After a four-hour gun battle in Mosul last week, Qusai Hussein lay
dead, next to brother Uday. Qusai, 37, was best known for the torture
and elimination apparatus that he had operated with cruel efficiency
over the years.
Now, families of the victims are trying to pick up the pieces.
Literally.
When Sadaam's brutal regime toppled in April, thousands of Iraqis
began the grim task of finding their missing loved ones.
"Disappearances" is the euphemism that reveals the faint glimmer of hope
that remains among the kinfolk of persons who were abducted and likely
killed.
According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
have simply disappeared since the early 1980s. Despite the varied
nationalities and ethnic and religious backgrounds of these victims,
almost all of them had one thing in common: they were male.
Really?
For example, one Amnesty International report noted that "in August
1983, Iraqi forces arrested some 8,000 men and boys, aged between 8 and
70, from the Barzani clan near Arbil." In
another case,
"thousands of
male members, including minors of those families who were deported to
Iran, were arrested and detained."
A 2001
Amnesty report on torture in Iraqi likewise revealed the grim
finding that the victims of Sadaam's torture machine were almost always
male.
And this past May, Human Rights Watch released a report on
The Mass
Graves of al-Mahawil. The
investigation noted that in 1991, Iraqi forces entered al-Shamali,
where, according to one eyewitness account, "They chased and traced all
the sons of my tribe." A tally provided by the local authorities
revealed, "The vast majority of the victims appear to have been young
men from the general area around al-Hilla."
Of the 2,600 bodies discovered near the village of al-Mahawil, it can
be estimated that at least 90% of the victims were male. Anyone who
doubts that statistic can visit the city squares around the country
where grieving wives and mothers have plastered the photographs of the
missing.
The point is, these persons were innocent civilians. And male.
So when the topic of gender oppression in Iraq comes up, why do people
automatically think of women?
The answer can be found in newspapers like the Washington Post that
have run a steady series of one-sided articles over the past two months
on the mistreatment of Iraqi women -- but have remained silent on the
elimination of innocent civilian men. Other examples of sex bias by the
media were documented in a
previous
essay.
The answer can be found in recent reports from Human Rights Watch that
deplore the rape or abduction
of 25 women, but fail to ask why some
2,300
boys and men at al-Mahawil were singled out for elimination
.
The answer can be found in bizarre statements by government officials
like Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary at the State Department, who wrote
in the Washington Post on July 2, 2003, "Now our first priority is also
of greatest concern to Iraqi women themselves: security for them and
their families."
Why the security of men was absent from Dobriansky's list of
priorities is anybody's guess.
In a society that prides itself on enlightened concern for fairness
and equality, sometimes we must sometimes ask ourselves unsettling
questions.
The silent graves in far-away Iraq compel us to ask, Does a person's
life count for less because he happens to be male?
