Iraqi women revive bonds forged in prison

The woman sketched the air with graceful hands, speaking softly as she recreated each detail. Once or twice she giggled in embarrassment. Her eight-year-old daughter leaned against her lap, listening gravely to every word.

"They threw me into the cell, joking and pointing. They hung me up on a hook until I could feel my ribs breaking. They shocked me with wires until I fainted." The woman paused to demonstrate, touching her wrists and twisting both arms behind her chair. Then she took a sip of orange juice and continued.

"When they were finished, they dragged me down a corridor with a pipe running along the floor. There were many men handcuffed to it. It was too dark to see their faces, but their backs were naked. As the officers walked by, they stubbed out cigarettes on their skin."

Surayah Abdel Kadhim is 45 now, a plump, pretty woman who bears a slight resemblance to actress Liv Ullman. Her particular corner of deposed president Saddam Hussain's hell no longer exists, but she has preserved her memories of nearly six years as a political prisoner - from the indignity of institutionalised torture to the sisterhood of shared confinement - as proud souvenirs of survival.

There were 300 women in the special cellblock at Baghdad's Rashad Prison with Kadhim, who was held there from 1986 to 1991. Like her, most were Shiite Muslims accused of helping the Dawa party or other underground Islamic groups that fomented violent resistance to the Saddam government during the Iran-Iraq war.

By the 1990s, most of the women were released into the larger prison of a society under dictatorial rule, where they scattered and shrank into the shadows, forbidden to keep in touch with one another and afraid to tell their stories to outsiders.

Now the women of Rashad are hesitantly emerging from their second seclusion and reviving the bonds that once kept them alive, meeting in one another's homes and at the recently formed Union of Political Prisoners. But some still fear being followed or denounced to the authorities, others have never re-built normal family lives, and many are still physically or emotionally fragile.

"For so long we were trapped at home. People were afraid to speak to us, informers were sent to spy on us," said Kadhim, an accountant and teacher who lives in an old house on an alley in the sprawling Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya. "Now I can walk to the market again, and my friends can come to my house. The smallest things feel like freedom."

Last week, a group of former cell mates gathered in Kadhim's tiny carpeted parlour. All were educated, professional women and practicing Shiites, dressed in full black capes and bonnets that covered their foreheads and were tied snugly under their chins. To Iraq's former government, they had been criminals, guilty of abetting illegal organisations in which membership alone was a capital crime.

Bonds of politics

But in Iraq's highly organised Shiite community, where the bonds of politics, religion and family form an inextricable web, and where hundreds of thousands of men joined the underground resistance movement of the 1980s, these women's crimes were often acts of family duty and charity as well.

Kadhim, for example, was given a life sentence - after a 10-minute trial before a secret Revolutionary Court - for bringing medical aid to a wounded fugitive who had taken refuge on her family's land. Another woman, Adimah Ali, 47, was condemned to death as a militant financier, though she insisted she was only raising money for widows and orphans of executed men.

"It was all lies, all of it. I still get furious when I read this," Ali said, her face flushing bright red as she showed a visitor her formal, typed confession. "They dragged in my husband's nephew and tortured him until he told them I was smuggling weapons and money from Iran. He was only 16 then." She began to weep, covering her face with her hands, revealing nails bitten to the nub.

Ali, a mother of four, said she came within hours of being put to death in prison, but a sympathetic official spotted the farewell message to her children she had penned on her hand and decided to stay the execution.

She was released in 1991, but her in-laws blamed her for the torture and execution of the nephew. "Even now they do not speak to me," she said, reddening again as the old wound flared. A third woman, Nadia Najih, was just 14 when she was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring with an older brother to finance an illegal Shiite party.

At the time, she had recently been widowed; her husband, a soldier in the Iraqi army, had been killed in battle while she awaited trial. "They took pity on me because I was a minor and a martyr's widow," said Najih, now 34. "Otherwise I would have been condemned to death."

When she eventually left jail, Najih said, security agents hounded her family, even forcing her to marry a brother-in-law as a way to keep her at home, pregnant and cut off from anti-government politics.

"He's a good man, but they bothered him all the time, sabotaging his business and pressing him to become an informer," she said angrily. "It all came down on my head."

Next to her huddled Ahlam Ahmed, a sad-eyed woman of 50, who nursed Kadhim back to health when she first arrived at Rashad, barely able to stand or hold a spoon after repeated interrogations. At their re-union last week, the two women hugged and laughed like old college roommates, but Ahmed seemed depressed, saying she had never been able to marry or return to her work as a chemistry teacher.

"I was a convict in a dictatorship. Who would want me?" she said with a resigned shrug. Unlike the other women, she initially shied away from being photographed, saying her family feared for her safety. "Last spring the TV showed a man hitting Saddam's poster with a slipper," she said grimly. "After that he was assassinated."

Sympathetic peers

In some ways, the simple hardships of prison life - insulated from society and shared with sympathetic peers - seemed easier for these women to endure than the interlocking pressures of family and religious politics that made them permanent targets of suspicion, ostracism and blackmail afterwards.

Both Kadhim and the others expressed nostalgia for the companionship and care they received from the mostly Shiite sorority in Rashad, whose members treated one another's wounds and illnesses, served as proxy families, and co-operated in cleaning the cellblock and sharing scarce resources.

"The hardest thing was the lack of water and bathrooms," Kadhim re-counted. "The sewage was always flooded, and we had to wait in line for hours to use the toilet. We organised a schedule for taking showers and washing floors, but many women came down with skin and urinary illnesses because they could not keep clean."

When she finally got out, she added, "the most precious thing to me was being able to go to the toilet whenever I wanted to."

More than most prisoners, the Rashad women relied on one another for psychological sustenance. As political prisoners, they were almost totally isolated - denied books, pencils, newspapers and radios and, with rare exceptions, not allowed even monthly family visits.

In many cases, moreover, their husbands, brothers an