Iraq abuse as bad as in Saddam era: ex-UN official
John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights office at the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, said extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by government-backed militia not to properly investigate deaths.
“Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less okay,” Pace said. “But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”
Mr Pace said while the scale of atrocity under Saddam was “daunting”, now nobody is safe from abuse.
Mr Pace spoke as sectarian tensions in Iraq push the country towards civil war.
There has been a surge in religious violence in Iraq since the February 22 bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in the mainly Sunni city of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, and a spate of reprisals against Sunnis.
The situation has been made worse by extremist Shi’ite militia operating within the Interior Ministry, said Pace, who singled out the Badr Brigade, which makes up a large chunk of the Iraqi security services.
He said militia and insurgents threaten morgue staff in Baghdad not to perform autopsies on bodies of torture and killings victims.
Pace said he used visit the morgue in Baghdad once a week and regarded it as a “barometer” of the level of violence in the country.
He said that around three-quarters of the several hundred bodies brought to the morgue each month had “gunshot wound” as the cause of death - a phrase Mr Pace says is a euphemism: “Nearly all were executed and tortured.”
Meanwhile, a bomb ripped through a vegetable market in a Shi’ite section of Baghdad and a leading Sunni politician escaped an attack on his convoy yesterday as at least 36 people were killed in the latest unrelenting violence.
Elsewhere an aide to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari lashed out at Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders who have mounted a campaign to deny al-Jaafari another term, saying the Shi’ite United Iraqi alliance won’t change its candidate.
Al-Jaafari cancelled a meeting yesterday with top political leaders after they launched their bid to unseat him, raising a new hurdle in US-backed talks on an inclusive government, which broke down last week when Sunni parties pulled out in protest at attacks on Sunni mosques triggered by the February 22 bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in Samarra.
