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مظالم الشيعـة في العراق
اضطهاد الشيعـة في تقارير منظمة هيومان رايتس
ووتش
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التقرير السنوي لسنة 1989م :
لم يرد فيه
أي ذكر لإضطهاد الشيعـة في العراق ، ويبدو أن لذلك علاقة بالعلاقات القوية التي
كانت تربط نظام الطاغية المقبور صدام بالولايات المتحدة الامريكية !
التقرير
السنوي لسنة 1990م :
Over the 22 years of Ba'th Party rule, thousands of Iraqi professionals and
intellectuals have been forced into voluntary exile in Western Europe and the
United States. But even abroad, those who have engaged in political activity
have not been safe. In January 1988, Shi'a Muslim leader Sayyed Mahdi al-Hakim
was lured from his place of exile in Iran to the Sudan, where he was shot to
death at the Khartoum Hilton. The Sudanese government later accused Iraqi
embassy personnel of involvement in the murder, compelling Baghdad to close the
mission.
Hopes for a more democratic government in Iraq, committed to a reversal of the
many abuses committed by the Saddam regime, depend crucially on the outcome of
the confrontation in the Persian Gulf over the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.
Prospects that a hypothetical post-Saddam government might pay greater respect
to human rights improved after a marathon series of meetings of Iraqi opposition
groups abroad. On December 27, seventeen parties concluded an agreement in
Beirut committing themselves to democracy and a multiparty system. Among the
agreement's points were an end to discrimination against Shi'ites (Iraq's
leadership is currently dominated by members of the country's minority Sunni
Islam sect); the reversal of the "Arabization" of Kurdish towns; and a
recognition of Kurdish rights, as contained in the KDP's March 11, 1970
Declaration.
التقرير
السنوي لسنة 1992م :
The Uprising In Iraq
In the immediate wake of Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, a new human rights
crisis unfolded, this time in war-ravaged Iraq itself. Residents of at least two
dozen southern Iraqi cities, joined in many cases by disaffected returning
soldiers, rose up against the government in early March, ousting government
forces from nearly all of those cities. Similar rebellions broke out within days
throughout the predominantly Kurdish north of the country.
In their counterattack and when consolidating their recapture of these cities,
government troops killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing
indiscriminately into residential areas; executing people on the streets and in
homes and hospitals; rounding up persons, especially young men, during
house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en
masse; and targeting fire from attack helicopters on unarmed civilians as they
fled the cities.
For their part, rebels and their sympathizers in both northern and southern
cities killed hundreds, if not thousands, of members of the security forces and
others allegedly working for the Baath Party or the government. While many were
killed in battle, others were summarily executed after they had surrendered and
were taken into custody, sometimes after summary people's "trials."
The Iraqi authorities have charged the rebels with the uprising-related summary
executions of over 2,500; in addition, they claim to have discovered mass graves
in Suleimaniyya (bodies of 370 "citizens"), Kut Sawadi (150 bodies of "persons
who had been killed by the groups participating in the disturbances") and Kushk
al-Basri (fifty bodies).42 The Western press also recorded rebel abuses. For
example, The Washington Post interviewed a Republican Guard officer from the
unit that recaptured Karbala in southern Iraq who reported that "dozens of
senior officials, including the chief of police, top security agents, the deputy
governor and high-ranking members of the Baath Party, were killed in an
outpouring of vengeful fury. Captain Abed said many of the victims had their
throats cut and bodies burned by the insurgents, while Shiite mobs ransacked
their houses and stole food supplies."43
There were reports of looting by rebels and their sympathizers in Basra and a
few other cities, but this seems to have been less widespread and systematic
than the looting carried out by government troops upon their recapture of
cities. Many refugees from the relatively prosperous northern cities likened the
plundering by soldiers of stores and households to the looting of Kuwaiti
private property by Iraqi soldiers during the early days of the occupation of
that country.
No reliable figures are available concerning the number of persons killed or
wounded by either side during the uprising. Iraqi authorities have not released
such statistics.44 One journalist reported from Iraq that the government "has
forbidden Shi'as from displaying traditional signs of mourning _ black flags and
paper streamers printed with the names of the dead _ because it would enable
visitors to count the numbers of Shi'a `martyrs.'"45 But senior Arab diplomats
told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October that Iraqi
leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the
uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south.46 Independent investigation
to verify this figure has not been possible, nor has it yet been possible to
determine how many of these casualties were noncombatants.
The turmoil began in Basra on March 1, one day after the cease-fire in Kuwait,
and spread within days to Karbala, Najaf, Hilla, Nasiriyya, al-Amara and other
mostly Shi'a cities of southern Iraq. The rebellion in the north began on or
about March 5; by March 21, Kurdish insurgents controlled every major city in
the north except for Mosul, which has an Arab majority.
The rebellions followed a general pattern. On the day of a city's uprising,
rebels and masses of civilians ousted government forces from their headquarters,
prisons and barracks, killing or capturing them or forcing them to flee. The
revolts were aided by soldiers who either switched sides or deserted, as well as
by some degree of planning during the preceding weeks and months by underground
opposition groups.47 However, the outpouring of popular support for the uprising
was largely spontaneous. It was fueled by anger at government repression and the
devastation wrought by two wars in a decade, and a perception that Iraqi
security forces were uniquely vulnerable after being crushed by the U.S.-led
forces.
After seizing power, both Shi'a and Kurdish rebels freed prisoners from known
and hitherto secret prisons. Many of the freed prisoners were found to be in
poor health as a result of ill-treatment, and some showed scars that they
attributed to torture.
The rebels then controlled the "liberated" cities for a number of days, while
government troops _ primarily the elite Republican Guard and regular soldiers _
regrouped outside the city limits and began shelling the city from tanks and
firing missiles and automatic fire from helicopters.48 Although the fire was
sometimes directed at suspected rebel strongholds, little effort was made to
limit civilian casualties, and on many occasions throughout the country
civilians were directly targeted.
The rebels were unable to resist for long. The army, and particularly the
Republican Guard, largely remained loyal to Saddam. Their counteroffensive was
buoyed by the failure of the U.S.-led alliance to prevent Iraqi use of
helicopter gunships.49
Meanwhile, the rebels had little experience defending captured territory and
were armed only with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and a few heavier weapons
captured from government forces. They were easily outgunned and outmaneuvered.
As the government forces closed in on a city, thousands of civilians began to
flee, terrorized by the indiscriminate shelling and fearful of the vengeance
that Iraqi troops would wreak. Over 1.5 million Iraqis escaped from the
strife-torn cities during March and early April, crossing into Turkey and Iran,
or fleeing into zones controlled by Kurdish rebels (pesh merga) in the north or
into the marshes in the south, beyond the reach of government forces.
Their exodus was sudden and chaotic, with thousands fleeing on foot, on donkeys,
or crammed onto open-backed trucks and tractors. Many, including children, died
or suffered injury along the way, primarily from adverse weather, unhygienic
conditions and insufficient food and medical care. Some were killed by army
helicopters, which deliberately strafed columns of fleeing civilians in a number
of incidents in both the north and south.50 Others were injured when they
stepped on mines that had been planted by Iraqi troops near the eastern border
during the war with Iran, and in rural areas from which the government had
forcibly relocated Kurds during the 1980s.
The extent of the land-mine problem became apparent during a Middle East Watch
mission to northern Iraq in September. Casualties from land mines during 1991
easily exceeded five thousand and may have topped ten thousand. The Suleimaniyya
City Hospital alone recorded the treatment of 1,652 mine victims between March
and mid-September, of which 397 underwent amputations. Many of the victims were
Kurdish refugees who had returned to Iraq from Iran and Turkey and attempted to
make their homes in unmarked minefields.
After bombarding a rebel-held city from afar, Iraqi tanks and infantrymen
recaptured city after city, until they were back in control of all cities except
for those in the "safe haven" around Zakho and Dohuk created by the U.S.-led
alliance to lure Kurdish refugees back from Turkey, and cities in a
rebel-controlled swath near the northeastern border with Iran.
Upon regaining control, Iraqi troops engaged in widescale looting and atrocities
against the civilian population. The violence was heaviest in the south, where a
smaller portion of the local population had fled than in Kurdish areas, owing
partly to the danger of escaping through the south's flat, exposed terrain.
Those who remained in the south were at the mercy of advancing government
troops, who went through neighborhoods, firing indiscriminately and summarily
executing hundreds of young men.51
There were many variations to this general pattern. Basra was the scene of
chaotic, pitched battles, but never fell completely into rebel hands. In other
cities, the rebels ousted the security forces with little difficulty. Similarly,
the army recaptured some cities, such as Karbala and Najaf, only after bitter
fighting, but swept into other cities, such as Suleimaniyya, with little
resistance.
Refugees alleged to Middle East Watch and others that Iraqi helicopters dropped
a variety of ordnance on civilians, including napalm and phosphorus bombs,
chemical agents and sulfuric acid. Representatives of human rights and
humanitarian organizations who saw refugees with burn injuries or photographs of
such injuries were unable to confirm the source of these burns. However, doctors
who examined wounded Iraqis said that some of their burns were consistent with
the use of napalm.52
What follows is a description of human rights abuses committed during March in a
sampling of cities, drawn primarily from interviews conducted by Middle East
Watch with Iraqi refugees in Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and London, as well as
from press accounts and reports by other organizations.
o Basra: Iraq's second-largest city was the first to erupt. According to a
popularly believed account that cannot be confirmed, on March 1 an Iraqi tank
driver fired a shell at a giant public portrait of Saddam Hussein. This act of
defiance ignited an uprising by members of the hitherto underground Shi'a
opposition, angry citizens, and disgruntled and weary Iraqi soldiers who had
just fled Kuwait. Many of those who took part expected support from American
troops who were stationed near the city outskirts, especially after President
Bush's February 15 call on Iraqis to rise up and oust Saddam.
Chaos reigned in many neighborhoods, as loyalist troops and bands of rebels and
army deserters dodged snipers and fought at close quarters. At the outset,
rebels slaughtered persons suspected of being government officials, Baath Party
members and secret police. Meanwhile, the army rolled tanks through residential
neighborhoods, firing at residential buildings and at civilians. Troops entered
homes and machine-gunned civilians. The streets were littered with bodies, and
loyalist troops conducted mass executions in public squares of persons who had
been rounded up. Hussein Ali Kazem, 22, told The Washington Post that he watched
the public execution of some four hundred people in central Basra before he fled
the city on March 6. "Their hands were tied, then they tied them to tanks and
shot them," he told reporters in Safwan. "The bodies are still there."53 Two
refugees interviewed by Middle East Watch described watching separate incidents
in which troops rounded up civilians, bound their hands and feet, attached rocks
to them and tossed them into the Shatt al-'Arab waterway.
There were several independent reports that the troops used human shields to
protect the tanks, either tying women and children to the tanks or forcing them
to walk in front. One refugee interviewed by Middle East Watch in London saw a
column of twenty tanks on March 8 coming from al-'Ashar toward the city center,
with three children tied to the lead tank.
Both the rebels and the army engaged in looting in Basra, a city where war and
the U.N.-imposed sanctions had created shortages and high prices.
Although the army had the upper hand within five days of the outbreak of the
rebellion, it was not until April that it had completely subdued resistance in
the city. By that time, the uprising had greatly compounded the devastation that
Basra had suffered during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars.
o Najaf: The uprising in Najaf was relatively long-lived due to a higher degree
of planning by the Shi'a opposition. On March 4, demonstrators, some of them
lightly armed, marched through the city streets, swelling in numbers as they
went along, and surrounded and seized government buildings. A refugee from Najaf
told Middle East Watch: "Saddamites who resisted were killed. Those who did not
resist were taken prisoner, and then killed when the army attacked."
The army's counteroffensive began in earnest more than one week after the
uprising. Its tactics were similar to those employed against other rebel-held
cities: an initial phase of firing ground-to-ground and helicopter-launched
missiles indiscriminately at civilian areas, followed by the entry of troops
into the city, house-to-house arrests, the public execution of suspected rebels,
and the invasion of Saddam Hospital and the slaughter of patients and medical
staff. One refugee from Najaf told Middle East Watch, "If any resistance
emanated from a house, that house was demolished." Refugees from other cities
also described incidents of troops punitively demolishing houses, a form of
summary collective punishment.
The last rebel stronghold in Najaf was the Tomb of the Imam Ali, one of the most
important Shi'a pilgrimage sites in the world. The army pounded the shrine with
mortar fire before entering it and shooting both rebels and civilians who had
held out there. Other religious shrines and schools in the area were also
damaged by shells, and others were demolished after the suppression of the
uprising.
One young man described to Middle East Watch watching as soldiers went through a
group of young men in their custody outside a former hotel, separating those
suspected of participating in the uprising and executing them. The witness fled
the scene after seeing four of the men shot dead. An Iraqi military officer who
deserted told The Washington Post of a massacre in Najaf by loyalist troops:
"When the Iraqi army entered...the families that had fled the fighting returned
with their children. They lined them up and executed them." Among the victims
were his wife and three children.54
The army also rounded up Shi'a clerics in Najaf, including the
ninety-five-year-old Grand Ayatollah abu al-Qassem al-Kho'i, the revered Shi'a
cleric with a worldwide following. A member of the Khoei family reported to
Middle East Watch that some 105 individuals affiliated with the Grand Ayatollah
_ relatives, staff, religious students and some senior clerics, including
eighty-nine-year-old Ayatollah Mortaza Kadhumi Khalkhali, a top aide of the
Grand Ayatollah _ were arrested in Najaf between March 20 and March 23.55 A
September report by the U.N. special rapporteur on Iraq notes some of these
detentions. Iraq's October 25 reply to the report states that of the sixty-two
associates of the Grand Ayatollah reportedly arrested in March and taken to
Baghdad, four "are alive and enjoying full freedom" but "the competent
authorities have no information concerning the others." Iraqi Shi'a sources told
Middle East Watch on December 19 that the Grand Ayatollah, whose home in Najaf
continues to be under surveillance by the Iraqi security forces, is living in
extreme distress due to the destruction of the religious schools in Najaf and
Karbala, concern about the fate of his missing family members, staff and
students, and his lack of contact with followers around the world.
o Karbala: Karbala was probably the major city most devastated during and after
the uprising. The rebellion began on March 5 when lightly armed rebels, joined
by thousands of civilians and deserting soldiers, attacked government buildings.
They had achieved full control of the city by the next morning.
Within one day, government tanks and helicopters began pounding the city with
indiscriminate fire. When army troops entered the city they encountered fierce
resistance. There were pitched battles at al-Husseini hospital, which was used
to treat wounded rebels. A physician from Karbala who fled to Iran told Middle
East Watch:
[The hospital] was run by the rebels. Doctors there treated the wounded, people
donated blood and whatever medicine they had at home. The army, when it
attacked, concentrated its artillery on the hospital. When they invaded, they
rounded up doctors and nurses, tied their hands and blindfolded them. They were
later released, only to be rounded up again later and killed. The rebels put up
strong resistance in defending the hospital.
The shrines of Abbas and Hussein, which became the city's rebel headquarters,
were heavily damaged by artillery fire and by rockets fired from helicopters
between March 7 and 11, as were the buildings near them. Further damage occurred
when Iraqi troops burst into the shrines, in which rebels and civilian
sympathizers had barricaded themselves. Hundreds of rebels and their supporters
are said to have died during the siege, either from the artillery and rocket
fire, or from the gunfire of the invading troops.
When security forces established daytime control again on about March 19, they
took vengeance on both rebels and civilians who had not fled. They moved from
district to district, rounding up young men suspected of being rebels, shooting
some of them on the spot and executing others in large groups. In both Najaf and
Karbala, there were reports that Shi'a clerics who walked on the streets were
shot on sight, and that young men were "systematically collected," taken to
stadiums, and never seen again. Summary killings occurred "in a manner that made
a point," one Iraqi Shi'a told Middle East Watch. "Dead bodies were mined and
they were not allowed to be removed from the streets." John Simpson, foreign
affairs editor of the British Broadcasting Corporation, wrote about the
authorities' round-up of the clerics earlier in the year. He visited Najaf in
late April and found the city's center deserted: "Thousands of Shi'a clerics
have been rounded up in Najaf and Karbala and disappeared," he wrote. "Normally
the streets would be full of them. Not now."56
Civilians fleeing Najaf and Karbala were strafed by helicopters as they traveled
on the road between the two cities. A refugee from Najaf who was interviewed by
Middle East Watch in Iran that on March 17, "People were told on the
loudspeakers to evacuate the city, for their own safety, within 24 hours and
head north, in the direction of Karbala. When thousands of people had gathered
in the northern outskirts of the city _ it was afternoon already, around 3
o'clock, and they were mostly women and children _ helicopters opened fire from
machine guns at them. Between 250 and 300 were killed."
o Suleimaniyya: On March 7 and 8, the nearly all-Kurdish city of Suleimaniyya
became the first major city to fall to Kurdish rebels. Four weeks later, it was
the last to be recaptured by Iraqi forces.
The ouster of government forces came in an uprising led by a small contingent of
pesh mergas. Uprisers overwhelmed the government forces who had sought refuge in
the headquarters of the dreaded security service (mudiriyat al-amn), capturing
and summarily executing agents of the security forces and freeing prisoners held
in grim cells. An English teacher recounted that the pesh merga and their
supporters "took three hundred Baathist prisoners....We punished those who had
martyred our brothers and looted our homes. We killed them without
trial....During the first days after the pesh merga took over, some escaped. We
caught many and killed them by shooting them and with axes. The mothers of
martyrs killed twenty-one escaping soldiers with axes and stones."
During the next three weeks, Suleimaniya remained under pesh merga control.
Kurdish refugees streamed into the city from other Kurdish towns that were
coming under attack.
The army's assault on Suleimaniyya began around March 31. Troops began firing
rockets from outside the city into residential neighborhoods, and dropping
rockets on residential areas from helicopters. Sensing defeat, rebel leaders
urged the population to leave before the army attempted to enter the city. The
city emptied between April 2 and 4, and government forces easily retook the
city. The troops then engaged in widescale looting of homes and stores,
according to refugees from Suleimaniyya who later returned to the city.
o Kirkuk: The battle for Kirkuk, the last major city to be captured by the
Kurdish rebels, was especially fierce. An oil-rich city with an ethnically mixed
population, Kirkuk has long been a bone of contention between the Kurds, who
demand its incorporation into the Kurdish Autonomous Region, and Baghdad, which
has sought to control it by relocating Arabs from the south to Kirkuk and
evicting Kurdish families.
By mid-March, Iraqi forces already had been ousted from several Kurdish and
southern cities. Fearing that Kirkuk would be next, Baghdad dispatched
reinforcements to Kirkuk.
On about March 10, the security forces placed predominantly Kurdish
neighborhoods of the city under curfew and rounded up several thousand men from
their homes, ranging in age from young teenagers to men in their fifties. The
men, all of them nearly without exception Kurdish, were transported out of the
city and held in vast compounds without charge or trial under harsh conditions,
although they were neither interrogated nor tortured. Most were released in
mid-April but were told that they would not be permitted to reenter Kirkuk. Many
of the men traveled instead to Kurdish-controlled areas or to refugee camps in
Turkey and Iran.
After the massive roundup of Kurdish men, Iraqi troops began demolishing houses
in Kurdish neighborhoods, using dynamite and bulldozers. In testimony
corroborated by others, a university student from Kirkuk told Middle East Watch,
"Troops came to Arassa, a neighborhood that is strongly pro-pesh merga. They
took the women to Kara Angir [a town north of Kirkuk], and told them, 'Go to the
pesh merga.' The next morning, the forces demolished the houses. Arassa is
totally destroyed, all the houses have been destroyed."
Nevertheless, Kirkuk erupted in rebellion on March 19 and by the next day was in
pesh merga hands. Unlike in Suleimaniyya, however, their victory was promptly
contested. Beginning on March 21, Iraqi tanks stationed outside the city began
pounding residential areas with artillery rounds day and night, while Sekhoi
helicopters flew overhead by day firing missiles.
After a week of bombardment, Iraqi tanks entered the city on March 27. Among
their first acts was to invade Saddam Hussein Hospital and to slaughter patients
and medical staff, opening fire indiscriminately, slashing patients with knives
and, according to eyewitnesses, throwing people out of windows. As in other
cities, the hospital had been filled with both rebels and civilians who had been
injured during the fighting. A primary school teacher told Middle East Watch,
"When the tanks entered Kirkuk on March 27, they went to Saddam Hussein
Hospital. My house is very near the hospital. About 150 meters away from me, I
saw troops enter the hospital and then I saw pesh merga being thrown out of the
windows. After they threw them on the ground, they shot those who were not dead
from the fall."
As they consolidated their control, troops ordered the remaining Kurdish
population of Kirkuk, predominantly women and children, to leave the city within
twenty-four hours. Those who fled at this late stage reported widespread looting
of homes by government troops and Arabs who had driven north from central Iraq.
Kurds who attempted to return to the city in April were turned back at
checkpoints that had been set up outside the city.
