Political and tribal leaders in western Iraq urged U.S. governor Paul Bremer on Saturday to free all detainees as a gesture of good faith in the wake of the U.S. abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail.
The leaders from the Sunni-dominated al-Anbar province, from where many detainees come, said the gesture needed to be large enough to offset the enormity of abuses which have shaken the upper reaches of the U.S. administration.
“We need a measure that is as big as the affair that has happened -- it needs to reflect the size of the problem,” Mamouon Sami Rasheed, vice chairman of the provincial council, told Bremer during a meeting at U.S. headquarters in Baghdad.
“We would like to see the release of all detainees, apart from those so far indicted and found guilty of some crime, and also compensation paid to all those detained in Ramadi and Fallujah,” he said, referring to al-Anbar’s two largest cities, where U.S. forces have battled fierce guerrilla resistance.
Rasheed’s call was seconded by the chairman of al-Anbar’s provincial council, Sheikh Amir Abduljabar Ali Suleiman, the nominal head of the province’s largest, most powerful tribe.
Many families in the province feared relatives held at Abu Ghraib were being abused and humiliated in the same way as those prisoners in the now infamous pictures broadcast around the world, Rasheed said.
Anger was growing and some sort of conciliatory move, backed by compensation, would serve to “pull the carpet from under those who would seek to use this issue” against the U.S.-led occupation, he said.
Detainee backlog
Bremer’s response was one of studied diplomacy. Eating rice and kebabs, he listened quietly to the proposal, nodding his head occasionally and replied by deploring the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
“I share the outrage of every Iraqi at what has happened. These actions by a small number of soldiers are outrageous, unacceptable and in some cases outright criminal,” he said.
“They have done enormous damage to the way the Iraqi people look at American soldiers and the work they do.”
He went on to say that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in testimony to the U.S. Congress on Friday, had raised the issue of compensation for those abused in U.S. captivity and said he hoped such a move would repair some of the damage done.
But he demurred when it came to addressing the idea of freeing detainees directly, arguing that most of the 43,000 people rounded up by U.S. troops since the invasion had been freed.
“The fact is that since liberation we have released more than 75 percent of all the people we have detained. This week we’ve released several hundred more and we’re going to continue with that program,” he said.
Around 11,000 people remain in U.S. custody, mostly rounded up on suspicion of carrying out “anti-coalition activities,” and are awaiting a judicial hearing and proper charges.
Bremer said the U.S.-led coalition could not afford to free any of the thousands of genuine criminals he said had been rounded up in the past year, many of them among the 80-100,000 Saddam Hussein freed in his own goodwill gesture in late 2002.
An effort would have to be made to work as quickly as possible through the backlog of detainees and free those that are genuinely innocent, he said.
“I agree with your outrage,” Bremer told the leaders. “And we are going to continue to work on this problem, which has a very, very high priority, going all the way up to the president of the United States.”
