09/18/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10136

SADDAM HUSSEIN’S REPRESSION

In a major address to the United Nations General Assembly, President George W. Bush said that Saddam Hussein "has proven...only his contempt for the United Nations." Mr. Bush reminded the U-N delegates that in 1991 the Iraqi regime accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 6-8-8, requiring it to stop repressing the Iraqi people. Iraq was also required to allow visits by representatives of international organizations. But from 1992 to the present, Saddam Hussein has prevented U-N human rights representatives from entering Iraq.

Saddam Hussein has continued his noxious campaign of violence against the Iraqi people. Last year, the U-N Commission on Human Rights issued a report that documented the "systematic, widespread, and extremely grave violations of human rights" by the Iraqi government. Amnesty International has reported that Iraq has the world’s worst record for the number of persons who have disappeared or remain unaccounted for. And in June 2001, the Human Rights Alliance reported that Saddam Hussein had killed more than five-hundred journalists and other intellectuals in the past decade.

Iraqi security services routinely torture detainees. According to former prisoners, torture techniques include branding, electric shocks, pulling out of fingernails, and denying food and water.

Saddam Hussein’s repression, said President Bush, "is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents. And all of these horrors [are] concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state."

As President Bush said, "If we fail to act...the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission."