Human rights in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

Hangings in Saddam-era Iraq.

Iraq's era under President Saddam Hussein was notorious for its severe violations of human rights. Secret police, torture, mass murder, rape, deportations, forced disappearances, assassinations, chemical warfare, and the destruction of southern Iraq's marshes were some of the methods the country's Ba'athist government used to maintain control. The total number of deaths related to torture and murder during this period are unknown. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.

Documented human rights violations 1979–2003

Human rights organizations have documented government-approved executions, acts of torture and rape for decades since Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003.

Mass grave.

'Saddam's Dirty Dozen'

According to officials of the United States State Department, many human rights abuses in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were largely carried out in person or by the orders of Saddam Hussein and eleven other people. The term "Saddam's Dirty Dozen" was coined in October 2002 (from a novel by E.M. Nathanson, later adapted as a film directed by Robert Aldrich) and used by US officials to describe this group. Most members of the group held high positions in the Iraqi government and membership went all the way from Saddam's personal guard to Saddam's sons. The list was used by the Bush Administration to help argue that the 2003 Iraq war was against Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party leadership, rather than against the Iraqi people. The members are:

Number of victims

Estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million,[9][10] including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion.[11][12] Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.[13]

Other atrocities

Of nearly 2 million refugees created by the 1991 crackdown on dissent, it is estimated that 1,000 died every day for a period of months due to unsanitary and inhumane conditions.[14] The destruction of Shi'ite religious shrines by Hussein's regime has been called "comparable to the levelling of cities in the Second World War, and the damage to the shrines [of Hussein and Abbas] was more serious than that which had been done to many European cathedrals."[15] Methods of torture used by Hussein's regime included assault with brass knuckles and wooden bludgeons; electric shocks to the genitalia; scorched metal rods being forced into body orifices; the crushing of toes and removal of toenails; burning off limbs; lowering prisoners into vats of acid; poisoning with thallium; raping women in front of their family members; burning with cigarette butts; the crushing of bones; the amputation of ears, limbs, and tongues; and the gouging of eyes.[16] After the 1983-88 genocide, some 1 million Kurds were allowed to resettle in "model villages". According to a U.S. Senate staff report, these villages "were poorly constructed, had minimal sanitation and water, and provided few employment opportunities for the residents. Some, if not most, were surrounded by barbed wire, and Kurds could enter or leave only with difficulty."[17]

Iraq sanctions

Researcher Richard Garfield estimated that "a minimum of 100,000 and a more likely estimate of 227,000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 through March 1998" from all causes including sanctions.[18] Other estimates have ranged as low as 170,000 children.[19][20] UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said that

if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998. As a partial explanation, she pointed to a March statement of the Security Council Panel on Humanitarian Issues which states: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war." [21]

The US State Department has stated that Iraq was offered the Oil-for-Food Program designed to alleviate the humanitarian condition of Iraq in 1991 but that Iraq refused to accept it for years. It claimed:

In Northern Iraq, where the UN administers humanitarian assistance, child mortality rates have fallen below pre-Gulf War levels. Rates rose in the period before oil-for-food, but with the introduction of the program the trend reversed, and now those Iraqi children are better off than before the war. Child mortality figures have more than doubled in the south and center of the country, where the Iraqi government—rather than the UN—controls the program. If a turn-around on child mortality can be made in the north, which is under the same sanctions as the rest of the country, there is no reason it cannot be done in the south and center. The fact of the matter is, however, that the government of Iraq does not share the international community's concern about the welfare of its people. Baghdad's refusal to cooperate with the oil-for-food program and its deliberate misuse of resources are cynical efforts to sacrifice the Iraqi people's welfare in order to bring an end to UN sanctions without complying with its obligations."[22]

In addition, President Bill Clinton argued that Iraq actually had more money to spend on humanitarian supplies under the sanctions regime than it had prior to the Persian Gulf War, adding that "we have worked like crazy" to avoid the unnecessary suffering of civilians.[23] Critics of sanctions, however, argued that the UN's restrictions on and approval process for items that could (allegedly) be used for chemical or biological weapons exacerbated the situation.[24] Activist Anthony Arnove noted that northern Iraq received disproportionate funding under the Oil-for-Food Program.[25] However, Michael Rubin in the Middle East Review of International Affairs noted that northern Iraq started from a worse baseline due its lack of existing governmental infrastructure, made fewer purchases per capita, as half the funds it was allocated went unspent; that northern Iraq was under a separate blockade by the central government; and that UN workers had rebuilt water purification facilities all over Iraq and engaged in dozens of other projects in an effort to compensate for the UN restrictions on and approval process for potential "dual-use" chemicals. Rubin argued that the sanctions regime should have saved lives because it required the government to spend at least 72% of its income on providing for its people, whereas it had previously never spent more than 25%.[26] Studies taken after the overthrow of Saddam's regime revealed that the previously reported childhood mortality figures for South/Central Iraq were inflated by more than a factor of two and that the childhood mortality rate in those regions was even lower than the rate in northern Iraq.[27]

