Patriotic voices

Iraqi intellectuals in exile rally in support of comrades at home

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On 30 April, scores of detainees were released from Camp Bucca, the US-run prison in southern Iraq. Mohsen Khafaji, a fiction writer and translator, was one of them. For almost three years he had been held without charge or trial in the notoriously squalid and violent prison camp.

Khafaji's case is similar to thousands of detainees who have undergone interrogation but been denied trial. Iraqi Patriots in Media and Culture (IPMC), an expatriate group chaired by novelist Haifa Zangana, has been lobbying for the release of Khafaji and other Iraqi detainees. In a statement issued Sunday, the IPMC described his detention as "a blatant infringement of international humanitarian laws, especially the 1949 Geneva Convention which regulates treatment of detainees in armed conflicts."

"Random arrests by occupation forces, directly or through its local employees, followed by several months of disappearance from any records, have become a nightmare for Iraqis," said the statement.

According to Amnesty International around 9,000 detainees are held at Camp Bucca. A recent report by the United Nations mission in Iraq expressed deep concern that nearly 12,000 Iraqis are being held by the occupying forces. A total of 30,000 detainees are in occupied Iraq. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), "the US holds 70-90 per cent of Iraqi detainees without cause," concluding "most detainees including women and children are innocent."

On 17 February 2006, ICRC spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas condemned the humiliation, torture and degradation prisoners are often subject to.

"The 1949 Geneva Conventions protecting people captured in conflict -- which the ICRC seeks to uphold -- forbid torture as well as any cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under any circumstance," she said.

At the end of February 2006, The New York Times reported that the State Department was requesting $100 million for building new prisons, though "no other big building projects were in the pipeline for the department's 2006 supplemental and 2007 budget requests for Iraq, which total just over $4 billion."

The IPMC, which was established earlier this year, has made calls for the support of writers and intellectuals inside Iraq, as well as supporting the campaigns of colleagues such as the late poet Kamal Sabti in Holland and writer Juma Allami in the UAE. Other initiatives followed from the UAE Writers' Union, the Now website and the Iraqi Cultural Forum in Russia. "The joint efforts by all have focussed world attention on the plight of Iraqi detainees under occupation or subjected to murder and horrific torture in Iraqi prisons run by occupation-trained agents," said novelist Haifa Zangana.

The campaigns have also shown the coming together of Iraqi intellectuals in exile in support of Iraqi unity and for resistance to occupation.

"Under banners of freedom, democracy and human rights, the US-UK-Zionist occupiers are responsible for daily heinous crimes in our country," the IPMC statement said. These, it went on, include kidnapping, arrest, disappearance and murder of academics, doctors and scientists, to the indiscriminate shooting of citizens absently approaching US tanks or random checkpoints.