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Fourteen years on from the Kurdish uprising, one of
the Baath regime's most notorious torture centres is
open to the public.
Hiwa Jamal and five of his friends are on a T-55
tank - but they are holding flowers, not weapons of
war. Smiling, the students hold the narcissus blooms
up to the foreground of a photograph that is being
taken.
The tank is part of an exhibition at the site once
known as Amna Surak, or Red Security, because its
external walls were painted red - a macabre
reflection of the suffering inside, where Kurds were
being tortured and murdered in their thousands.
In commemoration of the March 7, 1991 Kurdish
uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime, the Red
Security building in the northern city of
Sulaimaniyah is now a museum where visitors can
learn about the history of this region's fight for
autonomy.
Fourteen years ago, nobody would have dared come
close to this building, and it was said that even
the birds didn't dare land here. But now Saddam's
regime is gone and students are on the front
terrace, singing their national anthem, waving the
Kurdish flag and distributing bouquets of flowers.
Red Security consists of six buildings. One of them
was the administrative block and the others hold
cells - the average size of which was just under two
metres square.
In the office of the security manager who would
issue orders for the arrest and torture of Kurds,
there now hang large cages containing around 70
doves.
"These birds are symbols of the peace that the Kurds
wanted," said Sarwar Abdullah, a museum guide.
The total number of those arrested, tortured and
killed is unknown, but Abdullah estimates that 700
Kurds were executed here in 1989 and 1990 alone.
Those who spent their last days in these cells were
targeted because of their involvement with the
Kurdish opposition party or the peshmerga militia.
For the students, a tour of the torture rooms, cells
and morgue of Red Security brings shock and sadness.
This week, the young people got an added sense of
immediacy as survivors of this dreaded prison joined
the anniversary commemoration to share stories of
their time spent as captives here.
"In a four by seven metre room, there could be a
hundred people at any one time. We sometimes slept
standing up," said Tariq Ghafoor, who was held there
for nearly a year before being exchanged for Baatht
intelligence officers held by the Kurds in January
1991.
Women had a separate jail block, measuring seven by
five metres and designed to house 50 inmates. But by
1988 it held more than 200.
"I'll never forget when my aunt Gule, an older
woman, was shot dead with her son on the terrace of
this building," Ghafoor told the young people around
him.
Kamran Aziz, who was held here from January to
October 1990, told the students, "Although I was
released 15 years ago, I visit this building once a
month." As he spoke of the first day of his
imprisonment, some of the students began to cry
quietly.
Hansa Jamal, a secondary school student, said, "I
was born after the uprising. But I am now crying for
those men, women, boys and girls who were tortured,
shot and executed here."
The museum also includes a section dedicated to the
Anfal campaign, an ethnic cleansing campaign which
the Baath regime waged against the Kurds from 1987
to the autumn of 1988, in which 182,000 Kurds were
killed and around 5,000 villages were destroyed. To
represent the loss of life, the walls of a large
hall are covered in 182,000 pieces of mirror glass,
lit with thousands of tiny lights.
There are many grisly reminders of the horrors
perpetrated in Kurdistan. One photo on display shows
two people in military uniform carrying a headless
body. They smile as they make victory signs to the
camera. "These are intelligence agents and the body
is a peshmerga who was beheaded," said Abdullah, the
museum guide.
Exhibits also remember the chemical bombardments of
towns like Halabja, in which up to 5,000 civilians,
mostly women and children, died.
"This is a fragment of one of the chemical
projectiles that was used in Halabja. And this is
also an unexploded napalm bomb that was used against
another Kurdish area," said Abdullah. These are just
some of the many weapons in the arsenal used against
the Kurds on display.
Visiting this museum now you can still feel the fear
and misery that must have filled it years ago,
especially in the torture centre where ceiling hooks
remain. A statue shows visitors how detainees' hands
were tied behind their backs and then attached to
the hooks. They remained this way, naked, for hours
at a time.
Karwan Qadir, a students' union activist who helped
organise the visit to the Red Security museum, told
IWPR, "We are constantly bringing students and the
new generation here, so they will understand their
past and know what we have achieved today."
Rebaz Mahmood is an IWPR trainee in Sulaimaniyah.
www.iwpr.net
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