IRAQ:The Iraqi authorities have been castigated for executing defendants tried unfairly, writes Michael Jansen
The Bush administration is facing mounting criticism of its policies in Iraq. Amnesty International yesterday castigated the US-supported Iraqi authorities for imposing the death penalty on defendants it says were tried unfairly and convicted on confessions extracted under torture.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in 2004, 270 death sentences have been imposed and 100 people have been executed, including two women.
Amnesty revealed in its report, Unjust and Unfair: The Death Penalty in Iraq, that Iraq has the world's fourth-highest number of executions after China, Iran and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Joost Hilterman, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group, speaking about the northern city of Kirkuk, warned: "The Bush administration is preoccupied with saving Iraq by its new security plan in Baghdad and has ignored the Kirkuk crisis."
A report by the ICG, Iraq and the Kurds: Resolving the Kirkuk Crisis", said that the insistence by the Kurdish regional government on a referendum by year's end to decide the status of the oil-rich province was creating tensions between Kurd, Arab and Turkomen inhabitants and could result in a communal explosion if Kirkuk's future was dictated by a simple majority vote.
Meanwhile, Sunnis and Shias are being separated by barriers instead of being brought together through dialogue and reconciliation. The US military is building a 5km-long 3.6 metre-high concrete wall in Baghdad to seal off the Sunni Adhamiyah neighbourhood, on the east bank of the Tigris, from surrounding Shia districts.
When the wall is completed, Adhamiyah will become a gated community, with the predominantly Shia Iraqi army in charge of the gates, increasing Sunni unease about security.
In 2003 and 2004, barriers were erected around the Green Zone, where parliament, government offices and the US and British embassies are located. Other locations, including military bases, police stations and markets, have been provided with cement slab barriers and blast walls.
Recently, walls went up in the mainly Sunni area of Dora in south Baghdad to cut it off from adjacent Shia districts.
Several restive towns and cities have been surrounded by huge sand banks to restrict access. But barriers have not halted suicide bombings or prevented attacks by Shia militias or Sunni insurgents.
Iraqi analysts fear that barriers will partition the capital into warring sectarian enclaves and deepen fear and antagonism between Sunnis and Shias. Concern has been expressed that Baghdad could eventually be divided by the Tigris between Shias on the east bank and Sunnis on the west.
In Ramadi, the restive capital of Anbar province, there has been a potentially positive development. Two hundred tribal leaders, representing 50 tribes, are to set up a provincial sheikhs council and form a political party to contest provincial elections later this year and the next parliamentary poll in 2009. They are inviting tribal figures from three other provinces to a convention.
The tribes united last year to fight al-Qaeda and largely cleared them out of Anbar. But it is not certain that they can get together to form a party. The prime mover of this effort, Sheikh Abdul-Sattar, a member of the powerful Dulaimi tribal confederation, is seen as an ambitious man seeking to promote a personal agenda.