Senior members of Iraq’s interim government have admitted torture and abuse have taken place in police stations. Understandably they seek to play down the allegations, blaming lack of training. Privately, however, one senior politician has admitted that such treatment of prisoners has not been only in a few isolated incidents.
If this is true, then it is a profoundly depressing revelation. Iraqis were rightly angered by the discovery of abuse at Abu Ghraib by US occupiers and in Basra by the British who had come, so they said, to help Iraqis break with Saddam’s brutal past. If the coalition forces overthrew the Baathist dictator in the names of decency, truth and justice, they had a strange way of seeking to rebuild Iraq thereafter, they argued. They were right.
But when all is said and done, the Americans and the other coalition troops involved in abuse and allegations of abuse are all foreigners. Whatever their crimes, they will leave Iraq and the memory of their presence will fade behind them. It is very different when the abusers and brutalizers are Iraqi.
Saddam and his cohorts held power through fear and murder. Without the terrifying threat of arbitrary and violent reprisals, the people of Iraq would have turned on him. In the end, as countless Iraqis have testified over the last 20 months, they learned to survive the constant terror by editing their lives, even their thinking, so that they avoided confrontation with anyone in power. They may have been aware of the screams from Saddam’s jails but they did not dare to stop and listen.
And now we learn that this is beginning to happen again. The men wearing the police uniforms may be different; but their behavior seems to be chillingly similar to that of Saddam’s thugs. It could of course be argued that all those who replaced Saddam loyalists in the Iraqi police grew up in an atmosphere where violence from law officers was to be expected. They have known no better. Yet the world was told that their training would revolutionize policing in Iraq and produce a new breed of police officer. It may not yet be too late to believe that this is true.
One of the first acts for the new government in the coming weeks must be a thorough inspection, and weeding out, of the police. The fact that hundreds of law officers have been murdered by terrorists does not justify Iraqi police lowering themselves to the same level and torturing suspects. If the new Iraq’s policemen are seen as no better than the terrorists, popular support for the instruments of government will drain away.
There is also another sobering thought to bear in mind. In the days following Saddam’s fall, a number of mass graves where murdered prisoners had been tossed were discovered in Iraq. The men who filled those communal graves with victims were members of Saddam’s security forces and were all Iraqis. As Iraq struggles from the chaos of the Bush invasion, much depends on the creation of a just and consensual society. Policemen who torture and kill should have no place in that new world.
