“My son was taken 6 months ago by the Americans and I don’t have any information about him. I came here to ask about him and they told me to get a lawyer but the lawyer is asking for 250,000 Dinar. I don’t have money to pay, so what can I do? I don’t know if he’s charged with anything. He was just a taxi driver, he had a Brazili car and that was it.”

A Brazili car is, essentially, a lemon. They were imported from Brazil and sold cheaply and the streets were soon blocked with breakdowns because they were the most useless cars ever built. Hayder Sahib Jum’a Obaid is 25 and lived in Al-Habibia with his parents Hamdia and Sahib Jum’a. Hamdia showed me his picture.

“I am his mother and I went to a lot of places, to Basra, to Amara, to a lot of places, a lot of prisons. Some Iraqi people at the jail eventually told me you should get a lawyer for him, and then we will see if he is here or not. I said take his picture and make sure if he is here or not and that way I can pay money, because I don’t want to spend all the money and then he is not here and then I have nothing to get a lawyer when I find him.”

Sahib explained, “He was a taxi driver and he went out from home and just didn’t come back, about 6 months ago. I didn’t know what happened. First I went to a lot of hospitals and to the morgue and I did not find him, so I went to the American base and after that I went to the computer office and they gave me a paper and told me your son is in Abu Ghraib and gave me a paper with his name and a number on and I came here but no one gave me any answers and the guy inside, the translator, just told them to go and get a lawyer.

Hamdia continued, “After 3 months we found the car in a police station and when I talked to someone there he told me my son had been arrested, the Americans took him and then the police found the car and took it to the police station and left it there.

“Under the old regime he escaped from the army and even when they caught him they let his mother see him but now, no. We thought that they would do something good for us but they did not. They did the worst. When he was arrested we paid money, 15000 Dinar and they let him go. I just want to see my son. Just let me see him. You can ask anyone about my son. He is a good man. They should at least tell us where he is.

“Before, we were hiding our son from the old regime because we were afraid, we didn’t know what they would do, maybe they would kill him, maybe they would take him to jail, maybe they would take him to the army, but right now it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s worse. It’s been 6 months and we don’t have any information about our son and we didn’t see him.

“Even under the old regime if you had someone in jail you could go and see him, if you had someone in jail, your son or husband, anywhere, you could go and see him. Now if anyone took your son or husband or took anything from you, they will just leave you and no one is going to know any information about them. His daughter is crying all the time for her father.”

On the second of two days of protests for the rights of people detained without charge by the occupying powers, people stood waiting quietly, holding pieces of paper, queueing to talk to activists, NGO workers, journalists, anyone who would hear their story, anyone who might perhaps be able to help.

Abdul Rahman Abd Al-Khaliq told me, “The soldiers came and put bags over our heads and I was in the prison here. They took 6 people from my house. My father and I were released after 103 days. My 4 brothers are still inside. I was arrested in August at 3am. They destroyed 2 doors and everything between the 2 doors. Luckily no one was in that room. They took everything: computers, telephones, even the pictures on the walls. They stole from my home 11 million dinars [about $5,500 – people keep all their money in their homes because the banks are unstable]. They hid the money inside their clothes.

“They just put me in one room and gave me ration food. I was wearing only shorts, because it was night when they came. I wasn’t wearing anything on my chest. I wasn’t even wearing shoes. I was asking them please, just give me something to wear and no one would give me anything when they took me from the house. When I went into the jail, I asked the soldier, just give me a t shirt but no one would give me a t shirt. Only when they took me out from the prison one of them gave me a t shirt and I was asking for shoes and no one would give me any shoes, they said no shoes.

“They took me first to the republican palace in Karada and then here to Abu Ghraib. They did really silly things at first, like tying our hands and putting bags on our heads when they took us to the bathroom. On the first day they kept a bag on my head and my hands tied the whole day. After that it was only when they moved us from one cell to another.

“They will keep you there for 3 months and after that they will decide if they will release you or not. I was questioned only on one day and the rest of three months I was just in a cell. We had 6 cars, that’s what they said, that was the first reason they gave for arresting us, we were Fedayeen, that was the second one and we tried to kill Paul Bremer. That’s what they said.

