Posted on 05/16/2003 1:21:18 PM PDT by BunnySlippers
Saddam's Prisoner Amnesty Blamed For Iraqi Crime Wave
BAGHDAD (AP)--A few months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein made a bold political decision: He released 100,000 prisoners, most of them hardened criminals.
Now, with security tenuous across postwar Iraq and Baghdad plagued by crime and fear, U.S. officials are blaming that general amnesty for much of the chaos. And, in interviews across the capital Friday with more than 30 Iraqis, many agreed.
"Security will not return to the country until all the prisoners return to jail," said Khalil al-Baaj, a police lieutenant who has been stalked by one freed killer.
Even though Baghdad police have begun returning to work, and the U.S. Army has sent in 2,000 military policemen and says more are on the way, residents still fear venturing out at night. Reports are streaming in of kidnappings, rapes and carjackings.
Friday, an extremely senior official from the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance said there were thousands of hardened criminals running loose on the streets of Baghdad.
"Some of the law-and-order problems are the kind you'd expect in a city of 5 million where police protection is not yet adequate. Some are Baathists bent on unrest. Some are people who had been released from prison," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In the volatile mix that is Baghdad today, blame is an easy game. Many say, over and over, that they resent the U.S. for not stopping the chaos. But others are asking different questions. How much of the unrest, they wonder, is related to that amnesty and the bad guys it set free?
"Saddam probably felt he would gain popularity with the people and win their support in the war ... He probably hoped the armed gangs would confront the Americans," said Capt. Hadi al-Dilaymi, a Baghdad police officer.
"It was wrong to free the criminals," said Barakat al-Shumari, 40, who keeps her daughters inside because she fears kidnapping. Since Saddam's fall, police say, at least eight women have been reported raped in Baghdad, a city where rape reports are rare.
Recent comments by U.S. officials as high as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggest the U.S. occupying force has decided to make the amnesty an issue - and a way to stanch criticism that U.S. forces aren't doing enough to keep the peace.
On Wednesday, speaking to Congress, Rumsfeld explicitly blamed ex-prisoners for the lootings and other crimes. "They have to be rounded up and put back in," he said. "That takes a little time. You don't do that in five minutes."
L. Paul Bremer, the new top U.S. official in Iraq, is echoing that notion in his initial days of overseeing the country. He has promised to round up thousands of criminals and has said aggressive police patrols had made 300 arrests in two days.
Bremer didn't say specifically whether they were ex-convicts, but he pointed out that occupation authorities had resumed jail operations, and two courts are hearing cases.
"I've stopped looters, run political parties out of abandoned buildings, caught people with large amounts of cash and weapons," said U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Cody Williams. The work, he said, is aimed at "trying to keep the bad guys off the streets so the good guys can have normal lives."
Williams said many of the people he had arrested were former prisoners - who, he noted "are making their way back to prison."
He said most of the ex-convicts were committing not looting but violent crimes - armed robbery, murder, kidnapping.
But figuring out which of last week's arrests were last year's inmates is not easy in a country with no government and no organized way to track down rap sheets. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, said the absence of a "judicial process" makes it difficult to determine if the crimes are being carried out by former prisoners.
Al-Dilaymi, director of criminal investigation with the newly reconstituted Baghdad police, said Saddam released as many as 200,000 criminal prisoners. Al-Dilaymi blames what he says is an average of 10 reported murders each day on ex-convicts.
Only this week did the U.S. give Iraqi police permission to carry sidearms, and they feel crippled. "We only investigate," al-Dilaymi said. "We do not arrest them."
As criminals come off the streets, and as the U.S. struggles to restore order, the worry among the capital's residents is this: that a new government will be installed, and still they will feel scared on the streets of their city.
For al-Dilaymi, armed with only a handgun, any solution remains part of a distant future.
"If I come face to face with a criminal with a Kalashnikov," he said, "all I can do is say `Good Day' and run."
I do agree that all three actions shared the common goal of inconveniencing the US.
Follow the money and follow the power. The leaders want to be at the top, sucking the wealth out of the docile and productive population. Command of the army, police, and government do a good deal of the work. Lenient treatment of criminals also helps.
I think you can see an interesting aspect of this in some of the soft-on-crime but hard-on-guns attitudes common here and in the UK. Suppressing the ability of the law-abiding populace to defend itself while "understanding" criminals and doing little about their access to weapons does the same thing, at a lower level, as easy treatment of criminals in overtly totalitarian regimes.
I didn't know they'd stated it explicitly. The attitude was clear there, and its clear here. Think back to Eldridge Cleaver (writer of "Soul on Ice" in the Black Panther days).
It is also the way in England, where the posses run wild, and Tim Martin (if I remember his name correctly) is in prison for defending his home against teenage predators.
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