[News] Women prisoners in Iraq

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Focus shifts to jail abuse of women

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian

For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of 
Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she 
refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.

"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said 
Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he 
pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"

The incident is one of a number in which US soldiers are alleged to have 
abused, intimidated or sexually humiliated Iraqi women.

According to Prof Shaker, several women held in Abu Ghraib jail were 
sexually abused, including one who was raped by an American military 
policeman and became pregnant. She has now disappeared.

Most of the coverage of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on 
Iraqi men. But there is compelling evidence that several female prisoners, 
who are in a minority at the jail, were abused as well.

"A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her 
after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib she started crying," 
Prof Shaker said.

"Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say 
everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very 
difficult to talk about rape. But I think it happened."

Few women released from US detention have come forward to talk about their 
experiences in a Muslim society where rape is sometimes equated with shame 
and victims can be killed to salvage family honour.

According to the New Yorker magazine the photos and videos so far 
unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers "having sex with a female 
Iraqi prisoner", and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the 
scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female 
prisoners and that "a male MP [military police] guard" is shown "having sex 
with a female detainee".

Yesterday Prof Shaker, who began researching the subject this year for 
Amnesty International, said she believed the woman involved had been killed.

"The girl was called Noor. When I went to her house in Baghdad earlier this 
year she had disappeared. The neighbours said that she and her family had 
moved away."

Since the US military began its inquiry into prisoner abuse in January, 
many female detainees have been released from Abu Ghraib and the other US 
detention facilities across Iraq.

But five women are still in solitary confinement in Abu Ghraib's notorious 
1A cellblock where as many as 1,500 pictures were taken in November and 
December.

According to Rajaa Habib Khuzaai, an obstetrician who is one of three women 
on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council, none of the five has been 
raped or sexually abused. US officials allowed Dr Khuzaai to visit them 
yesterday and interview them privately.

Two of the women told her that US soldiers had beaten them after their 
arrest in December and January while they were in custody at Baghdad 
international airport, before their transfer to Abu Ghraib.

"They were a little embarrassed. They merely said they had been beaten and 
that was it," Dr Khuzaai told the Guardian.

She added: "They are now paid special attention. Conditions are OK and they 
have given them some privacy."

But there are unanswered questions as to why the women have been locked up 
without charge.

According to Dr Khuzaai, two of the women are married to high-ranking and 
absconding Ba'ath party officials, two are accused of financing the Iraqi 
resistance, and one had a relationship with the director of Iraq's former 
secret police, the mukhabarat.

Human rights campaigners say the US military frequently arrests wives and 
daughters during raids if the male suspect is not at home.

US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing 
male relatives to provide information: a strategy that is in violation of 
international law.

"The issue is the system," Nada Doumani of the International Committee of 
the Red Cross said yesterday.

"It is an absence of judicial guarantees. People are being kept in custody 
without knowing what for. The system is not fair, precise or properly defined."

Senior US military officers who escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib on 
Monday admitted that rape had taken place in the cellblock where 19 
"high-value" male detainees are also being held.

Asked how it could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, who is now in 
charge of the prison's detention facilities, said: "I don't know. It's all 
about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."

Journalists were forbidden from talking to the women, who are kept upstairs 
in windowless 2.5 metre by 1.5 metre cells. The women wailed and shouted.

They were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, Col Quantock 
said, with only a Koran.

Other allegations being investigated are that a 12- or 13-year-old girl had 
been stripped naked in the block and paraded in front of male inmates.

Yesterday Prof Shaker said after her ordeal in February her friends dragged 
her back into the car and drove off. "I vowed never to talk to another 
American soldier," she said.

She said the US and Britain should learn from the affair. "You can't treat 
human beings in this way. I hope they have learned from this."



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