Human rights in Ba'athist Iraq

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Human rights in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
)
Hangings in Saddam-era Iraq

suppression of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment
and torture.

Documented human rights violations 1979–2003

Human rights organizations have documented government-approved executions, acts of torture and rape for decades since Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003.

Mass grave.
  • In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned President Saddam Hussein's government for its "systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law" and called on Iraq to cease "summary and arbitrary executions ... the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances".[2]
  • Full political participation at the national level was restricted only to members of the
    Ba'ath Party
    , which constituted only 8% of the population.
  • Iraqi citizens were not legally allowed to assemble unless it was in express support of the Ba'athist government. The Iraqi government controlled the establishment of
    political parties
    , regulated their internal affairs and monitored their activities.
  • Police checkpoints on Iraq's roads and highways prevented ordinary citizens from traveling across country without government permission and expensive exit
    visas prevented Iraqi citizens from traveling abroad. Before traveling, an Iraqi citizen had to post collateral. Iraqi females could not travel outside of the country without the escort of a male relative.[3]
  • The Persecution of Feyli Kurds under Saddam Hussein,[4] also known as the Feyli Kurdish genocide, was a systematic persecution of Feylis by Saddam Hussein between 1970 and 2003. The persecution campaigns led to the expulsion, flight and effective exile of the Feyli Kurds from their ancestral lands in Iraq. The persecution began when a large number of Feyli Kurds were exposed to a big campaign by the regime that began by the dissolved RCCR issuance for 666 decision, which deprived Feyli Kurds of Iraqi nationality and considered them as Iranians. The systematic executions started in Baghdad and Khanaqin in 1979 and later spread to other Iraqi and Kurdish areas.[5][6] It is estimated that around 25,000 Feyli Kurds died due to captivity and torture.[7][8][clarification needed]
  • Kurdish town of Halabja were killed.[9]
Mass grave of Anfal victims
  • displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers after the demolition of their homes, and the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms and power stations.[9][10]
  • 50,000 to 70,000 Shia were arrested in the 1980s and never heard from again.[1]
  • 8,000 Kurds from the Barzani clan were disappeared and likely killed.[1]
  • 50,000 dissidents, party members, Kurds, and other minorities were disappeared and presumably killed in the 1980s through 1990s[1]
  • In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of
    Shia south. His forces committed full-scale massacres and other gross human rights violations against both groups similar to the violations mentioned before.[11]
  • In June 1994, the Hussein
    Sharia law, while government members and members of Saddam's family were immune from punishments for these crimes.[12]
  • In 2001, the Iraqi government amended the Constitution to make sodomy a capital offense.
  • In 1996 more than 40 Iraqi Turkmen were massacred in Erbil.[13]
  • On March 23, 2003, during the
    Geneva Convention
    .
  • Also in April 2003,
    reporters. Also according to the executive, "other news organizations were in the same bind."[14]
  • After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, several mass graves were found in Iraq containing several thousand bodies total and more are being uncovered to this day.[15] While most of the dead in the graves were believed to have died in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, some of them appeared to have died due to executions or died at times other than the 1991 rebellion.
  • Also after the invasion, numerous torture centers were found in security offices and
    electric shock
    and other equipment often found in nations with harsh security services and other authoritarian nations.

"Saddam's Dirty Dozen"

Sulaimaniyya

According to officials of the United States State Department, many human rights abuses in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were largely carried out in person or by the orders of Saddam Hussein and eleven other people. The term "Saddam's Dirty Dozen" was coined in October 2002

E.M. Nathanson, later adapted as a film directed by Robert Aldrich) and used by US officials to describe this group.[18] Most members of the group held high positions in the Iraqi government and membership went all the way from Saddam's personal guard to Saddam's sons. The list was used by the Bush Administration to help argue that the 2003 Iraq war was against Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party leadership, rather than against the Iraqi people. The members are:[17]

Other atrocities

Fifty-seven boxes were recently returned to the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya in Zeit trucks—large Russian military vehicles—by the Iraqi government authorities. Each box contained a dead child, eyes gouged out and ashen white, apparently drained of blood. The families were not given their children, were forced to accept a communal grave, and then had to pay 150 dinars for the burial.[19]

The destruction of Shi'ite religious shrines by the former government has been compared "to the leveling of cities in the

Abd al-Karim Qasim and his successors, including Saddam Hussein; by 2001, it was estimated that "Iraqi emigrants number more than 3 million (leaving a population of 23 million inside the country)."[22] Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times commented: "Police in other countries use torture, after all, but there are credible reports that Saddam's police cut out tongues and use electric drills. Other countries gouge out the eyes of dissidents; Saddam's interrogators gouged out the eyes of hundreds of children to get their parents to talk."[23]

Number of victims

In November 2004, Human Rights Watch estimated 250,000 to 290,000 Iraqis were killed or disappeared by the regime of Saddam Hussein including:[1]

The estimate of 290,000 "disappeared" and presumed killed includes the following: more than 100,000 Kurds killed during the 1987-88 Anfal campaign and lead-up to it; between 50,000 and 70,000 Shia arrested in the 1980s and held indefinitely without charge, who remain unaccounted for today; an estimated 8,000 males of the Barzani clan removed from resettlement camps in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1983; 10,000 or more males separated from Feyli Kurdish families deported to Iran in the 1980s; an estimated 50,000 opposition activists, including Communists and other leftists, Kurds and other minorities, and out-of-favor Ba'athists, arrested and "disappeared" in the 1980s and 1990s; some 30,000 Iraqi Shia men rounded up after the abortive March 1991 uprising and not heard from since; hundreds of Shia clerics and their students arrested and "disappeared" after 1991; several thousand Marsh Arabs who disappeared after being taken into custody during military operations in the southern marshlands; and those executed in detention-in some years several thousand-in so-called "prison cleansing" campaigns.

