A Lone Woman Testifies To Iraq's Order of
Terror
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 21, 2003
BAGHDAD -- She was walking hurriedly, as if in a trance, oblivious to the
weakness in her legs, not seeing the bewildered looks of the American troops
trailing her, not hearing her own cries of anguish. Jumana Michael Hanna, tears
streaming down her face, had slipped into the darkest recesses of memory.
Hanna, a 41-year-old Assyrian Christian from a formerly rich and prominent
Iraqi family, returned last week to the well of her nightmares: the police
academy in Baghdad, a sprawling complex of offices, classrooms, soccer, polo
and parade grounds -- and prison cells, some of them converted dog kennels,
according to American officials who now control the campus.
This is the place where in the 1990s Hanna was hung from a rod and beaten
with a special stick when she called out for Jesus or the Virgin Mary. This is
where she and other female prisoners were dragged outside and tied to a dead
tree trunk, nicknamed "Walid" by the guards, and raped in the shadow
of palm trees. This is the place where electric shock was applied to Hanna's
vagina. And this is where in February 2001 someone put a bullet in her
husband's head and handed his corpse through the steel gate like a piece of
butcher's meat.
Hanna has come back here to help the new occupation authorities in Iraq find
the men who tormented her. After she identified some of the men through a
series of photos of officers in the new Iraqi police force and provided other
corroborating information to American and Iraqi officials, on Saturday morning
an Iraqi police anti-corruption squad detained three men, including a brigadier
general. U.S. and Iraqi officials are talking to a fourth man and seeking his
cooperation. As of yesterday, none had been formally charged, but the
investigation is continuing.
"For two months I've been here and heard the rumors about what happened
to women, but no one came forward," said Bernard B. Kerik, the senior
policy adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and former police commissioner
in New York City. "This is the first case where someone has given us
information that appears to be credible and that we can corroborate and act on.
A lot of Iraqi women will see that we are serious. This is an event that will
lead to closure for a lot of people -- and justice."
Hanna, who agreed to the use of her full name, is just one of hundreds and
possibly thousands of women who were tortured and sexually assaulted by the
agents of the last government, human rights officials said. For those who
survived, their ordeal was often left unspoken, swept behind a cloak of family
and societal shame. That will make prosecutions extremely difficult, American
officials said, and makes Hanna's determination to expose her jailors all the
more dramatic for an occupying authority eager to build a clean, new police force.
A month ago, homeless and seeking assistance from Americans for her mother,
her two children and herself, Hanna went to the Baghdad Convention Center. A
leadership conference was underway for about 60 officers in the reconstituted
Iraqi police force. There, in the crowd, she said she saw the man she and the
other female prisoners knew as the Major. She recalled he was the man who had
laughed at their pain as he inflicted more and more of it, the man who
extinguished his cigarette on Hanna's leg on the day she was ordered released.
"Pain that no one can imagine," said Hanna. "Terrible, terrible
pain. Pain that steals your honor."
Hanna fled the convention center in a blind panic, wandering aimlessly
through the streets. Nearly two weeks later, she made her way to the Human
Rights Society of Iraq, housed in a two-story building near the Ministry of
Justice. Activists there told her that the U.S. occupying authorities in Iraq
would want to know about her jailors, especially if they had returned to the
police force.
And so, trembling, Hanna stood last week at the arched entryway of the
police academy, seeking justice but fearing what lay beyond. Between tears and
bouts of breathlessness, her story tumbled out in fragments as she guided her
hosts, U.S. officials working to rebuild the Iraqi police force, from one scene
of torture to another.
She pointed to a wall in a cell and said it hid a stairwell; the academy's
Iraqi commissioner later confirmed its existence, U.S. officials said. At one
moment, she walked through an open yard trying to find a second tree trunk,
just like the first one, "Walid," but used only to tie prisoners for
beatings with sticks or cable wire. She was convinced it was there, but no one
could see a second trunk. And, finally, there it was, hidden behind some wild
reeds and heaped brush. The guards called that one "Haneen," she
said.
"We'll nail the bastards," said Dennis Henley, the American
director of reconstruction at the police academy.
Among those detained Saturday morning was the one-star brigadier general,
who Hanna identified as taking part in her initial detention in November 1993.
U.S. officials have not been able to identify the Major, who was Hanna's
principal tormentor, and whose family name Hanna does not know. U.S. officials
hope the detentions will provide further leads, Kerik said.
An Iraqi judge and an Iraqi female prosecutor were assigned to the case by
the Ministry of Interior. U.S. officials said they planned to offer security to
Hanna, who has been sleeping in an abandoned school on some nights in recent
weeks because her friends were not able to house her entire family. She remains
afraid that her future testimony could endanger her and her children.
