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Text File | 1994-06-28 | 56KB | 993 lines

<text> <title> Iraq And Kuwait </title> <article> <hdr> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 Middle East Watch: Iraq and Occupied Kuwait </hdr> <body> (By treating human rights abuses in occupied Kuwait in the chapter on Iraq, Middle East Watch in no sense condones the Iraqi invasion of August 2, 1990, or recognizes Iraq's annexation of Kuwait as the country's 19th province. Rather, placing the discussion here reflects Human Rights Watch's policy of addressing abuses according to the forces committing them rather than the geographic boundaries in which they occur. For a discussion of human rights developments in liberated Kuwait after February 1991, see the chapter on Kuwait.) Human Rights Developments Throughout 1991, Iraq was under an international public microscope. A welcome result of this process was increased public awareness of the deplorable state of human rights in the country, a seemingly impenetrable one-party state where, until its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, rights abuses largely escaped sustained scrutiny and international opprobrium. Early in 1991, world attention was focused on the consequences of the Iraqi government's defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Foremost among these were Resolution 660 of August 2, 1990, condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and demanding the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi military forces, and Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990, authorizing the use of force after January 15, 1991 to end the Iraqi occupation. When Saddam Hussein refused to quit Kuwait, the international military coalition assembled by the United States moved to enforce the U.N. resolutions: Operation Desert Storm began with a massive airborne assault on targets in Iraq during the early morning hours of January 17. U.S. and allied violations of the laws of war during this forty-three-day international armed conflict are discussed in the chapter on the United States; Iraqi violations are discussed in this chapter. The first section of this chapter provides an overview of human rights abuses in occupied Kuwait by Iraqi forces in January and February. It is followed by a discussion of human rights developments in Iraq, and concludes with an assessment of Iraq's missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War. The Uprising In Iraq In the immediate wake of Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, a new human rights crisis unfolded, this time in war-ravaged Iraq itself. Residents of at least two dozen southern Iraqi cities, joined in many cases by disaffected returning soldiers, rose up against the government in early March, ousting government forces from nearly all of those cities. Similar rebellions broke out within days throughout the predominantly Kurdish north of the country. In their counterattack and when consolidating their recapture of these cities, government troops killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing people on the streets and in homes and hospitals; rounding up persons, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en masse; and targeting fire from attack helicopters on unarmed civilians as they fled the cities. For their part, rebels and their sympathizers in both northern and southern cities killed hundreds, if not thousands, of members of the security forces and others allegedly working for the Baath Party or the government. While many were killed in battle, others were summarily executed after they had surrendered and were taken into custody, sometimes after summary people's "trials." The Iraqi authorities have charged the rebels with the uprising-related summary executions of over 2,500; in addition, they claim to have discovered mass graves in Suleimaniyya (bodies of 370 "citizens"), Kut Sawadi (150 bodies of "persons who had been killed by the groups participating in the disturbances") and Kushk al-Basri (fifty bodies). (Iraqi government reply to U.N. Special Rapporteur Memorandum, pp. 27-28.) The Western press also recorded rebel abuses. For example, The Washington Post interviewed a Republican Guard officer from the unit that recaptured Karbala in southern Iraq who reported that "dozens of senior officials, including the chief of police, top security agents, the deputy governor and high-ranking members of the Baath Party, were killed in an outpouring of vengeful fury. Captain Abed said many of the victims had their throats cut and bodies burned by the insurgents, while Shiite mobs ransacked their houses and stole food supplies." (William Drozdiak, "Devastation in Southern Iraq," April 30, 1991.) There were reports of looting by rebels and their sympathizers in Basra and a few other cities, but this seems to have been less widespread and systematic than the looting carried out by government troops upon their recapture of cities. Many refugees from the relatively prosperous northern cities likened the plundering by soldiers of stores and households to the looting of Kuwaiti private property by Iraqi soldiers during the early days of the occupation of that country. No reliable figures are available concerning the number of persons killed or wounded by either side during the uprising. Iraqi authorities have not released such statistics. (This follows an apparent Iraqi government policy. Final tallies of Iraqi military and civilian casualties during Operation Desert Storm have not been released, although the allies have been no more forthcoming in this regard.) One journalist reported from Iraq that the government "has forbidden Shi'as from displaying traditional signs of mourning--black flags and paper streamers printed with the names of the dead--because it would enable visitors to count the numbers of Shi'a `martyrs.'" (Lara Marlowe, "A kind of normality," Financial Times, May 17, 1991.) But senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south. (October 2, 1991, as reported in Mideast Mirror, October 2, 1991.) Independent investigation to verify this figure has not been possible, nor has it yet been possible to determine how many of these casualties were noncombatants. The turmoil began in Basra on March 1, one day after the cease-fire in Kuwait, and spread within days to Karbala, Najaf, Hilla, Nasiriyya, al-Amara and other mostly Shi'a cities of southern Iraq. The rebellion in the north began on or about March 5; by March 21, Kurdish insurgents controlled every major city in the north except for Mosul, which has an Arab majority. The rebellions followed a general pattern. On the day of a city's uprising, rebels and masses of civilians ousted government forces from their headquarters, prisons and barracks, killing or capturing them or forcing them to flee. The revolts were aided by soldiers who either switched sides or deserted, as well as by some degree of planning during the preceding weeks and months by underground opposition groups. (Jonathan Randal, "Kurdish Uprising Aided by Clandestine Army Contacts," The Washington Post, March 23, 1991. Activists from southern Iraq told Middle East Watch that underground groups had laid some of the groundwork for the rebellions that erupted in southern cities.) However, the outpouring of popular support for the uprising was largely spontaneous. It was fueled by anger at government repression and the devastation wrought by two wars in a decade, and a perception that Iraqi security forces were uniquely vulnerable after being crushed by the U.S.-led forces. After seizing power, both Shi'a and Kurdish rebels freed prisoners from known and hitherto secret prisons. Many of the freed prisoners were found to be in poor health as a result of ill-treatment, and some showed s