..

Surviving the Torture, Counting the Dead

Address by

Jano Rosebiani

Documentary Film maker

Ibrahim & Taimour

Survivors of imprisonment/massacre under Saddam Hussein's Iraq

July 29, 2004

Jano Rosebiani

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you for being here and for inviting us here.  Every time we have a screening something comes to mind, and it’s an Anecdote I’d like to share with you.  I had the honor to meet a great human being not long ago who told me something that I never forget, and every time I see the film I remember it.  He is Archbishop Reverend Desmond Tutu.  He said, “Think of humanity as the body of a person and anywhere you stick a needle the entire body feels uncomfortable and it hurts.” There cannot be any more truth than that statement.  I hope that does have the effect on all the viewers who see this film you just saw, all that pain and suffering, that it did move you and that you felt the pinch.  With that thought in mind I did make this movie. 

We have to take these stories to the outside world, to the masses of the world, to the civilized world to make them understand how much the people of Iraq—the Kurds, the Arabs and the other groups in Iraq—suffered for 35 years under Saddam; to make the people really understand, and hopefully make them sympathize with the need or the necessity to remove Saddam and his regime from earth—and hopefully the likes of him as well—to make this world a better and more peaceful place. 

I also hope that the viewers will go a step further and help the Iraqis create that experiment in democracy that we’re working on so hard.  Whatever form of democracy will best fit that region or Iraq, where no one group will overshadow another group, where there will really be a successful democracy so that we, as Americans, can brag about this and tell the world, “See what we’ve done.”  Otherwise there may be more problems in that region and in Iraq and its surroundings, and this would be just another failure.  Therefore, what we need more than anything else is the sympathy of the American public, of the Europeans, of the Arab world, to help us rebuild that new Iraq and create a true democracy that will be a model for the rest of the region.

Thank you very much.

Ibrahim

Good evening.  My name is Ibrahim, president and founder of the Free Prisoners’ Association in Iraq. 

It was the first organization founded after the fall of the regime and before the end of the major combat operations.  We are involved in many noble and difficult tasks.  We were able to gather thousands of documents that are a flagrant indictment to the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein.  So far we have also been involved in uncovering 70 secret prison locations, the prisoners of which were the subject of chemical experimentation.  We were also involved in the release of thousands of prisoners many of whom were disabled and maimed for life.  We also were involved in the uncovering of 106 mass grave sites.  And because of lack of logistic support we were only able to mark some of the other sites and are awaiting further assistance to complete this huge task of unearthing mass graves and identifying missing people.

Part of our work also is to log the names of people who either disappeared or died, and put them in a big database archive.  So far we were able to regain the names of 164,000 people who disappeared.  Also, that database included the names of 54,000 released prisoners.  What we have accomplished so far is only 10 or 15 percent of the overall task ahead of us.  Because of the huge amount of work ahead of us as far as documenting the crimes of the fallen regime, and because our deep concern to satisfy the needs of all the groups who have grievances, we have opened 107 local offices in Iraq to deal with the needs on a local basis of the people who had their family disappear. 

I would like also to talk about my experience as a former prisoner and an activist.  I was engaged in political life very early.  I decided to enter political life in 1982 because seven members of my family had been arrested.  The first time I was arrested was in 1986, and after that I faced several arrests along with other peers who were also involved in opposition groups.  During the years I spent in prison I saw two people die from torture, and some others incur disabilities for life.  I faced the most heinous type of torture—I had my nose broken, scars on my face, I was subjected to electrical shock, and I was hung upside down and I had my toenails pulled. 

They took us to the tribunal of the revolution.  I would like to note that this tribunal was not a formal tribunal, it was an underground tribunal.  Most of us received death sentences.  During the second hearing most of the people received the death sentence, but my sentence got reduced from death to 15 years.  I had to spend two years in the Abu Ghraib prison section for political prisoners.  Towards the end of 1988 I benefited from a pardon, and I was released from prison.  Unfortunately, I got arrested a few more times after that.  Actually, the new arrest was until 1997.  That’s when I escaped out of Iraq and I joined a human rights organization under a fake name.  Upon my return to Iraq I faced new arrests.  Whenever there were any upheavals in Iraq or outside Iraq they would go about rounding up people and putting them in jail for a period of six to eight months.  They called it precautionary arrests.  The last time I was arrested was in 2002 on the 11 November, which coincided with the month of Ramadan. 

During the build up to the war and the mounting of multinational forces, I started thinking about setting up this new organization.  I would like to emphasize the very independent nature of our organization, the Free Prisoners Association, whose focus is on human rights and whose major task is to uncover and expose the crimes of Saddam and to archive and document thousands of people who disappeared, whether they be Iraqi or Arab.  We have received a lot of support, mainly from USAIA and from some friends of ours. 

Thanks for receiving us.

Taimour

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.  I’m here tonight to talk about my story.  I’m here tonight to tell you what Saddam Hussein and his regime have done to his own people.  My name is Taimour, I’m Kurdish, from north of Iraq.  I am the only survivor from 182,000 Kurdish people that have been murdered by Saddam. 

In l988, I was 12 years old and lived in a village in north of Iraq with my family.  One day the Iraqi government brought some tanks and helicopters and soldiers.  They came to the village and they burned down more than 4,500 villages, including my village.  They took us to a huge military base, which also can be a jail, on the border of Iran and Iraq. 

