IRAQ: Evidence has emerged that Kurdish women were being sold as sex slaves by the regime of Saddam Hussein, Lynne O'Donnell reports from Istanbul
The Egyptian government is refusing to co-operate with requests to find more than a dozen Kurdish women who disappeared from their homes in northern Iraq and, according to official documents found after the fall of Saddam Hussein, were sold to Egyptian harems as sex slaves.
Requests have been made to the government in Cairo to help find the women, who were rounded up by the former Baathist regime in 1989 and never seen again.
Documents found last month in the northern city of Kirkuk identify the women, who were aged between 12 and 29 years old at the time, and state that they were sold to Egyptian flesh traders.
The kidnapping of the women appears to have been part of Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Kurds, and other groups he regarded as enemies of his state, that was launched in 1987 and known as Anfal.
Kurdish officials said the documents provided evidence of what many people had long suspected - that Saddam's henchmen kidnapped Kurdish girls and women, then forced them into prostitution in other parts of Iraq, or exported them to neighbouring countries as sex slaves.
The revelations contained in Document Number 1601 could also help explain the fate of at least some of the 182,000 people who disappeared in the mass arrests of the Anfal campaign.
The dossier is dated December 10th, 1989, and addressed to the director of Intelligence in Baghdad from the general directory of Intelligence in Kirkuk. It refers to orders received after the first and second Anfal operations in April, May and June, 1987.
It states: "We have arrested different groups of people, among them young girls aged between 14 and 29 years old . . . According to your request, we have sent a group of these girls to the harems and nightclubs of the Arab Republic of Egypt."
The document lists the names and ages of 18 women, 10 from the village of Nawjul, the remainder from villages in the province of Gemiyan.
An official of the Egyptian Embassy in London denied that any Kurdish women had ever been trafficked to Egypt. The official, who asked not to be identified, said: "It is groundless, not related to any facts, completely wrong information, it is fake, far from fact. Egypt has always had good relations with the Kurds . . . We are an Islamic country, we have our traditions, it is impossible that this happened."
He said Cairo would not co-operate with any efforts to trace the women named in the document. "There is nothing to try to find because this is groundless."
For the families of the missing women, the Cairo government's refusal to accept even the possibility that their daughters, sisters and wives were sold to Egyptian flesh pits compounds the horror of Saddam's crimes against the Kurds.
"After 16 years, now I know what happened to my sister," said Mr Abdul Qadir Aziz, who found his sister's name in Document 1601. "Thirty members of my family have disappeared without a trace," he said in an interview translated on www.kurdishmedia.com.
"This has revealed more about the substance of the Iraqi Arab Baath Party, which had a dangerously detailed and substantial programme to destroy the personality of Kurdish females, and to destroy Kurds psychologically and socially," Mr Aziz said.
Mr Basharat Amin Hamza found the names of his sister, two nieces and sister-in-law and counts them among 14 family members who disappeared during the Anfal campaign.
Ms Nazaneen Rashid, a Kurdish women's rights activist based in London, said that the documents found in the ransacked Kirkuk office of Saddam's intelligence agency represented the first solid evidence of a crime she believes was widely perpetrated against Kurdish women.
"I've been shouting in the wilderness about this since 1995. It was a strategy that Saddam used against the Kurds, to dishonour them, to turn all their daughters into whores so that their honour was destroyed," said Ms Rashid.
"Saddam had Kurdish women raped for this reason. It is not unusual; women are always used as a tool in war, and this was part of Saddam's policy," she said.
After Saddam put down a Kurdish uprising against his rule in 1991, "rumours began that Kurdish girls were being sold to Arab countries all around the Gulf.
"I heard from high-ranking Baathist officials that Kurdish girls were being forced into prostitution, and Iraqi soldiers returned from the war in Kuwait with reports that Kurdish girls were working as servants in Kuwaiti homes," she said.
Kurdish officials said that the kidnappings described in Document 1601 were widely known about at the time, but family members believed the women had been sold to brothels in the United Arab Emirates.
A founder of Kurdish Women Action Against Honour Killing, Ms Rashid said that even if the women were traced, they faced the possibility of being murdered by their fathers or brothers to avenge the dishonour their fate had brought on their families.
She said: "It would be very hard to come back into Kurdish society. If and when they are found, they will need special protection and psychological support.
"This notion of dishonour could also mean that no more evidence of this is found - everyone wants to cover everything up. Anything related to women, rape, prostitution, it is all kept under the carpet in an effort to give the impression of purity of the society. It is very hypocritical," Ms Rashid said.
Ms Rashid has written to the Egyptian government, as well as the UN's British and American representatives in Iraq, calling for help in tracing the women. The Ministry of Human Rights of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which administers the region the women came from, has also requested clarification from Cairo.
The Anfal campaign was launched against the Kurds of northern Iraq in 1987, ostensibly to punish them for co-operating with Iran during that country's eight-year war with Iraq.
The campaign was run by Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who had a reputation for extreme brutality and earned himself the sobriquet "Chemical Ali". News of his death during the US-led war was greeted with widespread glee in northern Iraq.
Anfal included military operations like chemical gas attacks carried out by the Iraqi airforce that killed thousands and permanently damaged the health of may more. It also saw the depopulation and destruction of villages, imprisonment, torture and summary executions of Kurdish men, and the draining of the southern marshlands that had been home for centuries to the Marsh Arabs.