“When they questioned me they asked, do you know why you are here? I said no. They asked me, why do you have a lot of cars in your home? I said we are a rich family, we have a lot of things, we are five brothers and my father. They told me no, there are a lot of people meeting in your home. I said of course. My father is the oldest one of the family, all the family gatherings happen in our home. He said no, you are trying to make a new party now, trying to resist us. They came for me at 4 in the morning and questioned me until 10 at night.

“I said I will kill myself if you don’t release me. I’m a student in college and I need to be in college. I was studying business in Ma’amun College. After that they brought a lot of pictures and started asking me, even about children, do you know this one, do you know that one, about every picture. All the rest of the days for three months. I was just in the cell on my own.

“The Americans are just like Saddam because anyone who gives them information, they give him money, just like Saddam’s regime. They would give you money if you went and told them this person is against Saddam and now it’s the same. The Americans are paying money for anyone who tells them that this is information about the resistance. They are cheap people, trying to get money for CDs and satellite TV.”

One man said his brother was arrested when a policeman called Mohammed Saddam came to their home with US troops. The policeman had come to the family before to ask to marry one of their daughters and they said no, you have no honour. In revenge, they said, he returned with soldiers, accusing the brother of being part of the resistance.

Of course some of the information bought by the US administration is probably true but the practice of paying for tales in a country where, for so long, people have been paid for selling their neighbours, is a dangerous one. A woman told of a fight between her family and some neighbours. The other family told the troops that her sons were with the resistance. They were arrested in June and, as yet, she’s not been allowed to see them. She heard from one of the other detainees, who’s since been released, that an army dog bit her son while he was in the jail and he had to have 12 injections. Released prisoners are, for a lot of families, the only source of information.

Majida Hassan’s son Tahin was arrested on September 10th at the police station where he worked. He’d been a police officer for 6 years. She was told about it by his colleagues. He was first in Um Qasr, is now in Abu Ghraib. She took out a clear plastic bag, unrolled it and withdrew a scrap of paper with his name and the tag number – 18751. Everyone there had one of these scraps, kept safe somewhere, from the computer office where, if you give them a name, they might tell you the whereabouts of the person you’re looking for, as long as their spelling of the name, transliterated from Arabic to English, is the same as yours, otherwise there will be no trace.

They all have the A4 papers too – one headed “Request for Information” and another, “Request for Visitation.” Each contains the name of the prisoner. The former states that the bearer would like some information about the prisoner and the latter records a wish to be allowed to visit them. And that’s it. They have pieces of paper saying that they want information and a visit.

Majida has been more than 50 times to the prison trying to visit Tahin. The guards always refuse, tell her to come back in 4 months time. No appointment, just come back in four months. That’s what the pieces of paper are worth.

Sattar Mahmoud Alwan has a story: “You remember when there was looting? The kids found something, not gold but it looked like gold, some shiny thing, and they picked it up in the road and brought it home. Then you remember on the television, they put a picture and they said it has been announced that they found a big officer of the Fedayeen and the suiciders? It was my brother. His name is Khalid Mahmoud Alwan. After a while they put him in the jail and that’s it, we hear nothing about him. There has been no court hearing.

“They announced they had found a big general in the Fedayeen but he had no relationship with the Fedayeen. He’s just a normal civilian. He had a small shop for chocolates and sweets. They should make sure. If they want to fight the resistance, the resistance is out there. All they are doing is throwing innocent people in jail and saying oh, we captured the resistance. The fact is the resistance is outside and they are killing your soldiers. There is no difference any more between the freedom under Saddam’s regime and the freedom now. It’s not freedom, it’s like they are taking some revenge on our people.”

On Friday’s march they were chanting, “Britanee, amreekan, Wayn al haqooq al insaan?” [Britain, America, where are the human rights?] Women and children carried signs, photos, ID badges of their missing persons. A young woman called Yasamin had three brothers in jail, Mohammed, Mustafa and Waleed. “The Americans raided our house and arrested them and then came again and took all our money and jewellery and our ID.”

Her dad added, in English, “So now we are not Iraqis because we don’t have our IDs. In Iraq anyone who crosses the borders from Syria, from Iran, we are now like them, we are not Iraqis, and they stole about $11,000. That is our money. They stole everything, our jewellery. They are thieves.”

