Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under
Saddam Hussein, as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the
country, the former UN human rights chief in Iraq said
Thursday.
John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human
rights office at the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level
of extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue
workers are being threatened by both government-backed militia and
insurgents not to properly investigate deaths.
"Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to
freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less
OK," Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. "But now,
no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can
do anything they want to anyone."
Pace, who was born in Malta but now resides in Australia, said
that while the scale of atrocity under Saddam was "daunting," now
nobody is safe from abuse.
"It is certainly as bad," he said. "It extends over a much wider
section of the population than it did under Saddam."
Pace, currently a visiting fellow at the University of New South
Wales in Sydney, spoke as sectarian tensions in Iraq push the
country to the brink of civil war.
There has been a surge in religious violence in Iraq since the
Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the mainly Sunni city of
Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and a spate of reprisal attacks
against Sunnis.
The situation has been made worse by extremist Shiite militia
operating within the ranks of the Interior Ministry, said Pace, who
singled out the Badr Brigade, which makes up a large chunk of the
Iraqi security services and military.
He said militia and insurgents are responsible for threatening
morgue staff in Baghdad not to perform autopsies on bodies of
apparent victims of torture and killings.
"They are told it is not necessary, and not in their interests,"
he said, adding that both militia and insurgents were "trying to
minimize any chances" that their activities could be investigated
and prosecuted.
Pace, who spent much of his two years in the post in Iraq, said
he visited the morgue in Baghdad once a week when he was in the
city and regarded it as a "barometer" of the level of violence in
the country. He declined to provide more specific details about the
threats, citing fears for the safety of morgue workers.
He said that around three-quarters of the several hundred bodies
brought to the morgue each month were categorized with "gunshot
wound" as the cause of death — a phrase Pace says is a euphemism.
"Nearly all were executed and tortured," he added.
Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr, is a member of Iraq's
biggest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which ran the Badr Brigade. Badr
claims it is no longer an armed militia.
But former Badr commanders hold key posts in Interior Ministry
commando units, which are regarded by Sunnis as nothing more than
death squads. In November, the US Army raided an Interior Ministry
bunker in Baghdad and found 158 tortured and starved Sunni
prisoners.
"They have caused havoc," said Pace, referring to the Badr
Brigade. "They do basically as they please. They arrest people,
they torture people, they execute people, they detain people, they
negotiate ransom and they do that with impunity."
(Chinadaily.com via agencies March 3, 2006)
