Morgue workers say they have detected an increase in violent crimes against women since the 2003 US-led invasion ushered in a religious conservatism, write TINA SUSMANand CAESAR AHMEDin Baghdad
SOMETIMES, IT’S the forbidden stories, the ones people are afraid to tell in full that reveal the truth about a place. This is such a story.
It’s being told now not because the complete truth is known, but because the story nags at those familiar with its outlines, and because it says as much about Iraq’s progress as it does about Iraq’s resistance to change.
This much is known: A young woman imprisoned in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, sent a letter to her brother last summer, appealing for help. The woman, Dalal, wrote that she had become pregnant after being raped by prison guards.
The brother asked to visit her. Guards obliged. The brother walked into her cell, drew a gun and shot his visibly pregnant sister dead. His goal: to spare his family the taint of a pregnancy out of wedlock, a disgrace in Iraq often averted through so-called honour killings of women by their relatives.
For prison guards, the killing was also a relief. “They believed that her death would end the case,” said a lab worker at Baghdad’s central morgue, where the victim’s body – still carrying the five-month-old foetus – was sent.
The case might have ended there were it not for the morgue employee, who was determined to see those responsible held to account. At the employee’s insistence, lab workers using freshly acquired DNA-testing equipment drew a sample from the foetus. The prison guards were ordered to submit DNA samples and did so, apparently unaware of the sophistication of the morgue equipment.
“They thought we were incapable of figuring it out,” said the morgue employee.The DNA results showed that the father of the foetus was a police lieutenant colonel who reportedly supervised guards at the prison.
In another society, the scientific evidence would have led to arrests and prosecution. But, this being Iraq, the power wielded by men in uniform and the belief that a raped woman is better off dead, combined to cloud the truth.
About the only things anyone agrees on are that a young woman was slain and that her last days were spent pregnant and worrying about what would happen if she were released into a society that would condemn her for it.
According to a judge in the Tikrit court, the implicated lieutenant colonel and a police captain also accused in the case were arrested on rape charges but then released for lack of evidence. The judge said a third defendant, a police lieutenant, remained in custody.
Another Tikrit court official and a spokesman for the police in Salahuddin province, where the crime was committed, said the lieutenant colonel and captain remain in custody but were transferred from Tikrit to Baghdad.
Yet other accounts say the matter was settled through tribal justice. The clan of the accused lieutenant colonel paid the woman’s family to drop charges, according to some locals who are familiar with the case, but fearful of discussing it openly.
The morgue worker says those involved in the lab testing understood that all three of the police officers were freed. “I heard the dispute was solved by a tribal ransom,” the employee said. “The issue bothers me a lot. I’m doing my job, and the bad guys are getting back on the street.”
There are conflicting reports on the brother’s status. Some say he was jailed for killing his sister. Others say he was freed as part of the tribal deal.
As for the slain woman, several accounts say she was in prison in the first place not because she was a convicted or accused criminal, but because police wanted to question her brother about something. They thought he would turn himself in to free Dalal. Nobody has been able to explain why police wanted to talk to the brother.
The prison where she was held houses mainly men. There is a small section for female inmates, who usually number no more than a few. A female guard is supposed to watch over them. No one could explain how the lieutenant colonel was able to do what he did.
Nor could anyone say how Dalal’s brother entered her cell with a loaded gun. “He was supposed to be searched,” said Thabit, the police spokesman.
In Iraq, violence against women is a festering, but rarely addressed, problem. There are no readily available statistics on “honour” killings.
The number of rapes reported to police averages five to 10 a month for the entire country, said an official at Baghdad’s central morgue. “The actual number of rapes is actually more than we know. There are so many rapes in the prisons, for example,” he added, before going on to cite the Tikrit case to an Iraqi working for the Los Angeles Times.
Realising he was discussing a case not intended for public consumption, the official urged the reporter not to translate the facts for his English-speaking colleague. But minutes later, another morgue official and then the lab worker confirmed the case. All asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs.
Other workers interviewed during a day-long visit to the morgue, where rape victims are examined, said they had detected an increase in violent crimes against women since the 2003 US-led invasion ushered in a religious conservatism and brought social and economic upheaval. Most are honour killings, said one morgue employee, who a day earlier had received the body of a pregnant woman with her throat slit.
Human rights advocates say many of these homicides are believed to be typical slayings made to look like honour killings to gain leniency for the perpetrators. “It’s a lot worse now,” said Ibtisam Hamody Azzawi, a former engineer who runs a small aid organisation for abused women from her home in Baghdad.
“Our society witnessed so much war, and this is reflected in the domestic abuse situation.
“Everything is violence. Even the kids love war,” said Azzawi, whose husband, a university dean, was killed by extremists in 2007.
Much of her time is spent answering phone calls or knocks on her door from women looking for an escape from abusive homes. People find her by word of mouth. She does not tell her neighbours what she does, lest extremists attack her or one of her daughters.
Iraq has no shelters for battered or threatened women, and the war has splintered and displaced families who might have taken in female relatives. Amid the turmoil, killings have become an easy way out for husbands wanting to end their marriages, Azzawi said. It’s cheaper than divorce.
“Women get killed, but often it is reported that they are missing,” she said. “It’s all part of the chaos. Some husbands kill their wives and say maybe she was kidnapped, maybe she died in a bombing.“A husband and wife will have domestic problems. All of a sudden, the wife will disappear.”
At the women's prison in Tikrit, Saturday is visiting day. On a summer Saturday, a brother came to see his sister, her stomach swelling with her unborn child. She trusted him. – ( LA Times-Washington Postservice)