By Guillaume Decamme
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq: Kamiran Aziz Ali grimaces and leans forward, his hands behind his back, re-enacting the moment in January 1990 when Saddam Hussein’s henchmen flung him into a jail cell in the “Red House.” “I am still in pain,” Ali says. “I cannot sit down for a long time anymore.”
His return to the cell where he was jailed was not genuine.
For years an infamous torture center earmarked for Kurdish rebels fighting the ex-dictator’s regime, the Red House was used as a threat by Kurdish fathers to their sons for not doing their homework or other misdeeds. The Red House is now a museum.
Once used to extract so-called confessions from anti-Saddam fighters, since 1996 the Red House has exhibited the torture used by regime loyalists before the three-province Kurdish region of northern Iraq gained some autonomy from the dictator’s rule.
Officially called the National Museum in Order Not to Forget, locals still refer to it by its Saddam-era nickname. The concrete building lies in a wealthy neighborhood of Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan’s second city, 270 km north of Baghdad.
While the red paint that covered its walls has faded over time, the bars and barbed wire that stopped inmates from escaping are still in place.
Before 1991, hundreds of Kurdish rebel fighters were imprisoned in the Red House, accused of “subversion.” The current governor of Sulaimaniyah province was among them.
It took six years to build the facility, which was designed by engineers of the former East Germany, according to museum director Ako Gharib:
“This was not a prison in the conventional sense. It was an interrogation center. Detainees stayed here for six to eight months and would then be transferred to Abu Ghraib or Baghdad.”
Interrogation at the Red House was a euphemism for General Security’s method of extracting “confessions” from inmates.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Gharib says, each room in the facility was dedicated to a specific form of torture.
In one soundproofed office, museum visitors are shown a likeness of a detainee whose hands are tied to a metal pipe on the ceiling, his feet about 50 centimeters off the ground.
In a second room, guards would tie inmates’ feet to a metal bar held at waist height, while another guard would beat the detainee’s feet with an electric cable or metal pipe, for 6-12 hours at a time.
Now a civil servant in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Education Ministry, Ali suffered a different form of torture.
Having joined the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – the rebel group that is now the political party of Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani – in the 1970s, he was arrested and thrown in the Red House.
“They told me, ‘If you confess we will not torture you,’ and ‘If you will not confess, we will put a power cable on your penis and pass an electric current through it.’”
“When I lie down to sleep, I remember this place where, for two months, my bed was a piece of cardboard.”
The practice of extracting confessions continues to plague Iraq.
Ali was freed when Sulaimaniyah’s March 1991 uprising put an end to the Red House’s activities.
Memories from the Red House, however, are still vivid. “This building was a dungeon for a dictator,” he says. “We can never forget.”
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12/07/2013
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Performance/2013/Jul-12/223349-memories-vivid-at-torture-center-turned-museum.ashx#axzz2YiL5coi3
