Throwing Stones
We’re dealing with our prison abuses. Is the Arab world?

June 23, 2004, 8:49 a.m.
By Steven Stalinsky

Responding to the Abu Ghraib controversy, several Arab journalists have noted that the actions of a handful of Americans pale in comparison to what occurs daily inside Arab prisons. This has led to articles in the Arab media calling on Arab leaders to end human-rights violations within their own prisons.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak described Abu Ghraib as "abhorrent and sickening, and against all human values and human rights." But as Yusri Fatyan wrote in the Egyptian paper Al Arabi on May 23: "Frankly, what happens in Egypt doesn't differ much from what happens in Iraq's prisons... So that we don't get a surprise when foreign organizations start talking about some of our police stations, like Helwan, Al Sahel, Bilqas, and others."

Another Egyptian journalist, Muhamad Ali Al Farra, wrote in the Islamist paper Al Shab: "Some Arab rulers have practiced torture on people which no one would believe, and even finishing with tortured bodies by burning them in acid, so how could such rulers condemn torture of Iraqi prisoners? Who is going to throw stones at others when his own house is made of glass?"

Saleh Bin Humaid, chairman of the Saudi Shoura Council, called the Abu Ghraib abuses "hideous scenes of human-rights violations." This, despite the fact that Saudi prisoners have almost no legal rights, and that their punishments are based on Islamic law — including the severing of fingers and hands for stealing, and beheadings for drug-dealing.

Syrian Minister for Expatriate Affairs Buthayna Shaban, who recently returned from a trip to the U.S., wrote in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on February 18, 2004: "The pictures that one lone soldier managed to smuggle out of the Abu Ghraib prison aroused revulsion and condemnation in the world, because of the extent of the contempt for human dignity and fundamental human rights — particularly on the part of the forces that claimed [they had crossed] the oceans to rescue the Iraqi people from the inhumane actions [by the Saddam regime] and to bring freedom and democracy... It is the American administration's supercilious view of the Arabs and Muslims, particularly after the events of September 11, and the racist campaign against Islam and the Muslims in Europe... that leads to crimes of this kind."

Ahmad Jarallah, editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa and noted critic of the Syrian regime, responded in an editorial: "Dr. Buthayna Shaban, who is 'revolted'... should be the last to express her revulsion — because the kinds of torture carried out in the prisons of the regime of which she is a part and in whose services she acts are too numerous to count. No atrocity surpasses the kinds of torment and torture [in the Syrian regime]... We have gone overboard in our talk of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal... None has dared acknowledge that the U.S. behaved properly in uncovering [this] scandal, for having sufficient courage to apologize. It could have remained silent, or denied it — as is the custom of some Arab regimes that torture, assassinate, bury alive, rip out fingernails, and dissolve [people] in pits of acid, and appear before the world like innocent children with angels' wings."

Other Arab journalists have recognized that U.S. actions in Iraq are not based on any sinister plans and that, while the U.S. has made mistakes, it has done more for Iraqis than any Arab state. On the liberal Arabic website Elaph.com, Syrian columnist Hayan Nayouf wrote: "After the scandal of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers, the Arab media handled this affair in a way arousing ridicule, proving that the Arab media and intellectuals possess everything but objectivity, transparency, and disclosure of the truth and the facts... The American president, the president of the most powerful country in the world... apologized for the deeds of the American soldiers, and all the Americans also apologized for this shameful deed. And then the Arab intellectuals came, with their mocking, idiotic, and illogical media, and ridiculed this apology. The question arises whether Saddam or any other Arab leader [ever] apologized. Did Saddam apologize to the Iraqi people for burying a million Iraqis in the ground, for expelling millions of Iraqis, for murdering innocents in his prisons, for his crimes in neighboring countries, for invading Kuwait, and for murdering the Kuwaiti prisoners?"

Since the fall of Saddam's regime, much has been revealed about what transpired within his prisons. The treatment of prisoners went far beyond the terrible incidents of humiliation and the beatings that occurred at the hands of Americans in Abu Ghraib. Iraqi human-rights activist Ibrahim Al Idrissi, the president of the Association for Free Prisoners, an Iraqi NGO, has documented the execution of 147,000 political prisoners under Saddam's regime. Idrissi recounted one incident in which a woman was raped by twelve men, and then had her unborn child cut from her stomach. He told Lebanon's The Daily Star on May 24 that U.S. abuse in Iraqi prisons was a "joke" compared to what was endured under Saddam's regime.

— Steven Stalinsky is executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200406230849.asp