bogumilka
26.01.03, 21:24
Sunday June 23, 2002
The Observer
The witness against the government of Iraq walked stiffly into the room,
metal
callipers buckled to heavy medical shoes. They had tortured her two years
ago.
She is now four.
Her father had been suspected of involvement in a plot to kill Saddam
Hussein's
psychopathic son, Uday. He fled to the north of Iraq, but the secret police,
the mukhabarat, came for his wife, still in Baghdad, and tortured her. When
she
wouldn't break, they tortured 'Anna' in front of her.
Her father, 'Ali', is a thick-set Iraqi who worked in Saddam's privileged
inner
circle. He described what they did to her: 'They had a wooden stick. They
would
squeeze her feet and ask "Has Daddy called you?" - she understood - "Does
Daddy
contact you?"'
She is a victim of Saddam's brutality, proof that he is prepared to dispense
violence against even his country's children. By a cruel irony, her father is
also witness to Saddam's efforts to portray those same children as victims of
Western sanctions, which he claims have cost hundreds of thousands of young
lives.
Ali, outraged that Saddam's torturers may have crippled his daughter for
life,
spoke openly about how the regime's propaganda has faked mass baby funerals -
'evidence' of the 7,000 children under five the regime claims are being
killed
each month by sanctions.
Small coffins, decorated with grisly photographs of dead babies and their
ages -
'three days', 'four days', written usefully for the English-speaking media -
are paraded through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, the
procession led by a throng of official mourners.
There is only one problem. Because there are not enough dead babies around,
the
regime prevents parents from burying infants immediately, in the Muslim
tradition, to create more powerful propaganda.
Anna was the youngest witness to child torture by the Iraqi government in an
investigation, The Mother of All Ironies, to be broadcast by BBC2's
Correspondent today. It found six other adult witnesses in the Kurdish safe
haven in the north - the only part of Iraq where people are free to speak.
The most chilling witness was one of Saddam's torturers, who was captured
spying against the Kurds this year. 'Kamal' told us: 'They would bring the
son
in front of his parents, who were handcuffed or tied, and would start off
with
simple methods of torture, such as cigarette burns. Then they started using
other methods of torture, more serious ones.
'They would tell the father that they'd slaughter his son, and they'd bring a
bayonet out, and if the parents didn't confess they'd kill the child. 'The
interrogator has the right to kill the child, or perform any other butchery,
whatever's necessary.' And then Kamal chuckled.
· John Sweeney's report will be shown in Correspondent on BBC2 at 7.15pm
today