Foreign policy analyst Milton Leitenberg stated: "All alleged post-1990 figures on infant and child mortality in Iraq are supplied by the Iraqi government agencies."[28] Iraq denied UN requests to admit independent experts to assess living conditions.[29] In Significance, economist Michael Spagat argues that the ICMMS survey, the only one (of four) international sanctions surveys (graphed in his paper) to show a dramatic increase in child mortality, is suspect because of the abusive, manipulative nature of the Iraqi regime. He offers two possible explanations for the north/south discrepancy:

First, the Kurdish zone was free of Saddam’s control. In the South/centre, though, the reaction of Saddam Hussein’s regime to the sanctions must be part of a full explanation for child mortality patterns in this zone. ... A second potential explanation for the strange patterns displayed by the South/Centre in the [data] is that they were not real, but rather results of manipulations by the Iraqi government.[27]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "UN condemns Iraq on human rights". BBC News. 2002-04-19.
  2. ↑ JURIST - Dateline
  3. 1 2 "Whatever Happened To The Iraqi Kurds?". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  4. ↑ "Iraq: ‘Disappearances’ – the agony continues". Web.amnesty.org. 2005-07-30. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  5. ↑ "ENDLESS TORMENT, The 1991 Uprising in Iraq And Its Aftermath". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  6. ↑ "Human Rights Watch, Iraq archive". Hrw.org. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
  7. ↑ Jordan, Eason (April 11, 2003). "The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves". The New York Times. (requires login)
  8. ↑ http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135570128/grave-discovery-in-iraq-unearths-sectarian-unease
  9. ↑ War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention, Human Rights Watch, January 26, 2004.
  10. ↑ A Lifesaving War | The Weekly Standard
  11. ↑ Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq And Its Aftermath, Human Rights Watch, June 1992.
  12. ↑ A Lifesaving War | The Weekly Standard
  13. ↑ Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls
  14. ↑ "Iraqi Deaths from the Gulf War as of April 1992," Greenpeace, Washington, D.C. See also “Aftermath of War: The Persian Gulf War Refugee Crisis," Staff Report to the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, May 20, 1991. The figure of nearly 1,000 deaths per day is also given in "Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein," Staff Report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, November 1991, p.14.
  15. ↑ Milton Viorst, "Report from Baghdad," The New Yorker, June 24, 1991, p. 72.
  16. ↑ Perazzo, John, Iraqi Horrors, FrontPage Magazine, November 29, 2002.
  17. ↑ “Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein," p. 15. See also "Civil War in Iraq," Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, May 1991, pp. 8-9.
  18. ↑ "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children". Casi.org.uk. Retrieved 2009-06-15.
  19. ↑ "Reason Magazine – The Politics of Dead Children". Reason.com. 2002-03-01. Retrieved 2009-05-30.
  20. ↑ "The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the 2003 Conflict. PDA Research Monograph 8, 20 October 2003. Carl Conetta". Comw.org. Retrieved 2009-05-30.
  21. ↑ Iraq surveys show 'humanitarian emergency' UNICEF Newsline August 12, 1999
  22. ↑ "Saddam Hussein's Iraq". Fas.org. Retrieved 2009-09-02.
  23. ↑ Bill Clinton Loses His Cool in Democracy Now! Interview on Everything But Monica: Leonard Peltier, Racial Profiling, the Iraqi Sanctions, Ralph Nader, the Death Penalty and th...
  24. ↑ Hans Koechler (ed.), ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT - Studies in International Relations, XXIII - Vienna: International Progress Organization, 1997
  25. ↑ Arnove, Anthony. Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, South End Press, April 2000.
  26. ↑ Rubin, Michael (December 2001). "Sanctions on Iraq: A Valid Anti-American Grievance?" 5 (4). Middle East Review of International Affairs: 100–115.
  27. 1 2 Spagat, Michael (September 2010). "Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions" (PDF). Significance (journal).
  28. ↑ Milton Leitenberg, “Saddam is the Cause of Iraqis’ Suffering,” Institute For the Study of Genocide Newsletter, No. 28, n.d.
  29. ↑ New York Times, September 12, 2000.

Further reading

External links

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