30 June 2005

This place is never short of people in need. At the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights (MHR) a women's human rights organization held a demonstration to call attention to Iraqi detainees and the chaos of the prison system. The dust was thick and the air hot. In the shade of the blast walls a mother and father held pictures of their missing son. He was arrested in March but they have not been able to find him in the prison system. The U.S. says he is not in any of their prisons. The Iraqi police and Iraqi National Guard say the same. To the credit of the MHR, a manager came out and listened to the parents and then took them back inside to write down their son's information.

But there were many other people with problems outside. Throughout the day and the dust, people and their problems appeared and appeared and appeared. Everyone here has a story to relay. One Iraqi businesswoman spent a month in a U.S. detention facility before the U.S. found her innocent of any anti-Coalition activity. Another woman said she lost four young children in U.S. raids on her apartment complex. One ten year-old boy bore a scar along the left side of his scalp where his mother said a bullet entered his head and stopped behind his left eye. She said he could no longer see out of it. She said U.S. soldiers shot him and that the surgery he needs to fix his sight cannot be done in Iraq.

While Iraqis held signs and listened to the stories of others, a guard from the MHR took one sign from a demonstrator and taped it to the blast wall beside the ministry entrance. He must have been familiar with the wants of the people. He helped demonstrators tape up more signs. In the confusion of people's stories, CPTer Will Van Wagenen gave his chocolate wafer to the boy with the scar on his scalp. For that boy nothing else in the world existed until the wafer was gone.

The stories continued. A man said U.S. forces arrested his brother and cousin over a year ago. The two were scheduled for release in March but only the cousin was released. The brother is somewhere in the Bucca prison camps in the south, but no one can find him. A woman lost 13 family members in a car bomb explosion. The man in the parking lot lost his daughter when U.S. soldiers shot her by mistake. The Iraqi who interpreted for us spent eleven months in a U.S. run prison but he still has no idea why. He says was never charged with anything.

CPT remained at the MHR long after the demonstrators left. There were too many stories to hear. The wind grew hotter. The blast walls no longer provided shade as the sun moved higher. It was overwhelming. Like the dust clouds, the stories in Iraq never seem to stop. They hang over the land and the people. They settle on people's shoulders, in their hair and in their eyes. Every day new stories are told here.