BAGHDAD, 7 May 2004 — Photo images of US soldiers abusing and humiliating prisoners in Iraq may be just the tip of the iceberg and only a non-military inquiry will expose the full extent of the problem, human rights groups said yesterday.
In hundreds of interviews with former detainees over the past nine months, rights groups say a clear pattern of abuse has emerged, with the vast majority of prisoners saying they were beaten, hooded, deprived of sleep and often stripped.
In some isolated cases the abuse was much worse, they say, with detainees sodomised or sexually assaulted in ways similar to the pictures of abuse that have emerged over the past week.
One international rights group, Christian Peacemaker Teams, which has been operating in Iraq on and off since late 2002, estimated that around 80 percent of former detainees it interviewed had suffered abuse of one form or another.
The US military estimates it has detained around 40,000 Iraqis since taking over the country last year, although most have been released. Around 10,000 remain in custody.
“Iraqis feel that they have been treated as sub-human by the Americans pretty much since the beginning,” said Stewart Vriesinga, a coordinator for Christian Peacemakers.
“If that is what is finally coming to light, then what we’re seeing now is probably just the tip of the iceberg.” Vriesinga said his organization had taken depositions from Iraqis who said they had been stripped, made to pull their buttocks apart and been kicked in the rectum.
In other instances he said female soldiers had detained Iraqis at checkpoints and forced them to expose themselves.
Vriesinga told of an instance last winter when two young men who broke a curfew were forced to jump off a dam into the Tigris River north of Baghdad. One drowned. Others have been shot.
Amnesty International has said repeatedly over the past year that US soldiers were abusing detainees, first calling for an investigation last July.
The rights group said it hoped the pictures shown over the past week of military police in Abu Gharib prison forcing naked and hooded detainees to simulate sex acts and other humiliations would add pressure for a full, nonmilitary probe.
“We are demanding an independent, public investigation into this issue because everyone, Iraqis and the American people, have a right to know,” said Nicole Choueiry, Amnesty’s Middle East spokeswoman.
So far, US President George W. Bush has steered clear of any apology, saying only that he found the images abhorrent. As pressure grows on the US administration to tackle the issue more aggressively, the Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross said yesterday it had urged Washington repeatedly to take “corrective action” at Abu Gharib, a prison once notorious under Saddam Hussein.
But Iraq’s acting human rights minister suggested those outraged by the acts should also maintain perspective, saying no one should forget what happened under Saddam, whose son once had some 2,000 people executed at Abu Gharib in one day.
