Abrupt Amnesty at Iraqi Prisons

John F. Burns | New York Times | October 25, 2002

No event in years has shaken Iraq like the amnesty with which President Saddam Hussein emptied Iraq's jails on Sunday. Within minutes of the broadcast at noon, a crowd began gathering outside Abu Ghraib prison, 20 miles west of Baghdad, the grimmest in a gulag that has incarcerated tens of thousands of political prisoners. Soon, the gates were forced open and the mob stormed the cellblocks, liberating as many as 10,000 captives.

The freed men emerged squinting into the bright sunlight, pallid, dazed and weeping, before shouldering bedrolls and sacks of belongings and racing for the gates.

For many, though, it was a day of abysmal grief. Aging women in black wandered across the complex until darkness fell, searching for relatives who had disappeared into the prisons years ago, leaving no trace. Many were probably long since dead, victims of secret executions that have been chronicled in Western human rights reports. Hopes for a miracle flared, then died, as the missing fathers and brothers and sons failed to answer the names shouted into the gathering gloom.

At one cellblock, a crowd took iron bars and steel tubes to batter through the walls. Some guards helped; others stood their ground, beating the prisoners back. In the mad confusion, some prisoners were trampled, suffocating at the moment when liberty was within grasp. The wails of mothers and daughters could be heard into the night. Some dead prisoners left the prison on the shoulders of their loved ones; others remained where they fell.

Many prisoners thanked President Bush for their liberty, seeing it as the government's response to Mr. Bush's description of Mr. Hussein as a murdering tyrant. But the government described it as a gesture born of the "profound love" toward the 22 million Iraqis. "It is the act of a father forgiving his children," one prison official said. What nobody could know was where the day's turmoil would lead, but few who saw it believed that Mr. Hussein's stifling autocracy would be the same again.

Copyright 2002 New York Times Company