TV Program "Report" concerning maltreated children in the torture-prison "Report Mainz" vom 5. Juli 2004 - [English translation]
Moderation Fritz Frey: Reports from Iraq: the daily attack, Saddam on trial, kidnapped soldiers, every new headline covers over the preceding one. The scandal of the torture prison of Abu Gharib, oh yes, that was indeed one. REPORT has stuck to this story and has in the process come across a totally unbelievable suspicion. In Abu Gharib and elsewhere children and youth have been incarcerated and mistreated. Thomas Reutter with a difficult search for clues. Report: With tanks coming through the gate. U.S. soldiers storm an apartment building looking for terrorists. Sometimes during such roundups the soldiers also arrest children. What happens to the children? About that the military gives no information. We investigate, as it happens, through informants. One of them, who is knowledgeable about these things, is Sergeant Samuel Provance from U.S. Army Intelligence. For half a year he was stationed in the notorious Abu Ghraib torture-prison. Today, five months later, we meet with Sergeant Provance in Heidelberg. His superiors have strictly forbidden him from reporting to journalists about what he experienced in Abu Ghraib. Yet Provance wants to talk about it nonetheless. Pangs of conscience plague him. He tells us about one 16-year-old, whom he himself had to lead away. Samuel Provance, US-Sergeant: "He was full of fear, very alone. He had the thinnest little arms that I have ever seen. His whole body shook. His wrists were so thin that we could not put handcuffs on him. As soon as I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry for him. The interrogation specialists doused him with water and put him in a truck. Then they drove with him throughout the night, and at that time it was very, very cold. Then they smeared him with mud and showed him to his likewise imprisoned father. With him [the father] they had tried out other interrogation methods. But they had not succeeded in making him talk. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father had seen his son in that condition, it broke his heart. He wept and promised to tell them what they wanted to know." The son however remained in custody, and the 16-year-old was put in with the adults. Yet Provance reported also about a special department, expressly for children. A secret children's wing in the horror prison of Abu Ghraib. One person, who has seen the children's wing with his own eyes, is the journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz. Our correspondent met him some week ago in Baghdad. The Iraqi TV reporter related how he himself was arrested arbitrarily by the Americans while shooting film and spent 74 days in Abu Ghraib. Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter: "There I saw a camp for children. Young, under the age of puberty. In this camp were certainly hundreds of children. Some of them have been released, others are definitely still in there." From his solitary cell in the adults' wing, Suhaib heard a perhaps 12-year-old girl weeping. Later he learned that her brother was on the third floor of the prison. One or two times, says Suhaib, he saw her himself. In the night, according to Suhaib, they were with her in her cell. The girl shreeked out to the other prisoners and called out to her brother. Suhaib Badr-Addin Al-Baz, Fernsehreporter: "She was beaten. I heard her call: 'They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." Daily, says Suhaib, one heard her crying and wimpering. Many of the prisoners wept when they heard her. Suhaib reported also about a sick 15-year-old youth. [They chased him up and down the corridor with heavy water cannisters. translation uncertain] For so long until he collapsed from exhaustion, says Suhaib. Then they brought in his father, also a prisoner. He had a hood over his head. From shock the youth collapsed once again. In the so-called "War on Terrorism," the Americans storm Iraqi houses. According to Suhaib, they sometimes in the process seize whole families who appear suspicious to them. Statements from individual witnesses, difficult to confirm. In the report it reads: Citation:Over this up to now unpublished report UNICEF does not yet want to say anything. [Their reason is that] Their own workers in Iraq should not be put in danger. Seeking more information, we turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose helpers inspected Um Qasr, Abu Ghraib and other places of detention. And after intensive conversations came a further confirmation and even statistics. Florian Westphal, Internationales Komitee vom Roten Kreuz: "We have recorded a total of 107 children between January and May of this year in the course of 19 visits to 6 different detention places. And it must be emphasized that these are detention places that are controlled by coalition troops." In the internment camp Um Qasr and also in Abu Ghraib the Red Cross recorded minors as prisoners. Two international organizations confirmed to us independently of each other that the occupation troops are holding Iraqi children prisoner. Yet we have not received any information directly from the prisons. Even UNICEF was not allowed to visit the child prison in Baghdad. Zitat: "In July 2003 UNICEF applied for a visit to this detention facility, but access was refused." Since December, according to UNICEF, there have been no independent observers in the children's prison. To be sure, the U.S. Army opened the scandal-prison Abu Ghraib for a tour for journalists. Yet the reporters were presented with a for-show facility. Child prisoners were not shown to the press. We hold fast to this: four sources confirm independently of one another, that occupation troops are holding children as prisoners. Two witnesses even report instances of maltreatment. The human rights organization Amnesty International is outraged over the reports of Iraqi child prisoners. Barbara Lochbihler of Amnesty International, Germany, calls for follow-up action. Barbara Lochbihler, GeneralsekretË?rin amnesty international: "The U.S. government has to respond to this report, it must give concrete information about how old the children are, the grounds on which they have been detained, and under what circumstances they were incarcerated. And here we do not know the names of the children or how many children are there. That is scandalous." Concluding moderation by Fritz Frey: Self-evidently, we have confronted the responsible authorities with our research. The British Defense Ministry responded: Children and youth are not being held prisoner by British troops. We are still waiting for an answer from the American Pentagon. Links: www2.amnesty.deExclusive translation for Traprock Peace Center by Richard Gawthrop. Thanks to Paul Amrod, who saw this on German TV and brought it to our attention. Traprock Peace Center http://www.traprockpeace.org Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
|
For our Fair Use of Copyrighted material Notice, 
|