The Iraqi government was quick to assert that it had overcome the challenge of
the insurgents, although reports of rebel attacks against government forces and
installations continued throughout the year. Shi'a refugees in southwestern Iran
boasted to Middle East Watch in late April that fighters were reinfiltrating
Iraq and launching nighttime attacks on military targets on the roads near
Basra.
Ongoing Government Abuses
On March 16, President Saddam Hussein castigated the rebels as "malicious
traitors infiltrated from abroad" and declared that the uprising in the south
had been crushed.57 On April 5, Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Command Council
(RCC) issued a statement, announcing "the complete crushing of acts of sedition,
sabotage, and rioting in all towns of Iraq." In the same communique, the RCC
announced that it had "decided to pardon all Iraqi Kurds in the autonomous
region for any behavior that they could be accountable for by law _ except
crimes of murder, violations of honor, and theft _ that took place during the
riots and acts of treachery."58 On April 20, an RCC decision extended a similar
amnesty to all Iraqis involved in the uprisings.59
There is evidence to suggest that the amnesties were honored in the breach,
particularly in the south where government forces had greater control. Saddam
emphasized in an April 13 speech in Arbil that those suspected of certain
offenses during the uprisings would be dealt with harshly: "[T]he orders the
authorities have received are very clear: go after the killers, who violate the
people's honor, and those who stole the state's assets and have not returned
them. We give no guarantees to these people."60
There were also post-uprising reports of arrests and summary executions
throughout the country, purges in the Iraqi military and Baath Party,61 and the
detention of security-force personnel considered "soft" during the uprising.62 A
representative of the Iraqi Kurdistan Front told Middle East Watch that some
four hundred Iraqi soldiers who had returned to government lines after being
captured by Kurdish irregulars in August were executed on charges of having
failed to put up effective resistance to the enemy.
Government opponents charged that despite the amnesties, many Iraqis had been
arrested and taken to detention centers, some of them secret, in Baghdad and
elsewhere. The National Security center in the Radhwaniyya district of Baghdad
was identified as one such facility. In a June press release, the London-based
al-Khoei Foundation claimed that some 150,000 people had been arrested in
southern Iraq, including 15,000 from Najaf, a center of the uprising. The U.N.
special rapporteur's September memorandum highlighted that, despite the
amnesties, arrests were continuing:
[A]llegations remain that the amnesties are...used as a means of rounding up
members of opposition groups, and that the terms of the amnesties are frequently
violated by government agents who arrest certain persons returning out of places
of hiding....Several reports allege that persons already detained, as with
several of those arrested during (and in violation of) the amnesties, rather
than being released have actually 'disappeared' in the custody of the
Government.
The special rapporteur noted "significant and repeated allegations" regarding
Kurds from Arbil who had returned under the April amnesty and "were
detained,...taken to the city stadium, subjected to punishments or executed, or
have subsequently disappeared."
Iraqis who fled to U.S.-controlled Safwan in southern Iraq came with reports of
executions in Basra as late as May. The Washington Post reported that, according
to refugees, "Iraqi troops are still seizing rebels, and civilians with any
rebel links, after extracting confessions from friends and neighbors."63 A
teacher told The Post: "They shoot them and throw their bodies in the street to
make people scared of doing anything." A truck driver claimed: "They used an
execution squad right in the main square. They would blindfold their victims and
then shoot them, just leaving the bodies there." One refugee said that the
authorities were "torturing people into giving the names of people who are
involved in rebel fighting."64 The Post reported from Baghdad in May that the
city was "rife with talk that thousands of southern Shiite Muslims suspected of
rebel sympathies during the anti-regime uprisings last March have been summarily
tried and executed recently."65 The U.N. special rapporteur's September
memorandum noted reports of the summary execution by firing squad of seventeen
people in Arbil on April 17. The memorandum also reported allegations that
summary executions "are continuing to take place throughout the country,
particularly in the northern Kurdish Autonomous Region, in southern Shia
centers, and in the southern marshes."
The Post noted that the Iraqi authorities were continuing to respond in
characteristic fashion to actual and perceived opponents: "Prisons are described
as more full than ever. Families receive the coffins of sons and husbands,
accompanied only by a military court order of execution, no reasons given. There
are mass arrests and disappearances."66
Continued clashes between government forces and rebels often were at the expense
of innocent civilians, particularly when government forces retaliated with
indiscriminate artillery shelling and helicopter-gunship attacks on rebel
positions. In northern Iraq, fear motivated large numbers of Iraqi civilians to
flee to areas where they felt safe from government forces. The U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in late October that tens of
thousands of internally displaced Iraqis remained in the mountain areas of the
north, "either because their towns have been destroyed or because they fear a
fresh outbreak of violence."
Both sides shared responsibility for the continuing unrest. Insurgents openly
took credit during the uprising and its aftermath for the capture and execution
of Iraqi security force, intelligence and Baath Party personnel.67 The most
highly publicized abuse by anti-government forces during the year was the
October 7 summary execution by Kurdish rebels in Suleimaniyya of at least sixty
captured, unarmed Iraqi soldiers. According to Reuters photographer Kurt Schork,
who witnessed the killings, the men were shot, kneeling, at point-blank range.68
The Kurdistan Democratic Party, whose fighters were suspected of responsibility,
condemned the incident and said it was opening an investigation. To date, the
findings of this investigation have not been announced.
Targeting of Shi'a Institutions
Representatives of Iraq's Shi'a community reported to Middle East Watch in 1991
that the Iraqi regime intensified its deliberate targeting of Shi'a cultural and
nonpolitical institutions in an attempt to destroy the fabric of Shi'a society.
These attacks were part of what they called a broader campaign of post-uprising
"revenge on a massive scale" in southern Iraq.69 Iraqi Shi'a point out that the
regime's retaliatory actions continue a pattern of discrimination by the
Sunni-dominated government against the Shi'a religious majority in Iraq. They
charge that the discrimination includes violations of religious and cultural
rights including bans on publishing contemporary or traditional Shi'a written
materials, transmitting radio or television broadcasts with Shi'a content, and
teaching the Shi'a creed in the state school system, as well as widespread
employment discrimination in Iraq's public sector.70
Promises of Reform
Despite Iraq's resounding military defeat by coalition forces and the turmoil of
the uprisings, Saddam Hussein maintained and steadily consolidated his grip on
power. Iraq's feared internal-security apparatus appeared to have emerged
sufficiently unscathed from the Gulf war and the uprisings to remain a powerful
presence. By September, some opponents of the regime felt that even if some
political accord with the regime was struck, the most they could hope for in the
immediate future was "a softening dictatorship" in Iraq. They stressed to Middle
East Watch that the in-country opposition had "no illusions" about the prospects
for genuine political reform under Saddam Hussein. The government's actions in
1991 tended to bear out this view, reinforcing the perception that the regime's
rhetoric of reform was designed more for the international community than for
the skeptical and beleaguered Iraqi public.
For several months after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf war, government leaders
attempted to rebuild their domestic credibility through pledges to introduce
political liberties unseen since the Baath Party's seizure of power in 1968. In
a televised speech on March 16, Saddam Hussein blamed the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war
for the deferral of the political reforms originally pledged in 1979. He held
out a renewed promise of reform but, notably, without specifying a timetable for
implementation. "Our decision to build a democratic society based on the
Constitution, the rule of law and political pluralism is a decisive, irrevocable
decision," he said.
Then newly appointed Prime Minister Saadoun Hammadi, in a March 30 speech on
national television, spoke directly about democracy. Terming it "an integrated
system," he stated that "in organizing relationships, democracy is not confined
to the top echelon of the state but extends to all institutions from top to
bottom." He pledged that "the democratic reform process in all the state
institutions will start gradually and in accordance with the country's
circumstances."71
In an interview in May, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said that among the
reforms being contemplated were the abolition of the ruling Revolutionary
Command Council72 and replacement of the for-life presidency of Saddam Hussein
with renewable seven-year presidential terms.73 In a televised speech on July
17, Saddam mentioned that a new political-parties law would soon be in effect.
"We will soon start to apply the principles of pluralism in a broad
manner....Pluralism will be the main pillar in the next new phase," he promised.
Despite these commitments, it soon became clear that government initiatives said
to be aimed at political reform and pluralism were fundamentally flawed. Most
important of these were the new political-parties law, introduced in September,
and the negotiations with the Iraqi Kurdistan Front coalition, begun in April
and stalled several times, about measures for nationwide democratization.
The dismissal in mid-September of Saadoun Hammadi as prime minister, and his
removal from the RCC, was viewed as a setback for the putative effort at
political reform. It also was seen as a signal of Saddam Hussein's increased
confidence and resolidification of power. In April, Hammadi, a Shi'a and Baath
Party loyalist known for his pragmatic views, had openly advocated "the
importance of strengthening the rule of law through the reform of the legal
system, press freedom, and pluralism in all spheres, as well as through the
change of revolutionary institutions into democratic and constitutional ones,"
according to the state-controlled Iraqi News Agency. One Western authority on
the Arab world explained: "It was after he had expressed these views at a
congress of the Baath party in Baghdad on 13 September that Hammadi was
sacked."74 Some saw the move as a precursor to additional purges of reformers in
the bureaucracy and the military and security establishments. The significance
of Hammadi's later partial rehabilitation, through his appointment on November 6
as a presidential adviser with cabinet rank, remains to be seen.
Political Parties
The limits of reform could be seen in Political Parties Law No. 30 of 1991,
which was issued by the RCC in September after the law had been amended and
approved by the National Assembly, Iraq's rubber-stamp parliament. The statute
states in part that "political parties constitute one of the basic pillars of
the democratic system through which the citizen exercises his rights, duties and
freedom." But the law grants the government significant latitude in vetting
political parties. Under Article 3, parties must support Iraq's territorial
integrity and national unity, effectively foreclosing the legalization of any
Kurdish party that uses nonviolent means to advocate separatism or an
independent Kurdish state.75 Article 3 also mandates that parties "value and be
proud" of the 1958 and 1968 revolutions, in effect a pledge of political
allegiance to the ruling Baath Party. In addition, Article 19 prohibits the
organizing of political parties among the "armed forces, the internal security
force and the other security organs"; only the Baath Party is entitled to
recruit members in these key sectors.
The law empowers the Council of Ministers to approve or reject parties' requests
for legalization, but the law gives oversight of political parties to the feared
Ministry of Interior. The law clearly envisions the creation of Interior
Ministry dossiers on all nascent political-party leaders and activists. Parties
must register their applications with the Interior Ministry and submit the
names, addresses, professions and brief personal histories of their founding
members, who must number at least 150. Under Article 22, each January the
Interior Ministry, as part of its ongoing monitoring, must be provided with the
names, addresses and professions of all new party members as well as the names
of those whose membership has lapsed.
The law provides for government aid to political parties and lays the groundwork
for grants to be made on a political basis. Among the factors for grant
decisions set forth in Article 24 is a political party's "role in the national
struggle."
In an August interview, then-Prime Minister Hammadi was asked how much
competition the ruling Baath Party would tolerate, and whether opposition
political parties would ever be allowed to form a government. His answer was
evasive: "[W]e may be ready to share power with another party if the situation
allows and if there was such a party."76
One unexpected byproduct of the turmoil in Iraq in 1991 was the unprecedented
exposure of the regime's past human rights abuses. While the abysmal record was
generally known, precise information had been difficult to come by. However,
during the uprising in March, when rebels seized control of prisons, they
captured huge amounts of documentary evidence of past abuses. Following the
ouster of the rebels, the exodus of refugees brought to the world's attention
thousands of victims of past repression who were unafraid for the first time in
their lives to speak frankly to foreigners. In addition, with the pesh merga in
control of much of northeastern Iraq, Kurds and foreigners were able to travel
extensively through rural Kurdish areas for the first time since the Baghdad
regime had mined and sealed them off.
These developments helped to flesh out knowledge of past atrocities,
particularly with regard to the government's campaign to empty the Kurdish
countryside, the disappearances of scores of thousands of Kurds, and the harsh
conduct of Iraq's security agencies throughout the country.108
At year's end, human rights workers were still sifting through the mounds of
documents, videotapes and material evidence captured from Iraqi security
agencies. The evidence made the case strongly that past reports of the regime's
brutality toward suspected dissidents was, if anything, understated. The
discovery of several mass graves _ which are due to be analyzed by forensic
experts _ may finally provide answers to the cases of tens of thousands of Kurds
who disappeared during the 1980s.
U.S. Policy
The manner in which the Iraqi government suppressed the Shi'a revolt in the
south and the Kurdish revolt in the north produced some of the most extensive
and severe violations of human rights in 1991. Although Human Rights Watch is
highly critical of the role of the Bush Administration with respect to these
abuses, we do not espouse the view that military intervention was required for
humanitarian purposes. Iraq was not the only country in which it might be argued
that such intervention was required during 1991 to avert human rights disasters
of great proportion.
Yet there are many arguments against military intervention even in such urgent
circumstances. Without attempting to set forth those arguments here, it should
be noted that the difficulties that attend this question are so great that Human
Rights Watch has not yet adopted a policy on this question.
Nevertheless, we think that the Bush Administration deserves criticism because
the conflicting signals that it gave probably contributed greatly to the tragedy
that took place in Iraq when Saddam Hussein's forces massacred thousands in
putting down the revolts and when nearly two million were forced to flee their
homes. In part, the Bush Administration's actions may have reflected a lack of
sufficient concern for the consequences of the signals it gave; in part it may
be due to miscalculation; and in part it may be attributed to primary concern
with political considerations unrelated to the well-being of the residents of
Iraq. Whatever the reasons, the Administration contributed to the making of a
tremendous human rights tragedy.
In other ways as well, despite the Bush Administration's persistent castigation
of Saddam Hussein, the protection of human rights within Iraq was not a high
priority in 1991. The Administration's pre-war criticism of the Iraqi
government's human rights violations focused almost entirely on abuses committed
in occupied Kuwait; the previous history of systematic atrocities inside Iraq
was barely noted. A similar selective vision could be discerned once the Gulf
war ended and the unprecedented uprising against the Baathist regime was met by
the government's brutal suppression of the revolt and the unexpected mass flight
of civilians. The Bush Administration expressed concern for human rights
violations during this period, but acted forcefully only insofar as those
fleeing the carnage became allied responsibility as they huddled in winter
weather on the Turkish border. Three times as many Kurdish and Shi'a refugees
fled to safety in Iran, but the mutually antagonistic relationship between Iran
and the United States constrained Washington from either expressing concern
about those on the Iranian border or providing much practical assistance.
Indeed, for related reasons, very little was said by the Administration about
the Iraqi Shi'a, whose suffering paralleled if not exceeded that of the Iraqi
Kurds.
The Administration's greatest opportunity to prevent serious abuses by Iraqi
forces came in the course of the uprising. Strong warnings reportedly were
issued to the Iraqi authorities on March 7 against the use of chemical weapons
during the unrest, but the Administration equivocated about the Iraqi military's
use of helicopter gunships against civilians. President Bush and Secretary of
State James Baker stated in mid-March that the helicopter gunships should not be
used, but other Administration officials gave conflicting signals. In the end,
the aircraft were employed to attack rebels and civilians alike without any more
forceful reaction by coalition forces. Inquiries to Administration spokespersons
about why the warnings had not been enforced met with embarrassed buck-passing
and no substantive explanations.
Adding to the controversial nature of this equivocation was the president's
call, in two separate speeches on February 15, for Iraqis to revolt: "[T]here's
another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and
the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein,
the dictator, to step aside."109 This at the time was the Administration's most
explicit public statement that Saddam should be overthrown.110 The message,
broadcast on Voice of America, suggested to many Iraqis that the United States
would support them if they rebelled.
But once the call was heeded and the uprising began, fears of a disintegrating
Iraq led the Administration to distance itself from the insurgents, downplaying
the significance of the countrywide revolts and spelling out a policy of
nonintervention in Iraq's internal affairs.111 The Administration's
unwillingness to back the insurgents _ indeed, its eagerness to dispel the
politically embarrassing impression that it had encouraged the uprising _
appears to have led it to equivocate on the entirely distinct issue of Iraqi
government abuses committed while crushing the insurgency.
A rationale for nonintervention was offered by Italian Foreign Minister Gianni
De Michelis, who was interviewed after meeting with Secretary Baker in
Washington on March 4. Expressing concern about the "fragmentation" and
"Lebanonization" of Iraq, he said, "I am sure Saddam Hussein will go, but my
worry is we will not have another friendly regime" in Baghdad.112 In the
following days, senior U.S. officials expressed similar sentiments. On March 7,
U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney said, "The breakup of Iraq would
probably not be in U.S. interests."113 The same day, Secretary Baker described
the uprisings as "just one heck of a lot of turmoil." Asked if the United States
preferred continued Baath Party rule to an Islamic revolution in Iraq, Baker
said: "I'm not going to make a choice because I'm not sure that's what the
choices are necessarily. I will say this _ we do not want to see any changes in
the territorial integrity of Iraq and we do not want to see other countries
actively making efforts to encourage changes."
On March 5, Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that "chaotic and spontaneous" uprisings were
under way in thirteen Iraqi cities, but stated that Saddam would prevail because
of the rebels' "lack of organization and leadership."114 White House spokesman
Marlin Fitzwater appeared to discount the insurgents when he stated the same
day, "It's not clear to us what the purpose or extent of the fighting is."115
Secretary Cheney, in remarks on March 5, said he expected "a period of
instability" in Iraq, but that "it would be very difficult for us to hold the
coalition together for any particular course of action dealing with internal
Iraqi politics, and I don't think, at this point, our writ extends to trying to
move inside Iraq."116 The secretary's comment was reinforced by Marine Major
General Martin Brandtner, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, who on March 5 ruled out U.S. military assistance to the rebels: "There
is no move on the [part of] U.S. forces...to let any weapons slip through, or to
play any role whatsoever in fomenting or assisting any side."117
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher explained on March 6: "We don't think
that outside powers should be interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." On
March 21, Boucher added that "it's neither our intent [n]or our purpose to try
to choose the future leadership of Iraq." Asked whether by doing nothing the
United States was giving Saddam a free hand to crush the revolt, Boucher
replied, "Well, that remains to be determined." On March 23, President Bush
himself publicly back-tracked: "I don't think it is for us to see what will
follow on in Iraq....I think it would be inappropriate to try to shape or
suggest even what government should follow on."118
With one significant exception, this reluctance to take sides in the revolt
translated into a refusal to take a strong position about Iraqi government
abuses committed in the course of the revolt. The exception was a forceful
warning to the Iraqi government against the use of chemical weapons on the
insurgents. A senior Administration official told The New York Times that Iraqi
military communications had been intercepted revealing the imminent use of
chemical weapons: "We got an intercept on [March 7] indicating that they were
going to drop a gas bomb on a specific place at a specific time....We told them
in very explicit terms that this was something that would not be countenanced."
The Times reported that "[s]enior Iraqi diplomats in Washington and New York
were summoned [on March 7] by State Department officials and warned that the
United States would not tolerate chemical attacks on rebellious Iraqi
civilians."119 One warning was delivered by Thomas Pickering, the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, to his Iraqi counterpart, Abdul Amir
Al-Anbari.120 On March 9, Secretary Baker said in Saudi Arabia, in reference to
the possible use of chemical weapons, "We think it's important to warn them."121
However, the Administration was unwilling to move beyond blocking the use of
chemical weapons to barring _ at least in a consistent manner _ other weapons
that were being used to slaughter civilians, particularly the helicopter
gunships that were being used to fire indiscriminately on fleeing civilians.
President Bush said on March 13 that Iraqi helicopter gunships "should not be
used for combat purposes inside Iraq."122 The next day, the president obliquely
tied the withdrawal of U.S. troops to the use of helicopters by Iraqi forces: "I
want to bring [U.S. troops] home, but I'd like to have some security
arrangements in place, and...using helicopters...to put down one's own people
does not add to the stability of the area...." On March 17, Secretary Baker
discussed an allied meeting with ten Iraqi officers in Safwan that day: "We've
also said that helicopters should be used for logistical purposes, not for the
purpose of shooting and dropping bombs on your own people."123
On March 15, the president's and secretary of state's remarks notwithstanding,
U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces in the Persian Gulf,
said that Iraqi fixed-wing aircraft would "be subject to being shot down" by
coalition forces but said nothing about helicopters.124 According to a Pentagon
official, Major General Robert Johnston, General Schwarzkopf's chief of staff,
had warned at the March 17 meeting in Safwan that the use of helicopters against
the rebels was a "threat to coalition forces" and could lead to U.S. military
action against the helicopters.125 On March 21, even Pentagon spokesman Pete
Williams acknowledged that U.S. policy regarding the use of helicopters was not
clear. While admitting that "dozens" of helicopters were being used against the
rebels, Williams declined to say whether U.S. forces would fire at these
aircraft. He answered affirmatively when asked: "Is our policy somewhat
ambiguous?"
