NYT: Hundreds Disappear Into the Black Hole of the Kurdish Prison System in Iraq

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/world/middleeast/26kurdjail.html

The inmates began their strike with an angry call. “Allahu akbar!” they shouted, 120 voices joining in a cadence punctuated by whoops.

They thrust their arms between the metal bars and ripped away the curtains and plastic sheets covering the windows facing the prison courtyard. Their squinting faces were exposed to light.

Their Kurdish guards gathered, ready to control a prison break. There was no break. The inmates were able only to shove their bunks against the doors and barricade themselves in their cells. They settled into a day of issuing complaints.

They were not allowed the Koran, they said. Their rations were meager and often moldy. Sometimes the guards beat them, they said, and several inmates had disappeared. The entire inmate population had either been denied trials or had been held beyond the terms of their sentences, they said — lost in legal limbo in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq.

The prison strike here, on Dec. 4, ended when the local authorities agreed to transfer three unpopular guards and to allow copies of the Koran in the cells. But it exposed an intractable problem that has accompanied Kurdish cooperation with the United States in Iraq.


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times
About 30 men live in each cell in this Kurdish prison. Many prisoners have been held for years, but there is no legal system to sort out their fates.

[Erika]

1. W's Iraq

Damn him.

[GreenZoneLT]

2. Well, that explains the lack of violence in Kurdistan

Unlike the rest of Iraq, where there's a revolving door of arrest, lengthy detention, and release without resolution of charges, in Kurdistan they just lock up anyone who LOOKS like a pissed-off Sunni, and keep him locked up.

There's a similar standard of evidence for detention in Iraq as a whole, but one of the reasons for the continuing violence is that hardly anyone gets tried for whatever they supposedly did to get locked up. We probably create a fair number of new insurgents by putting them in detention with hardcore guys, both of whom are eventually released.