Scottish Iraqi wants new charges against Saddam


By David Pratt, Foreign Editor – Sunday Herald 04 July 2004

A human-rights activist based in Scotland intends to press independent charges against Saddam Hussein for the torture, deportation and murder of hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Dr Kamal Ketuly is an Iraqi Kurd who for more than 20 years has lived in Glasgow, from where he has run a campaign to highlight atrocities committed by the Ba’athist regime. He is compiling a dossier for the ministries of justice and human rights in Baghdad to enable them to add an eighth charge to the preliminary seven presented to the former Iraqi dictator last week.
“I was happy to see Saddam in the dock, but disappointed that many of the earliest atrocities carried out by his regime were not acknowledged in the seven key charges against him,” said Ketuly, who a little over a month ago, as reported in the Sunday Herald, turned down an offer of the post of minister for human rights from the then Iraqi Governing Council. Turning down the job was a decision that he insists had more to to with academic and professional commitments than fears for his own safety.
The sub-charges Ketuly aims to present, with the help of extensively collated evidence from eyewitnesses to atrocities and relatives of the dead and missing, relate to:
l Illegal detention, torture and killing of citizens, including his brother Jamal, who disappeared without trace from the Abu Ghraib prison more than 20 years ago.
l The forced deportation of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens to Iran in the 1980s.
l The illegal confiscation of property, businesses and bank accounts by the Ba’athist authorities.
l The torture and of det ainees and prisoners and their use in chemical and biological wea pons experiments.
It was more than two decades ago, after coming to Scotland that Ketuly launched his campaign from his house in Glasgow’s west end. Apart from the disappearance of his brother Jamal and 11 more of his immediate relatives, the remainder of his family were deported by the Ba’athists from their home in Baghdad to Iran before finally making their way to exile in Sweden.
This weekend Ketuly was working quickly to compile the evidence reports, in both Arabic and English, to ensure they would be available this week to Iraqi justice minister Malik Dohan al-Hassan and human rights minister Bakhityar Amin.
“I have been in direct contact with these ministers, and their departments, and they assure me that our charges can be added to those already made against Saddam and the other accused,” insisted Ket uly, a chemistry graduate and lecturer at Glasgow University.
His human rights group, originally called The Committee for the Release of Hostages and Detainees in Iraq, has in total, he says, the names and details of more than 900 people who have disappeared without apparent trace after arrest by Saddam’s secret police and military.
“We owe it to all the families and relatives of these people to find out exactly what became of them, and punish those responsible for any of their deaths,” said Ketuly.