The Administration justified distinguishing fixed-wing aircraft from helicopters
by the differing threats posed to U.S. forces, without regard to atrocities
being committed against civilians. White House spokesman Fitzwater explained
that "the planes pose a far more serious threat to U.S. personnel because they
fly faster and higher."126 Fitzwater also stated on March 26: "We made it clear
that we do not believe that they should be flying helicopters or fixed-wing
aircraft over the country, that we intended to shoot down fixed-wing aircraft
because of the direct threat that they posed to our forces."127 Deputy White
House spokesman Roman Popadiuk, when asked on March 29 about Kurdish requests
for U.S. attacks on the helicopters, responded as if the matter concerned only
which side prevailed in the conflict, not whether certain weapons were being
used to commit gross abuses: "The issue of internal unrest in Iraq is an issue
that has to be settled between the government and the people of Iraq. It's a
decision for the people of Iraq to make."128 Asked on April 2 why President Bush
issued the warning against the use of helicopters if he was not prepared to act
on it, the State Department deferred to the White House. Secretary Baker was
asked the same question two days later, but he, too, declined to answer. "Well,
that's a question that you can address to [President Bush]," he said.
After Iraqi military forces crushed the uprising, senior Bush Administration
officials adopted a self-consciously low public profile about the situation in
Iraq.129 On April 3, the president picked up the theme that what really was at
issue was simply an internal conflict. "I feel frustrated," he said, "any time
innocent civilians are being slaughtered. But the U.S. and these other countries
with us in this coalition did not go there to settle all the internal affairs of
Iraq."130 One senior Administration official told The Washington Post: "Engaging
on this issue gains us nothing....This is not a crusade. It is a somewhat
painful acceptance of a certain reality. You manage it in as low-key a way as
possible and hope you get through it."131
On April 13, President Bush emphasized the Administration's top priority: "I
want our troops out of Iraq and back home as soon as possible." While condemning
the "continuing savagery" of the Iraqi president, Bush reaffirmed the U.S.
policy of noninterference in internal Iraqi affairs, with the sole exception of
protecting the provision of assistance to internally displaced Iraqis and Iraqi
refugees. Rather than condemning the abuses that accompanied the suppression of
the uprisings, the president downplayed the significance of the nationwide
revolt by describing it as a manifestation of a long-standing internal conflict:
Internal conflicts have been raging in Iraq for many years, and we're helping
out, and we're going to continue to help these refugees. But I do not want one
single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that's been going on
for ages....We will not interfere in Iraq's civil war. The Iraqi people must
decide their own political future.
The Bush Administration continued to worry that it would be held responsible for
having encouraged the uprising. In a carefully crafted statement, State
Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said on April 2 that the Bush
Administration had "never, ever stated as either a military or a political
goal...the removal of Saddam Hussein." She said that although the United States
had said that normal relations with Iraq were "next to impossible" while Saddam
Hussein was in power, it did not "cal[l] on [the] Iraqi people to put their
lives on the line to overthrow the current leadership." It is unclear how the
Administration could square this comment with President Bush's entreaty on
February 15 for the Iraqi people "to take matters into their own hands."
On April 5, President Bush adamantly denied that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
was a U.S. policy goal. He appeared particularly sensitive to any perception, by
Iraqis or others, that the rebels were betrayed by his Administration, stating:
I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America.
I don't think the Shiites in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad or the Kurds in the north, ever felt that the United States
would come to their assistance to overthrow this man.
The president also said unequivocally, "I made clear from the very beginning
that it was not an objective of the coalition or the United States to overthrow
Saddam Hussein."
Some senior officials did use forceful language to highlight Iraq's suppression
of the uprisings. But their strong words were coupled with equally strong
indications of the limits of the U.S. role in post-uprising Iraq. On April 3,
for example, President Bush condemned "in the strongest terms continued attacks
by Iraqi government forces against defenseless Kurdish and other Iraqi
civilians." He called on Iraq "to halt these attacks immediately and to allow
international organizations to go to work inside Iraq to alleviate the suffering
and to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches needy civilians."
Similarly, Secretary Baker, on April 7 in Turkey, spoke of the "utter brutality"
of the Iraqi government and emphasized "Saddam's savage and indecent use of
force." He said that "Iraq's forces are killing, threatening, and committing
crimes against the Iraqi people." But Baker ruled out any more active effort to
stop the slaughter: "We are not prepared to go down the slippery slope of being
sucked into a civil war. We cannot police what goes on inside Iraq, and we
cannot be the arbiters of whom shall govern Iraq....We repeatedly said that
could only be done by the Iraqi people."
As allied forces assumed responsibility for hundred of thousands of Kurds
fleeing northern Iraq to Turkey, Secretary Baker was stronger in indicating that
interference by Iraqi forces with international humanitarian assistance in any
part of the country would not be tolerated. On April 8, after a brief visit to
the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish families on the Turkish mountain slopes,
Baker termed their situation a "mounting human tragedy." In a joint statement
with the Turkish foreign minister that day, he said:
Once again, the brutality and folly of the Iraqi regime has created yet another
gruesome tragedy: hundreds of thousands of refugees and many deaths among Iraqi
citizens who sought only their democratic rights. The Saddam regime has not
contented itself with more repression but has acted with excessive force,
driving its own citizens out of their own land.
Baker also noted: "The international community has once again closed ranks in
insisting that Iraq end its repression and allow immediate and unimpeded access
by international organizations to all in need through the country."132
With Kurds dying in inclement mountain terrain along the Iraqi-Turkish border,
U.S. and allied troops established a 3,600-square-mile "safe haven" in northern
Iraq to encourage the Kurds to come down from the mountains. This time, Iraqi
helicopters were effectively grounded; under the terms of an agreement with the
Iraqi government, Iraqi helicopters could not fly north of the thirty-sixth
parallel which marked the southern edge of the security zone.
On June 7, responsibility for relief operations in the zone was transferred to
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and allied troops began to
leave. Meanwhile, the United States announced plans for a "residual force" in
Turkey to deter possible _ but unspecified _ Iraqi repression against the Kurds.
Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said on June 25 that the mission of this force
would be "to stand by in the area in case there were problems in northern Iraq
that required the military action."133 Though again noting that the United
States "cannot solve long-term...long-standing problems in the region between
the Kurds and the Iraqis, between the Shi'as and the Iraqis," Williams adopted a
more forceful stance than during the uprising, stating that there would be "very
clear markers laid down to the Iraqis" about their expected behavior.134
Similarly, President Bush this time hinted that the United States might consider
some sort of unspecified intervention to protect Iraqi civilians "if the
situation requires." In a commendably firm, albeit after-the-fact September 16
letter to congressional leaders, the president stated that his Administration
remains concerned about the situation of the Kurds and other internal population
groups that have been the object of repressive measures by the Government of
Iraq. We have informed the Government of Iraq that we will continue to monitor
carefully the treatment of its citizens, and that we remain prepared to take
appropriate steps if the situation requires. To this end, an appropriate level
of forces will be maintained in the region for as long as required by the
situation in Iraq.135
The State Department also continued to insist that there was a clear link
between "the residual coalition military force" in southeastern Turkey and the
"deterrence" of Iraqi repression, at least in northern Iraq.136 The Pentagon had
taken the same public position some months earlier. In a July 24 interview, the
then U.S. commander of the allied force in Turkey, army Colonel E.E. Whitehead,
declined to specify the factors that might trigger allied intervention in
northern Iraq, but warned that "we have the aircraft and means, if necessary, to
move forces into Iraq."137
It soon became apparent that the Administration's stance had more bark than
bite. In early October, reports indicated that Iraqi military forces had
indiscriminately shelled the northern city of Suleimaniyya, held by Kurdish
rebels, and the towns of Kifri and Kalar south of Suleimaniyya,138 and that
thousands of civilians had fled to the mountains.139 On October 8, State
Department spokeswoman Tutwiler offered only this mild comment: "Iraq must allow
the return of refugees to their homes in Suleimaniyya, Kirkuk and other parts of
northern Iraq. This is an essential component of restoring stability." The
Pentagon was sophistic about the reports and appeared to excuse the actions of
Iraqi forces. Spokesman Williams said that since the Iraqis were "not using any
aircraft" to attack Kurdish forces north of the 36th parallel of the safe haven,
the actions did not violate cease-fire agreements with the allies.140 Tutwiler
said on October 9 that the previous day "the State Department called in the
Chief of the Iraqi Interests Section in Washington...to urge Iraq to cease using
artillery against population centers." Little was made at the time or in the
following weeks of the fact that up to 200,000 new refugees were created by this
and a series of other Iraqi military actions along the internal cease-fire line.
Throughout the year, the Bush Administration showed a preference for
highlighting the problems of the Kurds while tending to neglect, almost
entirely, the situation of Iraq's Shi'a population, particularly after the March
uprising in the south was crushed. This policy was undoubtedly linked to the
long-standing fears of Western governments of an Iranian-style revolution in
Iraq by Shi'a opposition groups. Following the crushing of the uprising, the
same distrust of Iran, a Shi'a-led theocracy, and its religious kin in Iraq, led
the allies to concentrate their relief efforts on Kurds fleeing to Turkey. The
need to protect relief operations in the north then compounded the discrepancy
in treatment.
The Work of Middle East Watch
A substantial proportion of Middle East Watch's resources were devoted to
working on different aspects of Iraq's human rights record during 1991, an
allocation of resources remarkable for the fact that the organization has yet to
gain official access to the country. In all, seven missions were sent abroad to
gather information pertaining to Iraqi government violations.
Four missions were sent to neighboring regional countries: to Jordan in
February, to interview refugees from Kuwait; to Kuwait in March, to review the
Iraqi occupation record over the previous seven months; through Iran to the
Iraqi border region in May, to interview refugees from the uprising; and to
Israel in June, to undertake a first-hand investigation of Iraqi missile attacks
during the war. Another mission went to Britain, to interview Iraqi exiles.
Finally, in the continued absence of official permission, two clandestine
missions were mounted inside Iraq itself, in September and December, to the
Kurdish rebel-controlled north of the country.
Repeated requests to Baghdad during the year to visit Iraq and Iraqi-occupied
Kuwait openly were met by either flat denials or stonewalling. Nor, despite U.S.
government sympathy for the objective, was it possible to gain legitimate entry
to Iraq through United Nations Security Council Resolution 698, which mandated
access by foreign humanitarian organizations. In what appeared to be a
breakthrough, on October 5 the Iraqi Red Crescent Society extended an invitation
to Human Rights Watch _ Middle East Watch's parent organization _ to make a
visit. However, by the end of 1991, exchanges of letters had still not resulted
in Iraqi agreement to the autonomy and confidentiality needed to conduct a
meaningful investigation.
The exceptional amount of attention paid to Iraq by Middle East Watch during
1991 was hardly surprising. Even if it had not been for Saddam Hussein's
occupation of Kuwait and the Gulf War, the Iraqi regime's atrocious domestic
human rights record would have preserved that country's high priority on the
Middle East Watch agenda. Reflecting that priority, Human Rights in Iraq,
originally published in February 1990 and re-released later in a Yale University
Press edition, was this new organization's first major report.
Commencing in late 1990, Middle East Watch embarked on a large-scale enterprise
aimed at studying the repression of the Kurdish people on a regionwide rather
than purely national basis. The twenty-four to twenty-six million Kurds form a
significant ethnic group in six regional states: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria,
Turkey and the former Soviet Union. But their political epicenter during this
century has usually been Iraq, where they comprise a larger share of the
population (about twenty-five percent) than anywhere else. Previous reports on
the mistreatment of Kurds in Turkey have been issued by Helsinki Watch, while
previous Middle East Watch prepared reports on Iraq and Syria have contained
sections on their Kurdish minorities. But no attempt previously had been made to
draw parallels across borders about the treatment of the Kurds.
What altered these plans was the collapse of the March 1991 uprising in Iraqi
Kurdistan, spurring a refugee exodus of Biblical proportions and gaining
widespread international attention for the Kurds for the first time in their
history. Plans by Middle East Watch to produce the regional report were thus
dropped in favor of a more historical book of both text and photographs,
intended for a wider public. The book aims to highlight cyclical patterns of
repression and survival by the Kurds over the centuries. Scheduled for
publication in 1992, Human Rights Watch is one of a group of international
organizations sponsoring its publication.
Another Human Rights Watch-authored book due for publication in 1992, by Yale
University Press, will present a broad overview of rights abuses linked to the
Gulf war, much of them committed by Iraq. Most of the research for this book was
carried out during the second half of 1991, in New York, Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia.
Work undertaken during the past year on the Kurds book included three
photographic trips to the region, to Iraq, Iran and Turkey; photo-research in
the United States, Britain and France; field research on contemporary conditions
in Turkey and Israel (the Israeli population today includes over 90,000 Jews of
Kurdish origin); participation in conferences in Stockholm, Athens and Bonn on
Kurdish human rights; and extensive archival research in several countries.
Discrete, separate research projects being undertaken by Middle East Watch on
the treatment of the Iraqi Kurds by Baghdad are to run side by side with the
larger demands of this book. In March, to coincide with a visit to Washington by
a delegation of Iraqi Kurdish leaders pleading in vain for U.S. government aid,
Middle East Watch gave a briefing on the fate of the more than 100,000 Iraqi
Kurds who had escaped an earlier wave of persecution by Baghdad, in 1988, and
whose plight in exile in Turkey and Iran had been largely ignored by the West.
Earlier in March, Middle East Watch held a press conference in Washington to
alert public opinion to the imminent danger of a massacre of Iraqi government
opponents, as Saddam Hussein moved to crush civil unrest in the north and south
of the country. Regrettably, those predictions of mass killings of unarmed
civilians and the wholesale destruction of property were realized.
In April, a Middle East Watch delegation traveled with a staff member of the
Washington-based U.S. Committee for Refugees to Teheran, Qom and refugee camps
in western Iran, where they interviewed scores of recently arrived Iraqi
refugees about recent and past human rights conditions in Iraq. The refugees
provided extensive information about the March 1991 uprisings and their
aftermath. They also provided detailed accounts of the government campaign to
depopulate the Kurdish countryside during the 1980s, a decade in which over one
hundred thousand Kurds disappeared; widespread arbitrary arrests and torture
during detention; and the repression of the Shi'a in the south of the country.
Further work on the continued persecution of the Shi'a, including the
destruction of religious property, mass arrests and a siege of tens of thousands
of people trapped in the southern marshes, was conducted in London during June,
through interviews with refugees and exiles, and later by telephone to Iraqi
opposition groups based in Iran. The findings of these missions are summarized
in the section above on human rights developments and will be the subject of
forthcoming reports.
In September, a land-mines expert engaged by Middle East Watch on a three-month
consultancy spent much of the month touring the rebel-held zone of northern
Iraq. His task was to determine the prevalence of minefields laid by government
forces over a period of many years, so as assess their impact on civilians.
Preliminary conclusions from this pioneering study, which demonstrated that
illegally laid mines may have caused up to ten thousand largely civilian
casualties during 1991 alone, and were a serious obstacle to the resettlement of
over half a million Kurdish refugees without shelter, were brought to the
attention of the United Nations in Geneva, the U.S. Congress and State
Department, and international relief organizations. A final report will be
issued in early 1992.
As the Kurdish guerrilla organizations and parties regained control over their
traditional homeland during the summer, in the shadow of Operation Provide
Comfort _ the U.S.-led military operation based in Turkey _ a growing body of
evidence began to emerge on the full extent of the Baathist regime's persecution
of the Kurds. Journalists, Western parliamentarians and relief organizations
encountered mass graves and huge caches of seized Iraqi secret police documents,
photographs and tapes attesting to suspected atrocities committed during what
Baghdad had secretly dubbed the Anfal (a Koranic expression for the plunder of
infidels) campaign of the late 1980s.
As a first step toward obtaining proof of the scale and circumstances of the
killings, a joint Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights mission was
dispatched to the region in late December. The forensic anthropologists involved
were asked to conduct a preliminary investigation of some of the many mass
graves recently discovered in Iraqi Kurdistan. Further follow-up work is planned
for early 1992.
Much of the Middle East Watch work on Iraq during 1991 stemmed from breaches of
international humanitarian law. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities on January
17, the greatest preoccupation had been with the grave violations of the Fourth
Geneva Convention committed by Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait. Testimony by the
Middle East Watch staff before the House Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle
East on January 8 provided a resume of Iraq's record in Kuwait over the previous
five months; it also looked back at the Kuwaiti government's own adherence to
universally accepted human right norms prior to August 1990 and addressed U.S.
human rights policy in the region after the Iraqi invasion.
On January 18, in the wake of the first Iraqi missile attack against Israel,
Middle East Watch reminded all parties to the conflict of their obligations
under the Geneva Conventions to respect noncombatants. On March 7, immediately
after the cease-fire, it issued another newsletter _ its sixth of the conflict
on human rights and humanitarian issues _ addressing the overlooked issue of the
legal requirements governing treatment of prisoners of war, the wounded and the
bodies of killed soldiers. An April article in the New York Review of Books,
based on a recent visit to Kuwait, reconstructed the last terrible forty-eight
hours of the Iraqi occupation.
During February, a Human Rights Watch specialist in humanitarian law spent three
weeks in Jordan, at the height of the air war, interviewing former foreign
residents of Iraq who were attempting to return home after fleeing the conflict.
That mission provided part of the raw material for a March 6 newsletter on the
bombing of Iraqi cities. It condemned the bombing without warning by the U.S.
Air Force of the Ameriyya air raid shelter in Baghdad, in which two to three
hundred civilians died. It also provided much of the testimony for a much larger
Middle East Watch report, published in November, on civilian casualties
resulting from violations by both sides of the Geneva Conventions and other
applicable rules of war. Entitled Needless Deaths in the Gulf War, this 402-page
report was widely quoted and reviewed, both for its ground-breaking legal
analysis and for its disclosures about the many instances in which the public
portrayal of the air war by the U.S. government and its allies, as being in
strict compliance with legal requirements to minimize civilian casualties, were
at variance with the facts on the ground.
Jointly with Physicians for Human Rights, Middle East Watch also conducted
research during the year into the misuse of U.N.-mandated economic sanctions
against Iraq, with highly adverse consequences for the civilian population.
التقرير
السنوي لسنة 1993م :
About 20 percent of Iraq's 19 million
people spent 1992 outside the control of the central government, in the
Western-protected Kurdish enclave. An additional, indeterminate number lived in
the southern marshes region contested by Shi'a rebels and government troops. The
remainder, Sunni Arabs like President Saddam and most of his ruling circle, as
well as members of the subject Shi'a population, remained under full government
authority. Most of the abuses noted in this report concern the second and third
category of persons; a portion examines the record of the Kurdish authorities in
northern Iraq.
Subject to unrelenting international pressure, designed to dismantle its war
machine and overthrow President Saddam Hussein, the Ba'th Party government in
1992 resorted to a blend of blandishments and repression to maintain itself in
power. In the process, the full gamut of human rights abuses was recorded, from
the indiscriminate bombing of rebel positions, resulting in hundreds of civilian
casualties, to the arbitrary arrest and execution of accused profiteers. Large
parts of the country were subjected to blockades that prevented food, fuel and
medicines from reaching the besieged populations. The blockaded regions survived
only through a mixture of international aid, smuggling, and the bribery of
soldiers at checkpoints.
Reliable information about human rights issues in Iraq remained hard to obtain,
largely because of close government controls on foreigners and a pervasive
climate of fear. But a number of factors combined in 1992 to give researchers an
unprecedented look inside a machinery of repression that has been in operation
since 1968. These were: the existence of the semi-independent Kurdish region, in
which some Arabs have also taken refuge; the number of Iraqis permitted to leave
the country legally, or who managed to flee abroad; the work of the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Iraq; and the discovery of a vast trove of secret police documents
captured by the Kurds during their March 1991 uprising.
Rebuilt after the setbacks during the uprisings that followed the Gulf War,
Iraq's security agencies reestablished a strong grip on the country. As in the
past, the General Security Directorate (usually referred to simply as the amn,
meaning security) appeared to have carte blanche to arrest any suspected
opponent of the regime. Other security forces, such as the Military Intelligence
(Istikhbarat) and the Special Security Agency (Jihaz al-Amn al-Khaas) played a
supporting role in the maintenance of Ba'th power.
Throughout 1992, there were reports of punitive military operations in the
marshlands area of southern Iraq which is home to an indigenous Arab people and
has been used as a shelter for Iraqi rebel forces and military deserters. The
counterinsurgency campaign included indiscriminate attacks by artillery,
helicopter gunships and fixed-wing aircraft on villages. The attacks were
reportedly accompanied by the arrest and execution of civilians, including
tribal leaders, the destruction of property and livestock, and the razing of
entire villages.
In April, Gulf War Victims (gwv), a Tehran-based monitoring organization headed
by a former Iraqi nuclear scientist and political prisoner, Dr. Hussein
Shahristani, described the aftermath of one clash between the army and rebel
forces in Hor al-Amara. According to gwv, whose accounts of events in the
marshes were impressively detailed and appeared accurate, "the army arrested a
large number of civilians of the area, including tribal chiefs, and shelled the
area with heavy artillery....The fate of those arrested is unknown." Another
report cited an attack by four helicopters on the village of al-Ager on July 17.
