Ex-Official: Iraq Abuses Growing Worse
By ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: SYDNEY Australia
Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein,as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the country, the former U.N. human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.
John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights
office at the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level of extra-judicial
executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by
both government-backed militia and insurgents not to properly investigate
deaths.
"Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of
expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK," Pace said in an
interview with The Associated Press. "But now, no. Here, you have a primitive,
chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone."
Pace, who was born in Malta but now resides in Australia, said that while the
scale of atrocity under Saddam was "daunting," now nobody is safe from abuse.
"It is certainly as bad," he said. "It extends over a much wider section of
the population than it did under Saddam."
Pace, currently a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in
Sydney, spoke as sectarian tensions in Iraq push the country to the brink of
civil war.
There has been a surge in religious violence in Iraq since the Feb. 22
bombing of a Shiite shrine in the mainly Sunni city of Samarra, 60 miles north
of Baghdad, and a spate of reprisal attacks against Sunnis.
The situation has been made worse by extremist Shiite militia operating
within the ranks of the Interior Ministry, said Pace, who singled out the Badr
Brigade, which makes up a large chunk of the Iraqi security services and
military.
He said militia and insurgents are responsible for threatening morgue staff
in Baghdad not to perform autopsies on bodies of apparent victims of torture and
killings.
"They are told it is not necessary, and not in their interests," he said,
adding that both militia and insurgents were "trying to minimize any chances"
that their activities could be investigated and prosecuted.
Pace, who spent much of his two years in the post in Iraq, said he visited
the morgue in Baghdad once a week when he was in the city and regarded it as a
"barometer" of the level of violence in the country. He declined to provide more
specific details about the threats, citing fears for the safety of morgue
workers.
He said that around three-quarters of the several hundred bodies brought to
the morgue each month were categorized with "gunshot wound" as the cause of
death a phrase Pace says is a euphemism. "Nearly all were executed and tortured,
" he added.
Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is a member of Iraq's biggest Shiite
party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which
ran the Badr Brigade. Badr claims it is no longer an armed militia.
But former Badr commanders hold key posts in Interior Ministry commando
units, which are regarded by Sunnis as nothing more than death squads. In
November, the U.S. Army raided an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad and
found 158 tortured and starved Sunni prisoners.
"They have caused havoc," said Pace, referring to the Badr Brigade.
"They do basically as they please. They arrest people, they torture people,
they execute people, they detain people, they negotiate ransom and they do
that with impunity."
Posted by marga at March 2, 2006 10:58 PM | TrackBack