KARBALA, Iraq, 15 September 2003 — The gaunt, weathered face of Wasan Kamil was the only thing peeking out from her long black abaya, and it was pursed in worry. The 28-year-old widow sat in a plastic chair next to the Iraqi judge, a man with sharp creases in his navy slacks and a palpable impatience with her crying, 8-month-old daughter.
“Quiet that child! I’m trying to listen!” bellowed the judge, Fadil Shahid, sitting below a crest of the 870th US Military Police Company painted onto the wall.
Kamil folded into her chair. Her brother-in-law had accused her and her mother of killing her husband. Iraqi police put Kamil and her mother in jail, along with the child. The US military police at the Karbala station, who review Iraqi arrests, took a special interest in Kamil’s case. Members of a reserve unit from San Jose, Calif., wondered why a woman with an infant and her 54-year-old mother were in jail. They escorted the judge to their office on a recent day to try to gain freedom for the three.
“We have a little problem with this case,” said Staff Sgt. Thomas D. Neal, who pulled his seat up close to the judge. “She’s accused of killing her husband, but the paperwork here says that she didn’t do it.”
“We cannot resolve a murder case in one day, not even in one year,” protested Shahid, who wanted the case to move through Iraqi legal channels. Shahid finally agreed to reconsider the case later that day. But in a few hours, before hearing from Shahid or the Iraqi police, a US commander released Kamil and her mother, Fadila Salem.
“I don’t want the Iraqi judges to interfere with this case,” said a tearful Salem as she walked out of the station with her daughter. “The Iraqi judges take bribes, but the Americans depend on facts and rights.”
The scene was a reminder of the incomplete effort to resurrect the Iraqi legal system, which is still divided between the US military and Iraqi police and judges. More than 300 courts are open and hearing cases, according to a spokesman for the occupation authority. But US military officials still have a say. Sometimes they get involved in a case when they shouldn’t, said Maj. Bernard Bercik, 46, an Army reserve lawyer with the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade who worked with the Iraqi judges and military police at the Karbala station.
For example, Iraqi police run the Karbala jail, but the US military police oversee its operation. The soldiers came to Bercik at one point to ask about releasing a woman who had been charged as an accessory to rape. She had a small child with her in the filthy jail. Bercik said he made a hasty decision to release her, and the woman never showed up at the station again, as she had promised.
A subsequent investigation showed that the woman did set up a 17-year-old girl to be raped. “That’s why I have to be careful,” Bercik said. A week after the Americans released Kamil and her mother, Shahid sat in a classroom with concrete walls that serves as a courtroom. He said that his working conditions were better than under ousted President Saddam Hussein. “We worked under pressure,” he said. “The Baathists (Hussein’s party) used to interfere with our work. When I issued an order, I felt I would be punished after that. We didn’t have the freedom to apply the laws.”
But he is not happy about what he called American interference. He said he has complained to the chief judge about other instances in which Americans had freed suspects who the Iraqis believed should have been imprisoned: A man stealing shoes from a mosque, for example, or a couple caught having premarital sex. “It is against our Islamic law and convictions,” Shahid said. “If you want to release someone, you can ask our advice and we will advise.”
On July 24, Kamil was at home. Her father was arguing with her brother over feeding rice to the pigeons, because food and money in the 11-member household were scarce. As the argument continued, Kamil said, her husband, Muttlib Harram, came home and tried to break it up. Her brother went to get a gun, intending to shoot her father. Harram stepped between the men and was shot.
“I tried to tell them to stop arguing but I couldn’t do anything,” she said. Her husband was taken to the hospital, then transferred to Baghdad for medical treatment. Kamil waited at a cousin’s house for news. Later that night she learned that her husband had died. Harram was a Karbala police officer and had a pension. In the first few weeks after his death, Kamil said, she did not think of going to collect it because she was concerned about taking care of her children. Finally, she went with her cousin to the police office to see about getting the weekly pension.
At the station, Kamil said, she was told that her brother-in-law had already picked up the money. He had also accused her and her mother of killing her husband. Iraqi police arrested them both, along with Kamil’s infant daughter, and put them in jail.
Lt. Joseph La Jeunesse, 34, from Santa Clara, Calif., noticed Kamil and her infant at the station and asked the Iraqi police about her case. He went to his company commander, Capt. Leo Merck, to ask his permission to have them released. “Normally we don’t get involved, but she had a kid. It was different circumstances,” said La Jeunesse, who added that he had seen female prisoners languish for months in jail because they had no money to hire a lawyer or because a male relative had not come for them.
Iraqi police were reluctant to release both women, so the mother stayed in jail while Kamil reported to the police station each day at 9 a.m. to try to resolve the case. La Jeunesse took a written statement from her brother-in-law, who said Kamil did not have a gun and could not have pulled the trigger. There was also an Iraqi police report with the dying utterance of Kamil’s husband, in which he named her brother as the shooter.
Neal, the staff sergeant, took over the case after about four days, and pushed for Kamil and her mother to be released. He asked military police to bring the judge to the police station to resolve the case. The two men went back and forth for almost an hour. Finally, Shahid agreed to consider the release after reviewing the entire file, which he promised to do that day. The American said they would wait for his decision.
Merck, 31, commander of the California National Guard military police company, told Shahid that if he didn’t release the family that day, he would. One hour stretched into two. Merck told his officers to let the mother go, and both had to promise that they would return the next day to settle the case in front of Shahid. Merck said the jail has a backlog of cases, and he has been pressing for the release of Iraqi suspects if there is no paperwork to substantiate the case against them.
“I’m not trying to let people go. I’m trying to move the judicial process along,” he said. He sat in front of two binders that held paperwork from arrests by the US military and arrests by Iraqi police. The binder of paperwork from the Iraqi arrests was three times as thick. The next day, Shahid approved the women’s release.
Both American and Iraqi authorities encouraged them to turn in the young widow’s brother and father if they knew where the two were hiding.