After its 800 residents were ordered by loudspeaker to evacuate to a school,
helicopters were said to have destroyed the village. By the summer, the
repression in the marshlands south of Amara-a triangle about 150 kilometers long
and 80 kilometers wide between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers-had reached its
peak. An hour-long video clandestinely shot in lateJune showed traditional
villages that had been destroyed by government shelling originating from the
edges of the marshes. Destruction in some areas was extensive, and families were
seen fleeing by boat. Although the video revealed that rebel fighters were mixed
in with the civilian population-an apparent violation of the international
prohibition against using civilians as shields-internationally recognized rules
of war also forbid attacks on enemy positions when there is a likelihood of
disproportionate civilian casualties.
In late July, after days of aerial strafing of villages south of Amara,
especially near the town of Salaam, international observers reported that the
main hospital in Amara was overflowing with "hundreds" of casualties. The
heaviest attacks, which involved the use of highly destructive ordnance against
villages, lasted from July 20 to 27. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams confirmed
that, for the first time since the Gulf War, Iraqi fixed-wing combat aircraft
had been used to bomb areas of southern Iraq. Attacks were widespread and
indiscriminate.
A week later, the three Western permanent members of the U.N. Security Council,
the U.S., Britain and France, announced the establishment of Operation Southern
Watch, imposing an indefinite "no-fly" zone south of the 32nd parallel. The ban
on Iraqi aircraft was enforced by allied aircraft operating from aircraft
carriers in the Persian Gulf and bases in neighboring Arab countries. In
northern Iraq, allied aircraft continued similar patrols north of the 36th
parallel, operating from Turkey under Operation Provide Comfort.
Western officials claimed that the air exclusion zone in the south significantly
reduced Iraqi military activity. But information gathered by Middle East Watch
and the U.N. Special Rapporteur suggests that civilians obtained only partial
relief. In one incident during the first week of August, over 2,000 people from
the Al-Keba'ish marsh, in Nasiriyya governorate, were reportedly rounded up and
transported to an army camp at Manareh, just south of the Iraqi-Kurdish
cease-fire line, near the city of Erbil, where they were confined to large
poultry sheds. According to Muhammad Sayyah 'Omran, a survivor who managed to
flee to Kurdish lines, on each of the three nights he was at the camp, about 100
detainees were executed. He was deputed to clearing up the blood the following
day. Farmers working land nearby, as well as a Kurdish border guard interviewed
by Middle East Watch, corroborated the main lines of his account.
'Omran told Kurdish interrogators that he was a fighter from the principal Iraqi
Shi'a opposition group, the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic
Revolution of Iraq (sairi). In early July, he and other fighters entered the
eastern Hammar marshes region from Iran, to try and relieve another rebel unit
being besieged by the Republican Guards' Sixth Brigade. After a battle from July
7 to 9 near Kermat Beni Sa'id, his contingent was forced to surrender. Together
with an estimated 2,000 men and 500 women and children from the vicinity, the
sairi prisoners were taken first to Baghdad and then transported further north
to a depopulated district near the Kurdish lines. Told they would be permitted
to farm there, they instead were systematically executed-in an operation that
recalled the manner in which Kurds were deported and slaughtered in large
numbers during 1988. Shi'a living in other sensitive regions away from the
marshes are also believed to have been relocated during August and September. In
late August, Shi'a living in the Kirkuk oil fields region were reportedly
rounded up and taken away to unknown locations. A truck driver told an
Associated Press reporter in northern Iraq, on August 29, that he had seen about
20 bus loads of people he believed to be Shi'a being taken to Makhmour, a town
adjacent to the Manareh army camp. During the first week of September, convoys
of Shi'a from Khanaqin, near the Iranian border, were reportedly taken to
Manareh. Convoys were also seen heading for the military base at Topzawa, not
far from Kirkuk. Middle East Watch had previously gathered much evidence as to
the use of Topzawa as a transit point for Kurds deported during the Anfal
campaign who were never seen again.
Representatives of the London-based Iraqi Civilian Aid (ica), a humanitarian
organization that visited the marshes in early November, reported that the
situation there was critical. The marshes were said to be totally blockaded by
troops, preventing food and medicine from reaching civilians.Escape across the
Iranian border was difficult because of stepped-up Iraqi patrols. Residents told
ica that since August, when the "no-fly" zone was declared, the shelling of
villages had tripled. ica saw houses in small villages that had been bombed and
burned. Mines laid in waterways presented a constant danger, making movement by
residents, in areas where there are no roads, dangerous. Several government
water-diversion projects, coupled with the construction of embankments and
barricades, appear designed-at least in part-to drain the marshes, facilitate
the construction of roads for the movement of military vehicles into the
interior, depopulate the area of civilians, and drive out the anti-regime forces
located there. ica reported that the impact of these projects was quite visible.
Large sections of marshland had dried up and water levels were low in other
areas. The water color and quality had changed, according to one ica
representative who has made many trips to the marshes. "The water was green in
color and it tasted extremely bitter. This water was once drinkable. It smelled
rotten," he wrote in a November report.
Repression was not confined to remote provincial districts. In late July, 42
prominent merchants were executed for alleged profiteering, either after summary
trials or no trials whatsoever. Foreign Ministry officials confirmed that at
least another 500 were arrested. One of the executed men was reported to be Ra`d
Tabrah, a merchant from the prominent Mal-Allah family. Another was Saleem
Hamra, former chair of the Iraqi Chamber of Commerce. To thwart possible public
demonstrations, the government prohibited public mourning of the dead.
The government-controlled media made clear that the merchants were offered up as
scapegoats to an increasingly impoverished public that was beleaguered by
soaring prices of basic commodities. The daily al-Jumhuriyah editorialized at
length on July 27 about "the greedy merchants," terming them "ungrateful
infidels" who "eat of the people's flesh and drink from their blood." It noted
that their "crimes are deemed, in view of the law and the special circumstances
being experienced by our people, high treason, a crime punishable by death." A
July 27 dispatch by the official Iraqi News Agency suggested that the merchants
had been tried by a court, stating that "the measures taken by the competent
authorities" were designed "to make others learn their lesson well, after the
courts have handed down sentences to those who deserve them for having gone too
far." Press reports said that some of those arrested were tied to telephone
poles, to face public insults; their fate was unknown.
In 1991, the regime intensified its deliberate targeting of Shi'a cultural and
other nonpolitical institutions, in an attempt to destroy the fabric of Shi'a
society. (Shi'a Muslims represent approximately 55 percent of the Iraqi
population.) The pattern continued in 1992, with reports that Shi'a mosques,
schools and other institutions in Kerbala, Najaf, Baghdad, Basra and Samarra had
been closed, confiscated or demolished. Entire areas of historic significance to
Shi'a culture were destroyed by the authorities, including parts of the ancient
Wadi al-Salaam cemetery in Najaf, revered by Shi'a worldwide.
Following the August 8 death of the Najaf-based Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Abul
Qassem al-Khoei, a leading religious authority with followers among many of the
world's 150 million Shi'a, the Iraqi government attempted forcibly to coopt his
son, Sayyid Mohamed Taki. On September 23, Taki was detained in Najaf for
several hours by government officials, who demanded that he publicly endorse the
regime's candidate to succeed his father, visit Saddam Hussein, and condemn
international protection efforts in southern Iraq. The regime also reportedly
pressured the remaining non-Iraqi Shi'a religious community in Najaf, mostly
Iranians and Pakistanis, to endorse the government candidate for Grand Ayatollah
or face expulsion from the holy city. The entire community has dwindled to about
200 teachers and students, from a peak of over 10,000.
التقرير
السنوي لسنة 1994م :
The blockades of regions of Iraq outside
government control were accompanied, particularly in the south, by intensive
military action. Scores of villages in the central Amara marshes were regularly
shelled, causing thousands of civilian casualties. Marsh villages were burned
and their inhabitants dispersed, denied medical care in government facilities or
rationed food supplies. Mines placed in the waters of the marshes and on earth
embankments protecting drainage schemes caused an untold number of casualties
among noncombatants. All such actions were grave violations of international
humanitarian law. While rebel groups based in Iran could be accused of similar
violations, by using civilian settlements in the marshes as shields for military
positions, or by targeting civilians for assassination as was claimed in
frequent communiqués, the vast preponderance of abuses were on the government
side of the conflict.
A vast hydrological scheme, to divert Euphrates and Tigris waters away from the
Amara and Hammar marshes, advanced apace during 1993. U.S. government-released
satellite photographs showed that, as of March, a significant part of the
marshes had been drained, destroying the habitat and way of life of an ancient
people, the Maadan or Marsh Arabs. Between July and September, as summer
temperatures rose and water disappeared, an estimated 7,000 Iraqi Shi'a from the
marshes region took refuge across the border in Iran. They reported that
frequent army attacks on fleeing persons made the crossing highly precarious.
At least 105 Shi'a clerics, some of them very elderly, were rounded up in Najaf
and Kerbala after the March 1991 uprising. They were not seen again by friends
or relatives; nor did the government respond to enquiries from abroad as to
their safety. However, contrary to some fears, Middle East Watch heard in
September 1993 that the clerics were probably still all alive, and were being
held in an undisclosed detention center. During the year, the regime moved to
consolidate its control over Shi'a religious institutions in Iraq, particularly
in Najaf and Kerbala. It also attempted to influence the succession to the late
Grand Ayatollah Abdul Qasim Musawi al-Khoie, spiritual leader of Iraq's eleven
million Shi'a and of many other Shi'a Muslims worldwide, who died in August
1992.
Iraq's maintenance of secret prisons and temporary detention centers, within the
premises of security forces and in other locations, such as under public
buildings, complicated the task of estimating the number of political prisoners
in Iraq or determining their physical and mental condition. U.N. Special
Rapporteur Max Van der Stoel estimated in February 1993 that there were over a
hundred such detention facilities in different parts of the country. Access by
the International Committee of the Red Cross andby other outsiders-except for
one visit in 1991 by the Special Rapporteur-was barred.
Based on the rough estimates of Iraqi human rights organizations located abroad
as well as information from opposition political parties, the total number of
persons being detained without charge was estimated conservatively by Middle
East Watch at 10,000 to 12,000. The majority were probably Shi'a men, detained
on the grounds of their beliefs, and not because of any specific crimes.
However, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Kurds-men, women and children-taken into
government custody during the Anfal military operations, in 1988, and not seen
again also remained to be accounted for. Most are believed to have been
executed. But reports persisted during 1993 of Kurds being held in secret
detention centers camouflaged to disguise their location.
Following a July 1991 amnesty, hundreds-possibly thousands-of prisoners were
released later that year. However, many other detainees remained incarcerated
beyond their prison terms. The U.N. Special Rapporteur said in February 1993
that he had gathered the names of 153 persons who should have been released in
the amnesty, but remained in detention as of that date. A small number of
foreigners sentenced to excessively long prison terms for offences such as
illegal entry into the country also remained in jail during 1993; among them
were three British citizens. Three Swedes and an American were, however, quietly
released.
The largest single detention facility in 1993 was believed to be the Radwaniya
military camp, west of Baghdad, which was estimated to hold somewhere between
5,000 and 10,000 detainees. Most of the Radwaniyya inmates were arbitrarily
detained after the 1991 uprisings. Former inmates described to Middle East Watch
conditions of gross overcrowding at Radwaniyya, and of periodic public
executions. Gross reports of torture, such as the rotation of prisoners strapped
to metal drums over open fires, were also reported, but could not be confirmed.
The execution of many persons was reported periodically during the year under
review by relatives who either managed to flee the country or were able to
communicate to others abroad. In August, hundreds of young Shi'a men held at
Radwaniyya were executed, most of them apparently after no legal process.
Families in Amara and Nasiriyya said that bodies returned to them sometimes bore
marks of torture.
In mid-November, dozens of prominent individuals detained in July and August,
apparently on suspicion of participating in plots to overthrow the regime, were
executed. Among them were serving and retired military officers. The total
number could not be reliably estimated, because of an information blackout on
this sensitive subject for the regime; but relatives claimed that the number ran
into the hundreds. Many were members of major families from Mosul and Tikrit,
part of the Sunni heartland of the country. According to relatives, they were
not informed of charges having been brought or of any trials having taken place.
Several of the victims had been killed with a bullet to the head,
gangster-style. Families were forbidden from burying the victims in family plots
or holding mourning ceremonies. As of mid-November, there had been no reference
to this wave of executions in the government-controlled Iraqi press.
Many thousands of Iraqis took advantage of the relative ease of travel abroad
during 1992 and 1993 to move to Amman, the Jordanian capital, where they waited
for visas to enter other countries. Even here, though, they were not safe from
the attention of the Iraqi secret police. On December 7, an Iraqi nuclear
scientist, Moayyad Hassan al-Janabi, was assassinated in front of his family in
Amman by suspected Iraqi agents, as he was attempting to secure refuge abroad.
In 1993, following reports of alleged plots to replace President Saddam, fresh
travel restrictions on serving and former army officers were imposed.
The military-backed blockade of the Kurdish-held enclave, where approximately
3.5 million people were living, continued during 1993. As a consequence of the
blockade, fuel prices in Iraqi Kurdistan were usually twenty times higher than
in government-controlled parts of the country, imposing considerable hardship.
In a further tightening of these internal sanctions, commencing in July,
electricity supplies were cut off by the government to the Dohuk region of the
enclave. Random bomb explosionsoccurred frequently during the year, causing many
civilian casualties. The bombs were frequently left in crowded public places
such as open-air markets, and appeared designed to destabilize the Kurdish
authorities and increase the pressure on them to negotiate with Baghdad over the
region's return to central control.
Outside the Kurdish enclave, foreign human rights groups gathered credible
information about the renewal of pressure on Kurds living in the major city of
Kirkuk to evacuate Kurdish-dominated districts. Periodic sweeps through Kurdish
districts resulted in many arbitrary arrests, although detainees were often
freed by paying bribes to their captors. The "Arabization" of Kirkuk and its
surrounding oil fields region has been a longstanding goal of the Ba'th regime.
In the year under review, no U.N. officials were based in southern Iraq, where
the worst abuses took place. When the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs
was negotiating to send a mission to the southern region, Iraq conditioned its
agreement on team members not attempting to monitor human rights-related matters
or to speak about them on their return.
Middle East Watch requested permission in March 1993 to visit the marshes region
of southern Iraq, to examine first-hand the claims and counter-claims of the
government and rebel groups concerning the draining of marsh waters and forced
depopulation of the region. No reply was received from the government. In common
with most other nongovernmental human rights organizations, to date Middle East
Watch has never been granted official permission to visit Iraq. It has, however,
made frequent visits to the Kurdish enclave, entering through Turkey, in the
process gathering valuable information about past and current abuses. In 1993,
the focus of Iraqi government policy remained the lifting of U.N. trade
sanctions; foreign groups interested in documenting the impact of sanctions on
vulnerable sectors of the population were thus given ready access to the country
and its institutions.
Monitoring by Iraqi exiles of human rights developments in their country was
carried out primarily in Tehran, Damascus and London. The Iraqi National
Congress, a London-based coalition of opposition parties; the Documental Centre
on Human Rights in Iraq, affiliated with the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq; the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, a private
London-based body; and Gulf War Victims, a private relief organization located
in Tehran, were the principal sources of information. The last three named all
focused on the rights of the Iraqi Shi'a.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
1995م :
The government of Saddam Hussein
continued to rely upon police, military and intelligence agencies to control and
intimidate the general populace. Pervasive violations of human rights included
torture, executions and disappearances, and arbitrary detention. Through these
various means of abuse, the government repressed ethnic groups and stifled
freedom of expression and association.
After the Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council's Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991
required Iraq to eliminate all its weapons of mass destruction and to recognize
Kuwait's sovereignty and borders. Two days later, in Resolution 688, the
Security Council expressed great concern about "the repression of the Iraqi
civilian population in many parts of Iraq" and called on the government to take
steps to end the repression. Iraq maintained that it had fully complied with
Resolution 687 and that the sanctions that limited the sale of oil and the
importation of goods should be lifted.
Rolf Ekeus, the U.N. envoy in charge of dismantling and monitoring weapons
systems, acknowledged that the Iraqi government had grown more cooperative and
essentially complied with the provisions regarding weapons monitoring under
Resolution 687. He still proposed a six month probationary period of monitoring,
to begin in October 1994, before the Security Council lifts the sanctions.
Before U.N. discussions regarding the renewal of sanctions were held in October,
the government sent over 50,000 troops to within twelve miles of the Kuwaiti
border. Within a week, however, the Iraqi forces had largely withdrawn from
their positions near Kuwait. On November 10, Hussein issued a decree accepting
the "sovereignty of the State of Kuwait, its territorial integrity and political
independence."
Iraq argued that sanctions violated human rights by starving its citizens. In
October, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said that the sanctions and the
embargo were "a process of vengeance, a process aimed at depriving the people of
Iraq...of the simplest constituents of human life." Iraq avoided widespread
hunger, however, distributing monthly food rations that provided 70 percent of
the average daily caloric requirements. Hyperinflation, however, made
supplementing the rations difficult for many. In September, the Iraqi government
announced that it was cutting the food rations in half. Iraq refused to make a
one-time sale of $1.6 billion in oil, as authorized by Security Council
Resolutions 706 and 712, to pay for essential civilian food and medical needs,
because it rejected the U.N.'s conditions by which the expenditure would be
monitored and controlled.
As the economic situation worsened, the regime employed new measures of
repression to bolster its position and power. In May, Hussein assumed the Prime
Minister's position. Following the formation of a new Cabinet, he appointed
three deputy prime ministers (Tariq Aziz, the former Foreign Minister, Vice
President Taha Yasin Ramadan, and Muhammad Hamzah al-Zubaydi). Several members
of Hussein's family also received cabinet positions in a further consolidation
of power.
Following the cabinet reshuffle and ostensibly in response to increasing crime,
the Iraqi government issued several new decrees introducing cruel and extreme
punishments said to be based on Islamic law, Shari'a, for a range of crimes.
First-time offenders convicted of stealing cars and other property valued over
five thousand dinars (approximately $15 U.S.) are to have their right hand
amputated and an "X" tattooed on their forehead. A second conviction would
result in another amputation. The penalty for forging official government
documents is amputation of the right hand or life imprisonment. Deserters from
the military are to have their earlobes amputated and their foreheads tattooed.
If a person had a weapon during the commission of a crime or a death occured
during the commission of the crime, the person is liable to the death penalty. A
death sentence will also be handed down if the person committing the crime is a
member of the armed forces, the security service or a government employee.
Conviction for smuggling Iraqi antiquities too, was made punishable by death.
Iraqi courts moved promptly to sentence people under the new decrees; an Iraqi
government official told Human Rights Watch/Middle East that in the first months
after their introduction several hundred convicts had suffered the amputation of
limbs and earlobes and been branded. Opposition groups and fleeing soldiers
estimate the number is much higher. The Iraqi government explained that these
penalties were "an improvement" upon the previous policy of executing deserters.
News reports suggested that the government enacted these punishments to relieve
prison overcrowding and the costs of caring for prisoners. According to the
Times (London), riots ensued in September to protest the ear amputations. In the
southern city of Amarah, angry crowds stormed Ba'ath Party offices and cut off
the ears of several Ba'ath Party officials. Moreover, the Times indicated that a
man in Nasiriyeh later killed the doctor who performed the amputation on his
hand in an incident highlighting the public's rising frustration. Iraqi doctors
who opposed the amputations were warned not to protest.
The government also began a crackdown against money changers in the spring.
Under a new law issued in June, conviction for currency speculation, too,
carries a punishment of hand amputation. Amnesty International reported that on
March 26 five money changers were executed for currency speculation at Abu
Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad.
During the Iraqi occupation of
Kuwait, thousands of Kuwaitis were taken as captives to Iraq. After the war,
over 7,000 were repatriated, and the Hussein regime maintains that as of January
1992 all Kuwaitis held in Iraq had been released, but hundreds who have yet to
be accounted for were last seen in Iraqi custody. The Kuwaiti government claims
that 625 Kuwaitis are still being held by Iraq. Recent Iraqi exiles continue to
report gross human rights violations at the Radwaniya military camp situated
west of Baghdad. Hussein Sharastani, head of the Gulf War Victims organization,
reported that Iraqi exiles fleeing to Iran charge that the Iraqi regime executed
two thousand prisoners early in the year, mostly Shi'a, who have been detained
since the failed 1991 uprising in southern Iraq. Sharastani said that although
many of the victims were buried in mass graves, the regime delivered hundreds of
bodies for family burials in the first quarter of 1994 in order to further
intimidate the Shi'a. Independent confirmation could not be obtained since Iraq
does not permit human rights monitoring and the few journalists who visit the
country are severely restricted.
