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Saddam's Shop of Horrors, Sulaimaniyah
22.12.2005
Kevin Sites on Tue, Nov 29 2005 |
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Torture and execution
were staples of the Red Security intelligence
headquarters in Kurdistan (northern Iraq). Now the
building is a monument to Kurdish resilience
SULAYMANIYAH, Kurdistan-Iraq -- It is a most
startling image: a life-sized figure of a Kurdish
rebel hanging by his wrists from a metal hook, his
arms bound behind his back -- a position intended to
use the prisoner's weight to dislocate his
shoulders.
He is dressed in the traditional Kurdish "sharwal"
baggy pants and his shirt is partly untucked. Two
electric alligator clips are attached to his
earlobes from where wires run to a green
hand-cranked electrical generator on a metal desk.
His face is frozen in a moment of agony. The room is
paneled in wood to muffle his screams.
It is only a museum display. But before 1991, what
happened in this room was all too real for the Kurds
who dared to oppose the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This compound of cinderblock buildings in the
Kurdistan (northern Iraq) city of Sulaymaniyah was
once one of the most feared places in the region.
Known as Red Security, it was the northern
headquarters for Saddam's military intelligence.
"There were many kinds of torture," says Nabaz
Mamhoud, a translator at the museum. "Some of them
were executed or slaughtered by Saddam Hussein; some
of them were imprisoned for the rest of their lives.
The other people were kept in jails while security
forces of Saddam Hussein tortured them in the most
severe way."
The Kurds have always bristled under governance by
the Iraqis, responsible for the first guerilla
attacks against the Iraqi army dating back 44 years
in 1961.
But Saddam Hussein reached his boiling point when
Kurdish militia known as peshmerga -- which means
"those who face death" -- fought with Iranians
during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Hussein's forces used chemical weapons against Kurds
in the city of Halabja near the Iranian border.
Survivors say when shells started landing in the
town they thought the Iraqis were just using high
explosives, so many took shelter in their basements.
It was a deadly mistake. The chemical poisons -- a
mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents -- were
heavier than air and seeped into lower ground. When
it all was over an estimated 5,000 Kurds, many of
them women and children, were dead.
The Halabja attack was the single deadliest incident
in Saddam's 1988 Anfal campaign, named after a verse
in the Koran that urges believers to attack the
infidels. The Anfal had three phases, each lasting
from several weeks to a month, each focusing on a
different Kurdish region.
Kurds say it was simply genocide; people were
rounded up into concentration camps or simply
marched into the desert and shot. The Anfal saw the
disappearance of 182,000 Kurds, most presumed to be
dead. Hardly a person in the entire Iraqi Kurdish
population did not lose a family member in that
violent rampage.
Red Security, museum officials say, was part of the
Anfal campaign. Anyone suspected of having any
connections to the peshmerga militia or the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) political party
was brought here for questioning, usually under
duress.
Large color photographs line the walls of Red
Security today, depicting images of incredible
cruelty: Iraqi soldiers smiling over the body of a
dead Kurd; the aftermath of executions; children in
concentration camps behind barbed wired
emplacements. |
Photo : Kevin
Photo : Kevin
Photo : Kevin
Photo : Kevin
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The museum has also tried to keep the cells inside
Red Security almost the same way they found them,
sometimes including life-sized figures inside
representing the torture and punishments meted out
here.
Woman and children weren't immune from imprisonment
at Red Security. In one dark cell, a statue of a
mother and her young daughter look out in fear on
their captors.
One cell was kept just for young boys thought to be
fighting with the peshmerga. The space is about 14
feet by 20 feet, the cold concrete floor covered
only by a few blankets where the boys slept.
Remnants remain of their plastic buckets used for
meals of rice and sometimes a little meat.
Writing covers much of the walls -- even drawings of
Batman. But museum guide Hamid Ibrahim says much of
the scribbling was done recently by a class of
schoolchildren left alone in the room unsupervised.
One passage, however, seems to bear some
authenticity, according to Ibrahim.
It reads: "I am 17 years old -- but they changed my
identification papers to 18 so they could convict
me."
There are no further details.
In another wing of Red Security is a figure of a man
hunched over, handcuffed to a low point on the wall
and in view of a large holding cell.
"This was the most lenient punishment," says
Ibrahim. "The person would be handcuffed here for
several hours or several days in a way in which the
person could not stand up straight, all in view of
the other prisoners, to make an example to them."
In the same wing, but in a back corner devoid of
almost any light, are four solitary confinement
cells. They're stalls, really -- two feet wide and
four feet long -- just high enough to stand in but
without enough room to recline. I get inside and
close the cell door. The completeness of the
isolation is terrifying, a severing of both sensory
input and human physical contact. It is easy to
understand how a person confined in the place could
feel he had been robbed of his soul.
Ibrahim unlocks one final door. The hallway is dark,
but immediately sparkles with the reflection of the
outside light. It is a passageway of 182,000 mirror
fragments -- one for each victim of the Anfal
campaign -- tiled against walls that curve along for
nearly 50 yards. On the ceiling shine an additional
5,000 tiny lights, one for each of the victims of
Halabja.
The outside buildings of Red Security are covered
with bullet holes, reminders of the Kurdish uprising
in 1991 when peshmerga attacked and liberated the
prison. A fallen guard tower remains where it
collapsed from the explosions.
And each week, Kurdish TV interviews people who were
held in Red Security but survived. Ibrahim says 500
people visit the museum every month.
"But many more come in the spring. It's the time for
picnics in Kurdistan, but many come here first to
remember," he says.
And as the Kurdish regions begin their process of
reuniting with the rest of Iraq after 14 years of
autonomy following the Gulf War, many feel it is
even more important that the history of Red Security
never be forgotten.
Kevin Sites
www.kevinsites.net
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