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Searching for Yunis — and how many others?
There are 5,000 Iraqi detainees the CPA admits to holding, a number most suspect is a gross underestimate.
Many of them are imprisoned indefinitely and without charges.
by David Enders, International Occupation Watch Center November 28th, 2003
ABU GRAIB PRISON, Nov. 28 — This massive prison on the southwest edge of Baghdad dwarfs the small dwellings in the surrounding farming community and was once Saddam Hussein’s most feared detention center. It is has new occupants and has been renamed “Baghdad Correctional Facility” but things are very much the same as before — family members of those detained inside wait anxiously in front of the prison gate, standing in line for hours for news of their loved ones. The road from the visitors’ parking lot is a humiliating and muddy slog of a few hundred meters, but lawyers and family make the trek to be met by US military police at the gate who tell them only 20 visits are allowed each day. Two days out of the week are for lawyers only.
“They told me to come back in four months,” said one man as he walked away from the prison. “My son has already been in there for four months and he has been charged with nothing! It was easier to get a visit under Saddam!”
Rory McKewan, an independent Scottish documentary maker, has come to the prison trying to locate his friend Yunis. Yunis is a cameraman who was arrested during a raid on his house in the Al-Adamiyah neighborhood in north Baghdad.
A chunky MP ignores the Iraqis who approach the gate with us and speaks to Rory and I, a pair of westerners.
“How do we request a visit with a prisoner?” Rory asks.
“Do you have the prisoner’s number?”
“Yes.”
The MP looks surprised. It is impossible to get a visit without knowing the prisoner’s number, and many families are unable to find out the numbers — either they are not provided by arresting soldiers or they are not available on lists given to Iraqi offices or misspellings of names during capture and cataloguing prevent a family from even approximating where their relative might be. Yunis’ family received his number when another man in the prison who is from Yunis’ neighborhood was released. Before being released, he wrote down the numbers and locations of many men he knew. This is how many families find out the numbers of their detained relatives, written on scraps of cloth torn from the prison yard tents.
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full at -
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=2080