US policies once again encouraging "freedom" in a Middle Eastern country

Iran hangs 30 over 'US plots'

Surge in public executions is a push to silence political activists, say critics

Robert Tait in Tehran
Sunday August 19, 2007
The Observer


Iranian officials at an execution in Tehran. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

Iran has hanged up to 30 people in the past month amid a clampdown prompted by alleged US-backed plots to topple the regime, The Observer can reveal.

Many executions have been carried out in public in an apparent bid to create a climate of intimidation while sending out uncompromising signals to the West. Opposition sources say at least three of the dead were political activists, contradicting government insistence that it is targeting 'thugs' and dangerous criminals. The executions have coincided with a crackdown on student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a 'soft revolution' with US support.

The most high-profile recent executions involved Majid Kavousifar, 28, and his nephew, Hossein Kavousifar, 24, hanged for the murder of a hardline judge, Hassan Moghaddas, a man notorious for jailing political dissidents. They were hanged from cranes and hoisted high above one of Tehran's busiest thoroughfares.

The spectacle, the first public executions in Tehran for five years, took place outside the judiciary department headquarters where Moghaddas was murdered. But the location, near many office blocks and the Australian and Japanese embassies, meant they were seen by many middle-class Iranians who would not normally witness such events.

The previous day seven men were publicly executed in the north-eastern city of Masshad, including five said to be guilty of 'rape, kidnapping, theft and committing indecent acts'. Another two were hanged separately for raping and robbing a young woman. The executions were also shown live on state television.

Public hangings are normally carried out sparingly in Iran and reserved for cases that have provoked public outrage, such as serial murders or child killings. Human rights organisations say the rising death toll has brought the number of prisoners executed this year to about 150, compared to 177 in 2006, a dramatic increase in capital punishment since the country's radical President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took office two years ago.

The executions come after the government launched a campaign targeting murderers, sex offenders, drug traffickers and others cast as a threat to 'social security'. It resulted in a wave of arrests after police raided working-class neighbourhoods in Tehran and other cities. Those arrested were paraded in public, often in humiliating poses.

The government has also sought to publicise executions conducted behind closed doors. Last month state television broadcast footage of 12 condemned men as they were about to be hanged in Tehran's Evin prison. The authorities said they had been guilty of 'rape, sodomy and assault and battery'. Opposition sources say at least three were political activists, though they have not disclosed their identities. Asiran, a government website, dismissed the claims as 'lies'.

International gay rights campaigners have also said that homosexual men were among the executed. Homosexuality is a capital offence in Iran, along with adultery, espionage, armed robbery, drug trafficking and apostasy.

Iran has long been one of the world's most prolific exponents of the death penalty and ranks second only to China in the number of executions. Human rights groups say it has the world's worst record for executions for crimes committed when the defendant was under 18.

However, there have been signs of official disquiet over the recent trend. Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the relatively moderate judiciary chief, has made an apparent protest by openly criticising Ahmadinejad's government on a range of issues. He also signalled displeasure with the repressive climate by ordering officials to investigate claims that student activists were tortured during a recent detention in Evin prison.

Shahroudi is believed to have been unhappy over the stoning to death last month of a man convicted of adultery after he had ordered a stay of execution.

However, the spate of executions seems likely to continue. Tehran's hardline chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, has announced that he is seeking the death penalty against 17 'hooligans'.

Original article posted here.

More Kangaroo Courts and Executions as Distration From Genocide

Outrage over Imminent Execution of Iraqi Women

Dahr Jamail and Ali Al-Fadhily

BAGHDAD, Mar 2 (IPS) - Three young women accused of joining the Iraqi insurgency movement and engaging in "terrorism" have been sentenced to death, provoking protest from rights organisations fearing that this could be the start of more executions of women in post-Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The execution of the three — Wassan Talib, Zaineb Fadhil and Liqa Omar Muhammad — and a fourth, Samar Sa'ad 'Abdullah, found guilty of murdering five members of her family, are scheduled to begin Mar. 3, according a member of the BRussells Tribunal.

