What
About The Women Prisoners?
By Luke Harding
21 May, 2004
The Guardian
The
scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph
but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail
west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so
shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women
lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them
hard to believe.
The note claimed
that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in
a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant,
it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men,
it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare
the women further shame.
Late last year,
Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees
in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and
torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention
without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered,
but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".
In November last
year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh,
a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who
would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been
raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her.
She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed
us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's
sake don't tell anyone about this.'"
Astonishingly, the
secret inquiry launched by the US military in January, headed by Major
General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter smuggled out of
Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor" was entirely and
devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke
three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation
in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that
women detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000
people in US custody since last year's invasion - have also been abused.
Nobody appears to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs
taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's
report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with
an Iraqi woman.
Taguba discovered
that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees.
The Bush administration has refused to release other photographs of
Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although it has
shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers
in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month
it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden
like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after
being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the
case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six
weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she
was a donkey."
In Iraq, the existence
of photographs of women detainees being abused has provoked revulsion
and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women involved may since
have disappeared, according to human rights activists. Professor Huda
Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University who is
researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks "Noor"
is now dead. "We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant
by a US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house.
The neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been
killed."
Honour killings
are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often equated with
shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier would,
according to one Islamic cleric, be "unbearable". The prospects
for rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no
women have so far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run
jails where abuse was rife until early January.
One of the most
depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US military
continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib,
in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. Last week, the military
escorted a small group of journalists around the camp, where hundreds
of relatives gather every day in a dusty car park in the hope of news.
The prison is protected
by guard towers, an outer fence topped with razor wire, and blast walls.
Inside, more than 3,000 Iraqi men are kept in vast open courtyards,
in communal brown tents exposed to dust and sun. (Last month, nearly
30 detainees were killed in two separate mortar attacks on the prison;
about a dozen survivors are still in the hospital wing, shackled to
their beds with leather belts.) As our bus pulled up, the men ran towards
the razor wire. They unfurled banners and T-shirts that read: "Why
are we here?" "When are you going to do something about this
scandal?" "We cannot talk freely."
The women, however,
are kept in another part of the prison, cellblock 1A, together with
19 "high-value" male detainees. It is inside this olive-painted
block, which leads into a courtyard of shimmering green saysaban trees
and pink flowering shrubs, that the notorious photographs of US troops
humiliating Iraqi prisoners were taken, many of them on the same day,
November 8 2003. A wooden interrogation shed is a short stroll away.
As we arrived at the cellblock, the women shouted to us through the
bars. An Iraqi journalist tried to talk to them; a female US soldier
interrupted and pushed him away. The windows of the women's cells have
been boarded up; birds nest in the outside drainpipe. Captain Dave Quantock,
now in charge of prisoner detention at Abu Ghraib, confirmed that the
women prisoners are in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. They
have no entertainment; they do have a Koran.
Since the scandal
first emerged there is general agreement that conditions at Abu Ghraib
have improved. A new, superior catering company now provides the inmates'
food, and all the guards involved in the original allegations of abuse
have left.
Nevertheless, there
remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be
here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as "security
detainees" - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify
the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access,
as part of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that
they are suspected of "anti-coalition activities".
Two of the women
are the wives of high-ranking and absconding Ba'ath party members; two
are accused of financing the resistance; and one allegedly had a relationship
with the former head of Iraq's secret police, the Mukhabarat. The women,
in their 40s and 50s, come from Kirkuk and Baghdad; none has seen their
families or children since their arrest earlier this year.
According to Swadi,
who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against
the women are "absurd". "One of them is supposed to be
the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she's
a widow who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver,
ferrying children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship
with the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a
kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds angrily. "She
is the only person who can provide for her children."
The women appear
to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because
of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married
to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously
acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives
to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find
a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter
instead.
The International
Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on human rights
abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in February
but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the system.
"It is an absence of judicial guarantees," says Nada Doumani,
spokesperson for the ICRC. "The system is not fair, precise or
properly defined."
During her visit
to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told Swadi that she had
been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. "The Iraqi translator
turned his head in embarrassment," she said. The release of detainees,
meanwhile, appears to be entirely arbitrary: three weeks ago one woman
prisoner who spoke fluent English and who had been telling her guards
that she would sue them was suddenly released. "They got fed up
with her," another lawyer, Amal Alrawi, says.
Last Friday, about
300 male prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib, the first detainees to
be released since the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475 are due
to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if any of the women
will be among them. General Geoffery Miller, who is responsible for
overhauling US military jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800
prisoners across Iraq "within 45 days". Some 2,000 are likely
to remain behind bars, he says. Iraqi lawyers and officials aredemanding
that the US military hands the prisons over to Iraqi management on June
30, when the coalition transfers limited powers to a UN-appointed caretaker
Iraqi government. Last week, Miller said "negotiations" with
Iraqi officials were ongoing.
Relatives who gathered
outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common knowledge that women
had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein, 40, who was there
hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former detainees who had
returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that several women
had been raped. "We've know this for months," he said. "We
also heard that some women committed suicide."
While the abuse
may have stopped, the US military appears to have learned nothing from
the experience. Swadi says that when she last tried to visit the women
at Abu Ghraib, "The US guards refused to let us in. When we complained,
they threatened to arrest us."