25 June–6 July 2003
5. White Beans
Kais Olwei is a strong and handsome thirty-seven-year-old Iraqi, with a scar like a small snake on his forehead. He feels unwell every time he sees a plate of white beans on a table. This is because of what happened to him eighteen years ago, but he’ll remember it until he dies and perhaps even after that.
He was nineteen then, and was arrested in one of those raids on students that Saddam Hussein’s security forces carried out ritually. They took him to the Headquarters of the Security Services (the Mukhabarat) in Baghdad, and the following morning, before they had even begun to interrogate him, they started torturing him. That was also routine. They hung him up by the arms, like a carcass of meat, and, soon after, while they questioned him, he received electric shocks through electrodes attached to his body. The chief of the three policemen who shared the narrow, dark cell with Kais administered the shocks by pressing a button. He received the shocks in short bursts, at regular intervals, firstly on the legs. Then the wires moved up his body until they reached the most sensitive parts: the anus, the penis and the testicles.
What Kais Olewi remembers of that morning — the first of many such mornings — are not what were doubtless his screams of pain or that slight smell of scorched flesh coming from his own body, but rather the fact that his torturers often forgot about him and became involved in personal conversations, about their families or trivial matters, while Kais Olewi, trussed and suspended in mid-air, reduced to a living wound, wanted to lose consciousness once and for all, but could not manage to do so. At midday they brought the three policemen their lunch: a bowl of steaming white beans. Kais still has a very strong memory of smelling that delicious waft of cooking while he heard the three men discussing which of the cooks at the Headquarters of the Security Services prepared this dish the best. From time to time, while he was still chewing, the head of the group would remember what he was supposed to be doing and turned his attention to the hanging man. Then, as if to assuage his professional conscience, he would press that button and Kais Olewi felt the shock to his brain. Since then he has not been able to smell or taste white bean stew without feeling faint.
Kais Olewi was condemned to life imprisonment, but was lucky since he only spent eight years in Abu Ghraib prison, from 1987 to 1995, before being released under an amnesty. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, he is one of the Iraq ex-political prisoners working as a volunteer in the organisation that I’m visiting: the Association of Free Prisoners. It is housed in an enormous run-down mansion in Khadimiya, on an embankment along the river Tigris where the people of Baghdad, in quieter times, would stroll in the evenings while the setting sun turned the sky red.
What now turns this place red are the posters with photos of thousands of people who disappeared during the dictatorship. Some images — of prisoners with their faces eaten away by acid — are almost impossible to look at. They were all found in the files that the Mukhabarat kept of their victims, many of which were unfortunately lost in the fires. But the Association of Free Prisoners, which began to operate immediately after the fall of the dictatorship, have collected from police stations and other organisations involved in the repression all the documentation that had not been destroyed. There is a crowd of people in the corridors, rooms and stairs, where the volunteers, working on improvised desks or on their knees, are filling in forms, establishing lists of names, collating data and trying to attend to the innumerable people — many of whom are women — who have come here to ask for help in finding their parents, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, who one fateful day, x years ago, disappeared from their lives.
There are other Human Rights organisations doing similar work in Iraq, but this association is the largest. It has offices in the eighteen provinces of the country, except Ramadi, and it receives some — albeit little — support from international bodies and from the CPA run by Paul Bremer. Its main function now is to help relatives locate the disappeared and provide them with documentation which will allow them to present petitions to, and seek reparation from, the Iraqi government (when it exists). The Association also has a group of volunteer lawyers who counsel the families of the disappeared who come to the building. I speak to one of them, Ammar Basil, who tells me about some of the horrifying cases that he has become involved in, like the shooting of a newborn baby, the son of a couple of doctors who were opposed to Saddam Hussein. They were subjected to the terrible ordeal of being made to watch the infanticide before they themselves were executed.
The vice-president of the Association of Free Prisoners, Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, assures me that, however exaggerated the figure might seem, the number of people killed or disappeared since the Ba’ath Party took power in a coup in 1963, which led to the irresistible rise of Saddam Hussein, is between five million and six-and-a-half million. That is, about twenty per cent of the population of Iraq. ‘Not even Hitler had a record like that,’ he says. Since I’ve become used to hearing fantastic figures from different Iraqis, I don’t tell him that I find that figure improbable. But it doesn’t matter: exaggerations are more expressive than the objective facts that will never be established. They show the desperate reaction of people who were powerless in the face of the extraordinary horror of the regime, which no one will ever be able to document precisely, only through vague approximations.
The repression affected all sectors, ethnic groups, social classes and religions, but it mainly affected Kurds and Shi’ites. Among those particularly targeted were intellectuals — teachers, writers, artists — whom Saddam Hussein, a thoroughly ignorant man despite his feeble attempts at studying Law in Cairo, where he was exiled, particularly mistrusted. The vice-president of the Association tells me that, based on a study of some fifteen hundred cases, it became clear that ‘the regime had intended to do away with every cultured person in the country. Because the proportion of educated people, with degrees, among the murdered and disappeared is very high’. Villages, whole neighbourhoods, clans and families disappeared in extermination operations that frequently took place, with no apparent motive, at times when Saddam Hussein had complete control over a cowed population, in a country where terror held sway. It was, says Abdul Fattah Al Idrissi, as if the despot had a sudden attack of homicidal paranoia, and decided on a quick massacre as a preventative measure, stirred by some hunch or macabre nightmare. That is the only way one can understand the extraordinary number of victims, the entire families that are turning up in the common graves that have been discovered in the past months. On other occasions, the collective killings had a precise objective: for example, to make the oil region of Kirkuk completely Arab, forcibly uprooting the Kurdish settlements and replacing them with Sunni communities, or punishing the Shia majority for their 1991 rebellion. All the Ba’ath Party buildings in the provinces were used as torture centres, since the offices of the Mukhabarat did not have enough room. The most frequent tortures inflicted on prisoners were electric shocks, pulling out their eyes and nails, hanging them until their bones were dislocated, burning them with acid, and daubing their bodies with alcohol-soaked cotton and turning them into human torches. When, as happened very infrequently, the families were informed of the death of a person, they received a death certificate that invariably attributed the death to ‘meningitis’.