As we watch UN inspectors search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, I ask, why are there no UN inspectors investigating Saddam Hussein’s crimes against the Iraqi people? Along with hidden caches of biological and chemical weapons, Iraq also has hidden torture chambers, prisons and mass graves.
In Saddam’s Iraq, women are especially vulnerable pressure points - victims who can be used to influence other victims. They are harassed, abused, raped, tortured and gassed both for their resistance to the regime and as a means to control their families. For reasons like this, other Iraqi women and I have been organizing to get our voices heard in the international arena. Last December we met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to brief him on the Ba'th regime's systematic abuse of women in Iraq, and how our families and communities have been persecuted by Saddam's regime.
Zahraa Mohammed is a Shi'a, Feyli Kurd from Baghdad. She described to Mr. Blair how she was imprisoned with her family for three months in 1980, during a mass deportation campaign of Feyli Kurds from Iraq to Iran. Saddam’s regime has conducted three such campaigns, in 1969, 1971 and 1980, in which hundreds of thousands of Feyli Kurds were expelled and lost all their property. Saddam’s agents took away Mohammed’s four brothers and eight cousins, and dumped the rest of her family on the heavily mined Iranian border. To this day, she does not know what happened to her brothers and hundreds of other relatives who have also disappeared. In total, seven thousand young men of the Feyli Kurdish community were taken hostage in April 1980, and twenty-three years later their fate remains unknown.
Berivan Dosky, a Kurd from northern Iraq, described how her mother was forced to flee her village in Duhok province in the 1961 Iraqi war against the Kurds, merely two hours after giving birth to Berivan. Berivan herself was later forced to repeat the scenario with her three-month-old son. In 1988, during a chemical attack against the Kurds, Berivan had to make a Faustian choice: She had only one gas mask, and had to decide whether to use it for herself, or give it to her then two-year-old son. She decided neither would wear it; they would either live or die together. Berivan is worried that Saddam will once again use chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds who live in the British and American-protected Kurdish safe haven. She asked Mr. Blair to make sure that there are enough gas masks for everyone.
Fatima Bahr-al-Ulum is a Shi'a from a respected religious family in Najaf, in Southern Iraq. She listed over twenty clergy members in her immediate family who are in prison; none of them were released in the recent amnesty. Scores of others have been killed. The Iraqi Shi'as have suffered greatly from the discriminatory policies of Saddam's regime, which has massacred over two hundred thousand Shi’as, murdered five of their religious leaders (Al Maraji'), and destroyed their Marsh lands, known as the Venice of the Middle East. All the great Sh'ia religious families in Iraq, like Fatima Ulum’s, have been targeted by Saddam's regime for their opposition to its brutal policies.
Layla Kelenchy, a Turkoman from Kirkuk, in Northern Iraq, described how she was expelled from her home during the 1990's as part of Saddam's "Arabization” campaign in which Sunni Arab Iraqis are resettled around the country to disrupt other Iraqi ethnic communities. There are an estimated one million non-Arab refugees within Iraq who have been displaced by Saddam's ethnic cleansing campaign and live in refugee camps or scattered in various cities in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Melina Bakhos, an Assyrian poet, told the Prime Minister how Saddam’s regime has destroyed more than two hundred villages, and dozens of ancient churches and monasteries, in her small Christian Assyrian community. Only this summer, his agents beheaded a 72-year-old nun in a Mosul Church. Hundreds of Iraqi women have been beheaded in the last two years under the orders of Saddam’s son Uday. Their heads are displayed on the walls and doors of their houses. Teachers have been beheaded in front of their pupils. These women, and others who were doctors and engineers, were accused of being prostitutes. In reality they were killed because of they were related to opponents of Saddam.
My father, Sheik Taleb Al Souhail, was the chief of the almost one million strong Bani Tamim tribe from the central part of Iraq. Our family fled from Iraq after the Ba'ath coup d'etat of 1968, but Saddam's agents still managed to kill my father in his exile home in Lebanon, in April 1994. Although the case is well documented, it was never prosecuted in the Lebanese courts. All our property in Iraq was confiscated by the Ba'ath regime, and several members of the tribe were arrested and executed. My mother and six sisters have remained in exile in Jordan. We receive constant death threats from the regime. Earlier this year, a voice on the phone told me: "Do not think that because you are a woman you will not face the same fate as your father."
These stories are a just a tiny sample of crimes that the Ba'ath regime has committed against the Iraqi people for the past three decades. It is essential for people of the world to understand that the suffering of the Iraqis will not end as long as the current regime is in power. The British prime minister's agreement to meet us was a heartening and encouraging gesture. We asked the British government to enforce those sections of UN Security Council Resolution 688, passed in 1991, which call upon the Iraqi government to end its repression of the Iraqi people. Resolution 1284, passed in December 1999, also calls on Iraq to cease its discrimination against various Iraqi ethnic groups. And we asked that a UN commission be created to investigate human rights violations in Iraq. There is ample evidence with which to indict Saddam Hussein for genocide and crimes against humanity in the international criminal court.
For the past three decades, we have been seeking international support for our efforts to bring about an Iraq within which our children can be brought up in peace and security. Iraq has violated sixteen UN Security Council resolutions, most of which were passed under the rarely used Chapter VII, which makes them legally biding on all UN members to enforce by military means if necessary. What is the point of these resolutions if the member nations of the UN do not show the will to enforce them?
Saddam Hussein is himself a weapon of mass destruction. Disarmament is not enough. It may avert a chemical or biological attack, but it would not protect the people of Iraq from arbitrary imprisonment, executions, rape, torture and daily intimidation and deprivation. Saddam’s oppression of Iraqis is the "king of wars." His ongoing war against the Iraqi people must be stopped. The long-suffering Iraqi people deserve to be freed, and to live in a democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself, the region and the world.