All four are being held in the Khadamiya female prison in northern Baghdad.

One of the three alleged "terrorists", Muhammad, 25, gave birth to a daughter after her arrest and is still nursing the child in prison. A second, Talib, 31, is also in prison with her three-year-old child, according to Amnesty International.

Talib and Fadhil, 25, were sentenced to death by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI) on 31 August 2006 for the 2005 murder of several members of Iraqi security forces in the Baghdad district of Hay al-Furat. Both women denied any involvement. Fadhil reportedly claimed that she was abroad at the time of the alleged killings, according to Amnesty International.

Muhammad was sentenced to death on 6 February 2006 by the CCCI, for kidnapping an official from the 'Green Zone' in 2005, according to sources in the Iraqi Lawyers' Union. Her husband is said to have been detained and accused of the same crime.

It is not known whether the three alleged "terrorists" will lodge appeals. But while this is possible, it is unlikely they will be successful without their own legal representation, according to sources.

An appeal by Abdullah was earlier rejected and she faces imminent execution, according to Amnesty International.

Many lawyers here are interpreting the death sentences on the three alleged "terrorists" as an attempt by the Iraqi regime to intimidate insurgents. Two of those sentenced to death — Fadhil and Mohammad — were accused of joining their husbands and two members of their families in their alleged crimes, according to the Iraqi Lawyers' Union.

Some Iraqis here have openly expressed surprise and disbelief that these women could have been involved in any insurgency.

It was a question of honour for Iraqi men that their women did not participate in any form of violence, they told IPS.

Independent lawyers have expressed strong criticism of the trials, saying they were "unfair" and violated international conventions.

The accused were denied the right of legal defence, Walid Hayali, a lawyer, said. He was barred from representing the three in court, he added.

"No lawyer was given the opportunity to do his job," a close friend of Talib confirmed to IPS.

But the right to independent legal representation was guaranteed under international law, lawyers here said.

The passing of a death sentence on the mother of a newly born child was also in violation of a specific UN safeguard, they added.

Iraqis questioned here said they believed the executions, if allowed to take place, would raise the level of violence across Iraq.

"This won't go unpunished," Fadhil Aziz, 40, from the Amiriya district in Baghdad told IPS.

"The U.S. and their Iraqi collaborators must pay for the crimes they are committing against our honour," he warned.

The impending executions are likely to increase the exodus of Iraqis out of the country.

"I am taking my family anywhere in the world rather than staying here and facing this," Abi Muhannad, an Iraqi teacher from the Kadhamiya district in Baghdad told IPS.

The UN estimates that some two million Iraqis have already fled the country. Approximately 50,000 are leaving every month, threatening to overwhelm other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Approximately one million are today living in Syria and up to 750,000 in Jordan, according to the UN High Commission of Refugees.

Roughly 40 percent of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled the country since the U.S. invasion in 2003, according to the UN.

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the American occupation authorities suspended the death penalty. But in August 2004, the new interim Iraqi government reinstated it for crimes including murder, kidnapping and threats to national security. In October 2005 a tough new anti-terrorism law was introduced, setting capital punishment for "proving, planning, financing and enabling" terrorism.

Last year Iraqi courts sentenced 235 people to death and over 6,000 to life imprisonment, according to the London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.

There are over 2,000 women classified as "security detainees", according to Mohamed Khorshid, quoted by the newspaper.

It is not known for certain how many have been executed since August 2004, but it is believed the figure is between 50 and 100. During 2006 at least 65 men and women were executed by the Iraqi government, including former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

(Ali al-Fadhily is our Baghdad correspondent. Dahr Jamail is our specialist writer who has spent eight months reporting from inside Iraq and has been covering the Middle East for several years.) (END/2007)

Origial article posted here.

Bringing Barbarism, Brutality and Repudiation of all Norms of Decency

Witness: Executed man's 'head just snapped off'

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A journalist who saw videotape of the Monday hangings of Saddam Hussein's half-brother and the dictator's former chief judge has described how one of the men was decapitated.

