Sweeping Rights Abuses in Iraq Included Doctors

Half of families saw violence, and half of physicians involved

TUESDAY, March 23, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- Nearly one out of every two families in southern Iraq have directly experienced violent human rights abuses, such as beatings, kidnappings, amputations and killings, since 1991.

More surprisingly, almost half of all Iraqi physicians in two southern cities said they knew of other doctors who were involved in amputating ears as punishment and falsifying medical documents and death certificates to cover up torture and abuse.

These findings come from two new studies, by the group Physicians for Human Rights, that appear in the March 24/31 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The number of abuses in southern Iraq was quite significant," says Dr. Lynn Amowitz, a senior medical researcher for Physicians for Human Rights in Boston. Amowitz visited Iraq in June and July 2003.

"The mental health burden will be huge. Almost every other household was subjected to some type of horror. The fact that many of the events happened inside the household means that the rest of the family was victimized as well," Amowitz says.

In one study, Amowitz and her colleagues interviewed 1,991 men and women in three large southern Iraqi cities. Almost 97 percent of those interviewed were Shiite Muslims and nearly all -- 99.7 percent -- were Arab.

Forty-seven percent of those polled said they or a family member had been subjected to one or more of the following abuses: beating, torture, gunshot wounds, being held hostage, disappearance, forced military service, ear amputations and killings. Seventy percent of these abuses occurred in the home, and the Baath political party was implicated as the perpetrator of 95 percent of the abuse.

Much of the abuse -- 53 percent -- occurred between 1991 and 1993, after an unsuccessful Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein's Baath regime.

The researchers also looked at women's rights in Iraq and found the domestic violence rate was almost seven times that of the U.S. rate. Half of the men and women surveyed felt a man has the right to beat his wife if she disobeys him.

While a majority said they believed in equal educational and work opportunities for women in theory, half said there was still a need to restrict these opportunities for women right now.

Amowitz says she was surprised by these attitudes. She previously visited Afghanistan and said 90 percent of the people there support women's rights. "In Iraq, we have both men and women not supporting civil rights for women," she says. "But you have to have women's participation to have a successful reconstruction."

In the second study, the researchers surveyed 98 physicians from two cities in southern Iraq. Seventy-one percent reported that torture was an extreme problem in Iraq, and many said that their peers were involved in human rights abuses.

Fifty percent said physicians were involved in amputating ears as a form of punishment, 49 percent felt that their peers had falsified medical records, and 32 percent had falsified death certificates.

Half of the physicians said doctors did not participate willingly in these activities, and the Fedayeen Sadaam -- the paramilitary force led by Uday Hussein, son of the deposed Iraqi dictator -- may have threatened the physicians or their family members to ensure participation.

"This is something that is not uncommon," Amowitz says. "Physicians are often co-opted and coerced by regimes into doing something against their ethics."

"The scope of what was happening in Iraq is chilling," says Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. "As we work to assist in the rebuilding and healing of Iraq, these human rights abuses need to be acknowledged and the potential health consequences need to be addressed."

More information

To learn more about human rights abuses in Iraq, visit Human Rights Watch, the U.S. State Department, or Physicians for Human Rights.

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