On April 12, Iraqi opposition figure Taleb al-Suheil, a leader of the
London-based Free Iraqi Council and a principal actor in an attempt to oust
Hussein from power last year, was assassinated in Beirut. Within hours of the
assassination, Lebanese authorities arrested several diplomats from the Iraqi
Embassy, two of whom allegedly confessed that the Baghdad office of Mukhabarat,
the Iraqi foreign intelligence service, ordered the assassination. Lebanese
security personnel also arrested Ali Darweesh, the Iraqi Consul, and Hadi Hassan
as they attempted to board a plane to Amman. Lebanese authorities claimed
Darweesh planned the assassination while Hassan actually shot al-Suheil.
On April 3, Lissy Schmidt, a German reporter and Aziz Qadar, her Kurdish
bodyguard, were driving on the road between Sulemaniyeh and Penjwin in the
Kurdish controlled region near the Iranian border when they were killed by
gunmen with automatic weapons. Kurdish authorities arrested Zaki Said Abbas and
Ismail Muhammad Mustafa. They allegedly confessed to the murder as well as other
attacks against foreigners in Iraqi Kurdistan. They maintained that Mukhabarat
had recruited them and offered them at least $3,000 for every foreigner killed.
The two men also claimed that their relatives were held hostage by Mukhabarat
until they carried out such attacks.
In two separate incidents in March and April, U.N. guards were wounded by
gunfire in Iraqi Kurdistan. In March, two Swedish journalists were seriously
injured in a car bomb explosion near Aqrah in northern Iraq.
Western journalists reported in June that Hussein allegedly extrajudicially
executed three senior army officials in a political purge. The victims were all
from the el-Douri family and had served within Hussein's circle of close
advisors.
The state employs a policy of discrimination and repression against ethnic
minorities; in addition to Arabs, Iraq has populations of Kurds, Turkomen,
Yazidis, and Armenians. Its population is also religiously diverse. Sunni
Muslims dominate the present government, despite a Shi'a Muslim majority.
Moreover, there are minority communities of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and
Jews. Government policy forbids citizens from classifying themselves as members
of any ethnic group except Arab or Kurd. Furthermore, in a campaign of
Arabization, government demographers frequently coerced non-Kurdish people to
identify themselves as Arabs. This policy was also applied to groups like the
Yazidis who consider themselves Kurdish, although practicing their own religion,
unlike the Kurds, who are Sunni Muslims.
Although Shi'a Muslims constitute approximately 55 percent of the Iraqi
population, the ruling Baath party has generally excluded them from any role in
the government. Since the Shi'a uprisings after the Gulf War, Hussein's military
forces have waged an aggressive campaign against the Shi'a in southern Iraq,
including the Marsh Arabs, Shi'a Muslims who have traditionally lived in the
marshy area of southern Iraq. By diverting the major rivers, the government is
draining the marsh region and destroying the environment that is essential to
the economy and culture of the Marsh Arabs.
Among the government documents seized by Kurdish rebels after the Gulf War was a
1989 document entitled "Plan of Action for the Marshes." It declares that
"security operations (such as poisoning, explosions and the burning of houses)
must be conducted against the subversives." The plan further describes measures
to destroy local village life. "The principle of economic blockade must be
applied to the villages and areas in which subversives are operating." This
blockade calls for "withdrawal of all food supply agencies;... a ban on the sale
of fish;... the severest of measures against persons who smuggle foodstuffs;...
[and] prohibiting goods traffic from entering those villages and areas." Lastly,
the plan required the region to be drained in order to facilitate controlling
the population and building roads in the area.
The government maintains that the massive marsh draining operation is actually a
development project to create new agricultural land. In February, the
MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour reported that Hussein described the operations in the
marsh region firstly as an issue of national security: "[t]he opposition in our
country, it was no longer a local opposition but an international opposition. It
calls for it to be subject to execution and to torture. In accordance with the
law, we say he who collaborates with a foreign party is sentenced to death."
التقرير السنوي لسنة
1996م :
In August, Lt. General Hussein Kamel
Hassan Majeed, minister of minerals and industries and head of Iraq's weapons
program, defected to Jordan. Joining him was his brother Saddam Hassan, head of
the presidential guard; their wives (Saddam Hussein's eldest daughters); and an
entourage of thirty people. While the international community was not sure what
to make of this unprecedented development, the Iraqi government acted
decisively; it immediately rounded up scores of individuals related to or
associated with Hussein Kamel, including soldiers and officers of the elite
Republican Guards as well as Mohammad Dhiyab al-Ahmad, minister of housing and
reconstruction and Amir Rashid al-Saadi, minister of industry.
Hussein Kamel publicly claimed that he defected in order to serve the interests
of Iraq and its people. But, intimately involved in the Iraqi leadership for
several years, Kamal and his brother had played direct roles in the government's
severe human rights violations. Hussein Kamel directed the destruction of the
Shia holy places after the uprisings in 1991, and he was directly responsible
for developing Iraq's biological weapons program. Saddam Kamel oversaw the
infamous Radwaniyya prison where thousands have been detained without trial and
tortured; and many were executed. It was reported that Saddam Kamel personally
executed several prisoners.
The government continued to repress Iraq's minority populations. Focusing on the
northern city of Kirkuk, the authorities maintained a policy of "Arabization"
designed to displace the resident Kurds and establish Arabs as the city's
majority; the Kurdish leadership has argued that Kirkuk be placed in the
Autonomous Region under Kurdish control. Since 1991, the government has expelled
Kurdish families from the city and seized their homes and property.
Other minorities such as the Turkomen, Assyrians and Chaldeans were coerced to
list their ethnicity as Arab in a government effort to erase their distinct
identities and increase the number of Arabs in the census. Turkomen
neighborhoods were confiscated and inhabitants forced to relocate.
In a similar manner, the government subjugated the Shi'a Muslim population,
despite the fact that they constitute a majority. Shi'a were prevented from
buying homes in Baghdad and some were expelled. In addition, the government
moved large numbers of Shi'a to areas in the north, such as Kirkuk, in order to
dilute the resident Kurdish majority, "Arabize" the area, and weaken the Shi'a
power in southern Iraq.
Although Iraq historically has not targeted Christians, in 1995 Human Rights
Watch/Middle East received reports including first hand testimony and documents
about abuses against Iraqi Jehovah Witnesses. A group of five Jehovah Witnesses
were detained and held without trial by the Intelligence Agency and the General
Security force. During their more than two months of detention, they were
reportedly beaten and whipped, subjected to severe overcrowding and denied
adequate food. Released from prison, their ordeal has not ended; they still
suffer periodic harassment, threats of imprisonment, and extortion.
The Right to Monitor
The freedom to monitor or disseminate information about government violations of
human rights does not exist in Iraq. Harsh laws punished those who were found to
insult or demean government or Ba'th Party institutions, subjecting them to
arrest, detention, imprisonment and even the death penalty. As far as we know,
no independent human rights organization openly operated within
government-controlled Iraq in 1995.
Iraqi exiles monitor human rights developments primarily from Tehran, Damascus,
and London. The Iraqi National Congress, a London-based coalition of opposition
parties; the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, a private London-based
group; the Documental Center on Human Rights in Iraq, affiliated with the
Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Gulf War Victims, a
private relief organization located in Tehran, were principal sources of
information about human rights conditions.
The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iraq, Max Van der Stoel, has
since 1992 been refused permission by Iraq to conduct investigations. Iraq said
in a letter from its U.N. mission that during his last visit in early 1992, Van
der Stoel "...behaved in a way which was far from neutrality and objectivity
that his mission demands..." The letter provided nothing to support these
allegations.
In February, Special Rapporteur Van der Stoel issued an interim report on the
situation of human rights in Iraq. He was extremely critical of the use of
amputations and brandings by the Iraqi government. He strongly rejected Iraq's
argument that such measures were necessary to prevent crime. He decried the
treatment of the Shi'a population, condemning the ongoing destruction of the
marsh region, military assaults on Shi'a villages, and ongoing "interference in
the conduct of religious affairs." In April, the Security Council passed
Resolution 986, under which Iraq would be permitted to sell $2 billion worth of
oil every 180 days in order to buy food and medicine for its people. The
conditions for this sale included the requirement that most of the oil flow
through Turkey and that 30 percent of the proceeds go toward war reparations,
U.N. humanitarian assistance programs, U.N. administrative costs, and a separate
relief operation in the Kurdish governorates in the northern "safe haven." Iraq
rejected the resolution, saying that the conditions infringed on its sovereignty
and national unity. In September the World Food Programme (WFP) issued a report
on its August mission to Iraq. "Alarming food shortages are causing irreparable
damage to an entire generation of Iraqi children," according to a WFP statement.
The crisis could no longer be ignored or merely blamed on Baghdad. International
organizations and some states recognized that if U.N. imposed sanctions were
even partly responsible for the deteriorating health and nutritional conditions,
then international action_either in the form of stepped up relief or adjustments
to the sanctions_was necessary to alleviate the suffering. But hopes of seeing
sanctions lifted anytime soon were dashed in August when the defection of Husein
Kamel shook loose new information about Iraq's weapons program which had been
withheld by Iraq. Compliance seemed to be a long way off and the mood in the
Security Council turned sharply against efforts to ease sanctions. United States
Policy While the U.S. held firm to its policy of isolating Iraq and maintaining
economic sanctions for the fifth consecutive year, 1995 saw an increasing number
of states_mainly in the Middle East, but also in Europe_express serious concern
about the impact of economic sanctions on the welfare of Iraqi civilians. The
momentum to consider an easing of sanctions received a boost early in the year
when it appeared that Iraq was moving closer to compliance with conditions,
outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolutions, for lifting sanctions. France and
Russia, keenly interested in reestablishing trade relations with Iraq, led this
initiative. It was met with determined opposition from the U.S. which insisted
on strict compliance with all U.N. resolutions before lifting sanctions,
especially the requirement to provide all relevant information on Iraq's past
and current chemical and biological weapons capabilities. Serious humanitarian
reasons for easing the crippling effects of sanctions were matched by principled
arguments that Iraq had been offered, but refused to accept, arrangements
through which oil sales would resume, strictly regulated by the U.N., allowing
Iraq to meet the basic needs of its people. It was argued that lifting sanctions
without strict control would remove pressure needed to hold Iraq accountable for
its aggression against Kuwait and to ensure the elimination of its weapons of
mass destruction. Trade and economic considerations increasingly emerged as
factors in the sanctions debate, although these were not often openly discussed.
As some states eagerly anticipated the end of sanctions to establish lucrative
trade deals with Iraq, others appeared to be more interested in maintaining
sanctions to preserve the status quo, in particular, protecting Saudi Arabia's
paramount position in the oil market. The Work of Human Rights Watch/Middle East
In June, Human Rights Watch published a report detailing the government's
enactment and implementation of harsh punishments including amputation,
branding, and the death penalty. Also, in June, after learning of a planned trip
to Iraq by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, we sent a letter
reminding the commissioner that his visit should not be seen as an alternative
to Van der Stoel's blocked human rights investigations and urging him to press
the government to allow the visit of the special representative. In August,
Human Rights Watch/Middle East conducted an investigative mission to meet with a
wide segment of the Iraqi exile community in Amman, Jordan. On the basis of
evidence gathered from more than eighteen tons of seized government documents
and two years of field research on Iraq's campaign of genocide against the
Kurds, Human Rights Watch continued to pursue the goal of bringing a case for
violations under the Genocide Convention against the Government of Iraq at the
International Court of Justice.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
1997م :
The Iraqi government continued to engage in a broad range of gross abuses that
systematically deprived its citizens of their most basic human rights. As the
U.N. sanctions regime entered its seventh year, Iraqi civilians continued to
suffer and die from malnutrition and illness in what had become a public health
crisis. In northern Iraq, which remained for most of 1996 outside Baghdad=s
direct control, the major Kurdish political parties and Iraqi forces engaged in
violations of human rights law.
Human Rights Developments in Government-Controlled Iraq
The government sustained a climate of fear and repression through a broad array
of human rights violations. Throughout 1996, persons involved in or suspected of
opposition to the government, especially those who held positions of
responsibility within the government and military, were targets of arbitrary
arrest, Adisappearance,@ torture, and extrajudicial execution. Several waves of
arrests and executions involving dozens of military officers were reported in
May, June, and July following what the government claimed were foiled or failed
coup attempts. By the beginning of 1996, the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances had over 16,100 unresolved cases of Iraqi
Adisappearances,@ more than for any other U.N. member state. There were
continued reports of executions of detainees, though such incidents were hard to
verify. For example, the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iraqi Shi`a opposition organization, reported that in
mid-March the government executed 500 detainees held in Abu Ghraib prison
located west of Baghdad for their alleged involvement in the March 1991 uprising
against the Iraqi government. The government reportedly prevented relatives of
those executed from holding public mourning ceremonies for their dead.
Fierce repression in the southern marshes continued as the government employed
artillery and armored divisions in several attacks against villages there
throughout the year. The government targeted this area in part because it was a
base for small armed resistance groups and a refuge for army deserters.
According to SCIRI, the government shelled villages indiscriminately and
arbitrarily arrested hundreds of persons there.
Iraqi courts imposed penalties of amputation, branding, and death against
persons convicted of theft, corruption, currency speculation, and military
desertion. The Permanent Mission of Iraq to the U.N. stated in an August 23
letter sent to Human Rights Watch that the government had repealed decrees
imposing amputation and branding as penalties for the offense of military
desertion. Human Rights Watch was unable to verify this claim or to determine
whether such forms of punishment had in fact ceased, but noted that the
penalties still applied to other categories of offenders.
The continued imposition of harsh U.N. sanctions contributed to a massive public
health crisis marked by malnutrition and increasing levels of infant mortality.
In response to Iraq=s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Security Council,
cognizant of the dependence of Iraq=s economy on oil exports, passed resolutions
blocking all Iraqi exports and freezing Iraqi assets abroad. It thereby severely
constrained Iraq=s ability to pay for imports of food, medical supplies, and
other basic goods. These resolutions also prohibited all imports except
essential humanitarian items.
Resolution 687 (1991) conditioned the lifting of this embargo on a determination
by the Security Council that the Iraqi government had complied with demands made
in that resolution, including the destruction of its chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons programs and the payment of reparations to Kuwait. The Security
Council to date had not made such a determination.
In response to Iraq=s worsening public health crisis, the Security Council
passed resolutions authorizing a one-time sale of US$1.6 billion worth of oil
provided that Iraq agreed to U.N. supervision of the distribution of supplies
and the deduction of some 40 percent of the proceeds for U.N. expenses and war
reparations. President Saddam Hussein rejected these conditions as infringements
on Iraq=s sovereignty, thereby putting this principle ahead of ensuring the most
basic material needs of his people.
Resolution 986 (1995) offered basically the same conditions for permitting the
annual sale of up to $4 billion worth of oil sales to enable Iraq to purchase
humanitarian supplies. On May 20, 1996, the two sides signed a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU) on the terms of this resolution. However, at the time of
this writing, implementation was stalled by disagreements over the oil pricing
formula and the number and freedom of movement of U.N. personnel observing the
distribution of goods.
The combined impact on the basic welfare of the civilian population of the
sanctions and of the air attacks of the 1991 Gulf War was catastrophic. Chronic
food shortages and skyrocketing food prices kept the population on a
Asemi-starvation diet,@ according to the World Health Organization, leading to
increased incidence of diseases such as marasmus and kwashiorkor. A 1995 report
by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicated that child
mortalityCdefined as the rate of death among children under sixty months of
ageChad quintupled since 1990. Based on these results, two of the FAO report=s
authors estimated over 500,000 sanctions-related child fatalities between 1990
and 1995. According to a joint FAO-World Food Programme assessment mission
conducted in 1995, four million Iraqis, most of them children and pregnant or
nursing women, were at serious risk of malnutrition. Drinking-water and
water-treatment systems, significantly damaged during the Gulf War, continued to
operate at limited capacity due to the inability to import spare parts.
Shortages of basic and specialized medical supplies led to sharp increases in
infectious, parasitic, and water-borne diseases, according to a 1996 report by
the independent, New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights. Since
September 1990, the Iraqi government maintained a food rationing system in areas
under its control, which met only an estimated one-third of caloric needs in
1996.
The U.S. mission to the U.N. contested the link between sanctions and the health
and nutrition crisis, accusing Baghdad of allocating scarce resources to such
projects as the construction of palaces. Human Rights Watch could not ascertain
the resources at the government=s disposal and the portion of those resources
allocated to alleviating the humanitarian crisis.
Human Rights Watch believed that the United Nations was bound by customary norms
of international humanitarian law. Thus, its economic sanctionsCthe coercive
means employed in pursuit of the objectives of resolution 687Cmust conform to
these legal requirements.
Article 54 of Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibits the use of
starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. International law permits
belligerents some latitude in prescribing conditions to ensure that shipments of
food and medicine are not diverted from civilian to military uses by their
adversaries. However, humanitarian deliveries cannot be blocked for motives
other than preventing diversion, such as to punish a civilian population in
retaliation for its government=s actions.
While resolution 687 did not prohibit the import of basic necessities, it
blocked Iraq=s ability to generate the foreign exchange it needed to purchase
adequate amounts of them and thereby contributed to the malnutrition and
health-care crisis described above. Furthermore, while various U.N. agencies
maintained relief operations in Iraq, these did not resolve the civilian
population=s food deficit.
Further Article 54 concerns arose when implementation of the oil-for-food deal
was delayed in late August and early September despite significant progress by
the Security Council and Iraq toward reaching an agreement on how supplies would
be distributed and on mechanisms for preventing Iraqi diversion. Edward Gnehm of
the U.S. mission to the U.N. stated on September 3 that the conditions for the
implementation of the MOU no longer existed, voicing concern for the safety of
U.N. personnel responsible for distribution of the relief supplies. But the
ability of U.N. agencies such as the World Food Programme to distribute goods to
civilians largely without interruption during the fighting in the north raised
suspicion that the U.S. motive for delaying the MOU was to punish the Iraqis for
the military incursion into the north.
Since then, U.S. concerns for observer safety apparently receded, but the issues
of the number of observers, their freedom of movement, and the oil pricing
formula remained in contention. At the time of this writing, with resolution 986
enacted, a MOU signed, and a detailed distribution plan accepted, the enormity
of the suffering in Iraq underscored the responsibility of the Security Council
and Iraq to resolve these issues and commence as rapidly as possible the oil
sales that would permit adequate humanitarian relief to reach the Iraqi people.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
1998م :
Human Rights Developments
The government of Iraq continued to engage in a broad range of gross human
rights abuses, including mass arrests, summary executions, extrajudicial
executions with no pretense of due process, and "disappearances." Armed Kurdish
political parties and Iraqi security forces continued to be implicated in abuses
in the portions of northern Iraq under Kurdish control. In May, Turkey launched
a major military campaign against bases of the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK,
see chapter on Turkey) in northern Iraq, adding to the large numbers displaced
by ongoing fighting among armed Kurdish political parties in that region.
Iranian airstrikes against an Iraqi-based Iranian opposition group reportedly
resulted in civilian injuries.
The United Nations maintained its economic sanctions against Iraq, now in their
eighth year. The implementation of U.N. Resolution 986 allowed Iraq to sell
limited amounts of oil and use the revenues to purchase goods to meet
humanitarian needs. These goods began arriving in March, but malnutrition and
shortages of medicines and spare parts for sanitary infrastructure continued to
cause hardship among the Iraqi people.
Human Rights Developments in Government-Controlled Iraq
Opposition groups in exile reported mass arrests and summary executions, many in
conjunction with the December 12, 1996 attempted assassination of President
Saddam Hussein's son Uday. For example, the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Amman-based Iraqi National Accord
(INA) both reported arrests of between 600 and 2000 people in the period
immediately after the assassination attempt. The London-based Worker Communist
Party of Iraq reported mass executions during February and March of 250
prisoners with life sentences or suspended death sentences at Abu Ghraib prison.
These and similar reports were difficult to verify due to Iraq's tight controls
on travel, free expression and contacts with foreigners ( see below).
Press freedom and freedom of expression and belief remained severely
constrained. Iraq's main media outlets were government-owned, and foreign
newspapers and magazines were banned. In April the government increased the
punishments for ownership of satellite dishes, which have been banned since
1994. The new penalties reportedly included the confiscation of all household
furniture, a 1 million dinar fine (approximately U.S. $660 at black market
rates), and imprisonment. As in previous years, the government interfered with
Shi`a religious observances in Karbala. In June Iraqi forces set up roadblocks
outside the city, turning back some Shi`a pilgrims making the annual walk to the
tomb of Imam Husayn. Some Shi`a opposition groups also reported clashes between
pilgrims and security forces resulting in many arrests.
Despite repeated inquiries by the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances, the Iraqi government failed to clarify the fate of over 16,000
individuals reported "disappeared" in Iraq. These cases are in addition to those
of over 600 persons reported "disappeared" during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Kurdish and Turkomen families reportedly continued to be forced to leave the
economically and strategically important Kirkuk and Khanaqin areas as part of
what observers have described as a policy of Arabization in these areas. It is
impossible to verify exact numbers, but U.N. sources involved in food
distribution in northern Iraq said at least 500 families displaced from their
homes during the first six months of 1997 had registered in areas under their
supervision. Those displaced suffered delays in obtaining rations, because they
had to reregister in a new district. Some were reportedly unwilling to do for
fear of undermining their claim to residence in their home districts.
