NEW WAVE OF VIOLENCE AGAINST IRAQI GAYS
Rights advocate speaks of an "extraordinarily brutal campaign", saying hundreds may have been killed in last few months.
By IWPR trainees in Baghdad
Iraqi gays are being targeted and killed in what rights campaigners say is some of the worst violence against the community in recent years.
At least 68 gay and transgendered men have been killed over the last four months, according to the London-based rights advocacy group Iraqi LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), bringing the total number of killings of Iraqis because of their sexuality to 678 since 2004.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, which recently conducted field investigations on the violence, estimates that hundreds of homosexual men may have been killed in recent months.
Scott Long, a senior Human Rights Watch representative, described the killings as an "extraordinarily brutal campaign" targeting gay, transgender and effeminate men in several provinces.
"I am so afraid that I will be killed," said Samir, a 20-year-old gay Baghdad resident, who preferred not to give his surname.
"People do not understand that I have been created like this. Those who claim to be religious are disgusted by me."
Effeminate men are being targeted whether or not they are gay, but transgender men, particularly those taking hormones, face the most danger, said Ali Hili, Iraqi LGBT chair.
Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that Shia militias are the primary perpetrators of the violence and say the majority of killings have occurred in Shia areas in south/central Iraq (including the towns of Ammarah, Najaf, Karbala and Basra) and Baghdad’s Sadr City district, the stronghold of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army.
This is based in part on reports of harassment and torture by Shia militias from victims who survived attacks.
“Sadr City was one of the areas where a lot of the killings appeared to be taking place … We talked to people in hospitals and morgues where bodies were coming in. Live victims were coming in with things like their anuses being filled with glue,” Long said.
Hili said names of individuals "wanted" for homosexuality have been posted in Shia neighbourhoods.
“Shia militias are ... [conducting] a killing, harassment…campaign against [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people in Iraq. They quite clearly have a specific target and tend toward sexual cleansing in Iraq,” he said.
While no group has said it’s behind the killings, Iraqi LGBT and HRW believe that elements of the Mehdi Army may be among the militants implicated in the violence, particularly in Sadr City.
Hili and Long also point out that smaller extremist Shia militias have openly threatened gays.
But both activists caution that it is difficult to know which militia is responsible for what in Iraq as most don't admit to crimes they’ve committed. It’s "always difficult to pin down exact accountability of militias in Iraq”, Long said.
Nonetheless, Long suggested that some members of Mehdi Army were trying to act as "agents of moral regeneration" in an attempt to regain some control over Shia neighbourhoods, following massive military operations that weakened the militia.
"My sense is that they probably initiated the campaign [of violence] because the Mehdi Army was trying to come back," he said.
“It is pretty clear that sermons started being preached in Shia mosques, particularly ones in areas that are heavily influenced by the Sadrists earlier this year, on the dangers of homosexuality [in the weeks prior to the wave of killings].”
Hili suspects Mehdi Army involvement in the violence in Sadr City because they are “are ruling and acting as a government [there]. There is no other force in Sadr City but Mehdi Army”.
Jasim al-Jabiri, a Mehdi Army leader in Sadr City, denied that the militia has played any party in the killing homosexuals in the district.
"The tribes to which the gays belonged killed them,” he said. “They consider them a shame on [the tribe].
“The Iraqi community rejects [gays] as disgusting and despicable."
And Sheikh Sayid al-Battat, a Sadr loyalist, said the perpetrators of crimes against homosexuals should be brought to justice.
"No party, whoever it might be, is above the law," Battat said. "Anyone proven guilty will be punished by Iraqi legislation and laws."
Sadr recently scorned homosexuality but warned against attacking gays.
He has launched a youth-targeted religious morality campaign to discourage "depravity", including homosexuality. Battat said that clerics deem homosexuality "a deviation from religious laws and will stand against it through preaching and guidance".
Iraqi LGBT and HRW also suspect police officers may be involved in the violence. They say some victims who survived torture or beatings reported their assailants were wearing uniforms. One said he was taken to an interior ministry building in Baghdad earlier this year, Long said.
Hili said his organisation receives reports of policemen arresting gays and handing them over to militias. “I think we’ve become a main target for extremist militias and even the Iraqi police,” he said.
Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the ministry of interior's official spokesman, denied the allegations.
"The police have nothing to do with these killings,” he said. “The police are launching an investigation to find the killers."
Currently, the interior ministry is only probing the murders of six homosexuals who were killed in Sadr City in April, but has not made any arrests. Khalaf said the ministry had no information about additional cases in which gays have been targeted.
Meanwhile, many gays in Baghdad are changing their appearance to make them less of a target. Fitted jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with baggier clothing. Hairdressers who cater for a gay clientele say customers who typically wore their hair longer are now requesting more masculine closely-cropped styles.
Some gays are even carrying guns for self-defence.
The United States early last month condemned anti-homosexual attacks and said the US embassy is raising the issue with senior Iraqi officials.
A number of local politicians have also spoken out against the killings. Rasheed Ismail, a representative of the Iraqi Communist party in Baghdad, called for protective legislation.
"Gays are not a huge population in Iraq, so why are they being killed and having their rights trampled on?" he asked.
Rights advocates see a bleak future for Iraqi gays, arguing that those under threat need to be granted asylum in western countries. Neighbouring states are not good options because they also persecute homosexuals, Long said.
