CPTnet
26 November 2007
IRAQ: CPT provides Human Rights training for Kurdish security officers

by Cliff Kindy

Venus Shamal, the deputy director of Kurdish Human Rights Watch in
Suleimaniya, recently invited CPT to assist in the human rights training of
security officers from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). She told
CPTers that the director of the security office in Suleimaniya, a former
teacher, had begun promoting human rights in his office after a scathing
critique of KRG human rights abuses from Amnesty International and the U.S.
State Department.

Members of the team in Suleimaniya hesitated to accept the invitation
because the training CPT receives does not provide indepth instruction in
international human rights principles developed over the past sixty years.
But the CPTers agreed to conduct this short one-hour training in the context
of CPT's own experiences.

Hours before the training was to start, the translator CPT had arranged for
the module called to say that her relative was ill and she could not
translate that day. She contacted a friend who was an English teacher in the
local secondary school. He came to the CPT apartment and spent an hour going
over the first three pages of a ten-page document that CPT had prepared
before they had to leave for the training. Clearly, the concepts and
vocabulary were new to him.

When CPT arrived at the classroom, the training coordinator explained that
CPT would have just one hour to teach, translation included. CPT presenters
cut sections of their talks, which further confused the translator, but the
session turned out to be adequate. Shamal praised Peggy Gish for the stories
she had selected from the detainee abuse report the team in Baghdad had
written and distributed in 2004. (See "CPT reports on Detainees,"
http://www.cpt.org/iraq/iraq.php.)

Afterwards CPTers had a chance to visit with some of the officers, who came
from various parts of the KRG area. One well-educated officer told them,
"Security is a very serious concern for Kurdistan." A day earlier, CPT had
learned that 200 security suspects in four northern governates of Iraq had
been detained. These detentions happened on the heels of news that the U.S.
military had released 500 detainees from its prisons in Iraq. During the
"surge" of the last few months, 10,000 new detainees had been added to the
U.S. detention centers in Iraq.

The four-day training culminated in a graduation exercise during which the
head of the security office came to hand out the certificates and shake
hands. Interestingly, this office is in the process of evaluating CPT's
request for extended visas, a requirement for this project to continue.
Shamal has asked CPT to assist with future human rights trainings of
security officers.