The torment of Jumana Michael Hanna began as a love story in the summer of
1993. She was the only child of a venerable Iraqi family. She met Haitam Jamil
Anwar, then a 30-year-old wood carver, son of immigrants from pre-independence
India. It was an unsuitable match for Hanna's mother and, much more
dangerously, Saddam Hussein's paranoid state.
Their first encounter was at Anwar's workshop when Hanna brought an old
ornamental box inlaid with fine Iranian stones to the Indian craftsman for
repair. He was funny, charming and flirtatious, she remembers. There was a
promise that the box would be ready in two days and an immediate attraction
that left her giddy afterward. The courtship began when, upon her return for
the box, Anwar asked if he could see her again.
Because of Iraq's tribal traditions, where each marries his own, Hanna said
she felt forced to hide her relationship from her mother. "I wanted her to
marry an Iraqi man, a Christian man, not a foreigner," said Hanna's
mother, Jeanne d'Arc Jacob Bahnam, 73, the daughter of an iron merchant who
married a pharmacist from her own community. Her husband died in 1974.
The family lived in a fine house in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood, were
members of the exclusive and largely Christian al-Hindia club, and vacationed
in the United States and Europe. Wealthy and well-known, Hanna didn't lack
suitors, her mother said. But she rejected them. She wanted, Hanna said, to
fall in love.
On Aug. 15, 1993, Hanna and Anwar eloped and were secretly married by a
sympathetic priest. In Iraq, however, the country's citizens needed state
permission to marry a foreigner and the newlyweds had broken the law. A trip to
the immigration authorities in Baghdad might have solved the problem, but
Hanna, confident of her status as a member of a prominent family, went instead
to the Olympic Committee in hopes that she could shortcut the bureaucracy. The
Olympic Committee was the personal fiefdom of Hussein's eldest son, Uday, a
psychopath and serial rapist whose penchant for cruelty and violence led him to
even run afoul of his father when he bludgeoned to the death one of Hussein's
close associates. The Olympic Committee building, now a burned-out ruin
abutting the police academy grounds, was a symbol of the venality of Hussein's
rule.
Hanna arrived at the building at 10 a.m. on Nov. 15, 1993. It was the
beginning of a prison sentence of two years, three months and seven days
without the approval of any court of law. Through much of that first day, she
waited in one room after another on the promise that a meeting about her
problem was imminent.
In the last room, where she was held for several hours, the door was locked.
At sunset two men entered. She recalled they said they had to take routine
security precautions in advance of a meeting with Uday Hussein. They slipped a
black hood over her head and tied her hands behind her back. The anxiety, which
had mounted through the day, flared into terror.
She was taken down to a lower level in an elevator and then along a passageway
that seemed narrow because of the way the two men bumped against her. She was
pushed into a room and tied, spread-eagle, to a bed.
"All of this period, I didn't resist," she said. "But on the
bed, I knew. I said, 'I am like your sister; please don't do this.' I started
to beg. They said if our sister married an Indian and started a network against
the government, we would kill her. I kept praying, calling for Jesus and the
Virgin Mary. I prayed to Muhammad. They damned them all."
"They raped me twice that first day," she continued. "I don't
know the persons. Two of them. I couldn't see them. They kept raping for four
days as well as I can remember. They took my honor."
A guard, who was not one of the rapists, took her periodically to a bathroom
and washed her himself because he said he couldn't untie her. He lifted the
hood to allow her to smoke a cigarette before taking her back to the room in
which she was held. "I thank him for this small favor," Hanna said.
On what she believes was the fifth day, another man entered the room. She
recalled he railed at her about a British spy network. He told her she had
wanted her papers stamped so he would stamp them. He applied electric shock to
her vagina; she lost consciousness.
Hanna awoke in what she thought was a veterinary clinic for dogs because of
the sound of barking. She was, in fact, in a room adjacent to the police
academy kennels. A woman applied alcohol to her vagina in a crude attempt to
clean it. Hanna was given a painkiller and put in a cell with 17 other women
where she was kept for 10 days before she was questioned again.
"We were one body and soul," she said of the women in the cell.
"We helped each other." All of the women, she said, had been detained
or kidnapped and then raped, some for as long as six months before they were
discarded by their captors and brought to the police academy. She remembers, in
particular, a Christian girl, a 16-year-old from Baghdad who said she was
kidnapped outside her school. She was beautiful, "like Barbie the
doll," said Hanna, who speaks some English and French.
