Blog 6

Back to one of the boils on the face of the planet. Not Afghanistan or Iran this time but that pestilential hole known as Iraq. Apart from Shias versus Sunnis and bombs set off ostensibly to frighten off voters in the forthcoming election, the world needs to take note of the following to realise where religious bigotry can take one. I don’t know whether or not it is copyright material but I am posting it edited anyway.

Iraq ‘killing campaign’ targets gay men
Graffiti in a Najaf neighborhood says, “Death to the People of Lot”, using a derogatory term in Arabic for men who engage in homosexual conduct, derived from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
“A killing campaign moved across Iraq in the early months of 2009,” Human Rights Watch writes in a report released today. It’s a campaign that aims to kill, torture, and terrorize men suspected of being gay or of not being sufficiently “masculine”.
HRW says the executions appear to be part of a coordinated campaign throughout the county, and that Iraq’s government has done little to stop them.
“This report… documents a campaign of violence against men in Iraq who are suspected of being gay or who simply don't act masculine enough in the eyes of their killers,” said Scott Long, director of HRW's LGBT Rights Program.
In the report, entitled “They want us exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq”, HRW researchers said it is almost impossible to calculate how many men have been killed, but estimated the figure in the hundreds.
The report says:
[T]he sharp spike in killings this year points to lethal failures that persist, despite the Iraqi government’s and coalition authorities’ self-congratulation on their supposed pacification of society. In Iraq, armed groups still are free to persecute and kill based on prejudice and hatred; the state still greets their depredations with impunity.
Associated Press talked to “an Iraqi Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity” who acknowledged there has been a sharp escalation in attacks against gay men this year by suspected Shiite extremists, but the official told the news service he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue with the media,
“What we found is disturbing,” said HRW researcher Rasha Moumneh. “We heard stories of murder, extra-judicial executions, brutal torture, abductions, extortions, detainees and threats.
Although the current wave of violence began in the Sadr City stronghold of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in Baghdad, it has spread to other parts of Iraq, HRW’s researchers found:
At this writing, in July 2009, the campaign remains at its most intense in Baghdad, but it has left bloody tracks in other cities as well; men have been targeted, threatened or tortured in Kirkuk, Najaf, Basra. Murders are committed with impunity, admonitory in intent, with corpses dumped in garbage or hung as warnings on the street. The killers invade the privacy of homes, abducting sons or brothers, leaving their mutilated bodies in the neighborhood the next day. They interrogate and brutalize men to extract names of other people suspected of homosexual conduct. They specialize in grotesque and appalling tortures: several doctors told Human Rights Watch about men executed by injecting glue up their anuses. (and then force feeding them laxatives)
Little known militias with names like Ahl al Haq (the “People of Truth”) have claimed responsibility for some of the executions, but HRW says members of the Mehdi Army militia group are thought to be spearheading the campaign.
Several people speculated to us that the Mahdi Army, striving to rebuild its reputation after a prolonged absence, sought to rehabilitate itself by appearing as an agent of social cleansing. It exploited morality for opportunistic purposes; it aimed at popularity by targeting people few in Iraq would venture to defend.
Police are also accused of participating in the terror campaign - even though homosexuality is legal. In some cases, Human Rights Watch says it was told, Iraqi security forces had actually “colluded and joined in the killing”
Both the media and sermons in mosques warn of a wave of effeminacy among Iraqi men, and execrate the “third sex.” Panic that some people have turned decadent or “soft” amid social change and foreign occupation seems to motivate much of the violence.
A May 2009 article in an Iraqi magazine acknowledged that “kidnappers” were targeting mithliyeen or homosexuals, but the article blamed not the murderers but the “puppies” – men who do not act like men.
The article approvingly talks of those who join a battle against what it calls “deviant phenomena”:
Bilal, a 27-year-old from the Baghdad neighborhood of Karada told HRW researchers that a friend had been killed three months ago. Bilal told HRW: He was very public, everybody knew he was gay. His family said his killers made a CD of how he was killed—they filmed it. They slaughtered him; they cut his throat. His family did not want to talk about it. And now they are killing people right and left in Shaab and al-Thawra. We heard 11 men were burned alive in al-Thawra. Everyone is talking about the numbers of people killed. And they just keep rising.
The next day, after my boyfriend was murdered, they came for me. They came into my house and they saw my mother, and one of them said: “Where’s your faggot son?” There were five men. Their faces were covered. Fortunately I wasn’t there but my mother called me after they left, in tears. From then on, I hid in a cheap hotel for two weeks. I can’t face my family—they would reject me. I can’t go home.
The Iraqi state must desist from silence, and fully and immediately investigate the murder and torture of people targeted because they do not correspond to norms of “masculinity,” or are suspected of homosexual conduct. It must appropriately punish those found responsible. It must take effective steps to restrain militia violence consistent with its own human rights obligations. It should dismiss any police or criminal justice officials who are found responsible for human rights abuses or who have been linked in the past to death squads or militia forces. …
The US and the US-led multinational forces in Iraq should assist the Iraqi government wherever possible in investigating these crimes.
What chance?