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Human Rights in Iraq
(Ha'aretz) Micha Odenheimer - Interview with Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, one of Germany's leading authorities on human rights in Iraq: In 1991, we were the only Europeans in Amara in the Shi'ite area of southern Iraq near Basra, and we arrived just a few weeks after the uprising had been crushed. The Iraqis made people lie down in the streets and then buried them alive under asphalt. They killed everyone who looked a little religious, because this was a Shi'ite area. It was forbidden to take the corpses from the street. All in all, 60,000 or 70,000 people were killed in this area. Syria is a dictatorship, but the fear and control in Iraq reaches into your living room. If there is no picture of Saddam Hussein in your living room, you might be arrested. In Syria, as long as you are not a member of the opposition, you can relax. You know you will not be harmed. But in Iraq, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you may be arrested, tortured, killed. The estimate of one million killed [by Saddam] only includes civilians. A million Iraqi soldiers were killed in the Iran-Iraq war. A half-million Iraqis died of hunger or disease because of sanctions on Iraq, and more were killed in the Gulf War. Ten percent of the Iraqi population has been killed or deported during the rule of Saddam Hussein. He is conducting a war against his own people and it must be stopped. The [Iraqi] Ba'ath ideology mixes pan-Arabism with admiration of Mussolini and Hitler, some ideas of state socialism, and the notion of an Arab supremacy which will be realized after the Arabs have liberated themselves from foreign - that means mainly Jewish - influence and British and American imperialism. Everything in Iraq is explained through this huge conspiracy theory against the Arabs, in general, and Iraq, in particular. With regimes like the Iraqi one, there will be no peace in the Middle East. You cannot contain a regime like Saddam Hussein's.