CPTnet
August 26, 2003
IRAQ: Searching for Human Rights

By Peggy Gish

Your father, brother, or your teenage son has disappeared two weeks ago, and
no one knows where he is. US soldiers made a mass arrest after a shooting,
sweeping up every man they found in that neighborhood. You have heard about
or seen soldiers beating or pushing handcuffed men on the ground, detainees
kept in plastic tents in the sweltering heat and not given enough water.
What do you do? How can you find him? Is he still alive?

These are not just questions asked by the Iraqi people in times of past
regimes. Paul Bremer recently estimated that U.S. Forces arrest 100 200 men
each day. Up to 11,000 Iraqis are currently under detention by the US
Military forces. It is very difficult for their families to find them and
unlikely that they can visit them. They have no access to a lawyer, and no
guaranteed legal rights.

Iraqis tell us, "Under Saddam our people disappeared, and now under the
Americans our people disappear!" But now, Iraqis are working hard to turn
this around.

Twice our team went to the Baghdad airport to try to visit the detention
center. Both times Iraqis were there trying to find missing family members.
They asked for our help. (Last week, on our second visit, we talked at a
checkpoint with a Sargent from Chicago, whose home is about three blocks
from CPT's headquarters. After describing the problems we have seen and
heard from the Iraqi people, one of our team members from Chicago said,
"This is just like the Chicago police." The Sargent answered, "Oh, but the
Chicago police are corrupt!" )

The groups working on detainee issues share with us their frustration with
the lack of respect shown by the U.S. military authorities for the basic
human rights of detainees. Representatives of the U.S. military working
with these groups encourage them to focus on human rights abuses of the
former regime, and not on that of the current authorities. We accompanied
leaders of two organizations to the Iraqi Assistance Center in Baghdad so
they could learn how to get what information is available, and so they could
begin to push the authorities to change the system.

On one of these visits, a Iraqi lawyer from one of the human rights
organizations in Baghdad spoke very clearly about the responsibility of the
occupying forces to provide for a fair and speedy processing of each case.
He discovered there was an organization of other lawyers working with
detainees, and has made contact with them. He was happy when we saw him,
that an official in the new Ministry of Justice gave him a computer list of
the charges and locations of the detainees, something previously unavailable
to any non military personnel.

These are beginning steps, but a movement toward claiming the right of all
people to humane treatment and a just legal process.