Two IWPR-trained journalists, whose identities cannot be revealed for security reasons, reported from Baghdad. IWPR Iraq editor Tiare Rath reported from New York.
BASRA PLAGUED BY MINE MENACE
UN critical of pace of landmine clearance, warning it’ll be decades before targets met.
By Ali Abu Iraq in Basra
Sadiya Khalaf Lafta limped over to her friend’s wedding, knowing she has little chance of getting married herself, despite her good looks. Her mother says she wept while the guests ululated in celebration.
“What good is a one-legged woman to any man?” Lafta asks, having stepped on a landmine while herding sheep near the Iranian border 15 years ago. She is still haunted by the memory of seeing her limb blown off before she blacked out.
Lafta’s village, Jurf al-Milh, meaning “salt bank” in Arabic, lies on the eastern shore of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the province of Basra.
The area is littered with millions of unexploded ordnance – mainly landmines and cluster bombs from recent conflicts.
Iraq is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and has made little progress towards removing them.
A report released this week by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, and Iraq’s environment ministry warned that the country is unlikely to meet its commitment to eliminate all landmines by 2018.
Iraq is estimated to have 20 million landmines and 2.66 million cluster bombs spread out over more than 1,700 square kilometres. Only 20 square kilometres have been cleared by demining organisations since Iraq signed up to the UN’s Mine Ban Treaty in February 2008.
The UN estimated that more than 1.6 million people are affected by the landmines. UNICEF reported that one million children are at risk.
Paolo Lembo, UNDP’s country director for Iraq, said in a statement that the government “will take decades to clear all mines and unexploded ordnance”, given its current capacities.
According to Ala Majid, director of Al-Rafidain Demining Organisation, an Iraqi NGO, landmine removal work ground to a halt last December because of conflicts between the defence, interior and environment ministries over who was in charge.
But news agencies have reported that the ministry of defence halted demining operations over concerns that the explosives were being sold to insurgents.
The Basra region has about seven million landmines, Majid said. His organisation has an annual budget of 2.2 million US dollars.
He estimated that only ten per cent of landmines have been cleared, despite efforts by non-governmental organisations and support from the UN over the past five years. Majid predicted the region will not be rid of its landmines before 2030.
The area, once famous for the cultivation of palm trees, has been cursed by its proximity to the Iranian and Kuwaiti borders. Much of the farmland is now mined. Even new reconstruction projects – such as a water treatment plant in Basra - are on hold because of landmines and other unexploded ordnance, the UN agencies say.
Abd al-Mutalib Abd al-Dyim, head of the Iraqi Society for Mine Removal and Land Reclamation in Shatt al-Arab county, estimated that 400 of the 2,500 people living in the area are landmine victims. Most of them are women and children, he said.
The landmines were first laid during the Iran-Iraq war. “They have threatened people’s lives ever since,” Dyim said.
Shatt al-Arab residents are traditionally shepherds. In recent decades, they have adopted a profitable yet deadly trade, becoming expert at dismantling abandoned weapons to recycle as scrap metal.
“It was not uncommon for a man to take home and disassemble rockets in front of his own family,” Dyim said. “There are a lot of stories here about the catastrophic accidents that occurred as a result."
Abu Mohammed, a man with an artificial leg and the battered face of a smallpox victim, is not yet 50 but looks at least twenty years older. He lives in a small, mud house among narrow alleyways dotted with heaps of garbage and filthy pools of water.
Chain-smoking throughout the interview, Abu Mohammed said he had made a living ransacking abandoned military positions during the UN-imposed sanctions in the 1990s.
“That was the only job available to us,” he said. “One day, despite all my caution and experience, I got caught in one of those minefields and the blast damaged my eyesight and my leg.
“Two years later, my son Mohammed also lost a leg looking for scraps from the war. And then my younger son Nizar lost both his legs while shepherding the only three lambs we had left from the flocks of the good old days.”
The interview with Abu Mohammed was interrupted by the angry cries of a woman inside his house. “What good have these people done, showing up with their cameras to photograph us when we can barely afford our bread?” she said.
Another woman responded in a louder voice, “Shut up you fool! Some good may come of this. Let’s wait and see. We have nothing to lose.”
Abu Mohammed chuckled, and explained, “My wives never stop bickering.”
Iyad Jiri al-Canan, a local sheikh and member of a demining committee, said the minefields became a source of livelihood for scavengers after the first Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi government began buying scrap metal from its citizens.
Until then, he said, the minefields had been largely cordoned off – though victims were reported as early as the 1980s.
Canan, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion, said his artificial limb was not well made and he cannot walk properly. He expects to wait a year for a replacement.
The Centre for Artificial Limbs in Basra was established in 1995 to provide aid to landmine victims. It is the only centre of its kind in southern Iraq and has about 600 people on its waiting list.
Dr Kamal Yacoub, the centre’s director, says it is not equipped to cope with the demand.
“The centre produces 50 to 60 artificial limbs a month on average and can serve the same number of handicapped people, about 70 per cent of whom are landmine victims,” he said.
The centre has also helped landmine victims with micro-financing projects, enabling them to invest in small businesses and raising livestock. Sewing machines are available for maimed women.
Lafta tried to start a sewing business at home with seed money provided by the centre. “But the family was always in need and it did not take long before the money was all gone,” she said.
Ali Abu Iraq is an IWPR-trained journalist in Basra.
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