Kurds Remember “Red Security” Hell

Hiwa Jamal and five of his friends are on a T-55 tank – but they are holding flowers, not weapons of war. Smiling, the students hold the narcissus blooms up to the foreground of a photograph that is being taken.

The tank is part of an exhibition at the site once known as Amna Surak, or Red Security, because its external walls were painted red - a macabre reflection of the suffering inside, where Kurds were being tortured and murdered in their thousands.

In commemoration of the March 7, 1991 Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime, the Red Security building in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah is now a museum where visitors can learn about the history of this region's fight for autonomy.

Fourteen years ago, nobody would have dared come close to this building, and it was said that even the birds didn’t dare land here. But now Saddam’s regime is gone and students are on the front terrace, singing their national anthem, waving the Kurdish flag and distributing bouquets of flowers.

Red Security consists of six buildings. One of them was the administrative block and the others hold cells – the average size of which was just under two metres square.

In the office of the security manager who would issue orders for the arrest and torture of Kurds, there now hang large cages containing around 70 doves. "These birds are symbols of the peace that the Kurds wanted," said Sarwar Abdullah, a museum guide.

The total number of those arrested, tortured and killed is unknown, but Abdullah estimates that 700 Kurds were executed here in 1989 and 1990 alone. Those who spent their last days in these cells were targeted because of their involvement with the Kurdish opposition party or the peshmerga militia.

For the students, a tour of the torture rooms, cells and morgue of Red Security brings shock and sadness.

This week, the young people got an added sense of immediacy as survivors of this dreaded prison joined the anniversary commemoration to share stories of their time spent as captives here.

"In a four by seven metre room, there could be a hundred people at any one time. We sometimes slept standing up," said Tariq Ghafoor, who was held there for nearly a year before being exchanged for Baatht intelligence officers held by the Kurds in January 1991.

Women had a separate jail block, measuring seven by five metres and designed to house 50 inmates. But by 1988 it held more than 200.

"I'll never forget when my aunt Gule, an older woman, was shot dead with her son on the terrace of this building," Ghafoor told the young people around him.

Kamran Aziz, who was held here from January to October 1990, told the students, "Although I was released 15 years ago, I visit this building once a month." As he spoke of the first day of his imprisonment, some of the students began to cry quietly.

Hansa Jamal, a secondary school student, said, "I was born after the uprising. But I am now crying for those men, women, boys and girls who were tortured, shot and executed here."

The museum also includes a section dedicated to the Anfal campaign, an ethnic cleansing campaign which the Baath regime waged against the Kurds from 1987 to the autumn of 1988, in which 182,000 Kurds were killed and around 5,000 villages were destroyed. To represent the loss of life, the walls of a large hall are covered in 182,000 pieces of mirror glass, lit with thousands of tiny lights.

There are many grisly reminders of the horrors perpetrated in Kurdistan. One photo on display shows two people in military uniform carrying a headless body. They smile as they make victory signs to the camera. "These are intelligence agents and the body is a peshmerga who was beheaded," said Abdullah, the museum guide.

Exhibits also remember the chemical bombardments of towns like Halabja, in which up to 5,000 civilians, mostly women and children, died.

"This is a fragment of one of the chemical projectiles that was used in Halabja. And this is also an unexploded napalm bomb that was used against another Kurdish area," said Abdullah. These are just some of the many weapons in the arsenal used against the Kurds on display.

Visiting this museum now you can still feel the fear and misery that must have filled it years ago, especially in the torture centre where ceiling hooks remain. A statue shows visitors how detainees’ hands were tied behind their backs and then attached to the hooks. They remained this way, naked, for hours at a time.

Karwan Qadir, a students' union activist who helped organise the visit to the Red Security museum, told IWPR, "We are constantly bringing students and the new generation here, so they will understand their past and know what we have achieved today."

Rebaz Mahmood is an IWPR trainee in Sulaimaniyah.