None of the brothers has been charged with anything as far as they know. The first was taken from the house at 3am, during the raid, the second from his workplace and the third was arrested when he went to the CPA to ask about the first two. One brother is married with three kids. “Where is the man, where is our man,” his mother asked. “We are just women in the house and children asking for their father. We don’t know where he is.”

Yasamin told me, “The American army, in the morning, stopped near my house in Adamiya four days ago. They saw the children playing on their way to school and the soldier pointed his gun at him and said ‘I’ll shoot you, I’ll shoot you’. The child didn’t understand what did he say and he was afraid, very afraid.”

Ali and Odai were arrested in Ad-Dora in October. Eman, their mother, said Ali was due to get married. She’s not been allowed to see them at all so far. For a long time she didn’t even know where they were. Their dad died 3 days after his sons were taken. Two brothers, carpenters, Abdul Rahman and Fadil, were in the mosque at early morning prayer time. The area, near Ramadi, was suurounded by troops and they were taken by US soldiers as they left the mosque. A third brother, Yasir Alewi was a guard at the electricity station. Soldiers came and asked for him a month ago, saying they would bring him back in an hour. There’s been no sign of him since.

And there was Ahmed Berdi Shermouk from Habania, whose brother Abed was arrested driving home from the barbers to his village, which had been surrounded by US troops while he was gone, and Abdul Khattan Mohammed with a letter from a lawyer stating that the governor of Diwaniya had ordered the release of his son Tha’ir, subject to bail, because no charges had been made against him, and a man carrying a list of 20 names of young men arrested from two villages near Ramadi and Sayid Ghazi Shahaf with a list of more than 20 names from Diyala.

“They surrounded the area and entered the villages after one and started choosing people and they took all of those people with them and we just don’t know any information, why they did that. They came on four occasions with a few days in between, 1 and a half to 2 months ago. No one knows any information about any of them, even whether they are alive. I have come as a representative of the village. They are all farmers.”

Even if people are accused of genuine terrorist offences, or caught in the act of theft, for example, still there has to be due process, otherwise, as the families say, there is no difference between the Americans and the old regime. Previously you could be detained on a trumped up charge and could disappear. Now, they say, you can be detained on no charge at all and disappear.

The demonstration gave the relatives a chance to be seen and heard which they seemed desperate for. After some hours it was announced that, in the morning, a list of 700 names would be published and each of those prisoners would be allowed one visitor, women only, then men the next day. Only a few relatives were still there to hear the promise, those still waiting to give their prisoner’s name to the Chirstian Peacemaker Team in hope that they could find out some information from the generals.

One man put a hand, for balance, on the coil of razor wire that separated the protesters and families from the soldiers. “Don’t touch my wire,” the major shouted. “Ah, it is his wire,” said an Iraqi man next to me, “but his wire is on my soil.” A bulldozer thing came along and started shunting concrete wall blocks into a line, sandwiching metal posts in between and draping coils of razor wire between the posts. The noise of the machine was making the kids nervous and they stood shouting at it.

The far side of the wall a fourteen year old boy called Mohammed was herding sheep. Later, when the soldiers had gone back to the prison gates he came over to talk, stepping and wriggling his way through, throwing stones at the sheep when they came too close to the dirt road into the prison. “All their relatives are in here,” he said. “Many many people. Down Saddam, down Bush.”



Please write letters to newspapers about the detentions without charge in Iraq and to Tony Blair, George Bush or whoever you’d normally write to, demanding that detainees be given legal representation, visitation rights and proper legal processes, like charges and trials or release on bail.

If there are any doctors reading, there was a man called Khalid at the march whose 3 year old daughter Shahat is sick. He had a paper from a doctor saying she has lamellar icthyasis and recommending neotigason or isotretinan / acitretin. He says the medicine is not available inside Iraq. Her skin is cracked and discoloured dark brown, her eyes are red and sore around the lids and he says in the summer when it’s really hot her eyes and nose and ears bleed and they haven’t got a generator. Can anyone tell me what this disease is, what causes it and whether those are the best drugs to give to her.