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[Gość: MarcSemo]

Arrests And Abuse By American Troops On The Rise In Iraq
"They're treating us like cattle"
by Marc Semo
Translated from Libération (Paris), July 30, 2003
www.globalresearch.ca 1 August 2003
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SEM308B.html


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The curfew had just begun, at 11 p.m., as it has for the past three months
in the Iraqi capital, and Nudir was late, but he was only a few hundred
meters from his villa in the Zeyouna district when an American patrol
blocked the BMW where he and two friends happened to be. Polite, but firm,
the GIs stretched them out on the hood. They searched the vehicle. In the
glove compartment they had a revolver for self-defense, as many Iraqis do.
The Americans handcuffed them at once. "They made us get into an armored
troop transport, and there they began to beat us up," said the young
engineer, who, after spending the night at a collection center stuffed into
a wire-mesh cage with 350 other suspects, finally ended up at the airport
prison, "Camp Cropper," which consists of tarps surrounded by barbed wire
under a blistering sun. There he spent sixteen days. That was at the end of
May. He was registered as "enemy prisoner of war" number 8,122.
NUMBER 16,481
As for Tony, he was arrested ten days later, on June 3, at his home in the
Al-Mansour district. "Some thieves had started pillaging the house next
door. Along with the other neighbors, we had started shooting in the air to
make them go away, and the Americans arrived a few minutes later. They
weren't interested in the thieves. They asked who had fired and where the
guns were. I showed them the Kalashnikov I was keeping to protect my
family. They confiscated it, and then they bound my hands and took me away,"
says the young Christian economist. It would be thirty-seven days before he
came home again, after spending time in the prison camps that have been
built in the southern part of the country, near Um Qasr. During his time in
Camp Cropper, he received the number 16,481.

Statistics are lacking, but these registration numbers give an idea of the
number of persons arrested in Baghdad during the round-ups and searches
conducted by American troops. "An enormous numbers of detainees are coming
and going, making any precise accounting impossible," says a representative
of the International Committee of the Red Cross. While acknowledging that
he "now has access to all detention centers," he complains about "the major
problems, namely the slowness of procedures and the absence of lawyers and
judges."

The misadventures of Nudir and Tony are two stories among many others
testifying to the daily repression enforced by American troops, who are
feeling increasingly nervous. In his report to the Security Council, the UN
representative in Baghdad, Sergio Viera De Mello, expressed his concerns
about the status of human rights in Iraq. Amnesty International, in a [July
23] "Memorandum on concerns relating to law and order"
(http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE141572003 ), denounced "reports
of torture or ill treatment by Coalition Forces."
There are also "abuses," more and more frequent, during violent operations,
for the GIs are still behaving as if they were at war.
Shots at civilian cars that have the misfortune to pass by at the wrong
moment. Shots at occupants of a commandeered house who start to react
defensively because they think they're being robbed. From a legal point of
view, everything remains in a state of utter vagueness.

INHUMANE CONDITIONS
To all this must be added the poor hygiene, the heat, and the crowding in
the detention centers improvised by the Americans, who, in addition to the
tarpaulin camps, have put back into service the immense Abu Ghraib prison,
the symbol of the thirty years of repression by the defunct regime. "It is
shameful to see people detained in inhumane conditions without their
families being informed, often for weeks," said Mahmoud Ben Romdhane, the
head of Amnesty's delegation to Iraq, indignantly.

There is certainly no comparison between the life of a detainee today and
what that was during Saddam's time, but those who have been incarcerated by
the Americans remain profoundly shocked, even if they acknowledge that in
general the GI guards "behaved appropriately."
General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, explained
the difficulties in publishing lists of prisoners to inform
families "because of problems in spelling names, which are often imprecise."

ON THE GROUND
When he arrived at Camp Cropper, near the airport, Nudir broke down. "Under
nothing but a tarp, there were 200 of us, and we didn't have the right to
leave the barbed-wire enclosure that surrounded each tent. There were a
dozen of them, and we couldn't talk back and forth, except by making distant
gestures," said the engineer. In the neighboring tent, he saw some "VIPs" -
former officials of the regime on the list of wanted persons, including the
former president of Parliament, Sadoun Hammadi - who "was being treated like
everybody else." "We slept on the ground, on newspapers or, for those who
were lucky, on gunnysacks. The food was meager, army rations once a day,
and water was even scarcer, scarcely three liters a day despite the extreme
heat It was always hot, brought in metal containers. The latrines were just
holes dug inside the enclosure giving off a pestilential stench," recalled
Nudir, for whom the worst was going without cigarettes. Smoking was
strictly prohibited. At the slightest infraction, the detainees were punished
by making them stand for hours in the sun, arms and legs
outstretched. "When a prisoner collapsed, they brought him to with a little
water, and then he had to resume his standing position," said the ex-
detainee, who also saw some of his companions punished for more serious
misconduct by being thrown into the dirt on their stomach with their hands
tied under the hot sun. "They didn't beat us, but they treated us like
cattle," exclaimed Tony, who, after two days, was transferred to the south,
to Um Qasr, to a prisoner-of-war camp, "where at least there was soap to
wash with."
INDIGNATION
During his detention, Nudir was interrogated only once, for five
minutes. "I didn't know how long I would be there. Then one day they called
my number. I learned I was free," he said. His family had only been
informed of his detention fourteen days later. "They thought I had been
killed by robbers, and for days they made the rounds of police stations, the
Red Crescent, the International Red Cross, the American authorities, all to
no avail," the engineer complained.

When Tony was finally interrogated, after ten days in the Um Qasr camp, and
was able to tell his story, the officer suddenly stood up. "I thought he
was going to hit me, but he shook my hand, saying he was truly sorry for
what had happened to me," said the economist, who nonetheless had to wait
seventeen more days to be freed, after two other lengthy interrogations by
intelligence officers who asked him if he belonged to the Baath Party,
whether he knew any Baathists, what he had done during the Kuwait war, and
why he didn't support the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, the
Americans' protégé. He was able to prove his good faith. They walked him
to the camp's gate, in the middle of the desert, 430 miles from Baghdad.
They gave him $5 and it was up to him from there. He sighed:
"I hold it against the Americans. Like a lot of other Iraqis, I blessed
them for having freed us from Saddam Hussein. F