May 29, 2007

During the past four years more than 10.000 Iraqi women were imprisoned. Most of them have undergone rape, be it by the local police forces, or by the occupying forces.

The secretary general of the Union of political prisoners and detainees in Iraq, Mohamed Adham, explained "that the recently uncovered cases of rape of Abir Janabi and Sabrine Chamari, do not represent more than 1% of the crimes of this kind against the women in the prisons. Despite the cases made public by the courts, many detainees in prisons are held there as fresh meat for members of the Police and Secret Service."

In his declaration to the newspaper Al Khalij, Mohamed Adham further said: "Never since Medieval times have in a war so many rapes and crimes against women taken place." (Note: this unfortunately seems to be a false estimation to the disadvantage of the female victims of this kind of "war-waging" in the world.) These crimes were committed by the occupying forces as well as by agents of the puppet government. The latter seem to have acted a lot more vilely than their employers.

The overcrowding of Iraqi prisons and other places of detainment has reached its high point. Certain prisons such as the one of Khadimia or the secret camp for women and children at the airport of Mathna, near Baghdad, are full to the brim and inadequate, since they partially already have served as stables. The same is going on in the camp of Shikhan, governmental district of Mosul (Kurdish Autonomous Area), and in numerous other prisons in the South. In many cases the women’s and men’s areas are seperated only by curtains.

Mohamed Adham draws attention to the fact that AIDS has spread dangerously among the detained women. The Directorate for Health in Nadjaf has recently published an information sheet in which they alert about "the rapid and severe progression of this disease since the occupation of Iraq through the anglo-american troops".
Concerning the number of women detained since the occupation in 2003, the general secretary of the Union of Political Detainees explained that "the calculations of international organisms, the information from human rights organisations and the National Centre for Research and Arabic Studies, agree with our own estimations of a quantity of 10.000 women".

Mohamed Adham finally reminds us „that all these crimes against the Iraqi people are not becoming time-barred and that the offenders and responsible ones must be condemned by international courts for war crimes and crimes against humanity."


translated from the French http://tunisitri.net/lette-appel/appel25.html
which in turn was translated from the original Arabic http://www.iraqirabita.org/index3.php?do=article&id=8087/