Survivor of Iraqi horror makes case for peace

by Mike Littwin

Rocky Mountain News

November 30, 2002

Ibrahim Kazerooni doesn't need anyone to lecture him on the evils of Saddam Hussein.

Ibrahim Kazerooni sits in his smallish southwest Denver mosque, where he is the imam, and slowly and calmly and sadly and, finally, tearfully expounds on the evils of Saddam. These are evils Saddam's thugs have committed against him personally.

All who have left Iraq, Kazerooni says, hate Saddam with "every cell of their being."

We only have Kazerooni's version of events. But if you listen to his story - he tells it one Ramadan morning from the Islamic Center of Ahl Al-Beit - you believe every powerful word he says. You can only reflect, yet again, on man's tireless inhumanity to man.But that isn't what brought you to see Kazerooni. You came because you heard he had allied himself with the local anti-war movement and you wanted to know how to reconcile the two facts.

How, you ask, does a victim of Saddam's torture come to oppose the war against his tormenter?Kazerooni says it's not so hard to understand. He wants Saddam overthrown as much as anyone. He just doesn't want America doing the overthrowing. He'd rather America supported rebel groups within Iraq.

He thinks you can trace many of the problems in the Muslim world to the Western powers' bad habit of installing leaders in countries without consulting the citizenry.

He wonders, too, whether America, Saddam's former friend in the Iraqi war against Iran, has the standing to do the job.

He says he was astounded when George W. Bush offered the shocking pictures of Kurds who were gassed in the late '80s as a rationale for attacking Iraq. Kazerooni says that while most European countries were condemning Saddam for using mustard gas at the time, it was the United States "that stood and said the evidence wasn't conclusive."

Even as the weapons inspectors return to Baghdad, the war drums continue to beat. You know the tune. There are Sad-

dam's weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not possess. There is the hypothetical scenario - rejected by many - in which Iraq hands off the WMD to a terrorist who blows up something American. There is the danger, too, that Saddam represents to his neighbors - a danger, though, that seems to have been in check since the Persian Gulf War.

And then there's the argument that trumps all the others. It's the one that hits you at your core. It's the one that says Saddam, the self-admitted admirer of Josef Stalin, terrorizes his own people. It's clearly this Saddam that the world, and especially Iraq, would be a far better place without. Sure, there are other human rights violators out there. China, to name one, ends up with the 2008 Olympics as America applauds. But Saddam is, by anyone's standards, among the worst in modern times.

It's when Kazerooni rejects this argument for war - the seemingly inarguable argument - that he demands attention. Because, believe me, Kazerooni has the moral standing to make his case.

He earned it starting at age 15. The lesson began when four men in a long black Russian car - this was 1974, when long black Russian cars were in vogue in that part of the world - grabbed him outside his school. It was a religious school where Kazerooni, a Shiite Muslim from a long line of theologians, studied. If you came to this story late, Saddam has been persecuting Shiite clerics since he came to power 34 years ago.

The story, as Kazerooni tells it, is quite graphic. It's a story he couldn't bring himself to tell for many years. He says he tried to suppress it in order to live with it.When he tells it now, he stops and the voice catches and the tears well up and he's a young boy again in a torture chamber and they're pouring the boiling water down his throat.

"Immediately, the torture started," he says of his stay at the infamous Fifth Department. "My hands were tied to my feet in the back . . . and then they mercilessly started beating me. The shock was so great that I couldn't cry. I couldn't even feel. After a half an hour to 45 minutes, they asked me to get up. My feet were numb, I couldn't stand."

The next day, the torturers returned. This time, he lost consciousness, only to wake up in a cell so small he couldn't even stand. The room was completely dark and there was, he says, a "very rotten smell" that he couldn't immediately place.

The smell was people - 20 poor souls stuffed into a cell maybe 15 feet by 25 feet, with no window, no circulation and a heat that could kill.

He was 15, thrown in with adults who would become his mentors in survival. The most important skill they taught him: to never sign a confession, no matter how painful the torture. If he signs, they told him, he will be shot. If he doesn't sign, he may live.

The next morning, Kazerooni was pulled from his cell and tied by his feet to a revolving ceiling fan and beaten with batons, with sticks, with cable, until he lost consciousness.

The next day, they hanged him from his hands and beat him again. And so his life would go. And then came the day he was beaten and, after losing consciousness, found himself in a chair that looked like a dentist's chair.

"My hands were kind of clamped," he explains. "Later on, when I went to England and I saw some of the old British history, it reminded me of the torture chambers of the kings . . . There was a piece of metal around my head, holding my head stiff. My neck was clamped. My shoulders were tied. The only thing I could move was my eyes and lips.

"They made the usual threats, 'If you don't sign the paper, we will kill you,' and so on and so forth. I just said, 'I haven't done anything.' "

Then they knocked him unconscious. And when he woke up, he was in the same chair, with his mouth wide open, strings holding it in place, and a pot of boiling water in plain view.

"I was told to sign," he says. And here he stopped, the pain clearly still with him.

"I said I wouldn't sign. And somebody picked up a glass of boiling water and poured it down my throat."

When he woke up this time, there were blisters all over his mouth. He was screaming. The pain would not subside. They threatened, he says, to kill him if he didn't stop screaming. He couldn't.

Eventually they took him to a doctor, who, Kazerooni says, had tears in his eyes when he treated him.

And three days later, he was taken to another building, the palace where the king was shot in the 1958 revolution, a palace now designed as a torture chamber. One day, after weeks of torture, they took him from his cell and told him he would be shot.

They led him to a room and brought in a person whose head was covered by a sack. Kazerooni couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman.

"In front of my eyes," he says in a whisper, "they shot this person dead. Once the body was removed, they gave me a few towels and told me to wipe up the blood and then to stand in the same place and they would come back for me."

He wiped up the blood. He stood where they told him. And he listened to every sound, thinking it would be the last he'd hear. His life, as in the movies, flashed before him. He waited, he says, for what seemed like an eternity - and then they took him back to his cell.

Only to do the same thing again the next day. And the day after. And the day after.

After two months, for reasons unknown, they released him. They took him to a bus station, and the bus driver, seeing his bruised body, drove him to his hometown.

But months later, they came after him again. This time, though, he was able to hide with friends and then escape from Iraq.

Eventually, he got to England, where he went to the university to become an engineer. After some years of what he called his time of disillusionment, he returned to his faith. He traveled across Europe and into Canada, and two years ago, he took the position as imam at the Islamic Center.Now he finds himself in the strange position of opposing a war against his torturer. His reasons are the same you hear from other protesters - that the inspections should be given a chance to work, that many people would die, that war could well destabilize the region, that the people who would most suffer are the Iraqis themselves and they've suffered too much already. He also argues that American support for Israel undermines its position in the Muslim world."You don't need a reason for peace," Kazerooni says. "Peace is part of human nature. But you need a reason for war.

"The average Iraqi has suffered under the embargo since 1991. He doesn't hear anyone talk about the hospitals that don't work, the schools that have been damaged. When Iraqis hear the American reasons for war, they are uneasy. They think there must be some other reason."

Kazerooni can't speak for all Iraqis, just as you or I can't speak for all Americans. Polls show shifting degrees of support for the war. The inspectors seem to be satisfied in the early going. But as the debate rages, there's one point no one can dispute: Kazerooni has earned the right to be heard.

Mike Littwin's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Call him at (303) 892-5428 or e-mail him at littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com. 

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