There is a feeling that at least three million Iraqis are watching the eleven million others.

— "A European diplomat," quoted in The New York Times, April 3, 1984.[24]

A January 2003

1991 uprisings.[11][26] In addition, 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison were reportedly executed in a particularly large 1984 purge.[27] Far fewer Iraqis are known to have been executed during other years of Saddam's rule. For example, "Amnesty International reported that in 1981 over 350 people were officially executed in Iraq ... the Committee Against Repression in Iraq gives biographic particulars on 798 executions (along with 264 killings of unknown persons, and 428 biographies of unsentenced detainees and disappeared persons)." Kanan Makiya cautions that a focus on the death toll obscures the full extent of "the terror inside Iraq," which was largely the product of the pervasive secret police and systematic use of torture.[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "Iraq: State of the Evidence". Human Rights Watch. 3 November 2004. Archived from the original on 2021-05-20.
  2. ^ "UN condemns Iraq on human rights". BBC News. 2002-04-19. Retrieved 2016-12-11.
  3. ^ "JURIST - Dateline". Archived from the original on 25 June 2010. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
  4. ^ "From Crisis to Catastrophe: the situation of minorities in Iraq" (PDF): 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 August 2020. Retrieved 23 May 2017. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ "Iraqi Kurds Seek Recognition of Genocide by Saddam". Al-Monitor (in Hebrew). 8 March 2013. Retrieved 23 May 2017.
  6. ^ "جريمة إبادة الكرد الفيليين … والصمت الحكومي والتجاهل الرسمي عن إستذكار هذه الفاجعة الآليمة ! !". Retrieved 23 May 2017.
  7. ^ Jaffar Al-Faylee, Zaki (2010). Tareekh Al-Kurd Al-Faylyoon. Beirut. pp. 485, 499–501.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Al-Hakeem, Dr. Sahib (2003). Untold stories of more than 4000 women raped killed and tortured in Iraq, the country of mass graves. pp. 489–492.
  9. ^ a b "Whatever Happened To The Iraqi Kurds?". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  10. ^ "Iraq: 'Disappearances' – the agony continues". Web.amnesty.org. 2005-07-30. Archived from the original on 2007-10-27. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  11. ^ a b "ENDLESS TORMENT, The 1991 Uprising in Iraq And Its Aftermath". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2016-08-21. An independent French organization called The Truth About the Gulf War reported in June 1991 after a trip to Iraq that authorities were vague about the toll of the uprising, but 'the figures given for those killed, most of them in southern Iraq and the overwhelming majority of them civilians, ranged from 25,000 to 100,000 dead.' ... The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates that 30,000 Iraqi civilians, including rebels, and 5,000 Iraqi soldiers died during the uprisings as a result of the clashes and killings, while acknowledging that 'little authoritative information is available.' ... A demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau, Beth Osborne Daponte, also arrived at the figure of 30,000 civilian deaths during the uprising.
  12. ^ "Human Rights Watch, Iraq archive". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  13. ^ www.qha.com.tr https://www.qha.com.tr/amp/turk-dunyasi/31-agustos-1996-saddam-rejimi-erbil-de-turkmenleri-katletti-477680. Retrieved 2024-03-21. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  14. ^ Jordan, Eason (April 11, 2003). "The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves". The New York Times. (requires login)
  15. ^ "Mass Grave Discovery In Iraq Could Fuel Divisions". NPR. Retrieved 6 July 2016.
  16. S2CID 237538201
    .
  17. ^ a b c Harris, Paul; Heslop, Katy (16 March 2003). "Iraq's dirty dozen". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
  18. ^ Weber, Bruce (7 April 2016). "E.M. Nathanson, Author of 'The Dirty Dozen,' Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
  19. ^ Pryce-Jones, David (1989-01-01). "Self-Determination, Arab-Style". Commentary. Archived from the original on 2016-09-27. Retrieved 2016-09-27.
  20. ^ Milton Viorst, "Report from Baghdad," The New Yorker, June 24, 1991, p. 72.
  21. ^ "Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein," p. 15. See also "Civil War in Iraq," Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, May 1991, pp. 8-9.
  22. Middle East Quarterly
    . 8 (3): 39–49.
  23. ^ Kristof, Nicholas (2002-03-26). "Try Suing Saddam". The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-02-15.
  24. ^
    ISBN 9780520921245
    .
  25. ^ Noting that the Iran–Iraq War cost approximately 800,000 lives on both sides and that—while "surely a gross exaggeration"—Iraq estimated there were 100,000 deaths resulting from U.S. bombing in the Gulf War, Burns concludes: "A million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark." See Burns, John F. (2003-01-26). "How Many People Has Hussein Killed?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-10-05. Also writing in The New York Times, Dexter Filkins appeared to echo but misrepresent Burns's remark in October 2007: "[Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. ... His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead." See Filkins, Dexter (2007-10-07). "Regrets Only?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-12-04. In turn, Commentary writer Arthur L. Herman accused Saddam of "kill[ing] as many as two million of his own people" in July 2008. See Herman, Arthur L. (2008-07-01). "Why Iraq Was Inevitable". Commentary. Archived from the original on 2016-12-20. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  26. ^ Johns, Dave (2006-01-24). "The Crimes of Saddam Hussein: The Anfal Campaign". PBS. Retrieved 2016-08-21.
  27. ISBN 9788176484787
    .

Further reading

External links

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