New York Times reporter John F. Burns told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Monday evening that Barzan Hassan's head "just snapped off," because he was apparently given too much rope and fell too far -- about eight feet -- for a man of his medium build and weight.

The hangman's calculations -- a grim science governing the weight of the condemned and how much rope is necessary to kill quickly -- were apparently wrong, Burns said.

He said: "Two deeply frightened men in orange jumpsuits, Guantanamo-style, standing on the trapdoor, black hoods over their heads as they intoned the prayer of death.

"As ... they dropped the eight feet allowed by the coiled rope his head just snapped off, just like that, in an instant."

Burns was among a small group of reporters, which did not include CNN, who were invited to watch a videotape of the two side-by-side hangings.

The hangings happened at about 3 a.m. Monday (7 p.m. Sunday ET), said Basam Ridha, spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office.

After the men dropped, Burns said, the videotape shows Hassan "lying face down -- [a] headless pool of blood accumulating around his neck."

Hassan's head was still in the black hood that covered his face before he fell through the trapdoor, according to Burns.

"It seems what happened was that the Iraqi officials who had worked so hard to get this one right just got it wrong," he said.

Burns said the decapitation appeared to be accidental and the execution of the second man, Awad Bandar, appeared to be properly conducted.

"It only goes to show that, you know, when things go wrong, they go very badly wrong in Iraq," said Burns, who has covered the region for many years.

The Iraqi government previously released a silent video of Saddam Hussein's December 30 execution, that ends before the actual hanging.

However, unauthorized mobile phone video showed Hussein's hanging and included audio of Shiite guards taunting the Sunni ex-dictator on the gallows.

That video sparked widespread outrage and suggestions the execution was a sectarian lynching.

There was no audio on the videotape of Monday's executions, Burns said.

Iraqi officials were motivated to show the videotape to reporters because they are "absolutely determined," Burns said, that the video not get on the Internet and "be replayed a million times, especially across the Middle East."

The video will not be released to the public, Ridha said.

Compared to the approximately 25 people who witnessed Hussein's hanging, only about 10-12 people saw Monday's executions, said Burns.

Everyone in the room was required to sign an agreement promising not to engage in taunting the condemned men or recording the execution, said Ridha, who was a witness.

"It was not like a very pretty scene," said Ridha, who called the decapitation "an act of God."

According to their wishes, Hassan and Bandar were buried around 8:30 p.m. Monday near Hussein's grave in Owja, Iraq, a local government spokesman told CNN.

The men were executed for their roles in the killings of 148 men and boys after a 1982 assassination attempt on Hussein in Dujail, Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Sunnis reacted with anger to the decapitation, and some Shiites expressed shock at the way the hanging was conducted, according to wire reports. (Full story)

'Very apologetic'

Describing Monday's execution, Ridha said the two men, dressed in their orange prisoner uniforms, "looked very surprised" that they were actually going to be hanged.

They "were very apologetic," asking that they not be put to death, he said. "They asked God for forgiveness," he said.

Hoods were placed over their heads, unlike Hussein, who asked not to be given a hood when he was hanged on the same gallows, Ridha said.

The two were sentenced to death in November.

Their death sentences were upheld by an Iraqi appeals court in December but delayed amid the controversy surrounding Hussein's execution.

Original article posted here.

Teaching Death and Destruction to Children

Collateral damage—Texas child hangs himself after viewing Saddam Hussein lynching

A 10-year-old boy in Texas hanged himself from his bunk bed in an apparent accident after having seen the execution of Saddam Hussein on television. The child of Guatemalan immigrants, Sergio Pelico was found dead on New Year’s Eve by a relative who was watching the children while their mother Sara Pelico DeLeon was at work. He had pulled a slip-knotted rope around his neck, mimicking what he had seen on TV.

Essentially the same tragic scenario was played out in at least three other countries in the wake of the televised broadcast from the Iraqi execution chamber. Also on New Year’s Eve, a 9-year-old Pakistani boy, Mubashar Ali, hanged himself with the help of his 10-year-old sister. Three days later, 15-year-old Moon Moon Karmarkar hanged herself from a ceiling fan in the suburbs of Kolkata, India. And in Saudi Arabia, a 12-year-old boy in Hafr al-Baten, near the Kuwaiti border, climbed on a chair and hung himself with metal wire from a door frame in his family’s home. Security officials said that the child had watched coverage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging.

