Former Iraq Leader Tells Paper Abuse There as Bad as in Saddam's Day

By: E&P Staff Abuse of human rights in Iraq is as bad now as it was under Saddam Hussein, if not worse, former prime minister Iyad Allawi said in an interview published on Sunday in the British paper The Observer. "People are doing the same as (in) Saddam Hussein's time and worse. It is an appropriate comparison," Allawi said.

Allawi was Iraq's first prime minister of the post-Saddam era but failed to win January's election, which brought current Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, an Islamist Shi'ite, to power.

"People are remembering the days of Saddam," said Allawi, a secular Shi'ite and former Baathist who is standing in elections scheduled for Dec. 15. "These are the precise reasons why we fought Saddam Hussein and now we are seeing the same things.

"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," said Allawi in an apparent reference to the discovery of a bunker at the Shi'ite-run Interior Ministry where 170 men were held prisoner, beaten, half-starved and in some cases tortured. "A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations."

Meanwhile, in a front page article Sunday, Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reported that the leader of Iraq's most powerful political party has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, "saying his country will only be able to defeat the insurgency when the United States lets Iraqis get tough."

But Allawi in the Observer said the Interior Ministry was afflicted by a "disease." If it is not cured, he said, it "will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government."

"The Ministry of the Interior is at the heart of the matter," Allawi said. "I am not blaming the minister himself, but the rank and file are behind the secret dungeons and some of the executions that are taking place."

According to the Washington Post article, Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite Muslim religious party that leads the transitional government and whose armed wing is the most feared of Iraq's many factional forces, said in a rare interview last week that the United States is tying Iraq's hands in the fight against insurgents. One of Iraq's "biggest problems is the mistaken or wrong policies practiced by the Americans," he said.

Hakim denied accusations that the government's security forces -- with alleged involvement by his party's armed wing -- have operated torture centers and death squads targeting Sunni Arabs.