Sunday Herald - 05 January 2003
If the West is so worried about Saddam Hussein's human rights record, why has it ignored Iraq's 'disappeared'?

By David Pratt, Foreign Editor
IT was last October when I got my first ever glimpse of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Driving into Baghdad from the north, its walls and watchtowers ran for miles alongside the main highway leading into the Iraqi capital.
The cockroach-infested cells and guards with Kalashnikovs were only yards away, but still a world apart from the comforts of a house in Glasgow's west end, where 15 years earlier I first heard about the prison.
Even harder to comprehend was that, at a kitchen table in that house, I first spoke with the man who was to draw attention to human rights abuses that until then had been largely ignored by the rest of the world.
Dr Kamal Ketuly is an Iraqi Kurd, and the fate of the 'disappeared' -- those swallowed up by the prisons and detention camps run by Saddam Hussein's regime -- has been the focus of his tireless campaign for more than two decades. Today, as UN weapons inspectors scour Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, Dr Ketuly's campaign has taken on new impetus with claims that many of those held were used a guinea pigs in experiments to test chemical and biological weapons.
The cause is understandably close to his heart. Among those he fights for are his brother Jamal and 10 immediate relatives; a mere handful among the more than 100,000 others who have vanished without apparent trace.
Today, as war looms again in Iraq, the human rights situation in the country is being invoked with unusual urgency by some Western political leaders to justify military action. Ironically, many are the self-same political leaders who in the past turned a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of unarmed Kurdish civilians who were gassed at Halabja in 1988, or perished in the notorious Anfal operation and many other human rights violations in Iraq before the Gulf war.
Such selective attention to human rights in Iraq was recently described by Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary general, as 'nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists'. Ketuly is no stranger to such attitudes. From the bulging files that cover his desk he plucks out letter after letter of response from representatives of every conceivable political and humanitarian organisation.
Among them are the International Red Cross, former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, and the International Court of Justice. Then there is Ketuly's one-time MP, George Galloway, who once personally presented a letter enquiring about Ketuly's brother Jamal and other 'disappeared' to the Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. According to Ketuly, Galloway returned empty-handed, having been told by Aziz: 'Neither I nor anyone else in Iraq can touch this issue. Perhaps you should go to Saddam and give him the letter yourself.'
To all but the most resolute campaigner, such responses would represent a crushing litany of dashed hopes and polite political brush-offs. Ketuly, however, is undeterred.
'It's the same for all of us who have family or friends as hostages,' he points out. 'Only every so often is there a glimmer of light from the end of the tunnel.'
The story of Ketuly's family and the uncertain fate of his brother is a terrible tale of expulsion, detention and torture.
Since the 1960s, entire families have been deported to Iran by the Iraqi authorities. With the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980, the practice became widespread and thousands of families were forcibly sent across the border. They included Arab and Feily Kurdish Shi'a Muslims, who were declared by the authorities to be ''of Iranian descent'. 'It was April 7, 1980, six months before Iraq attacked Iran, that it all began,' Ketuly recalls. 'Saddam had called together over 1000 leading Iraqi businessmen to discuss the economy at the House of Commerce in Baghdad and my father was among them.'
His father recalled how events had an ominous air that evening, with large numbers of armed secret police positioned in and around the building. After dinner, many of the 'guests' were taken by bus at gunpoint to the headquarters of the General Intelligence Service.
There, drawing on a detailed personal file, Mukhabarat officers interrogated Ketuly's father, in particular about his sons. Then, along with the others, he was taken to the frontier with Iran. 'My father remembers seeing large customs warehouses empty of goods and filled with people, mainly families ready for deportation.'
Still in their dinner suits, the businessmen were then ordered to walk to Iran, with their escorts threatening to shoot them should they try to return.

