NEVER, NEVER FORGET (part II):

'I hadn't even suffered and yet I was sobbing' (Telegraph, 3/6/2003)

"It's the woman professor who haunts me most. A prisoner under Saddam, she gave birth to a girl, but couldn't feed her because the thin soup wasn't enough to provide breast milk," Ann Clwyd tells me. "When she begged the guards for milk, they beat her. She held that dead baby for three days, refusing to give it up. The temperature in the cell was stifling, the smell was horrendous, but none of the other prisoners complained. In the end, they took her away and killed her."

When Mrs Clwyd stood up in the House of Commons last week to talk about the plight of the Iraqis and Kurds, MPs fell silent....

Former prisoners showed her around [the new Kurdish genocide museum]. On the walls were hundreds of photographs of piles of clothing, mass graves and skulls. "Saddam's regime is like the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis; they are obsessed by documenting everything they've done. There are lots of photographs of prisoners just before they were executed, grinning at the cameras. The guards tickled them before they died to make them laugh."

The day she opened the museum it was snowing, grey and icy. "Hundreds of relatives of the dead and the victims queued up to watch and to tell me their stories. An old Kurdish woman shoved a piece of plastic at me; inside were two photographs of her husband and two missing sons. She wanted to know how they died. One old man showed me a photograph of 15 of his family. He was the only survivor. 'Why was I meant to survive?' he said....

"I burst into tears. As I stood in that museum, I just thought: 'Why didn't we carry on to Baghdad? Why did we let this keep happening for another 12 years?'"

Why, indeed. Better late than never. Posted by Paul Jaminet at March 12, 2003 5:58 PM