfavour were punished. "If they are true, then further action will be required." "We've received the complaint and we're dealing with it," IOC ethics commission official Paquerette Girard Zappelli said in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the IOC is headquartered. Tales of torture and execution emerged last month in claims brought forward by Indict, a London-based human rights group. Citing witness statements by exiled Iraqi athletes and United Nations reports, Indict said the Iraqi committee was in violation of the IOC's ethics code and should be expelled. Indict carries some political baggage. The group receives three-quarters of its funding from the U.S. Congress. It was set up in 1997 to try to get Sadam Hussein and leading members of his regime brought before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity. Paul Henderson, another IOC member from Canada, recommended caution. "I am not sure why they are doing this before there is proof that there are proven problems," he said. Indict said Odai Hussein once made a group of track athletes crawl on newly poured asphalt while they were beaten and ordered that some be thrown off a bridge. A former athlete turned military man, General Faleh Akram Fahmi, whose father established the Iraqi Olympic Committee in 1948, was executed in 1987 or 1988 for cursing Saddam in front of a group of officers, according to Issam Thamer ai-Diwan, a former national team volleyball player and coach. He was quoted on ESPN.com. "You only need to criticize the government, but the fact is Odai cannot stand to think that someone in Iraq could be smarter or more famous than he," the volleyball player said, adding that he and other national team members were imprisoned in a cramped cell for two weeks in 1986 after placing third in the Arab championships. "We could not all lie down. We had to sleep in shifts." Other tales of horror from former Iraqi athletes say sportsmen had been dragged on pavement until their backs were bloody, then dunked in sewage to see that they suffered infections. Pound said there is precedent for the IOC to act against a national Olympic body. "We have withdrawn recognition of NOCs in the past for reasons of conduct, including South Africa and Afghanistan," he said. "Not, so far as I can recall, for torturing athletes who didn't perform well. . . . "The best independent body we have for investigation is our ethics commission, which has a majority of non-IOC members, several of which have international status," Pound said. The IOC ethics commission, whose members include track star Edwin Moses and former UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar, previously suspended Afghanistan's national committee because the country's former Taliban regime barred women from sports. The ethics commission was set up in 1999, principally to monitor the behaviour of IOC members in the wake of a corruption scandal that swept the Olympic movement. It is not the first inquiry into the treatment of Iraqi athletes. In 1997, soccer's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, sent officials to Baghdad to investigate reports that national team players had been imprisoned and their feet caned after losing a qualifying match to Kazakhstan. The federation said it uncovered no evidence of torture. globeandmail.com