Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAPÊ-RIVISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LA PRENSA-BASlN ÖZETÎ
THE TORON10 STAR Monday, April 6. 1992
Kurdistan' s killing fields
By Bob Hepburn
TORONTO STAR
, SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq - Three steel hooks in
the œiling give Sabah Rashid Mohammed's living
room a grisly touch.
The hooks were once used for a single purpose
.:- to hang Mohammed's friends and other Iraqi
Kurds.
"The Iraqi soldiers would make people stand
on a chair, put a rope around their necks and
then push the chair away," he says as.hestares'
ùp at the three huge hooks. "I saw It happen
three or four times. They would force us to sleep
on the ground while the bodies hung above us,
then make us take them down in the morning."
Now, that same chamber
where hundreds of Kurds
were tortured and hanged is
Mohammed's living room. It
was one of dozens of cells in
the lragi secret police's
Amin pnson now used as a
place to sleep by homeless
Kurds.
"I am not afraid," Mohammed
says in the cell he has '
transformed with ru~s, pillows
and lanterns lOto a
PART 3
makeshift living room. "I
spent three months in this same jail. I know what
this room was for."
Nearby is the trailer that a U.S. report called
the "rapmg room." It's where Iraqi secret police
gang-raped Kurdish women and 81:ls, t~en nailed
their underwear to the wall as trophies."
Mohammed lives in the former prison with
families from the nearby city of Kirkuk who fled
last spring when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
ordered his troops to stamp out the Kurdish uprising
in northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf war.
When the uprising ended. Iraqi troops controlled
Kirkuk, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kurds
who fled the city without a home.
To find shelter in a former torture chamber,
though, may be the ultimate irony for these refugees.
For it was here, and at hundreds of other
locations in Iraq, that Saddam's forces carried out
one of the most brutal, systematic mass extermi- .
nations of an ethnic group since World War II.
"As many as 300,000 have disappeared and are
feared dead. That's tantamount to genocide,"
says Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle
East Watch, an international human-rights
organization.
Details of the Iraqi massacre against J{urds during
the late 1980s are slowly emerging as Kurdish
leaders sift through a mountain of secret police
documents, diaries, tape-recordings and videotapes
seized when Iraqi troops vacated large
parts of northern Iraq during the Kurdish upnsing
last March.
The Kurds are finally able to lift the lid on this
hidden campaign of terror and torture, which
remained far from foreign eyes becaus~ northern
Iraq was one of the most restricted areas in the
world for foreigners.
• ~IFUTEAnLLPtKJTO
BURN VICTiM:' Kurds claim Iraqis usod napalm to quoll 1991 rovolt, leaving ,Its
victims scarred, like this boy shown last April at Islkveren refugee camp.
, Today, video-rental shops in downtown Sulaymaniyah
carry copies of tapes Showing gruesome
scenes of Kurdish boys bein~ tied to pores, blindfolded,
then executed by finng squad.
"Good job," one Iraqi secret police officer is
heard to say on one videotape as his colleagues
èmp!y their pistols into the still-jerking body of a
, KurdIsh youth.
, Kur~ish leaders ~ont~nd ~ey also have a tape-
,recordmg of a sessIOn ln which police tortured a
Victim t6 death for failing to provide information'
,they were seeking. They also claim to have a
,photograph of three officers - one holding his
fingers in a '