Mideast Dispatches

At 34, Ali is four years younger than I am. But he looks old enough to be my father.

It isn't only his graying beard or the deep furrows that mark his face. It is also his cheerless eyes and his resigned, hunched shoulders that speak to his plight. This man has been to hell and back and it most definitely shows.

Ali is one of thousands of Iraqis who at some point in their lives were victims of torture.

Many of them were subjected to inhumane incarceration and investigation techniques under Saddam Hussein's old Baath party regime. Others became victims of violent torture in the new Iraq at the hands of errant officials or marauding sectarian gangs.

Ali had the misfortune of experiencing the mercilessness of both types.

Under Saddam's regime, he was a reluctant soldier who deserted at one point after being denied leave to be with his first-born son. The authorities caught up with him and he was beaten in the relentless summer heat and forced to crawl into a hole in the ground full of mud for added humiliation.

His final punishment, he says, was to carry a bucket filled with sand around his neck and spin around. He says he was then zapped with electric cables, which sent him into a coma for several months.

When he came to, he was an altogether different person: Aggressive, combative and very violent. He started beating his wife. He would also cry at the drop of a hat.

He knew he needed help but in Ali's Iraq there was nowhere to go.

What to do

After months of being thrown in and out of prison, Ali eventually ran away to Lebanon with his family. That is where I first met him at the humble Beirut office of the Restart Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Violence, a small outfit with a huge job: To help Iraqi refugees here deal with the memories and consequences of torture and violence.

Very few non-governmental organizations, or governments for that matter, have given much thought to the psychological health of the millions of Iraqi refugees who have fled their homeland.

That is probably primarily because these groups are preoccupied with the more immediate needs of shelter, food and education.

But the psychological well-being of these victims is a pressing matter, both inside and outside Iraq. A large number of adult Iraqis suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. An unacceptable number of Iraqi women live everyday with the ugly memories of rape.

As well, many Iraqi children are growing up with psychological problems related to traumatic events they have witnessed or experienced. That in turn hinders their ability to learn and often leads to the kinds of behavioural problems that can affect the entire family.

Signs of torture

Torture victims are particularly overrepresented among the Iraqi population.

In Baghdad I met former soldiers whose ears were partially cut off to mark them for life as deserters.

Shortly after Saddam's regime fell, I visited a seemingly ordinary suburban home that had been converted into an interrogation centre where thousands of detainees had been shocked by electric cables attached to car batteries and held in large numbers in tiny, dank rooms for punishment.

Two years later, I met a man who had been hung from his arms for hours and whose legs were covered with the telltale signs of cigarette burns. He had refused to admit that he was a member of the insurgency, even though he was not. His torturers were policemen serving at the Interior Ministry under the new, post-Saddam government.

Also in this group would be the many Iraqi detainees who were so famously humiliated at the hands of U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Small comfort

The Restart centre has been seeing Iraqi victims of torture since 1996, but this year, with the help of a small grant from the UN, it opened a new office in Beirut to respond to the growing number of Iraqi refugees here. The centre is already dealing with some 250 Iraqi patients, some of whom will require treatment for life.

"The picture is very black," says Restart director, Dr. Suzanne Jabbour. "Torture victims can suffer from depression, anger, insomnia, anxiety, sleeping and eating disorders, and acute stress.

"It is very, very hard to deal with this type of disorder, because, how can you give people hope if they have lost everything?"

Ali is a case in point. "A cure is difficult," Ali told me. "There are things inside me that I can never forget."

One of them is a night in Baghdad, shortly after he had returned following the fall of Saddam.

He was on his way to a dinner at a friend's house with his wife when two cars filled with men corralled him into stopping. One of the men stabbed him several times and left him for dead; the others took his wife and sped away.

When Ali awoke in the hospital, he found out his wife had been beaten and repeatedly raped before she was let go.

"I wished that I would be dead so all this wouldn't stay inside me," he said, adding "I hope God never forgives them."

The violence inside

Ali says he feels some improvement in his mental state with the therapy and medication the Restart centre provides. From time to time, though, the anger does resurface.

"This centre is my second home," he says. "If Iraq became heaven and God told me there's a palace for you in that heaven, I would say, no, leave me here, or find me a third place, anything but return to Iraq."

On June 26 every year, the UN marks a day in support of victims of torture. Yet there is so little offered to the thousands of Iraqi victims of torture, both inside the country and out, to come to terms with the violence they have had to endure.

There is much said these days about the gains made in the security situation in Iraq and many thanks have been handed out to the countries and agencies that have helped shelter the millions of Iraqis who have left their homeland.

But little has been done to address the violence inside the individuals themselves — the long-term individual, social and domestic consequences of so many people living with the memories of torture.

Added to the violence that is still very much part of living in Iraq, including the hardships of the continuing shortages of water, electricity and jobs, living with those memories must be unbearable.

Not only do these memories harm the individual and their immediate families but, in the words of the man who was hung by his arms at the interior ministry, they can also sow the seeds for future terrorism.

At the Restart centre, a poster on the wall declares that silence is an accomplice of torture. In the case of Iraq, that's a lot of accomplices.

The Restart Centre is a member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. For more information, please visit www.irct.org

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