Torture was routine in Basra

Anwar Abdul Razak said both his ears were cut off. Saad Abdul Wahab said his jailers placed electrodes on his navel to administer shocks. Rassem Issa said his shoulders were dislocated and an electric wire was wrapped around his private parts and attached to a hand-cranked machine. Zuhair Kubba said he was hung upside down and beaten with an iron rod.

Former prisoners of ousted president Saddam Hussain's government are everywhere in Basra, standing on street corners waiting for water, rummaging through papers in the headquarters of the once-feared secret police, sitting quietly at home on a hot afternoon.

These are the tortures they describe, and more: a prisoner forced to sit on a heated metal stove, a small blade used to slash a prisoner's back.

Even doctors became torturers; they cut off army deserters' ears. Servants of the system fell victim to it, too: police officers and prison guards arrested, tortured, then sent back to work.

In more than two dozen interviews since the British military entered Basra April 6 and Saddam's Baath Party government collapsed in Baghdad three days later, former prisoners recounted in minute detail stories of torture in the city's prisons.

In most cases, there are no documents to verify their accounts, only the scars on their bodies and the corroboration of relatives and neighbours.

The accumulation of their experiences, however, provides insight into how the Baghdad government kept control here in the capital of Iraq's Shiite-inhabited south, where periodic rebellions against Saddam's Baath Party have broken out and been suppressed.

A major challenge to Saddam's rule arose here during the 1980-88 war with neighbouring Iran. Iran-sponsored subversion had helped set off the war, raising fears that Iraq's 60 per cent Shiite majority would break away from Baghdad's secular rule.

Then in 1991, after the Gulf War, an open Shiite rebellion briefly shoved aside Saddam's central government, until the Shiite rebels were put down with overwhelming force and Baghdad's security forces set out to suppress any further dissent.

Many of the missing men sought by family members were arrested after 1991. In 1994, a flood of army desertions caused Saddam to issue a decree ordering deserters' ears cut off, and that order appears to have been carried out with particular ferocity here.

In 1999, another uprising swept Basra and the cities of the south after Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sader, a prominent Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf, was gunned down with his two sons in an assassination blamed on government operatives.

The interviews suggest that torture became widespread as the uprisings were contained and that the abuse often continued until a confession was extracted and a sentence imposed.

Many prisoners and former Baath Party officials said such torture was encouraged by a system of financial incentives. The goal, said numerous prisoners, was to extract a confession that the prisoner opposed Saddam and the Baath Party.

Torture was considered so routine that many former prisoners shrugged at first when asked about it. "Of course, they tortured me. Beating people here is something regular," said Maithem Naji.

Naji said he was arrested and jailed for 42 days because he spoke with United Nations representatives who came by his house in the Basra suburb of Abu Khasib for a few minutes in 1998. After he got out, he joined the Baath Party because it was the only way to get a job. He ended up as a guard at a party headquarters.

"It's a prison in Iraq," said Arif Othman, an army deserter who said he fought in the 1991 uprising, then escaped to Iran while his father and brother were arrested. He returned to Iraq in 1998 after believing there was a general amnesty and was arrested and tortured.

"It happens to all people."

Nabil Abdul Ali was one of them. He is 30 years old now and his hands shake.

After the 1999 uprising, Baath Party officials and secret police came to his home to arrest his brother Aziz, a student they accused of participating in the uprising. Two days later, they came back for Ali's father, Abdul Karim. A week or so after that, a bulldozer arrived and destroyed their home, which still lies in ruins in Abu Khasib.

The rest of the family - 11 people in all -fled north to an uncle's house in Karbala. The security forces caught up with them there. All 11 were arrested, including his mother and two sisters, his two brothers' wives and two young children, ages 6 months and one year.

For 10 days, Abdul Ali said, they stayed at the security department in Karbala. "I was tortured the worst," Abdul Ali said. "Look at how I am trembling."

Then they were transferred to police security headquarters in Basra, where they stayed for another 35 days, "and there was the same torture all over again."

Abdul Ali said he was targeted because he was closest in age to his brother Aziz. He said the torture usually happened overnight: two hours of it, then an hour off, then another two hours.

Sometimes, Abdul Ali recalled, he had his hands tied behind his back and then he was hung in such a way as to dislocate his shoulders. Sometimes, they used electricity on him, on his private parts and under his nails.

And sometimes, they threatened to abuse his family's women in front of him. "They used to tell me I'm going to get your sister and your mother right now and take off their clothes in front of you," he said.

They asked him about his brother and whether he had participated in the 1999 uprising. "I used to give them information to stop the torture," he said, "to make up stuff, anything to stop this."

He said he hoped the information hadn't been used as a reason to execute his brother. "They need a confession from the person himself. They know that because of all this torture, people will lie," he said.

Eventually, the family was taken to a prison in Basra known as the Jail for Adult Re-Education because it used to house a school for adult education. There were many other entire families there, Abdul Ali said, and there they were reunited with their father.

Their father had been with Aziz. He told them he had been tortured himself and had seen Aziz tortured in front of him. He told them that he had been forced to lie about Aziz, to give false evidence against him. "My father used to accuse himself and shame himself because he talked about his son," Abdul Ali recalled.

They were reunited for a month and a half before his father got sick. He was taken to the hospital and he died the next day, Abdul Ali said.

On October 14, 1999, the rest of the family was released as part of a general pardon issued by Saddam. Before they left, each one had to put a fingerprint on a document swearing never to act against the Baath Party or the government and never to tell what had happened to them in prison. The punishment for disobeying would be execution.

Until this week, they never knew what had happened to Aziz. On