BAGHDAD, 10 July 2004 — Women who claim they were arrested without charge, tortured and sentenced to long years in jail under Saddam Hussein demanded yesterday the injustices they suffered also be taken into account in the trial of Iraq’s former dictator. Saddam faced seven charges at a preliminary hearing last week of crimes against humanity and war crimes such as during the 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait and the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja two years earlier.
But there was no mention of the sufferings he inflicted on women, according to hundreds of women who met at Baghdad’s national theatre to denounce the omission. “We want them to listen to our voice,” said Inaam Hassan, an engineer, who was imprisoned between 1981 and 1986.
“I am speaking for all the women who were executed, for those who spent their youth behind bars and were deprived of the chance to marry,” she said.
At the start of 2004, Inaam and several other former inmates created a Committee of Female Iraqi Prisoners, which now has a membership of some 1,000 women — 95 percent Shiite Muslims and the remainder Kurds.
The majority of Saddam’s female victims were Shiites, accused of belonging to the then outlawed Dawa party, which was created in 1958 by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Sadr who was assassinated by the former regime in 1980.
Members of the banned group were systematically arrested by Saddam’s Baath Party who resented the support they gave to the Islamic regime in Iran which fought a 1980-1988 war against Iraq.
“From 1981 to 1991 a lot of women were thrown into prison. I was one of them. They accused me of belonging to the Dawa party and for wearing a headscarf,” said the president of the committee, Imane Aziz.
The women hope the new interim government will push their case as Saddam’s judicial proceedings develop in the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, who is also president of the Dawa party, attended the gathering at the national theater along with Amaar Aziz Hakim, son of Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq chief Abdel Aziz Hakim.
“To bring a case against Saddam Hussein we had to submit an initial list of seven charges, but others are likely to follow. But we will see,” he said. In 1984, Sahar Jabber was a 22-year-old physics student at the University of Mosul in northern Iraq. She took part in secret Dawa meetings. “We spoke about religion and did not think about taking up arms,” she said.
One day, police came to find Sahar on the pretext of wanting to take her in for a brief interrogation. Blindfolded, she was driven to an unspecified location. “They ran an electric truncheon over my body, hit my legs with a metal cable and forced me to jump on the spot,” she recalled.
“They told me to give them the names of my friends. If I had admitted to being a member of the Dawa party, they would have killed me,” the woman added. Later, with gadgets attached to her head, she was given a series of electric shocks.
Tortured every day for nine months, the young women was finally condemned to life imprisonment. Today, aged 42, Sahar said: “Saddam must be condemned for the crimes he committed against the women of Iraq. But before he is executed, I want him to be able to glimpse the new Iraq.”
Meanwhile, Muslim leaders in Iraq were united at Friday prayers in their rage against the country’s new sovereign government, accusing Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of colluding with the former US-led occupiers.
“Either they should be totally sovereign or resign collectively,” said one sheikh at a Baghdad mosque, referring to the interim Cabinet, which officially took office following the termination of the US-led coalition on June 28.
Random arrests and attacks in the Sunni Muslim bastions of Fallujah and Samarra, west and north of Baghdad, carried out in the name of the government must stop, said Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Ghafour Samarrai in his weekly sermon.
“We violently condemn such acts,” the Sunni cleric said, with regard to recent airstrikes by US warplanes on suspected hide-outs of top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi and the deadly force unleashed by US soldiers on Thursday in Samarra after a national guard station was attacked by mortars.
In the Shiite Muslim city of Kufa, a cleric speaking on behalf of radical preacher Moqtada Sadr condemned Allawi for a range of glitches during his first few days in charge, from failing to allow religious and popular Iraqi leaders to oversee the trial of Saddam Hussein to not providing basic services.
“I call upon the installed government to provide the same levels of electricity, drinking water and fuel to the public as are readily available for the occupiers,” said Jabir Khafaji, referring to the US-led foreign presence that remains in Iraq despite the handover of power.
