Iraq : an intolerable, forgotten and unpunished repression
While no NGO can go to Iraq in order to investigate about the human rights violations carried out massively and systematically by Saddam Hussein’s regime, last summer Human Rights Alliance France /Coalition for Justice in Iraq and the International Federation of the Human Rights Leagues gathered the testimonies of dozens of Iraqi refugees and asylum-seekers in Jordan and Syria, two countries where the flow of Iraqi refugees is especially important and regular. These testimonies show the most recent violations perpetrated in this closed country.
The information gathered and the revelations made by some of the persons questioned are eloquent about the violence of the repression exerted against the Iraqi population. Gathered notably among men and women who have fled Iraq recently, these information throw light on some demonstrations recent and especially ferocious of the policy of terror carried out by Saddam Hussein. They are the subject of a report of over forty pages, which is available in French and English.
This report, called ’Iraq: an intolerable, forgotten and unpunished repression", lists the constitutive elements of the Iraqi regime: the total lack of respect of Human Rights, the cult of the personality, the rule of planned violence and terror, etc. Under this regime, the Iraqi population is subjected to all the possible aspects of repression: military training of children, arbitrary arrests and detentions, ethnic cleansing and deportation, corruption, etc. The report puts especially the emphasis on the violations carried out against women in Iraq. It notably mentions a campaign of women’s beheadings launched in June 2000 and continued until the arrival in Syria or in Jordan of the representatives of the FIDH and of Coalition for Justice in Iraq. The two NGO have been able to establish a nominative list of 56 beheaded women. But several witnesses have recounted other executions without being able to name the victims, the number of which greatly exceeds this assessment.