| Monday, Mar 17, 2003 | |
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Opinion |
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Posted on Mon, Mar. 17, 2003 |   |
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A survivor of Saddam Hussein's terror argues for war
LONDON - Do the demonstrators who have been filling the streets in the capitals of civilized, comfortable nations in the West in opposition to a war against Iraq have any idea what they are protesting? I have been imprisoned, tortured and gassed by Saddam Hussein's regime. I know what life is like inside Iraq. So I can assure these demonstrators that they wouldn't survive a month if they were dropped into Baghdad and forced to live as Iraqis live. They would be arrested and tortured as soon as they started complaining about the lack of basic human rights. I was born in Halabja, close to the Iranian border in the northern Kurdish region. After graduating from school, I became a mathematics teacher there. In the mid-1980s, a law was passed decreeing that all teaching must be done in Arabic. No more would we be allowed to teach in Kurdish. There were demonstrations. Some students burned books in protest. These young protesters soon found themselves fleeing Iraqi intelligence officers who were sent to our town to round up the demonstrators. I helped hide these youths in the school's physics lab and they managed to escape. But someone must have informed the authorities because I was arrested the following day. I was held for three days, during which I was forced to sit in ice-cold water and, like so many other Iraqi women, endure many humiliations. After I was released, Iraqi intelligence officers followed me everywhere. No one was allowed to speak to me. I was soon fired and told not to go anywhere near my school or any of my former pupils. I was reassigned to the education department office of the regional government in the city of Suleimaniyah. In 1987, I received a memo from the director calling me to a meeting. I arrived to find the hall packed with friends and colleagues. Intelligence officers surrounded the building and arrested all of us. Before being taken away, the women were told, "Bring your menfolk who are peshmergas (anti-Saddam Kurdish guerrillas) or bring divorce papers." I did neither. That was the day I decided to join the peshmergas. Once released, I fled to the mountains, living the life of a guerrilla - a life of hell. In 1988, 21 members of my family died of suffocation when Saddam's forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons. Fortunately, my mother, brothers and sisters were in Suleimaniyah and survived. I wasn't so fortunate. Saddam's forces launched a chemical attack on the small mountain village of Kanyto where I was living. I survived, although badly injured, and spent three months in a hospital recovering from the chemical burns blistered my body from head to foot. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, I decided to leave my homeland: I fled to England and resumed my teaching career at a school for boys in London. Since then, the most dangerous thing I have to deal with these days are unruly teenagers. This is the world that the protesters know, not Saddam's world of chemical weapons, of arbitrary terror and rape. How many opponents of the war have spoken to an Iraqi woman who has been raped in front of her father and son by Saddam's thugs? How many have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being executed - and then ordered to pay for the bullet that killed him? How many know that these mothers have been forced to applaud as their sons died, or face execution themselves? I saw and heard all this in the village of Suleimaniyah. I still hear the clapping. I have spoken to many people in northern Iraq over the last few weeks. They all agree that the threat of war advocated by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair may be the one chance to rid Iraq of the disease that is Saddam Hussein. Like myself, they worry that Saddam will see the war protests as a sign of weakness. Giving U.N. weapons inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq is complying with international demands that it give up its weapons of mass destruction is a bad joke. Saddam will never disarm. He will lie, cheat and bluff his way out. He always has and always will. Freshta Raper is head of mathematics at a boys school in London. Readers may write to the author at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Lancaster House, 33 Islington High Street, London N1 9LH, U.K.; Web site: www.iwpr.net. |
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