The U.N. Security Council kept in place economic sanctions against Iraq, which
were originally imposed in response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
sanctions block all Iraqi exports, freeze Iraqi assets abroad, and thereby
constrain Iraq's ability to pay for goods to meet the population's basic needs,
which are excepted on humanitarian grounds from the prohibition of exports to
Iraq. The sanctions have contributed since 1990 to a massive public health
crisis marked by malnutrition and increasing levels of infant mortality.
Resolution 687 (1991) conditioned the lifting of this embargo on a determination
by the Security Council that the Iraqi government had complied with demands made
in that resolution, including the destruction of its chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons programs and the payment of reparations to Kuwait. In late
October Iraq ordered U.S. members of the U.N. Special Commission's arms
inspection team to leave the country, and barred other U.S. team members from
entering Iraq.
Security Council resolution 986 (1995) allowed the sale of U.S.$2 billion in oil
during a 180-day period, but implementation did not begin until December 1996.
Resolution 986 allowed Iraq to use $1.3 billion of the oil proceeds to purchase
humanitarian supplies, including $260 million in supplies for Kurdish-controlled
northern Iraq, which was administered separately. Although the sale of Iraqi oil
proceeded relatively smoothly, the purchase and distribution inside Iraq of the
humanitarian goods were delayed by disputes over distribution plans, monitoring,
and processing of contracts. The first shipments did not begin to reach Iraq
until March and the first shipment of medical supplies did not arrive until May.
Iraq suspend oil exports from mid-June to mid-August in protest of the ongoing
delays. The Iraqi government increased ration amounts for some foodstuffs after
the arrival of food shipments. However, with only a small number of U.N.
monitors allowed into Iraq it was difficult to determine if distribution was
equitable, and whether the quantities of humanitarian supplies reaching the
Iraqi people were sufficient to produce significant health improvements. After a
week-long visit to Iraq in May, Yasushi Akashi, the head of the U.N. Department
of Humanitarian Affairs, said that he and his team of experts saw "clear
evidence of prevailing humanitarian suffering which is unmistakable." Resolution
986 was renewed for an additional six-month period in June 1997.
In September Iranian planes bombed bases of the People's Mojahedine
Organization, an Iranian opposition group based in Iraq. The group reported that
bombs destroyed Mojahedine buildings in Kut and Jalula in southern Iraq, and
injured civilians in residential areas of Jalula.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
1999م :
التطورات في مجال حقوق الإنسان
واصلت الحكومة العراقية ارتكاب أنواع شتى من انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان، من بينها
الاعتقالات الجماعية، والتعذيب، وحالات الإعدام الفوري، وحالات "الاختفاء"، وإعادة
التوطين قسراً. كما ارتكبت الأحزاب السياسية الكردية المسلحة وقوات الأمن العراقية
في منطقة كردستان العراق مختلف أشكال انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان، بما في ذلك الاحتجاز
التعسفي للمشتبه في معارضتهم السياسية، والتعذيب، والإعدام خارج نطاق القضاء. وقد
حل العام التاسع على سريان العقوبات الاقتصادية التي فرضتها الأمم المتحدة على
العراق، وأصدر مجلس الأمن القرار 1153 الذي ينص على زيادة كمية النفط التي يُسمح
للعراق بتصديرها لتلبية احتياجاته الإنسانية، ولكن استمرت أزمة الصحة العامة التي
تواجه الشعب العراقي
تطورات حقوق الإنسان في المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرة
الحكومة العراقية
أشارت جماعات المعارضة المقيمة في المنفى، والأمم المتحدة، إلى وقوع حملات اعتقال
جماعية وإعدام فوري للمعتقلين. وذكر المقرر الخاص للأمم المتحدة المعني بالعراق
ماكس فان دير شتول أن الحكومة العراقية قامت في نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني وديسمبر/كانون
الأول 1997 بإعدام ما يربو على 1500 من المعتقلين السياسيين في سجني أبو غريب
والرضوانية، في إطار "حملة تطهير السجون" التي بدأت في أعقاب الزيارة التي قام بها
إليهما ابن رئيس الجمهورية قُصيّ صدام حسين. وورد أن جميع السجناء المحكوم عليهم
بالسجن لمدة تتراوح بين 15 سنة و20 سنة، أُعدموا إعداماً فورياً؛ وقيل إن بعض الجثث
التي أُعيدت إلى ذوي السجناء كانت تحمل آثار التعذيب. وذكر "المجلس الأعلى للثورة
الإسلامية في العراق"، ومقره طهران، نبأ إعدام 60 شخصاً بشكل جماعي في فبراير/شباط،
وزعم أن 100 معتقل في سجن الرضوانية "قد دُفنوا أحياء"، ولكنه لم يحدد أسماء أي من
الضحايا المزعومين أو يقدم أي معلومات أخرى دعماً لتلك التهمة. وذكر "الحزب الشيوعي
العراقي"، ومقره لندن، أن 35 سجيناً شيعياً قد أُعدموا في مايو/أيار، وكانوا قد
اعتُقلوا أول الأمر إبان انتفاضة فاشلة في عام 1991. وقد تعذر التثبت من صحة هذه
الأنباء وأمثالها بسبب القيود التي يفرضها العراق على السفر، وحرية التعبير،
والاتصالات مع الأجانب
ولم تتوافر أية بيانات عن مصير نحو 16500 شخص ورد أنهم "اختفوا" في السنوات العشر
الماضية، ومعظمهم من ذوي الأصول الكردية، أو من الشيعة، وإن كان من بينهم أيضاً نحو
600 كويتي ورد أنهم كانوا محتجزين لدى العراق ولم يُستدل عليهم منذ حرب الخليج في
عام 1991. ورغم ما زعمته الحكومة العراقية من أنها شكلت لجنة لمعالجة هذه القضية،
فلم تتوافر أي معلومات تُذكَر عن أنشطتها، ولم يسمح العراق "للفريق العامل المعني
بحالات الاختفاء القسري أو غير الطوعي" التابع للأمم المتحدة بزيارة البلاد
واستمر القمع الذي يتعرض له السكان الشيعة في الجنوب؛ فقد ذكر "المجلس الأعلى
للثورة الإسلامية في العراق" من مقره في طهران أن الحكومة شنّت حملة لإحراق المنازل
بغرض قمع المقاومة في الأهوار الجنوبية. وقُتل في إبريل/نيسان ويونيو/حزيران اثنان
من رجال الدين الشيعيين، أحدهما إيرانيٌ يُدعى آية الله علي الغراوي، وكان له أتباع
كثيرون في المنطقة الجنوبية؛ وقد سبق أن تلقى تهديدات من المسؤولين الحكوميين. ولم
تُجرِ الحكومة أي تحقيق رسمي علني في الأمر، وحظرت تشييع جنازة له أو إقامة مأتم
لتأبينه وتعرضت حرية الصحافة والتعبير للقمع كذلك؛ فالمنافذ الإعلامية الرئيسية في
العراق تملكها الحكومة، مثل التليفزيون الوطني والإذاعة الوطنية والصحف الكبرى؛ أما
أجهزة الإعلام الخاصة فقد ظلت تخضع لرقابة صارمة وعقوبات شديدة. ففي أغسطس/آب، قُبض
على داود الفرحان، وهو من الصحفيين البارزين، واحتُجز شهرين، بعد أن كتب مقالات
تلمح إلى تفشي الفساد في الحكومة. وفُرض الحظر على معظم المطبوعات الأجنبية، وعلى
امتلاك أطباق تلقي إرسال القنوات الفضائية
وكان مجلس الأمن الدولي قد أكد بموجب القرار رقم 687 (1991) استمرار العقوبات
الاقتصادية المفروضة على العراق منذ قيامه بغزو الكويت عام 1990، والتي دخلت الآن
عامها التاسع. وظلت العقوبات قائمة إزاء رفض العراق الامتثال للشروط التي ينص
القرار على ضرورة استيفائها قبل رفع العقوبات، بما في ذلك تدمير برامج الأسلحة
الكيميائية والبيولوجية والنووية، والسماح بتفتيش مواقع الأسلحة المحتملة دون أي
عوائق أو قيود. وقد ساهمت هذه العقوبات وسياسات الحكومة العراقية في نشوب أزمة
هائلة في الصحة العامة، اتسمت بسوء التغذية، وارتفاع معدل الوفيات بين الأطفال،
وعودة ظهور الأمراض التي كانت قد استُؤصلت شأفتها في العراق. وفي أكتوبر/تشرين
الأول 1997، ذكر صندوق الأمم المتحدة للطفولة (اليونيسيف) أن مليون طفل يعانون من
سـوء التغذية المزمن، وأن معدلات وفيات الأطفال دون سن الخامسة في عام 1996 بلغت
ثمانية أضعاف معدلاتها قبل حرب الخليج. وقال فيليب هفينك، ممثل اليونيسيف في بغداد:
"إن ما نشهده هو تدهور رهيب في مستوى تغذية الأطفال العراقيين منذ عام 1991؛ ومبعث
قلقنا الآن هو عدم وجود أية أدلة على تحسن الأحوال منذ أن بدأ سريان قرار مجلس
الأمن رقم 986"
Human Rights Developments
The Iraqi government continued to engage in a broad array of human rights
violations, including mass arrests, torture, summary executions,
“disappearances,” and forced relocations. In Iraqi Kurdistan armed Kurdish
political parties and Iraqi security forces were also responsible for a wide
variety of human rights violations, including the arbitrary detention of
suspected political opponents, torture, and extrajudicial executions. The United
Nations economic sanctions against Iraq entered their ninth year. The Security
Council’s resolution 1153 increased the amount of oil Iraq could export to meet
humanitarian needs, but the public health crisis facing the Iraqi population
continued.
Human Rights Developments in Government-Controlled Iraq
Opposition groups in exile and the U.N. reported mass arrests and summary
executions of detainees. U.N. Special Rapporteur for Iraq Max van der Stoel
reported that in November and December 1997 the government executed more that
1,500 political detainees in Abu Ghraib and Radwaniyah prisons as part of the
“Prison Cleansing Campaign” following visits there by Qusay Saddam Hussein, the
president’s son. All prisoners with sentences of more than fifteen to twenty
years were reportedly summarily executed and some of the bodies returned to
families were said to have shown signs of torture. The Tehran-based Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) reported a mass execution of
sixty people in February and claimed one hundred detainees at Radhwaniya prison
were “buried alive,” but did not identify any of the alleged victims by name or
provide other information to support the charge. The London-based Iraqi
Communist Party reported the execution in May of thirty-five Shi’a prisoners,
originally arrested during a failed uprising in 1991. These and similar reports
could not be verified due to Iraqi’s restriction on travel, free expression, and
contacts with foreigners.
No details were available about the fate of the approximately 16,500 people
reported “disappeared” in the last ten years, mainly ethnic Kurds and Shi’as but
including the approximately 600 Kuwaitis reported to have been in Iraqi custody
but unaccounted for since the 1991 Gulf War. Although the Iraqi government
claimed that it had established a committee to deal with the issue, little
information was available about its activities and Iraq did not allow the U.N.
Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to visit the country.
The repression of the southern Shi’a population continued. Tehran-based SCIRI
reported a government campaign of house burning intended to suppress resistance
in the southern marshes. Two Shi’a clerics, one an Iranian, were killed in April
and June. The Iranian, Ayatollah Ali al-Gharavi, had an extensive following in
the southern region, and had been threatened by government officials in the
past. The government conducted no public investigation and prohibited a funeral
procession or any public mourning.
Freedom of the press and expression were suppressed. Iraq’s major media outlets,
including national television, radio, and the main newspapers were government
owned and private media was subjected to strict control and severe penalties.
Dawoud al-Farhan, a prominent journalist, was arrested in August and detained
for two months after writing columns that hinted at government corruption. Most
foreign publications and the ownership of satellite dishes were banned.
The U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 (1991) sustained the economic sanctions
against Iraq, now in their ninth year following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Sanctions remained in the face of Iraq's refusal to comply with conditions for
their lifting made in the resolution, including the destruction of its chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons program and allowing unobstruced investigations
of possible weapons sites. In September the Security Council’s resolution 1194
responded to Iraq’s suspension of cooperation with the United Nations Special
Commission and International Atomic Energy Agency weapon’s inspectors by
removing the periodic sixty day review of Iraqi compliance with U.N. conditions
for the lifting of sanctions, rendering them effectively indefinite. The
sanctions contributed to a massive public health crisis, marked by malnutrition,
increasing levels of infant mortality, and the reemergence of eradicated
diseases.
The approval process for humanitarian contracts under resolution 986 (1995),
which allowed the annual sale of $4 billion of oil for the purchase of food
supplies, continued to be problematic, with the Iraqi government maintaining its
opposition to U.N. conditions. In September, the executive director of the U.N.
Office of the Iraq Program, Benon Seran, reported that the calorie level of
foodstuffs per day was 2,000, up from 1,300 to 1,400 calories per person when
the enhanced distribution program started in 1995. Denis Halliday, the U.N.
relief coordinator for Iraq, resigned in July and made statements highly
critical of the long-term sanctions policy. In September, at a news conference
in the U.S., Halliday said he felt unhappy that the U.N. was responsible for
implementing trade sanctions at the same time it operated a humanitarian
programme, and that the imposition of sanctions does not impact on governance
effectively and instead it damages the innocent people of the country.”
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2000م :
ظلت الحكومة العراقية، بقيادة الرئيس
صدام حسين، تتولى مقاليد الحكم في معظم أنحاء البلاد، باستثناء المحافظات الشمالية
الثلاث دهوك وأربيل والسليمانية، وبعض البلدات والقرى في محافظتي كركوك ونينوى.
وتواترت أنباء من المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرة الحكومة عن إعدام سجناء بشكل جماعي دون
محاكمة.
وأدى اغتيال أحد رجال الدين الشيعة البارزين في فبراير/شباط 1999، على أيدي الحكومة
أو بأوامر منها فيما يبدو، إلى اندلاع مصادمات واسعة النطاق بين المتظاهرين وقوات
الأمن في بغداد وكثير من مدن الجنوب، كما استمر على مدى الأشهر التالية ورود أنباء
عن وقوع مزيد من الاضطرابات. وذكرت الأنباء أن عمليات إعادة التوطين القسرية استمرت
في مناطق مختلفة، ولا سيما في المنطقة الغنية بالنفط حول كركوك حيث يقيم كثيرٌ من
الأكراد والتركمانيين، ووردت أنباء عن تدمير منازل على سبيل العقاب في بغداد
وغيرها.
وفي المحافظات الشمالية ذات الإدارة الذاتية، استمر التنافس والصراع بين "الحزب
الديمقراطي الكردستاني" و"الاتحاد الوطنى الكردستاني" . ولم تتجدد الاشتباكات
المسلَّحة بين ميليشيات هذين الفصيلين، في أعقاب اتفاق الهدنة الذي توصل إليه
الحزبان من خلال مفاوضاتهما في العاصمة الأمريكية واشنطن، في سبتمبر/أيلول 1998؛
ولكن لم تُنفذ البنود الخاصة بتقاسم عائدات رسوم الحدود وبترتيبات إجراء انتخابات
جديدة للبرلمان الإقليمي، وذلك بالرغم من عقد اجتماعات أخرى على مستوى رفيع بين
الحزبين في واشنطن، في يناير/كانون الثاني ثم في يونيو/حزيران 1999.
ودخل الحظر الذي يفرضه مجلس الأمن الدولي على صادرات وواردات العراق عامه العاشر في
أغسطس/أب 1999؛ وما برح الجدل قائماً حول عدم امتثال العراق بشكل كامل لمطالب مجلس
الأمن فيما يتعلق بنزع الأسلحة العراقية؛ كما استمر الانقسام الحاد بين الدول الخمس
الدائمة العضوية في المجلس بشأن الخطوات الواجب اتخاذها لضمان الامتثال الكامل،
ولمواجهة الأزمة الإنسانية المتواصلة، التي ضاعفت من حدتها حالة القحط الشديد في
المنطقة. وكان من شأن ارتفاع أسعار
النفط في صيف عام 1999 أن يتيح للعراق أخيراً بلوغ بل وتجاوز قيمة كمية النفط
المسموح بتصديرها، وهي 5.2 مليار دولار، وفقاً لبرنامج "النفط مقابل الغذاء" الذي
أقرّه مجلس الأمن بموجب القرار رقم 1153(1998)، والذي تم تمديده لفترة ستة أشهر
تنتهي في 20 نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني؛ إلا إن القيمة الإجمالية لعائدات النفط بمقتضى
هذا البرنامج ظلت أقل من الحدِّ المصّرح به. فقد ذكر مكتب برنامج العراق التابع
للأمم المتحدة أنه بحلول 20 سبتمبر/أيلول، كان مجلس الأمن قد أقرَّ عقوداً لتصدير
النفط بما قيمته 8 مليارات دولار، من بين العقود التي قُدمت بموجب البرنامج منذ
بدايته في مطلع عام 1997 وقيمتها 9.7 مليار دولار، وحصل العراق من ذلك المبلغ على
5.5 مليار دولار، تلقى 72 بالمائة منه في صورة مواد غذائية. وفي منتصف ديسمبر/كانون
الأول 1998، شنّت الولايات المتحدة وبريطانيا هجوماً جوياً على العراق استمر أربع
ليالٍ، وتبعته هجمات شبه يومية على مواقع الدفاع الجوي العراقية في منطقتي الحظر
الجوي الجنوبية والشمالية.
وفي نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني 1998، ذكر "مركز حقوق الإنسان"، وهو يتبع "الحزب الشيوعي
العراقي" المعارض ومقره لندن، أن السلطات العراقية بقيادة اللواء صباح فرحان الدوري
قامت، فى أول أكتوبر/تشرين الأول 1998، بإعدام 119 عراقياً وثلاثة مصريين في سجن
أبو غريب بالقرب من بغداد. وقال المركز إن من بين الذين أُعدموا 29 من أفراد القوات
المسلَّحة، بالإضافة إلى 50 شخصاً سبق أن سُجنوا لاشتراكهم في الانتفاضات التي
اندلعت في مارس/آذار 1991 عقب حرب الخليج. ومن بين أولئك القتلى، لم تُسلَّم سوى
جثث ثلاثة من كبار ضباط الجيش إلى ذويهم، بينما أفادت الأنباء أن كثيرين دُفنوا في
مقبرة جماعية في منطقة تابعة لبلدية أبو غريب.
وجاءت عملية الإعدام الجماعي هذه، على ما يبدو، استمراراً لحملة "تطهير السجون"
التي بدأتها الحكومة قبل عام. فقد ذكر المقرر الخاص للأمم المتحدة المعني بوضع حقوق
الإنسان في العراق، في تقريره إلى المجلس الاقتصادي والاجتماعي بالأمم المتحدة في
فبراير/شباط 1999، أنه تلقى أسماء وبيانات ما يزيد عن 200 سجين أُعدموا في الفترة
من أكتوبر/تشرين الأول إلى ديسمبر/كانون الأول 1998، ليصل بذلك مجموع الذين أُعدموا
منذ أواخر عام 1997 إلى نحو 2500 سجين. وتلقت منظمة "مراقبة حقوق الإنسان" أنباء عن
أكثر من 600 معتقل ورد أنهم أُعدموا خلال الشهور الأربعة الأولى من عام 1999،
وتضمنت الأنباء أسماء وتواريخ إعدام كثيرين منهم. ولم تُتَّبع الإجراءات القانونية
الواجبة، على ما يبدو، في أي من عمليات الإعدام التي تناقلتها الأنباء.
وفي مساء يوم 19 فبراير/شباط، اغتيل آية الله محمد صادق الصدر، أبرز رجال الدين
الشيعة في العراق، بينما كان يستقل سيارته عائداً إلى منزله في النجف، وقُتل معه في
الحادث ابناه مصطفى ومؤَّمل، وهما أيضاً من كبار مساعديه، بالإضافة إلى سائق
السيارة. وكانت الحكومة قد اعترفت بالصدر مرجعاً أعلى للشيعة في عام 1992، ولكنه في
الشهور التي سبقت وفاته كان قد بدأ ينأى بنفسه عن مواقف الحكومة خلال خُطب الجمعة،
ويحث الناس على أداء الصلوات في حشود جامعة، وهو الأمر الذي لا تحبذه الحكومة.
