BAGHDAD, 28 April 2005 — A rights watchdog said yesterday the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were just the “tip of the iceberg” of US mistreatment of Muslim prisoners. The abuses at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger pattern of US rights violations of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, New York-based Human Rights Watch said.
Its summary of accusations of abuses came on the eve of the first anniversary of publication of photos showing humiliation and mistreatment of prisoners at the Iraqi jail. “Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg,” Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
“It’s now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over — from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to a lot of third-country dungeons where the United States has sent prisoners. And probably quite a few other places we don’t even know about.”
The group said it was concerned the United States had not stopped the use of what it called illegal coercive interrogation. It said nine detainees were known to have died in US custody in Afghanistan. At least 11 Al-Qaeda suspects have also “disappeared” in US custody, with no evidence of where they are being held. It said there was growing evidence that prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of links to radical Islamic groups “have suffered torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment”.
Abuses there include chained detainees being forced to sit in their own excrement, Human Rights Watch said. The CIA has also transferred up to 150 prisoners to countries in the Middle East known to practice torture routinely, the group added.
The US military says its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is humane and justified and says it has changed some of its policies in Iraq since the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included sexual humiliation of detainees. The photographs depicting US forces mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, once a notorious prison under Saddam Hussein, triggered international criticism of US policies. The former US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, was cleared of wrongdoing by an army panel last week. The head of the military police unit at Abu Ghraib received a letter of reprimand and was relieved of her command.
Meanwhile, a new report by a US academic suggests Iraq should consider splitting itself into five or six federal states under a single national government to give Iraqis greater management of their own affairs. The division should take place along geographic not ethnic lines, and Baghdad should be one of the states, argues the report by a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, an independent think tank.
“Iraq’s elections on Jan. 30, 2005, were a watershed in the country’s history. Still, democracy involves much more than voting,” says “Power-sharing in Iraq”, a 50-page analysis written by Middle East and Iraq scholar David Phillips. “It is about the distribution of political power through institutions and laws that guarantee accountable rule. In the new Iraq, federal Iraqi states should control all affairs not explicitly assigned to the federal government.”
Phillips, a former adviser to the US government, suggests two or three states be formed from nine southern and central provinces, where the population is mostly Shiite, and another state crafted from four central and western provinces that are predominantly Sunni. Another would be carved from the three mainly Kurdish provinces in northwestern Iraq, and Baghdad would stand alone. “Consistent with the principle of decentralization, federal Iraqi state and local authorities should have the ability to adopt laws that conform to local custom,” Phillips says.
His report is due to be translated into Arabic and distributed to the Iraqi government and Parliament shortly. A division of Iraq into states has been suggested before, but the proposal raised questions about ethnic and sectarian separation and left hanging the core issue of how the country’s vast oil wealth would be distributed.
Iraq sits on the world’s third largest oil reserves, but production is based in the far south and around the northern city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by Arabs, Kurds and minority Turkmen alike.
