February 6, 2006
On hostage taking in Iraq
American soldiers are taking the wives of wanted Iraqis as hostages, hoping their husband will turn themselves in. Not a new story, though new documents comfirming the practice, have brought it to the attention of AP and the national media. In one case, a nursing mother was arrested and taken away from her three young children to be "held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender." She was let go after two days, when a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer, present at the arrest, complained.
It's also not a surprising practice. The American military has for years been training Latin American military at the School of Americas and other more transient institutions. The course work has historically included techniques of "urban warfare" against "subversives." Latin Americans have also served as instructors at such institutions and have informally mixed with American military, facilitating the flow of information on repressive techniques. It's thus no wonder that the techniques used by American Task Forces in Iraq bear a lot of similarity with those used by Argentine Task Groups during the "Dirty War."
According to the Red Cross victims are often arrested after dark, when a group of armed men break into their home, yelling and pushing around everyone inside. Victims are handcuffed and hooded, often punched, kicked and struck with rifles. Sometimes all the adult males present in the house are taken - in Argentina, women were taken almost as often as men.
As in Argentina, victims are often first taken to interim detention centers. Both during their transfer and at the centers they may be beaten or tortured. American torturers are not as keen of picanas, or electric cattle prods, as Argentinians are, preferring more ad hoc torture methods such as forcing victims to lie naked on extremely hot surfaces, physical and mental humillations and beatings. The Iraqi security forces, however, seems to have adopted the use of the picana with gusto.
Most victims are eventually transferred to regular prisons, where their abuse may continue, or freed. While this was the practice early in Argentina, as the "dirty war" progressed they were taken to Secret Detention Centers instead, where they were tortured and eventually killed. The United States has also set up secret detention centers in Iraq and other countries where "ghost detainees," the term used to describe the "disappeared," are held. Following the example of their US counterparts, the Iraqi security forces have already also started to set up secret detention centers.
And taking family members of the person sought as hostages was common practice in Argentina. Sometimes it even worked.
So it shouldn't come to any surprise to anyone, least of all me, that American forces are "fighting" the "war" in Iraq by the book - at least the books used at the School of the Americas. And yet reading about that young mother who was torn away from her six-month-old baby and other little children particularly outrages me, more than that, hurts me. Perhaps it is because I am a nursing mother myself. My little girl just turned one and for the first time she spent a night away from me with her grandparents. It was a happy occasion, a time to take some much-needed alone time with my husband and get the first whole night of sleep I've had in more than a year. And I enjoyed it until my breasts, used to the baby suckling on them throughout the night, got full and became painful. And with the physical pain came the emotional pain of separation. And I knew that my baby was happy and comforted, surrounded by people who loved her and with plenty of bottles of breastmilk for her in the fridge.
It must have been so horrible for that other mother and for those children. She, alone, imprisoned by people who saw her and the children as nothing more than pawns in their sick game, criminals of war who, in denying others their humanity, ultimately lose their own. And I ask myself: Was she able to leave her children with a trusted person? Would there be anyone to comfort them at night when they asked where their mother was taken? What could they be told? And that baby - what did he eat? It may take a nursing mother to realize that many breast-fed babies don't take a bottle, and that if they are exclusively breast-fed, suddenly changing their diet to cow's milk or formula may make them sick, especially at six months. And that mother, alone in that prison, not knowing how her kids were, her breasts getting fuller, the pain only adding to the emotional wretchedness.
It is probably because I am a nursing mother that this affects me so much. It's easy, for me, to identify with the victim in this case. She's not that different, after all. Quite a bit younger, with three kids instead of two, but ultimately a nursing mother like me. And in the current political atmosphere, where the Bush administration spies on private citizens and human rights organizations, denies the fundamental right to habeas corpus and maintains that in waging the war on terror the President is above the law, the idea that one day, not too far away, it could be me is not as preposterous as it once may have seen. If Bush does win this political/legal battle, if indeed he has the right to do anything in the name of the war of terror, I'm pretty sure he will.
Hostage taking is, of course, a crime under international law. It's considered a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions (ratified by the US) and a war crime by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (not ratified by the US). According to the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages "[a]ny person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person ... in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or a group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage commits the offence of taking of hostages..."
But those are just words, of course. The cases of Americans facing prosecution for the war crimes or crimes against humanity they've committed are few and far between. Most often, the guilty parties have only received a slap on the wrist. But I think we should not despair. Only last April, thirty years after the start of the "Dirty War" in Argentina, an Argentine Navy Captain, Adolfo Scilingo, was sentenced to 640 years in prison for participating in the commission of crimes against humanity. His crimes were very much like those of the members of American Task forces in Iraq. One day they too will face justice.
Of course, that's of little comfort to the Iraqis who are illegally detained, mistreated, tortured, raped and killed today. And it's of little comfort to me.
Posted by marga at February 6, 2006 5:17 PM | TrackBack