November 24, 2009

After the State Minister of Woman Affairs, Mrs. Nawal Al-Samara’i declared at the beginning of 2009 that there are thousands of women detainees and prisoner exposed to the worst kinds of violations, that they are living in inhuman conditions, that their numbers are unknown, and that she personally worked on releasing seven of them; after this relatively too bold a statement, coming from a woman working within an occupying government, her voice was lost in dead silence.

It appeared later, from sources very close to the Minister, that on the background of her statement, her husband participated in imposing house arrest on her, all her means of communications were taken away, and her husband threatened to separate her from her children if she went on declaring what would offend the "government" which gave her the ministry chair of woman affairs, as the Islamic Party share in the government.

Friends say that Mrs Nawal Al-Samara’I accepted the job of a minster of woman affairs because of personal motivation: to do justice to the Iraqi women as far as she could. They explained that while she was still living in Amman (Jordan) before she left to Iraq to get the job.

At the beginning of this year after all the silence regarding Mrs. Nawal Al-Samara’i story, Mr. Harith Al-Udeidi (MP) also talked about the issue of the women detainees and prisoners in Iraq. At the beginning he declared that there are 4000 of them in Iraq, that he met some of them and they talked to him about how they were abused, this time, by the Iraqi prison guards. Then on Al-Sharqiya Satellite, he took back what he declared about the number and said that they were 400 odd. ..However he did talk about human rights and women rights violations, as he was an MP working in the parliament human rights committee, of the forth Iraqi occupation government, representing the Islamic Party share too. Soon after, Al-Ubeidi was assassinated after Friday prayer in Al-Shawaf mosque (in Baghdad).

We can conclude that these two cases were not coincidence, that the common denominator in both of them was the women prisoners’ abuse in the Iraqi prisons, that there are people (among those who claimed to bring democracy, human rights and freedom of expression to Iraq) who do not want these abuses to be uncovered.

What is obvious, however, is the absence of any precise number of these women prisoners, and that this absence and confusion are deliberate. Needless to say that covering up information on human rights and women abuses per se is considered an abuse. In this sense the abuse exists in all its contexts, forms and means against women, as it exists against all human beings in Iraq, regardless of gender.

Those who are secluded in the Green Zone whatever their nationalities are do not want to release the information about the women situation in the prisons and detention places, because they realize how sensitive the issue is in our culture and values, which would jeopardize the reputation of those (executioners), competing on the chairs in a democracy game based on sectarianism. This covering up about the numbers and the conditions of women prisoners is an evidence of the complex abuse on the Iraqi women. That is why none of their officials did articulate any number, only in a very obscure imprecise manner. Here we have some indicators of the discrepancy between what the officials and the women and human rights activists say.

In our most recent attempts to find something about these women, we asked a woman lawyer who works on women rights issues, and also follows cases of people are accused of (terrorism) and who cannot afford a lawyer, she said:

1- All that I know is there are 6 security prisoners in Radhwaniya prison. I have no information about their conditions, names, identities, or what they are accused of. ("security prisoner" is an official phrase refers to people involved in the resistance)

2- I could not get any information about the total number of women prisoners in Iraq neither about how many in each prison (she promised to do her best to get them)

On the other hand, if the late Harith Al-Ubeidi had taken back his declaration that there are 4000 women prisoners, saying that they are only 400 odd, other information say that they are 22.000, but we could not find a way to confirm this number or to deny it. On the other hand Mr. Muhammad Idham, General Secretary of the Iraqi Union of Prisoners and POW confirmed that rape cases like the case of Abeer Al-Janabi and Sabreen Al-Shemmari and others do not actually represent more than 1% of similar crimes which other Iraqi women prisoners are exposed to.

He also confirmed that there are huge numbers of women prisoners who are kept in prison for nothing just to rape them, even if there is a judicial order to release them. He added that the Iraqi police who are controlled by the militias do not obey the judicial orders.

He had confirmed earlier that more than 10.000 Iraqi women detainees are arrested in places that are not good enough to be even animal pen, as the prison of Kadhimiya, the secret prison of children and women in al-Muthanna airport in Bagdad, Shikhan prison camp for women in Mosul, in addition to the big numbers of them in the prisons of the north and the south of Iraq.

The Human Rights Minister of the forth occupation government in Iraq admitted that there are 15.000 women detainees, she spoke of miserable conditions. But she mixed the reasons of detention deliberately to blur the picture so that it looks as if government’s prisons take only criminals. She did not deny that there are women arrested as hostages or because they are accused of belonging to the resistance.

In a previous report on torture means, some detainees explained, after they were released, the hideous ways of torture and dirty abuses…but the most horrible were those which humiliate men’s dignity using their women, threaten to rape them if the detainee does not admit some false charges against him. One of the detainees said that when he saw his wife brought to the detention center he offered to sign with all his ten fingers on whatever charges they want him to sign, only that they leave his wife alone.

The abuse philosophy, the hideous ways of torture, the aggression on human dignity are common characteristics of the occupation authorities and the local ones during the recent years, indicating that there is no difference between the aggressors and their followers. It is the philosophy of the occupation and hegemony. In Iraq many styles of abuse are similar to those of the Zionists during decades.