وأفادت الأنباء أنه أمر، في مطلع ديسمبر/كانون الأول 1998، بوقف مسيرة إلى ضريح
الإمام الحسين في كربلاء، بعد أن حشدت الحكومة أعداداً كبيرة من قوات الأمن حول
المدينة تنفيذاً لقرارها بحظر المسيرة. وذكرت مصادر المعارضة العراقية أن محمد حمزة
الزبيدي، قائد منطقة وسط الفرات، زار آية الله الصدر في يناير/كانون الثاني 1999،
وحذَّره من مغبة الاستمرار في انتقاداته للحكومة. وقالت صحيفة الإندبندنت اللندنية
إن آية الله الصدر طالب، في خطبته الأخيرة التي ألقاها يوم 12 فبراير/شباط وسُجلت
على شريط هُرِّب خارج العراق، بالإفراج عن أكثر من 100 من رجال الدين الشيعة الذين
اعتُقلوا عقب انتفاضة مارس/آذار 1991، وظل مصيرهم ومكان وجودهم في طي المجهول.
أما صحيفة "الجمهورية" الحكومية الرسمية فوصفت حادث الاغتيال بأنه يأتي في إطار
المؤامرات العديدة التي تُحاك ضد العراق، ويمثل محاولة لزعزعة الأمن الداخلي،
وسارعت بالإعلان عن اعتقال عدد من المشتبه فيهم. وفي 6 إبريل/نيسان، أصدرت وكالة
الأنباء العراقية الرسمية بياناً موجزاً أعلنت فيه أن اثنين من رجال الدين، هما
الشيخ عبد الحسن عباس الكوفي والشيخ علي كاظم حجمان، واثنين من طلاب الحوزة
الدينية، هما أحمد مصطفى أردبيلي وحيدر علي حسين، قد اتُهموا بارتكاب جريمة
الاغتيال وأُعدموا شنقاً؛ وأضاف البيان قائلاً إنه "تم القضاء على عناصر الفتنة"،
ولكنه لم يذكر تاريخ الإعدام، ولم يبين ما إذا كانت الإجراءات القضائية الواجبة قد
استوفيت. كما ذكر البيان أن الأشخاص الأربعة "أجانب"، وألمح إلى أنهم إيرانيون.
وأوردت صحيفة ليبراسيون التي تصدر في باريس، في عددها الصادر يوم 7 إبريل/نيسان،
نبأً نقلته عن صحيفة أسبوعية للمعارضة الشيعية بتاريخ 31 يناير/كانون الثاني، يشير
إلى أن أحد الأربعة، وهو الشيخ الكوفي، قد قُبض عليه في النجف في 24 ديسمبر/كانون
الأول 1998، ومن ثم فالأرجح أنه كان رهن الاعتقال عندما اغتيل آية الله الصدر.
وفي أعقاب مقتل آية الله الصدر، تواترت أنباء على نطاق واسع عن وقوع مصادمات عنيفة،
استغرقت أربعة أيام على الأقل، بين المتظاهرين وقوات الأمن في المناطق ذات الأكثرية
الشيعية المجاورة لبغداد مثل "مدينة الثورة"، وفى أغلب المدن الشيعية مثل كربلاء
والناصرية والنجف والبصرة، وقُتل خلالها عشرات الأشخاص كما قُبض على مئات آخرين.
وقد نفت الحكومة هذه الأنباء، ولكنها رفضت السماح للصحفيين بزيارة المناطق
المذكورة. وفي أواخر سبتمبر/أيلول، نشر "مركز حقوق الإنسان" أسماء 21 شخصاً قائلاً
إن جثثهم كانت ضمن عشرات الجثث التي اكتُشفت في مقبرة جماعية بالقرب من بلدة الزبير
في جنوب البلاد. وأضاف المركز أن هؤلاء الأشخاص أعُدموا خارج نطاق القضاء بعد
اعتقالهم في أعقاب "انتفاضة شعبية" استغرقت عدة أيام في البصرة في منتصف مارس/آذار.
كما وردت أنباء من مصادر المعارضة عن عمليات عقاب جماعي اتخذت شكل تدمير المنازل
على سبيل العقاب في القرنة في نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني 1988، وفي مدينة الثورة في
يوليو/تموز، وفي القرى التي تسكنها عشيرة الرميض في مطلع أغسطس/آب. ونشرت الحكومة
الأمريكية، في سبتمبر/أيلول، صوراً التُقطت من الجو قائلة إنها تؤيد ما ذكرته
المعارضة من أنباء عن أن القوات الحكومية دمرت 160 منزلاً في قرية المسحة حتى سوتها
بالأرض في 29 يونيو/حزيران، عقب اندلاع المظاهرات احتجاجاً على عدم تسليم الأغذية
والأدوية. وترددت أيضاً أنباء عدة عن إعدام بعض ضباط الجيش بسبب ما زُعم أنها
مؤامرات للقيام بانقلاب، في ديسمبر/كانون الأول 1998، وفبراير/شباط و مارس/آذار
1999.
وأفادت الأنباء بأن عمليات التهجير القسري للأكراد والتركمانيين وغيرهم من الأقليات
غير العربية قد استُؤنفت في الشهور الأخيرة من عام 1998، ولا سيما في منطقة إنتاج
النفط المحيطة بمدينة كركوك شمالي البلاد. ففي ديسمبر/كانون الأول 1998، قال
مسؤولون في حكومة إقليم كردستان، في المنطقة ذات الحكم الذاتي، إن نحو 200 ألف كردي
قد أُبعدوا من المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرة الحكومة منذ عام 1991. وقال مصطفى زيا، رئيس
تحالف عدة أحزاب تركمانية، إن قرابة 5000 من التركمانيين المبعدين يعيشون في ظروف
غير آدمية في شمال العراق، بينما فرَّ 20 ألفاً آخرون بصورة غير قانونية. وادعى
بيان صدر عن حكومة إقليم كردستان، في 19 نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني 1998، أن 35 عائلة قد
أُمرت على مدى الشهرين السابقين بمغادرة حي الشورجة في كركوك، وأن الأراضى التي كان
يملكها في منطقة طوزخورماتو أكرادٌ وتركمانيون، ممن جُرِّدوا من ممتلكاتهم وأُعيد
توطينهم قسراً في جنوب العراق، قد مُنحت لعائلات عربية لزراعتها والسكن فيها. وفى
10 مارس/آذار، بعث جوهر نامق سالم، المتحدث باسم "المجلس الوطني الكردستاني" في
أربيل، برسالة إلى أمين عام الأمم المتحدة كوفي عنان، حث فيها الأمم المتحدة على
التحقيق في سياسات "التطهير العرقي" التي تنتهجها الحكومة العراقية.
وفي أواخر إبريل/نيسان، ذكرت جماعة "الوفاق الوطني العراقي" المعارضة، أن الحكومة
قد أبعدت إلى منطقة الحكم الذاتي 400 عائلة كردية وتركمانية من مناطق أزادي،
وإسكان، والإمام قاسم، والشورجة، ورحيم عوا، والقرية، وبلقار، وصاري كهيا في كركوك.
ودخلت العلاقات بين العراق ومجلس الأمن مرحلة أخرى من المواجهة في ديسمبر/كانون
الأول 1998، عندما قدم ريتشارد بتلر، رئيس اللجنة الخاصة التابعة للأمم المتحدة
المكلفة بنزع أسلحة العراق (أنسكوم)، تقريراً إلى مجلس الأمن قال فيه إن العراق لم
يفِ بوعوده السابقة بالتعاون مع اللجنة. فقد شنت الولايات المتحدة، بمساعدة المملكة
المتحدة، هجمات بالصواريخ والطائرات على مدى أربع ليالٍ ضد مواقع ذات صلة عسكرية في
بغداد وغيرها. وكان قد تم إجلاء مفتشي لجنة "أنسكوم" قبل بدء الهجمات، ومنذ ذلك
الحين لم تجرِ عمليات تفتيش ميدانية على المواقع التي يُشتبه في احتوائها على أسلحة
محظورة في العراق.
وفي أعقاب الهجوم، بدأت أنظمة الدفاع الجوي العراقي تتحدى الدوريات الجوية
الأمريكية والبريطانية فيما يُسمَّى منطقتا "الحظر الجوى" شمال خط العرض 36° وجنوب
خط العرض 32°؛ وقالت الولايات المتحدة وبريطانيا إن طائراتهما الحربية كانت ترد
بضرب تلك المواقع عند تعرضها لهجمات. وذكرت صحيفة نيوريوك تايمز، نقلاً عن مصادر
عسكرية أمريكية، أنه بحلول 3 أكتوبر/تشرين الأول، كان زهاء 1650 صاروخاً وقذيفة
موجهة بالليزر قد أُطلقت على 385 هدفاً عراقياً. وفي 17 سبتمبر/أيلول، قال قائد
القوات الجوية العراقية إن الغارات أسفرت عن مقتل 187 مدنياً وجرح 494 آخرين. غير
أن وكالة أنباء أسوشيتدبرس، في تقرير لها بتاريخ 25 سبتمبر/أيلول، نقلت عن متحدث
عسكري أمريكي قوله بأن الخسائر في صفوف المدنيين كانت "شبه منعدمة، وأن معظم ما
ذكره العراقيون لم يحدث". وكان لبرنامج "النفط مقابل الغذاء"، الذي تم توسيع نطاقه،
بعض الآثار الإيجابية على الأزمة الإنسانية الناجمة عن الحظر الذي يفرضه مجلس الأمن
وعن مساعي الحكومة العراقية لإبعاد آثار الحظر عنها وإلقائه على عاتق السكان
المدنيين؛ ولكن الوضع الإنساني بصفة عامة ظل مروِّعاً؛ ففي منتصف نوفمبر/تشرين
الثاني 1998، قال بينون سيفان، المدير التنفيذي لمكتب برنامج العراق في الأمم
المتحدة، إن "أقصى ما يمكنني قوله هو أنه في عدد من المجالات الرئيسية استطاع
البرنامج أن يحول دون تفاقم الوضع؛ وفي مجالات أخرى، أدى البرنامج إلى التقليل من
معدل التدهور". أما "صندوق رعاية الأمومة والطفولة التابع للأمم المتحدة".
(اليونيسيف) فقد خلص، من خلال مقارنة الوضع في الفترة من عام 1984 إلى عام 1989
والفترة من عام 1994 إلى عام 1999 في مناطق وسط وجنوب البلاد الخاضعة لسيطرة
الحكومة، إلى أن معدل وفيات الأطفال الرضَّع قد زاد من 47 إلى 108 حالة وفاة في كل
1000 مولود، بينما زاد معدل وفيات الأطفال(دون سن الخامسة) من 56 إلى 131 حالة وفاة
في كل 1000 طفل، وهو تزايد سريع ومطرد لمعدل وفيات الرضّع والأطفال لم يسبق له مثيل
تقريباً. وعلى النقيض من ذلك، أشار تقرير اليونيسيف إلى انخفاض معدل وفيات الأطفال
في المحافظات الشمالية ذات الحكم الذاتي. ولاحظ تقرير أمين عام الأمم المتحدة، الذي
يغطي فترة ثلاثة شهور تنتهي في 31 يوليو/تموز، أن معدل انتشار أمراض سوء التغذية
المزمنة بين الأطفال والرضَّع قد بدأ في الانخفاض للمرة الأولى في ذلك الجزء من
البلاد الخاضع لسيطرة الحكومة. وانتقد الأمين العام و"لجنة الشؤون الإنسانية"، التي
شكلها مجلس الأمن (انظر ما يلي) تعليق طلبات العراق لاستيراد المواد وقطع الغيار
اللازمة لقطاعات الطاقة الكهربائية والمياه والصرف الصحي وإنتاج النفط بموجب برنامج
"النفط مقابل الغذاء". وانتقدت اللجنة الحكومة العراقية بسبب "الاختناقات التي لا
مبرر لها"، والتي تحول دون توزيع المواد غير الغذائية، ولا سيما الإمدادات الطبية،
على محتاجيها
. كما وجه الأمين العام في عدة تقارير انتقادات للسلطات العراقية بسبب التقاعس عن
طلب أغذية خاصة مُوصى بها للرضع والأطفال والأمهات المرضعات، وبسبب تشجيع السكان
على استخدام الرضاعة الصناعية على خلاف ما ينصح به كل خبراء الصحة العامة في العالم
تقريباً، وكذلك بسبب استخدام الاعتمادات الطبية لاستيراد أجهزة غالية ومعقدة لا
تُستخدم إلا على نطاق محدود بدلاً من استيراد الأدوية والإمدادات الطبية التي
يحتاجها عموم السكان
The Iraqi government headed by
President Saddam Hussein continued to rule most of the country except for the
three northern governorates of Duhok, Arbil, and Sulaimaniyya, and some towns
and villages in Kirkuk and Nineveh governorates. There were frequent reports
from government-controlled areas of mass summary executions of prisoners. The
February 1999 assassination of a prominent Shi`a cleric, apparently by or at the
behest of the government, provoked extensive clashes between demonstrators and
security forces in Baghdad and many southern cities, and reports of further
unrest continued to emerge over the following months. Forced relocations
reportedly continued in various areas, notably in the oil-rich region around
Kirkuk where many Kurds and Turkomans reside, and there were reports of punitive
house demolitions in Baghdad and elsewhere.
In the northern autonomous governorates, the rivalry between the Kurdistani
Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) continued.
Armed clashes between the militias of the two groups did not resume following
the truce negotiated between the two parties in Washington, D.C., in September
1998, but provisions for sharing border revenues and arranging new elections to
the regional parliament were not implemented, despite further high-level
meetings between the groups in Washington in January and again in June 1999.
The United Nations Security Council embargo of Iraqi exports and imports entered
its tenth year in August 1999. The stalemate over Iraq's incomplete compliance
with the disarmament demands of the Security Council continued, as did sharp
division among the five permanent members of the council over what steps to take
to secure full compliance and to address the continuing humanitarian crisis,
which was complicated by a serious drought in the region. Rising oil prices in
the summer of 1999 finally allowed Iraq to reach and even exceed its quota of
$5.2 billion in allowable oil exports under the expanded "oil-for-food" program
authorized by Security Council Resolution 1153 (1998) for the six month phase
ending November 20, but total oil revenues under the program remained below the
authorized level. As of September 20, out of $9.7 billion worth of contracts
submitted under the program since its beginning in early 1997, the Security
Council had approved $8 billion and $5.5 billion of this, 72 percent of it
foodstuffs, had arrived in Iraq, according to the U.N. Office of the Iraq
Programme. A four-night air assault on Iraq by the United States and the United
Kingdom in mid-December 1998 was followed by almost daily attacks on Iraqi air
defense installations in the southern and northern "no-fly" zones.
In November 1998 the Centre for Human Rights, a London-based affiliate of the
opposition Iraqi Communist Party, reported that on October 1, 1998, Iraqi
authorities under the command of Gen. Sabah Farhan al-Duri executed 119 Iraqis
and three Egyptians in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The group reported that
twenty-nine of those killed were members of the armed forces, and fifty had been
imprisoned for their participation in the March 1991 uprisings that followed the
Gulf War. Among them, only the bodies of three senior military officers were
turned over to relatives; many of the others were reportedly buried in a mass
grave in an area controlled by the Abu Ghraib municipality.
This mass execution was apparently a continuation of the "prison-cleansing"
campaign launched by the government a year earlier. The U.N. special rapporteur
on the situation of human rights in Iraq, in his February 1999 report to the
U.N. Economic and Social Council, reported having received the names and
background information regarding more than 200 prisoners executed between
October and December 1998, making a total of some 2,500 executed since the last
months of 1997. Human Rights Watch received reports of more than 600 detainees
who were reportedly executed in the first four months of 1999, many by name and
date of execution. None of these reported executions appeared to follow from any
judicial due process.
Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the leading Shi`a cleric in Iraq, was
assassinated in Najaf while driving home on the evening of February 19 along
with his two sons and chief assistants, Mustafa and Mu`ammal, and their driver.
The government had recognized al-Sadr as grand ayatollah in 1992, but in the
months preceding his death he had begun distancing himself from the government
in Friday sermons and urging people, against government wishes, to attend mass
prayer gatherings. In early December 1998 he reportedly called off a march to
the shrine of Imam Hussein in Kerbala after the government massed security
forces around the city to enforce its ban on the march. According to Iraqi
opposition sources, Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaidi, commander of the mid-Euphrates
region, visited Ayatollah al-Sadr in January 1999 and warned him to cease his
criticisms of the government. The Independent (London) reported that in his last
sermon, on February 12, recordedon a tape smuggled out of Iraq, Ayatollah
al-Sadr demanded the release of more than one hundred Shi`a clergy who had been
detained following the March 1991 uprising and whose fate or whereabouts had not
been accounted for.
The official government newspaper Al-Jumhuriyya labeled the killings as "among
the many conspiracies against Iraq" and an effort to "disturb internal
security," and quickly announced the arrest of several suspects. The official
Iraq News Agency on April 6 issued a brief announcement that two clerics, Shaikh
Abd al-Hassan Abbas al-Kufi and Shaikh Ali Qazim Hajman and two religious
students, Ahmad Mustafa Ardebili and Haidar Ali Hussein, had been charged with
the crime and hanged, saying that "the agents of sedition had been extirpated"
but without providing a date of execution or any suggestion that judicial due
process was observed. The statement also said the four were "foreigners,"
insinuating that they were Iranian. The April 7 edition of Liberation (Paris),
citing a Shi`a opposition weekly dated January 31, noted that one of the four,
Shaikh al-Kufi, had been arrested in Najaf on December 24 and thus was likely to
have been in detention at the time of Ayatollah al-Sadr's assassination.
Following the murder of Ayatollah al-Sadr there were widespread reports of at
least four days of heavy clashes between protesters and security forces in
heavily Shi`a neighborhoods of Baghdad such as Medinat al-Thawra and in majority
Shi`a cities such as Karbala, Nasriyya, Najaf, and Basra in which scores were
killed and hundreds arrested. The government denied these accounts but refused
to allow reporters to visit the areas in question. In late September the Centre
for Human Rights provided the names of twenty-one persons whose bodies they said
were among scores discovered in a mass grave near the southern town of Zubair.
According to the group, they had been extrajudicially executed after being
detained following a "popular revolt" lasting several days in Basra in
mid-March.
There were also opposition reports of collective punishment in the form of
punitive house demolitions in Qurna in November 1988, Madinat al-Thawra in July,
and in villages of the al-Rumeidh tribe in early August. In September the U.S.
government released aerial photos that it said substantiated opposition reports
that government forces had razed 160 homes in the southern village of al-Masha
on June 29 following protests over the failure to deliver food and medicine.
There were also several reports of executions of army officers for alleged coup
plots in December 1998 and February and March 1999.
Forced displacement of ethnic Kurds, Turkomans, and other non-Arab minorities
reportedly resumed in the last months of 1998, particularly in the oil-producing
region around the northern city of Kirkuk. Officials of the Kurdish Regional
Government (KRG) in the autonomous region said in December 1998 that some
200,000 ethnic Kurds had been evicted from areas under government control since
1991. Mustafa Ziya, the head of a coalition of Turkoman parties, said that about
5,000 evicted Turkomans were living in "subhuman conditions in northern Iraq"
while 20,000 others had fled illegally to Europe. A KRG statement of November
19, 1998, claimed that over the previous two months thirty-five families had
been ordered to leave the Shorja quarter of Kirkuk, while in the Tuzkhurmatu
district land belonging to Kurds and Turkomans previously dispossessed and
forcibly relocated to southern Iraq were allocated to Arab families for housing
and farming. Jawhar Namiq Salem, the speaker of the Kurdistan National Assembly
in Irbil, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 10, urging a U.N.
investigation of the "ethnic cleansing" policies of the Iraqi government. The
Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group, reported in late April that the
government had expelled into the autonomous region 400 Kurdish and Turkoman
families from the Kirkuk neighborhoods of Azadi, Iskan, Imam Qasim, al-Shorja,
Rahim Awa, Qaria, Baglar, and Sari Kahia.
The relationship between Iraq and the U.N. Security Council entered another
confrontational period in December 1998, when Richard Butler, chairman of the
special disarmament commission (UNSCOM), reported to the Security Council that
Iraq had failed to live up to its earlier promises to cooperate. The U.S., with
the support of the U.K., launched four nights of missile and aircraft attacks
against military-related sites in Baghdad and elsewhere. UNSCOM inspectors were
evacuated prior to the attack, and there have been no on-site arms inspections
in Iraq since then. Following the assault, Iraq air defense systems began to
challenge U.S. and British air patrols in the so-called "no-fly" zones above the
36th and below the 32nd parallels, and U.S. and U.K. reported that their
warplanes responded by attacking those sites when provoked. The New York Times ,
citing U.S. military sources, wrote that as of October 3 some 1,650 missiles and
laser-guided bombs had been fired against 385 targets. The commander of Iraq's
air force said on September 17 that the raids had killed 187 civilians and
wounded 494. In an Associated Press story of September 25, a U.S. military
spokesperson said that civilian damage had been "minimal to none-most of what
the Iraqis have reported did not happen."
