[News] Women prisoners in Abu Ghraib

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THE OTHER PRISONERS

By Luke Harding
The Guardian U.K.
Thursday 20 May 2004

Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on
male detainees. But what of the five women held in the jail,
and the scores elsewhere in Iraq?

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."

Honor 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."
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