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First war crimes museum opens
By: Kareem Omer (Bulletin Northern Correspondent)
Published date: 7/7/2003
SULAMANIYEH — A windowless, bullet-ridden building here that once housed prisoners has been turned into Iraq's first a war crimes museum.
Dubbed Amna Suraka (Red Security), the building was used by the ex-regime to house and torture prisoners.
One of the chambers was ironically referred to as the “Sheraton” by the prisoners since it was a clean, tidy room with walls made of sound-proof material so cries would not emanate from the chamber while prisoners were being tortured.
When the Kurdish uprising against the former Iraqi government broke out in the spring of 1991, the building was the last refuge for the Baath loyalists and it was there that the fiercest resistance took place. It then became a home for displaced Kurdish people for several years during the last decade before Hero Ibrahim, wife of Jalal Talabani, secretary general of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, decided to turn it into a war crimes museum.
The funds she raised for the museum were small and intermittently donated, which led to a slow pace of work for the project. The museum now contains five statues of ex-prisoners and a long and narrow hall covered with small pieces of broken glass. Its ceiling is lit by many small bulb lights and there is an archive of pictures and documents seized by Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas during the uprising.
The facade of the building and a large proportion of its chambers have been left unchanged to express the brutality of the place. Surviving prisoners provided museum staff with information to accurately recreate the confinement cells and collective rooms.
Former prisoners sometimes visit the site and with their children and friends to tell them about the traumatic experiences they went through during their stay in the prisons. The prison chamber is a separate compound inside the building, empty and deadly silent. The writings of former prisoners remain on the walls.
Local artist Kamaran Omer sculpted all five statues in the museum.
“Two of the statues are of two late prisoners who were executed on the same day and the other three are from my own imagination,” Omer said.
Atta Ahmed Qadir's statue, a member of the PUK underground network, has been placed in a collective chamber in the second story of the building. Atta, dressed in a traditional Kurdish suit, faces the small window at the top edge of the wall. The other statues are in different postures: a man handcuffed and blindfolded sitting on some steps in the corridor, another standing handcuffed in front of a collective chamber. Perhaps the most expressive one is of a man hung on a hook with his hands bound behind his back. The prison used to contain separate chambers for women and children.
The statue of Mamosta Ahmed (Teacher Ahmed) sits in the same cell Ahmed himself occupied in the prison. Ahmed, also a member of the PUK underground, was selected because all the prisoners who escaped death in the prison spoke of his braveness and steadfastness in the face of his torturers, Omer said.
Along with four of his other colleagues, Ahmed was executed in November 1990 in Abu Ghraib prison. Ahmed's body, along with several others, was found in May in the Karikh graveyard near Abu Ghraib and returned to Sulamaniyeh to be reburied.
Besides the administration of the museum, the building now hosts a permanent war photo exhibition and the office of Society of Kurdistan Free Prisoners.
Published date: 7/7/2003
Author: Kareem Omer (Bulletin Northern Correspondent)
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