The expanded "oil-for-food" program had some positive effects on the
humanitarian crisis stemming from the Security Council embargo and the Iraqi
government's efforts to redirect the embargo's impact from itself onto the
civilian population. The overall humanitarian situation, however, remained
appalling. Benon Sevan, the executive director of the Office of the Iraq Program
in the U.N. secretariat, stated in mid-November 1998, "The most I can say is
that in a number of key areas the program has stopped the situation from getting
worse. In other areas it has slowed down the rate of deterioration." UNICEF,
comparing the 1984-89 and 1994-99 periods in the government-controlled center
and south of the country, found that infant mortality had increased from 47 to
108 deaths per 1000 live births, while child mortality (under five years of age)
had increased from 56 to 131 deaths per 1,000 live births-a rapid and sustained
increase in infant and child mortality rates that was virtually unprecedented.
UNICEF reported, by contrast, declining mortality rates in the northern
autonomous governorates. The report of the secretary-general covering the three
months ending on July 31 noted that for the first time the rate of chronic child
and infant malnutrition had started to decline in that part of the country under
government control. The secretary-general and the "humanitarian panel"
established by the Security Council (see below) criticized the "holds" put on
Iraqi applications to import goods and parts for the electric power, water and
sanitation, and oil production sectors under "oil-for-food." The panel
criticized the government of Iraq for "unjustifiable bottlenecks" that prevented
the delivery of non-food goods, particularly medical supplies, to end-users. The
secretary-general in several reports criticized Iraq for failing to order
recommended special foods for infants, children, and nursing mothers, for
encouraging bottle feeding against the advice of virtually all international
public health experts, and for using the medical allocation to import expensive
and sophisticated equipment with limited use rather than medicines and medical
supplies needed by the general population.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2001م :
يبدو أن عمليات إعدام عديدة قد نُفِّذت في
السجناء السياسيين وآخرين من المدانين بارتكاب جرائم جنائية في إطار حملة "تطهير
السجون" التي قامت بها الحكومة، والتي شملت العديد من السجون ومن ضمنها سجن أبو
غريب وسجن الرضوانية. وفي مارس/آذار قدم مركز حقوق الإنسان التابع للحزب الشيوعي
العراقي المعارض تفاصيل عن 223 حالة إعدام إلى المقرر الخاص للأمم المتحدة المعني
بوضع حقوق الإنسان في العراق، وذكر المركز أنها نفذت فيما بين 12 أكتوبر/تشرين
الأول 1999 و9 مارس/آذار 2000؛ وتضمنت 26 معتقلاً سياسـياً أعدموا في 26
نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني، و26 آخرين أعدموا في 27 يناير/كانون الثاني؛ وقد أُعدم جميع
هؤلاء في سجن أبو غريب قرب بغداد، وكان غالبيتهم من المسلمين الشيعة من البصرة
والسماوة والناصرية والديوانية والحلة والعمارة وبغداد، وكان بعضهم قد احتجزوا منذ
1991 بدون مراعاة الإجراءات القضائية الواجبة، للاشتباه في اشتراكهم في انتفاضة
مارس/آذار 1991. وورد أن جثث الضحايا قد دُفنت في مقابر جماعية قرب السجن.
واستمرت قوات الأمن العراقية في استهداف الأشخاص المشتبه في مناصرتهم لآية الله
محمد صادق الصدر، وهو من رجال الدين الشيعة البارزين اغتيل هو وابناه في النجف في
فبراير/شباط 1999. وفي مارس/آذار ذكر عشرات من المسلمين الشيعة الذين فروا من
العراق في وقت سابق من العام وفي عام 1999 لمنظمة "مراقبة حقوق الإنسان" أنهم
تعرضوا مراراً للاستجواب، وفي بعض الحالات للاحتجاز والتعذيب. وبعض هؤلاء المحتجزين
أقرباء لرجال دين بارزين أو من طلاب آية الله الصدر الذين ألقي القبض عليهم عقب
اغتياله بفترة وجيزة. وحوكم 22 من هؤلاء المقبوض عليهم في أعقاب اغتيال الصدر أمام
محكمة خاصة تابعة لمديرية الأمن العامة في بغداد بعدة تهم، من بينها شن هجمات مسلحة
على رجال الجيش وأعضاء حزب البعث، والانتماء لتنظيم محظور، وإيواء مناصري آية الله
الصدر الذين كانت السلطات تسعى للقبض عليهم. وفي 13 مايو/أيار صدرت أحكام بإعدام
ستة منهم على الأقل وهدمت بيوتهم، وجميعهم من طلبة العلوم الدينية في النجف، ومن
بينهم الشيخ سالم جاسم العبودي والشيخ ناصر السعيدي وسعد النوري. كما صدرت أحكام
بالسجن المؤبد وبعض الأحكام الأخف وطأة على متهمين آخرين. وحتى أكتوبر/تشرين الأول
2000، لم يكن معروفاً ما إذا كانت أحكام الإعدام قد نُفِّذت أم لا. كما ألقي القبض
على بعض أقارب المتهمين وتعرضوا للتعذيب.
واستهدف عملاء الاستخبارات العراقية المعارضين السياسيين الذين فروا من العراق، بأن
قاموا بتهديدهم وترهيبهم أو باعتقال ذويهم في العراق وتعذيبهم. ففي 7 يونيو/حزيران
تلقى الفريق الركن نجيب الصالحي، رئيس الأركان السابق للفرقة السادسة مدرعات بالجيش
العراقي والذي فر إلى الأردن في 1995، شريط فيديو يصور إحدى قريباته بينما يغتصبها
رجال الاستخبارات. ولطالما استُخدم الاغتصاب أو التهديد به في العراق كإجراء عقابي
ضد المعارضين لانتزاع الاعترافات أو المعلومات منهم، أو للضغط عليهم للكف عن
الأنشطة المناوئة للحكومة. وبعد وصول الشريط بفترة قصيرة، تلقى الصالحي مكالمة
تليفونية من أخيه في بغداد يطلب منه التوقف عن كافة الأنشطة المعارضة. وعادةً ما
يذكر المنفيون السياسيون العراقيون، سواء الذين يعيشون في أوروبا أو في أماكن أخرى،
أنهم تعرضوا للتهديد بإلقاء القبض على أقاربهم أو إعدامهم إذا لم يعودوا إلى
العراق، أو إذا لم يتخلوا عن نشاطهم المعارض. كما ذكر طالبو اللجوء السياسي في
الأردن وسوريا وبعض البلدان الأخرى أنهم موضوعون تحت مراقبة عملاء الاستخبارات
العراقية.
Numerous executions of political
prisoners as well as those convicted for criminal offences were apparently
carried out as part of the government's "prison cleansing" campaign involving
several prisons, including Abu Ghraib and Radhwaniyya. In March, the opposition
Iraqi Communist Party's Center for Human Rights submitted to the U.N. special
rapporteur on Iraq details on 223 executions that it said were carried out
between October 12, 1999, and March 9, 2000. They included twenty-six political
detainees executed on November 26, 1999, and a further twenty-six executed on
January 27, all in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The majority were Shi'a
Muslims from Basra, al-Samawa, al-Nasiriyya, al-Diwaniyya, al-Hilla, al-'Amara
and Baghdad, some of whom had been held without judicial due process since 1991
on suspicion of having participated in the March 1991 uprising. The bodies of
the victims were reportedly buried in mass graves near the prison.
Iraqi security forces continued to target suspected supporters of Ayatollah
Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, a leading Shi'a cleric who was assassinated in al-Najaf
in February 1999 together with his two sons. In March, scores of Shi'a Muslims
who had fled Iraq earlier in the year and in 1999 told Human Rights Watch that
they had been repeatedly interrogated and in some cases detained and tortured.
Some of those detained were relatives of prominent clerics or of Ayatollah
al-Sadr's students who had been arrested shortly after his assassination.
Twenty-two of those arrested soon after his murder were tried by a special court
attached to the Mudiriyyat al-Amn al-'Amma (General Security Directorate) in
Baghdad on charges including carrying out armed attacks on military and Ba'th
Party personnel, membership of a prohibited organization, and sheltering
supporters of Ayatollah al-Sadr who were being sought by the authorities. On May
13, at least six, all students of religion in al-Najaf, were sentenced to death
and their homes demolished. They included Shaikh Salim Jassem al-'Abbudi, Shaikh
Nasser al-Saa'idi and Sa'ad al-Nuri. Other defendants received sentences of life
imprisonment or lesser terms. By October 2000 it was not known whether the death
sentences had been carried out. Some of their relatives were also arrested and
tortured.
Iraqi intelligence agents targeted political opponents who had fled Iraq,
threatening and intimidating them or arresting and torturing family members
still in the country. On June 7, Staff Lieut. Gen. Najib al-Salihi, former chief
of staff of the Iraqi army's Sixth Armoured Division who had fled to Jordan in
1995, received a videotape showing the rape of a female relative by intelligence
personnel. The rape or threat of rape has long been used in Iraq as a punitive
measure against opponents to extract confessions or information or to pressure
them into desisting from anti-government activities. Shortly afterwards, Salihi
received a telephone call from his brother in Baghdad, asking him to cease all
opposition activity. Iraqi political exiles living in Europe and elsewhere
consistently reported being threatened with the arrest or execution of their
relatives if they did not return to Iraq or abandoned opposition activity, and
asylum seekers in Jordan, Syria and other countries reported being under
surveillance by Iraqi intelligence agents.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2002م :
وفي أكتوبر/تشرين الأول، أُعدم 21 سجيناً كانت
محاكم خاصة قد أدانتهم بقتل عددٍ من عناصر الأمن، وبينهم فلاح أحمد حسين ومحسن
ياسين كاظم وباقر جاسم علي.
ويُذكر أن ضابطاً سابقاً في الاستخبارات العراقية هو النقيب خالد ساجد الجنابي، كان
قد فر إلى الأردن في يونيو/حزيران 1999، وكشف النقاب في نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني 2000
عن وجود حملة حكومية "لتنظيف السجون". وقال الجنابي، الذي عمل في الاستخبارات من
عام 1979 إلى عام 1999، إنه صدر أمر من مكتب الرئيس، بتاريخ 15 مارس/آذار 1998،
يقضي بتشكيل لجنة للإشراف على "تنظيف السجون العراقية"، وإنه عُين في اللجنة
المشرفة على سجن أبو غريب. وأضاف الجنابي قائلاً إن عمليات "التنظيف" أسفرت عن
إعدام زهاء ألفين من المعتقلين والسجناء المحكوم عليهم في يومٍ واحد هو 27
إبريل/نيسان 1998. كما ذكر أن ما لا يقل عن 50 من الكويتيين، الذين اعتقلتهم
السلطات العراقية منذ حرب الخليج عام 1991، كانوا لا يزالون محتجزين في مقر المباحث
العامة في بغداد في الفترة من إبريل/نيسان إلى يوليو/تموز 1989. وبالمثل، أفاد طبيب
يُدعى ماهر فاخر الخشان، وكان يعمل في مستشفى سجن أبو غريب قبل فراره إلى الأردن في
يوليو/تموز، بوقوع عمليات إعدام جماعية للسجناء بصفة منتظمة. وقال الخشان إن معظم
الذين أُعدموا قد حُددت هويتهم بأرقامٍ مسلسلة وليس بأسماء، وإن جُثثهم نقلت
بسياراتٍ خاصة لدفنها، وإن آخر ما شهده من هذه العمليات هو إعدام 34 سجيناً يوم 8
يوليو/تموز. كما ذكر أن سلطات السجن كانت تجبر الأطباء على حقن بعض المعتقلين بمواد
سامة ثم إصدار شهادات وفاة تعزو وفاتهم إلى أسبابٍ طبيعية.
twenty-one prisoners convicted by
special courts of killing several security agents were executed in October,
including Falah Ahmad Hussain, Muhsin Yassin Kadhim, and Baqer Jassim 'Ali.
In November 2000, a former Iraqi intelligence officer who fled to Jordan in June
1999 disclosed the existence of a government "prison cleansing" campaign.
Captain Khalid Sajed al-Janabi, an intelligence operative from 1979 to 1999,
said a March 15, 1998 directive from the Office of the President had authorized
the establishment of supervisory committees to "clean up Iraqi prisons" and that
he had been appointed to the Abu Ghraib prison committee. The "cleansing"
operations, he said, resulted in the execution of some 2,000 detainees and
sentenced prisoners on one day, April 27, 1998. Al-Janabi also reported that at
least fifty Kuwaitis detained by Iraq since the 1991 Gulf war were still being
held at the General Investigative Bureau in Baghdad between April and July 1998.
A doctor who worked at Abu Ghraib prison hospital before fleeing to Jordan in
July also reported regular mass executions of prisoners. Maher Fakher Khashan
said most of those executed were political detainees identified by serial number
rather than by name, whose bodies were removed for burial in special vehicles,
and that he had most recently witnessed thirty-four such executions on July 8.
He reported too that prison authorities forced doctors to inject some detainees
with poison and then issue death certificates attributing their deaths to
natural causes.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2003م :
واستمر معارضو الحكومة وأقارب المعتقلين
السياسيين في الإبلاغ عن إعدام الكثيرين من المشتبه فيهم سياسياً، والمدانين بجرائم
جنائية عادية، وكذلك أفراد الجيش السابقين الذين اشتُبه في عدم ولائهم للسلطات. ففي
أوائل مارس/آذار، أُعدم، فيما يبدو، عشرات من المدنيين المحتجزين في سجن أبو غريب،
وكان من بينهم خمسة من طائفة الشيعة من محافظة النجف، وكان قد قبض عليهم في
ديسمبر/كانون الأول 2001 في أعقاب ما تردد عن عدم تعاونهم مع السلطات في اعتقال
الفارين من الجيش، وأعيدت جثثهم إلى أهليهم في مارس/آذار. وفي يونيو/حزيران، أعدم
عشرة آخرون في سجن أبو غريب، وكانوا من المشتبه في معارضتهم للحكومة، ومن بينهم
جبار صادق علي، وعبد السلام هادي جواد، وكلاهما من البصرة. ويبدو أن السلطات لم
تُعد جثث هؤلاء إلى أسرهم بل دفنتها في أحد مدافن بغداد. وورد أيضاً أن عدداً من
أفراد القوات المسلحة قد أُعدموا رمياً بالرصاص في بغداد، والموصل، وغيرهما من
المدن في مارس/آذار، وكان من بينهم عبد الحق إسماعيل وعبد الحسين جاسم.
Government opponents and relatives
of political detainees continued to report numerous executions of political
suspects and those convicted of ordinary criminal offenses, as well as former
army personnel suspected of disloyalty to the authorities. Scores of civilians
detained in Abu Ghraib prison were apparently executed in early March, among
them five Shi'a Muslims from al-Najaf province who were arrested in December
2001 after reportedly failing to cooperate with the authorities in the capture
of army deserters. Their bodies were returned to their families later in March.
Ten other suspected government opponents were also executed in Abu Ghraib in
June, among them Jabbar Sadeq 'Ali and 'Abd al-Salam Hadi Jawad, both from
Basra. The bodies of these victims were apparently not returned to their
families, and were buried by the authorities in a Baghdad cemetery. A number of
armed forces personnel were also reportedly executed by firing squad in Baghdad,
Mosul, and other cities in March, among them 'Abd al-Haq Isma'il and 'Abd
al-Hussain Jassim.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2004م :
On March 4, 1991, thirteen-year-old
Khalid Khudayyir and his thirty-three-year-old cousin Fu’ad Kadhim left their
village in southern Iraq on foot, headed for the city of al-Hilla to buy food.
They never returned.
More than twelve years later, on May 16, 2003, the family learned of their fate
when their identification documents were found among decomposed human remains in
a mass grave near al-Mahawil military base, some twenty kilometers north of
al-Hilla. Like thousands of Iraqis in the predominantly Shi`a southern part of
the country, they had been arrested and “disappeared” during the Iraqi
government’s brutal suppression of the popular uprising that followed the Iraqi
army’s defeat in Kuwait in 1991.
For the Khudayyir family, the gruesome discovery brought some closure to a sad
and horrific chapter in their lives. For Iraq’s Shi`a population, and other
Iraqis as well, it helped mark a beginning of collective reckoning with decades
of state persecution and mass murder. Almost immediately after the fall of the
government in April, Iraqis began to identify mass gravesites around the
country.
The acting mayor of al-Hilla notified U.S. military authorities on May 3 of one
of the smaller al-Hilla mass gravesites. The gravesite at al-Mahawil contained
the remains of more than two thousand Iraqi victims. Another mass gravesite
about five kilometers distant contained several hundred bodies. A third site
just south of al-Hilla contained an additional forty bodies. In all three sites
the bodies were buried en masse, in contact with one another, rather than in
individual plots.
A U.S. assessment team from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance (ORHA, the predecessor of today’s Coalition Provisional Authority, or
CPA), visited several days later and recommended that military troops secure the
sites and arrange for exhumations by forensics experts. Instead, in the absence
of a comprehensive strategy for assisting with mass grave exhumations, desperate
families used shovels and mechanical backhoes to search fields, tumbling bodies
into heaps of clothes and bones. U.S. Marines at the site, whose orders were
simply to “assist local authorities,” videotaped the exhumation and collected
some testimonies. The family of Khalid and Fu’ad found what they sought, but
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others may be denied that closure due to the
disorganized and unprofessional exhumations. After frantic digging at the
largest site in the area, more than one thousand remains—approximately half of
those originally interred—were reburied without identification in conditions
that almost surely preclude subsequent identification.18
The experience at al-Mahawil was not unique. In the southern city of Basra and
its environs, eyewitnesses to the killings of scores of young Shi`a men in 1999,
in reprisal for street disturbances following the assassination of Ayatollah
Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr by government agents in February 1999, came forth to
identify three of the numerous unmarked gravesites in the area. There, too,
families waited in vain for direction from U.S. and U.K. authorities as to how
the coalition intended to exhume the gravesites and preserve evidence for
possible criminal proceedings. Relatives grew impatient as they combed through
lists of executed prisoners recovered from looted government archives, and began
to excavate some of the sites without professional direction or support. At the
gravesite of al-Birigisia, thirty miles south of Basra near an oil refinery, the
chaotic conditions at the exhumation precluded even rudimentary precautions
against misidentification of remains.
Mass graves of this sort almost always indicate that the deaths were the result
of natural disasters or mass atrocities. The random manner in which Khalid
Khudayyir and Fu’ad Kadhim and thousands like them across Iraq were exhumed in
those weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government exposed a disturbing
lack of planning by the U.S.-led coalition. Saddam Hussein’s government
“disappeared” at least 290,000 Iraqis over the years of its rule. Despite
awareness of Saddam Hussein’s crimes—indeed often using them to justify war—the
occupying power did not secure the gravesites, provide forensic teams, or tell
desperate Iraqis searching for their loved ones what procedures and mechanisms
were being planned to address the crisis.
This failure to protect the mass gravesites had direct consequences, first of
all for the families of victims, and the effects likely will be felt for years.
The flawed exhumation at al-Mahawil rendered perhaps half the bodies
unidentifiable. Bodies were mixed up and many corpses were dismembered. Identity
documents were lost. There were also consequences for holding accountable those
most responsible for these atrocities. These mass gravesites were crime scenes,
and evidence that could have been crucial to future criminal prosecutions for
crimes against humanity may have been tainted if not lost or destroyed.
Many mass gravesites remain undisturbed. Not all of the relevant evidence has
been lost, by any means, and practices appeared to improve with time. According
to U.S. officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority, the intervention of
local rights activists, political parties, and community and religious leaders
convinced many families and relatives of the need to conduct exhumations in a
professional manner, with the help of trained forensic experts, in order to
provide more reliable identifications and to preserve evidence for future
criminal proceedings.
U.S. officials also told Human Rights Watch that they are working with Iraqi
leaders to select some twenty key gravesites connected to the major incidents of
atrocities, such as the 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds in the north
and the 1991 and 1999 massacres of Shi`a in the south, based on assessments of
international forensic teams that have visited the country. These sites would be
the focus for forensic investigations in connection with trials of top leaders
of the former government before a special tribunal.
Nevertheless, by failing to secure sites like those at al-Mahawil and
al-Birigisia, the U.S. risked compromising the ability of Iraqis and the
international community to hold accountable those responsible for serious past
crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, at least with
regard to the evidence of specific atrocities uncovered and now lost or ruined
at those sites.
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2005م :
أهملت
المنظمة أي ذكر
لإضطهاد الشيعـة في العراق واستهدافهم بصورة مباشرة من قبل الارهابيين !!
التقرير السنوي لسنة
2006م :
The victims of targeted
assassination by insurgent groups include government officials, politicians,
judges, journalists, humanitarian aid workers, doctors, professors and those
deemed to be collaborating with the foreign forces in Iraq, including
translators, cleaners and others who perform civilian jobs for the U.S.-led
Multi-National Force in Iraq (MNF - I). Insurgents have directed suicide and car
bomb attacks at Shi`a mosques, Christian churches and Kurdish political parties
with the purpose of killing civilians. Claims that these communities are
legitimate targets because they may support the foreign forces in Iraq have no
basis in international law, which requires the protection of any civilian who is
not actively participating in the hostilities.
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