The events of that night marked the beginning of what was to become the mass expulsion of many ordinary people Saddam perceived as enemies. In the next six months alone, some 500,000 were deported; another half a million in the following few years. Deportees found themselves stripped of belongings and property, passports and Iraqi citizenship. 'It was impossible for people to protest,' explains Ketuly. 'Saddam's henchmen intimidated them by keeping members of each family behind as hostages.'
Only weeks after their father's enforced exile, it was the turn of the rest of the Ketuly family. Around midnight one night their home was visited by a dozen or so secret policemen armed with assault rifles. Realising they too were to be deported, another of Ketuly's brothers asked for time to gather a few belongings and say goodbye to relatives, but was refused. In the ensuing argument he was singled out and handcuffed.
'My mother knew what this meant, grabbed a Kalashnikov from one of the policemen, and threatened to shoot herself until they allowed my brother to leave with the rest of the family.' The deportation process itself was brutal and humiliating. Children were often separated from their parents in the confusion; the elderly and sick sometimes had to be left where they fell. Whole families had to negotiate army minefields as they crossed the frontier.
By the time Ketuly, who was back in Scotland, knew anything of his family's predicament, the situation had worsened.
Coming home on leave from military service, his older brother Jamal had found the family home sealed up.
'Our neighbours told Jamal to escape, but the warning came too late. The Mukhabarat took him hostage and sent him to the 'heavy wing' of Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. A real living hell of a place.'
Around this time a friend of Jamal Ketuly, Ali Hussein Abbas, was also taken hostage. He was to spend the next eight years as a prisoner, firstly in Abu Ghraib and then other camps, before inexplicably being released and fleeing to Britain as a refugee. He is a rare eyewitness to the horrors endured by those like Jamal who were left behind.
'I was taken first like the others to the Mukhabarat HQ. Everyone was blindfolded, handcuffed, and very scared. We had all heard of the acid baths used for getting rid of people and thought our turn had come. Instead, inside a caged van disguised as an ambulance, we were taken to Abu Ghraib. Jamal was already there in the same cell, 13 of us crammed into each one about 15ft square.'
In the claustrophobic hell of Abu Ghraib's 'heavy wing', everything was painted black. The one small ventilation slit in each cell was useless in the stifling atmosphere. Each group of prisoners had only a single bucket of water each day for washing and drinking.
'In summer the heat and stench were unbearable,' recalls Ali Abbas. 'Sometimes the guards would torment us by spitting or putting things in our food. When one man in our cell died it was hours before they took his body away.'
Throughout this period, in Glasgow Ketuly had kept up a barrage of letters and enquiries about his family. By May 25, 1980, the International Committee of the Red Cross had located his reunited family, now refugees in Iran, but could provide no help regarding his brother Jamal.
Meanwhile, in Abu Ghraib, Jamal, Ali Abbas and others were witnessing the worst of the Iraq authorities' political retribution. Forced to clean out basement torture areas, Ali Abbas recalls seeing inmates who had been subjected to electric shocks, and others kept in cupboard-sized cells without light and lined with shards of broken glass.

According to Ali Abbas, when Red Cross representatives finally gained access to Abu Ghraib, the authorities prevented prisoners from meeting them and disguised their cells as stock rooms.
In desperation the 'heavy wing' hostages rioted, but after two days of fierce fighting, their hopes were blown away by the bullets and tear gas of Saddam's Republican Guard. Worse was to come when prison informers betrayed 750 of the rioters as the ringleaders. Among those rounded up was Jamal Ketuly. Since that day in 1984, he and the others have never been seen.
Two years later Ali Abbas was transferred to a detention camp at the old British Army airfield at Habaniya. There, scratched on the walls of his cell and scribbled in blood on tiny strips of paper hidden in the plasterwork, he found notes by previous inmates saying that some had been used as guinea pigs in chemical and biological weapons experiments. Throughout this time, and right into the mid-1990s, the UN reported the continuation of mass arrests and summary executions of detainees.
UN special rapporteur for Iraq, Max van der Stoel, reported that in November and December 1997 the authorities executed more than 1500 detainees in Abu Ghraib and al-Radwaniyah prisons as part of a 'prison cleansing campaign' following visits there by Qusay Saddam Hussein, the President's son.
All prisoners with sentences of more than 15 years were said to have been summarily executed and, says Ketuly, many of the bodies returned to families showed signs of torture. While the remaining members of the Ketuly family were ultimately to leave Iran for political asylum in Sweden, the ordeal of the intervening years took its toll. Distraught at Jamal's arrest and 'disappearance', his mother's health deteriorated rapidly and she died in April 1984, aged 54, with her wish to see him again before her death unfulfilled. Three weeks after her mother's death, Jamal's younger sister, Thikra, committed suicide at the age of 20.
'I still have her suicide note,' says Ketuly. 'We were looking every day for news of Jamal and to go back to our country, but I see there is no end to it,' Thikra wrote.
Today Dr Ketuly, when not working as an associate professor of chemistry, continues his campaign with the Committee for the Release of Hostages and Detainees in Iraq, and searches for that snippet of information that will keep hope for Jamal alive. As a scientist however, used to dealing with evidence and facts, he knows the chances of his brother still being alive are slim.
'Since UN resolution 1441 was adopted and is being enforced by sending in various investigation teams searching for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, we would ask the UN and Mr Hans Blix to arrange a special investigation team to search for those hostages who have been used for chemical weapons experiments,' says Ketuly. On October 20 last year, the day after I passed Abu Ghraib prison on my way out of Iraq, the Revolutionary Command Council, issued Decree Number 25, signed by President Saddam Hussein himself, ordering the release of all prisoners, including those held on political grounds.
However, it seems most were petty criminals and few what might be called political detainees.
As Hanny Megally, of Human Rights Watch, put it at the time: 'If the amnesty was in good faith the Iraqi government must also account for all those who did not emerge into the daylight this week.'