Few details of the Pelico family’s circumstances have been reported, but those that are available are typical of working class immigrants from Central America and other countries, who live in Houston and cities across the US. Reliance on an extended family network, a father who lives apart from the family in New Jersey, no resources for childcare—while the mother works on a Sunday—other than neighboring relatives looking in, tragically in this instance, not often enough. Nor does Pelico’s family have enough money for a funeral; the family is trying to raise money to bury the boy in Guatemala.

Family members have connected Sergio’s tragic death with the TV news coverage of Saddam Hussein’s execution, aired intensively in the days following the Iraqi ex-leader’s state killing. One of the boy’s uncles, Julio Gustavo said that Sergio was upset by what he saw and had to be reassured that the killing was “OK,” because Saddam was “real bad.”

“I don’t think he thought it was real,” Gustavo said. “They showed them putting the noose around his neck and everything. Why show that on TV?”

Indeed, this was apparently a question that the television executives themselves debated in the wake of the lynching, attempting to determine whether and how much of the video to show. In the end, prurient sensationalism won out, and the footage of Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck was broadcast, together with incessant references to the “butcher of Baghdad.”

According to the Hollywood Reporter/Reuters, the networks ABC and CBS said they wouldn’t air the full execution if the video became available. “We’re very aware that we’re coming into people’s living rooms and that there could be children watching,” CBS News senior vice-president Linda Mason said.

Be that as it may, the gruesome footage was still shown. If anything, the impact of the somewhat abbreviated version is more ghastly—for what it attempts to hide. And the spectacle of the hanging was supplemented by images of sections of the Shia Iraqi population rejoicing.

However, the effort to turn Hussein’s execution into a triumph for the American occupation has backfired. After limiting itself to showing excerpts from the official video, the television networks were upstaged by an unedited video taken by an Iraqi official with a cell phone and circulated over the Internet.

In this version, ski-masked guards can be heard taunting Hussein, shouting the name of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, making it obvious that this was a sectarian lynching. Hussein’s relative dignity under the circumstances has made him into a martyr across the Arab world, even where he had been previously been viewed with hostility.

No doubt another viewer in Texas was watching the video of Hussein’s execution over New Year’s weekend. While reportedly asleep on his ranch in Crawford Texas at the time of the execution, President Bush knew it would be going forward even though his administration has since tried to distance itself from the timing of the botched event. His official comment was that Hussein’s show trial had been fair, and that he had received “the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.”

In celebrating the lynching of Hussein as justice, the administration, as in so many other things, stands in sharp contradiction to the broad sentiments of the American people. This one more grisly spectacle produced by the US occupation of Iraq was viewed in the US, as around the world, with revulsion and shame.

And, in the case of Sergio Pelico, the crimes carried out by US imperialism in Iraq have produced a tragic echo in the US itself in the death of a young boy.

Original article posted here.

Saudi child hangs himself imitating Saddam's execution

Riyadh, Jan 9: In a third incident of its kind, a 12-year-old Saudi boy accidentally hanged himself while imitating the way former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was executed, media reports said Monday.

Sultan Abdulla al-Shammari hanged himself Sunday in an annexe at his home in Hafr al-Baten, close to the Iraqi border, Saudi Arabia's Okaz newspaper reported.

Sultan's brother came back from the mosque to find him hanging from a rope that he had fixed on an iron door. Two of his younger brothers were sitting helpless beside the dead body.

The older brother unhooked Sultan and took him to the hospital but the child was already dead.

A police investigation into the case is underway.

Two similar cases occurred last week when a 10-year-old boy in Texas and another nine-year-old in Pakistan hanged themselves the same way.

Saddam's execution on Dec 30, 2006 was broadcast on several Arab and Western satellite TV channels.

Original article posted here.