On the 10th day, Hanna said, she met the Major, then about 35 years of age,
a broad-shoulder man with curly black hair balding at the temples. "He
wanted to know about a British network," said Hanna, who said he began by
slapping her in the face. "He was sure I was working for the British. He
gave me names, Iraqi names, men. I said, 'Yes, yes. I signed every paper he
wants.' "
Over the next seven months, Hanna said, she implicated people she had never heard
of in a spy network she knew nothing about. She was routinely beaten and she
said the Major, in a grotesque joke, kept three sticks on a wall hanging under
the names Jesus, the prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali, whom Shiite Muslims believe
is Muhammad's true heir. Whichever holy man a prisoner called out for
determined which stick they were beaten with. The Major, she said, also
routinely used electric shock and once set a police dog on her in a small room;
the scar of the bite mark is still on her arm.
The Major "is a sadist," said Hanna. "He loves torturing,
especially in the sensitive spot." But, she added, the Major never raped
the prisoners. The women were sexually assaulted by other guards, particularly
at night when they would come to the cells. "They choose a girl and take
her to the yard," Hanna said.
For months, Hanna's mother thought her daughter had simply fled with her new
husband. But he had also been arrested. "I asked my relatives if they knew
where they were," Bahnam said. "No one knew. I thought she had
disgraced me."
After seven months, three men arrived at Bahnam's house and told her that
her daughter had been arrested. They produced a handwritten letter from Hanna,
secured by the Major, asking Bahnam to sign over her house to them in order to
secure her daughter's release.
"I agreed," said Bahnam. "I asked for time and they said they
would give me 15 days to get out." The house has since been sold and
re-sold and is one of thousands of similar cases that may clog the Iraqi courts
for years as victims of the last government seek compensation.
"I took my gold and went out," said Bahnam. "I went to a
Muslim house and begged him and he said, 'You are welcome.' " That man,
Ahmed Safar, who is still living in Baghdad, said he sheltered Bahnam because
it was his obligation as a Muslim once she asked for his help. He had never
seen her before she showed up at his doorstep.
Over the next 19 months, the security officers drained Bahnam of her
remaining wealth, forcing her to convert her gold into cash -- about $25,000 in
all, she estimates.
In early 1996, Hanna and her husband, who had been held in a detention
center directly across from the police academy, were finally released. Anwar's
body bore the marks of torture and one of his legs had been broken while he was
in custody, Hanna said.
Moving from rental to rental over the next few years, the couple subsisted
on part-time jobs. They had two children, Sabr, a girl, and Ayoub, a boy, but
they never had their marriage sanctioned by the state.
In January 2001, Anwar went to the Ministry of Interior to try and sort out
his children's papers before they started school; he also needed the papers so
their church would baptize them. He was arrested and taken back to the cells near
the police academy where he had been held before.
"He never came home," Hanna said. On Feb. 14, 2001, Anwar's body
was passed through the front gate of the detention center to Hanna after she
had been summoned there. "I lost my mind," she said. "I was
hysterical." A taxi driver agreed to take the body to her church, where
Hanna washed and dressed her husband for burial. Anwar had been shot in the
head.
With her husband's body, she was also handed a piece of government paper
recognizing her as the two children's legal guardian. They could now be
baptized and go to school.
Last Wednesday evening, Henley and Gerald F. Burke from the U.S. occupation
authority's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance took Hanna to
a trailer near the former Republican Palace to examine photographs of officers
who had joined the reconstituted police force since the fall of Baghdad.
As an American soldier scrolled through pictures on a computer screen, Hanna
suddenly said, "Go back, go back." Klumb gave the mouse to Hanna, who
stopped at one picture.
"This is Salah, this is Salah," shouted Hanna, dressed in black,
as she has been since her husband's death. "He brought me to jail."
The computer showed a brigadier general, a smiling, gray-haired man, in the
photo. Hanna said he was the man who detained her at the Olympic Committee when
a hood was placed over her head before her supposed meeting with Uday Hussein.
Hanna continued to click through pictures. "No, no, no," she said.
And then: "Saddam, Saddam." She identified a police sergeant, the
man who washed her in the bathroom at the Olympic Committee and gave her
cigarettes.
Then she found two of the men who allegedly raped her and other women at the
police academy, a police captain and a senior sergeant.
"They raped us, they raped us in the night," she said. The
pictures continued to scroll, hundreds of them, and she identified two men who
escorted her to interrogations but did not abuse her.
"This is Raad, Raad," she said at another point.
"He was responsible for the dogs. For the dogs." He was among
those detained on Saturday. Hanna said that this man brought her and other
women out to the tree trunk known as "Haneen." One of his preferred
forms of torture, she said, was to order the women to strip, then tie them to
the tree trunk, and smear wet sugar on them so the dogs would terrorize them as
they licked it off their bodies. Hanna also identified his superior at the
academy.
But Hanna failed to find the Major among the photographs. U.S. officials
promised they would continue to look for him.
Once he is found, she said, "I will take off my black clothes."
Special correspondents Souad Mekhennet and Hoda Lazin contributed to
this report.
© 2003 The Washington
Post Company