Home > ’It was punishment without trial’
The Guardian (UK)
August 15, 2003
’It was punishment without trial’
Hundreds of Iraqis civilians are being held in makeshift
jails run by US troops - many without being charged or
even questioned. And in these prisons are children whose
parents have no way of locating them. Jonathan Steele
reveals the grim reality of coalition justice in Baghdad
By Jonathan Steele
It was a warm spring evening in a Baghdad suburb when
American troops stopped the car in which 11-year-old
Sufian Abd al-Ghani was riding close to his home with
his uncle and a neighbour. They were ordered out and
told to lie face down on the road. Sufian’s father heard
the commotion and rushed out to find the soldiers
pointing their rifles at his son and the others.
Claiming the uncle had fired at them, they started
beating the three captives with their rifle butts,
according to the father.
A neighbour confirms that a shot had been fired, but it
was part of a row between the Ghanis and another family.
"In Iraq this is normal. Almost every household in
Baghdad owns a weapon. One man was drunk. The Americans
must have heard the shot as they were passing. It was
not directed at them," says the neighbour, who prefers
not to be named.
The American soldiers searched the Ghanis’ house, but
found nothing. For three hours Sufian was kept on the
ground with the two adults. Then the Americans put hoods
over their heads, tied their hands with tight plastic
bracelets, and drove them away. "Why are you taking my
son?" a desperate Abdullah Ghani pleaded. "Don’t worry.
As he’s a child, we’ll send him back in a couple of
days," a Sergeant Stark assured him.
The three were driven off to Baghdad airport, where US
forces have set up a makeshift prison in large tents.
Around 500 Iraqis are held in miserable conditions,
sleeping on the ground, with inadequate water rations
and not enough blankets to go round, according to former
detainees.
Sufian spent eight days in a tent with around 20 adults.
They were given yellow packets of ready-to-eat meals,
the standard US army fare, but no change of clothes.
Then the hood went back on and Sufian was taken to the
Salhiyeh detention centre for women and juveniles - a
holding facility in a police station just outside Saddam
Hussein’s Republican Palace, which has become the
headquarters of the coalition authority.
A woman prisoner spotted Sufian and realised he was much
younger than the other inmates. On her release she went
to see the Ghanis, who had been searching frantically
for their son. It was now June 17, almost three weeks
after his arrest on May 28.
They brought the boy food and clean clothes, and four
days later obtained an order from Mohammed Latif al-
Duleimi, a US-approved investigating judge, for Sufian’s
immediate release. Sufian’s father took it to the US
military police who run the detention centre. But they
told him that orders by Iraqi judges had no legal
authority.
Ghani turned for help to the new US-founded police
academy. He met a Captain Crusoe, who took up the case
and rang a US army lawyer at the airport. The lawyer
ordered the boy’s release on June 21 - but still the
military police refused to act.
Ghani went back to Crusoe, who made more phone calls, to
no avail. Finally Crusoe went to the detention centre
with Ghani, and brought Sufian out himself. "Take your
son," he said.
After 24 days the boy’s ordeal was over, but he
regularly has nightmares. However, his case is not the
worst in the four months since the Americans occupied
Iraq. Several children have been shot dead, some as
passengers in cars which fell foul of American
checkpoints, some mistaken at night for adults. But if
those deaths were the result of accidents, how is it
that an 11-year-old could be held for over three weeks
without anyone in authority asking questions?
The answer is: easily. Sufian’s detention highlights the
problems faced by hundreds of Iraqis: arrests followed
by incompetent interrogation, or none at all; the lack
of an efficient trial-or-release system; shocking prison
conditions; constant buck-passing; and sloppy paperwork
by the coalition authorities. The result is that in
almost every case families take weeks or months to find
out where their loved ones are being detained.
Ahmed Suhail, a final-year high-school student, was with
his father, a well-known Baghdad vet, when they were
stopped at a checkpoint on May 15. His father had a
pistol (the coalition banned the carrying of weapons
outside the home from June 14, but at the time it was
not an offence). Both were hooded and taken to Baghdad
airport. "We were in a tent for 150 people. We only got
25 litres of water a day for everyone, which means about
a cupful per person, in temperatures of over 40C," Ahmed
recalls. "There was a small ditch in the open for a
toilet, which meant you were naked in front of
everybody. There was no shower. We slept on the sand. My
father could speak some English and two soldiers gave us
overalls as a change of clothes."
After three weeks, for no apparent reason, Dr Suhail was
taken to Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s notorious Baghdad prison,
which has been pressed back into service by the
Americans. A week later he was released, but Ahmed
remained at the airport. "Then I was told I was being
taken to a prison camp at Umm Qasr. No reason was
given."
Umm Qasr is close to the Kuwaiti border, about 400 miles
from Baghdad, and Ahmed said he was taken with 21 other
men, lying on the floor of an American army lorry for 11
hours, with a stop for the night in Nassiriyah.
