Stop executions in Iraq

In the imperialist media, there is no equality among victims or alleged victims of state repression.

In June a young woman was killed in Iran. It is unclear who killed her or why. Yet Iran is a U.S. “enemy,” and so the whole world knows her given name—Neda. Her face quickly showed up on the T-shirts of protesters.

By Aug. 4, the usurpers in Honduras had killed six people who were peacefully protesting the military coup. Unless you follow the progressive Spanish-language press, you might not know this even happened. Of course you haven’t heard their names.

In Iraq, still occupied by 134,000 U.S. troops, still with a U.S. Embassy armed like a fortress, the regime plus its courts and prisons owe their very existence to the U.S. invasion and occupation. But the names of their potential victims are unprinted, or if printed, the individuals are demonized.

On March 10, 2007, Workers World published a story about Iraqi women who faced execution. (See workers.org.) One was charged with the killing of five officers in an attack on the occupation police. Another was charged with participating in an attack on a joint patrol of the Iraqi and U.S. armies in Baghdad; and a third with the killing of an official in the Green Zone in the course of a kidnapping.

To the vast majority of people in the world, even if the charges are true, these women are seen as freedom fighters taking legitimate action to defend their country. Given the state of Iraqi injustice under the U.S. occupation regime, it is likely that torture and rape led to their convictions. Even organizations like Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, though not sympathetic with the Iraqi resistance, have denounced the legal system in occupied Iraq.

Last year an international campaign stopped the executions. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention stated then that “the three Iraqi women will not be executed until an appeals court has ruled on their cases.”

International supporters of human rights for Iraqis under the occupation commented: “This assurance came from Iraqi authorities. It is not enough. We demand to know the charges on which these three Iraqi women stand convicted. We demand to know the date of their appeal hearings. We demand that a public statement is made. We demand that they be afforded all due protections under international human rights and humanitarian law.”

The suspicions behind these demands were justified. Now two of the women, Wassan Talib and Samar Saád ’Abdullah, are again facing execution. According to Amnesty International, they are among at least nine women in Iraq facing imminent execution after recently having their death sentences confirmed. One of the condemned women says she was tortured into falsely confessing.

More than 1,000 people have been executed in Iraq since 2004. A dozen were executed this May. More than a hundred prisoners are on the Iraqi equivalent of death row.

Workers World joins with those in the Iraq Solidarity Association in Stockholm, Sweden, in their anger at the “absence of rights in Iraq under the occupation, an absence of rights for which the occupation power bears ultimate responsibility.”

And with them we say: “Stop the executions of the Iraqi women! Make public all information about the women! Recognize all the legal rights of the women! Guarantee a stop to the rapes and torture! Stop all executions in Iraq!” (www.iraksolidaritet.se)