We lived there for ten days.  A lot of children and a lot of women died because of hunger. 

After ten days they took us to a military base for mainly Kurdish people.  Before we entered the jail they separated the men from the women.  They put the children and the women on the side and put them in jail.  Of course, the same thing happened there.  The weather was very hot and we barely had food, a lot of children died because of hunger and a lot of women were raped.  The Iraqi soldiers would come into the jail and look at women and whichever they preferred they would take her, rape her and kill her. 

After living for thirty days a horrible life there, 6:00 o’clock one morning they brought 30 buses that were closed—no windows—and you could barely breathe.  They put children and women in there and they drove all the day until 7:00 o’clock at night.  When we got to the border of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, before we got to the place where they were to shoot us and kill us, they took everybody out and they gave us some water.  I think the water had some kind of drug because when I drank the water my whole body became numb.  I couldn’t even feel it. 

They handcuffed me, they closed my eyes and they threw me into the bus—not just me but everybody else.  They drove another ten minutes and then stopped.  When they stopped they opened the door, and when they opened the door I opened my eyes and I looked.  There were holes dug for us with bulldozers.  A lot of holes were dug.  I would say more than a hundred holes, and they threw everybody in there and they waited for the weather to get dark and then they started shooting at innocent people, children and women, with machine guns, AK-47s. 

There was a woman who was pregnant and about to give birth inside the car when they were driving. They threw her into the hole and they shot her so many times her stomach got ripped and the baby fell out.  This is something I saw with my own eyes—I was there in the same hole. 

I got shot in my left shoulder. I tried to run at the soldier—I was trying to stop the shooting, which I couldn’t.  I was trying to tell him—I didn’t speak Arabic at that time—I was trying to tell him that we’re just children and women.  We’re innocent people.  We haven’t done anything. There’s no reason for you guys to kill us.  It didn’t work.  They threw me back into the hole and they started shooting at us again, and that’s when I got three to four bullets in my back. 

I played dead until the soldiers moved away.  The shooting was finished, and they moved away and they started talking to each other.  That’s when I crawled out and took my chance to run away.  There were a lot of other empty holes that were dug and they were empty.  Nobody was in them.  So I hid myself in a couple of those holes.  I was trying to get some distance from the soldiers and hide myself where they could not find me.  In the last one I think I fainted.  I don’t know what happened. 

I got up after a while and I looked around and everybody was gone.  They’d covered everybody with earth and I didn’t know what to do or where to go.  I was left in the middle of the desert near the Syrian border.  I started walking and while I was walking I was bleeding.  I couldn’t breathe properly through my mouth.  I put my hand on my left shoulder and I could feel the breath coming out with blood.  Blood was pumping out from my shoulder and I walked, and I walked, and I walked. 

All of a sudden somebody came up.  A Bedouin person came out, and he was talking in Arabic and I was talking in Kurdish.  We were trying to communicate with each other, but he couldn’t understand what I was saying and I did not understand what he was saying.  But he knew that I’m Kurdish because of my clothes, Kurdish people have their own style of clothes.  He pulled me inside his tent and he gave me shelter there for two days, but he knew that I could not survive there.  The weather was hot and I was shot and bleeding.  So they had some family members in the city and they took me to the city.  I stayed there for three years with a family.

After that, I decided to go back to Kurdistan to find my uncle, my people who were left.  There were seven brothers; one of their sons had joined the military in northern Iraq and Kurdistan.  I called him to find my family, which he did.  He looked for my family and he found my uncles and they came to the city where they gave me shelter and my uncle brought me back to northern Iraq and Kurdistan. 

When I got to Kurdistan in 1990 some of my family members wondered where I had been for three years, what happened to me.  They were asking a lot of questions.  What happened to those people that were taken by the Iraqi government?  Some of them I told the truth of what happened and some I couldn’t tell them the truth because I was afraid for my life.  Somehow, the word got to the Iraqi government that I survived, and they put a million dollar reward for my head to stop me from testifying against them.  I ran away by myself to the villages that were burned down by the Iraqi government.  I stayed there for a couple of months until the Kurdish fighters against the Iraqi government came down and they destroyed most of the villages and the cities in northern Iraq.  That’s when I was able to come out and tell the people what happened. 

Then the Iraqi government came back to northern Iraq.  A lot of people ran away to the Iranian border, and I ran away with my uncles to the Iranian border and somehow the Kurdish military brought some information that the Iraqi government was behind me and they’re looking for me, trying to find me and kill me.  I had to run off by myself to go to a Kurdish area and get involved with the fighters in the mountains, and I went there by myself to hide and I stayed with them.  Then one of the big leaders in northern Iraq and the Kurdistan area gave me shelter there in his house.  He found out that I survived and he brought me into his house and he gave me shelter for a couple of years and he tried to defend me and back me up so nobody could hurt me.  After that I decided to come to the United States.  I got to the United States in February 27, 1997.  I’m here and I built up a small business for myself to survive.   I live in Massachusetts right now, and I’m very proud of it.

Thank you very much.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the World Affairs Council, which pays neither honoraria or expenses to its speakers.