Conditions in the camp in Umm Qasr were much better than
at Baghdad airport, and the prisoners had regular access
to showers.
After 33 days there, and 66 of detention in all, Ahmed
was brought back to Baghdad and released. "At no time
was I questioned or interrogated, or charged. It was
just punishment without trial. When the Americans first
came to Baghdad I was happy, but I don’t want to speak
about my feelings towards them now," he says.
One reason for Iraqi suspects’ lengthy stays in the
tented camps at Baghdad airport and Abu Ghraib is the
coalition authority’s decision to award itself 90 days
before a detainee needs to be brought before a
magistrate or judge. Amnesty International, which has
produced a detailed memorandum of concern about the
coalition’s handling of law and order, points out a
bizarre double standard: suspects held by the Iraqi
police have to have their case reviewed by a magistrate
within 24 hours.
Amnesty also reported that the coalition’s rules require
that suspects should be allowed to consult a lawyer
within 72 hours of "induction" into a detention camp. In
practice, there is no deadline for induction and
"detainees appear to be invariably denied access to
lawyers, sometimes for weeks," it said.
Another reason for the chaos is the coalition’s failure
to keep an accurate central list of detainees, with
names in Arabic, to which searching families can refer.
In her home in al-Mansour, a suburb of Baghdad, Eftekhar
Medhat relates the arrest of her husband, Zakariya
Zakher Sa’ad. He is a gardener and nightwatchman at the
home of the Russian consul. The consul had left during
the American bombing and the house remained an obvious
target for looters and burglars long after the first
turbulent days of the occupation.
Alerted one night by a neighbour, Sa’ad went out with a
Kalashnikov. He ran into an American patrol and was
thrown to the ground and arrested. The neighbour tried
in vain to tell the soldiers he was not a thief. "At
first we went to Abu Ghraib," says Medhatas, her 19-
year-old daughter, Huda, sitting nervously beside her.
"The Americans told us to go to the airport. At the
airport they told us to go to the International
Committee of the Red Cross. We went to the ICRC but got
no help."
They then turned to the 101st Airborne’s civil military
operations centre, located in a disused supermarket.
Here they found two unusually sympathetic officers,
Major Hector Flores and his sergeant, Paul Holding.
Their work was in sharp contrast to the behaviour of
most US troops, who patrol in vehicles in conditions of
increasing tension as attacks on convoys show no let-up.
Flores and Holding present a different face: "I’m the
happiest man in the US army. We are in contact with
ordinary Iraqis and we can really help them. We call
them customers," says Holding. Their job includes
processing claims by Iraqis for damage when American
troops shoot at vehicles or homes, or when Iraqis are
wounded by unexploded bombs.
Trawling through lists of thousands of badly
transliterated Arabic names, Flores finally found a
reference to an "Ahmed Mahjoub Zakariya, born in 1948".
"I think it is your husband," he told Medhat. "I’m going
to fax a photo of him to Camp Bucca, and I hope they
will then let him out."
A system which requires an individual act of kindness by
an American officer to locate a detainee, or in Sufian’s
case to insist on implementing a release order made by
an Iraqi judge, is clearly inadequate.
The coalition authorities are aware of the problems. In
addition to Amnesty, the coalition has also come under
pressure from the UN and the ICRC. Sergio Vieira de
Mello, the secretary-general’s special representative in
Iraq, recently reported that he had told the US
administrator, Paul Bremer, and his British counterpart,
John Sawers, about his anxiety over "searches, arrests,
the treatment of detainees, duration of preventive
detention, access by family members and lawyers, and the
establishment of a central prison database". He said he
found them "receptive", and they had explained what was
being done to address the problems.
The ICRC is also alarmed by the lack of a proper
database. "The lists provided by the coalition are not
comprehensive and far from complete. The process needs
to be improved. They are willing to improve it and are
really trying to help", says ICRC spokesperson Nada
Doumani.
In their defence, coalition spokespeople point to the
appalling legacy of the Saddam regime. "In his time
people had to scrawl their names on cell walls to get
remembered. There was no list of any kind," says Charles
Heatly, a spokesperson seconded from the Foreign Office.
Work was almost complete on repairing cell-blocks at Abu
Ghraib so that medium-security prisoners could move from
tents into proper buildings "comparable to UK prisons,"
he adds. A large prefabricated building for several
hundred other detainees should be ready at Abu Ghraib in
a week’s time. The tents at Baghdad airport would then
be emptied and its 500 prisoners transferred.
Mobile teams of magistrates were being trained to handle
cases faster. He acknowledges that US military lawyers
sometimes overruled Iraqi judges’ release orders.
"That’s probably true. It shows the difficulties in
getting systems to match", he says.
The message is that things are getting better. But the
occupation forces’ shocking handling of civilian
prisoners will not be forgotten quickly by the victims.
They are one more example of how badly those who planned
the war on Iraq failed to plan the peace.
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003