An Egyptian human rights center has claimed in a report that Iraqi government policies are behind the "humiliation and suffering" of people in the Gulf Arab country.
The Cairo Center for Human Rights said in the report, titled State Terrorism and the Deterioration of the Iraqi Policy, that the Iraqi individual, under the rule of the Baath party, had been transformed into an intimidated person living in a decayed society.
The report, cited by the official Kuwaiti news agency, KUNA, claims that the “current breakdown in the Iraqi society is a direct result of the Baath Party.”
The repotr says that the current Iraqi political culture is now more poorer than before.
It describes the March 1991 rebellion in Shiite-inhabited south Iraq as being "a tragic episode in the miserable series of the Iraqi nation."
The report also says that the people there, who took advantage of the Iraqi army’s defeat by a US-led international coalition, were able to steal tens of thousands of documents from Iraqi intelligence offices in the area.
“Those documents paved the way for recognizing the methods used by the regime in creating differences and rifts in society,” claims the report, whose authors do not say whether they had access to the documents.
The report further says that the Iraqi regime relies on an intelligence system that covers all aspects of society, besides “the special system in charge of protecting the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party and its public organizations, which all work as surveillance systems.”
It says that all these systems are concerned with spreading an atmosphere of terror and a feeling of helplessness among the people.
The Cairo Center for Human Rights split from the umbrella Egyptian Organization of Human Rights (EOHR) in 1994.
NGOs in Egypt have been accused of receiving Western money for their programs and events.
The head of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Research, and a human rights activist, was this year convicted of accepting foreign money and working to undermine the image of his country.
A report by Cairo Times in 1997 by Andrew Hammond quoted sources as claiming that “bodies abroad are competing with each other to fund programs in Egypt, while groups here are competing to get their money."
One member of EOHR charged that “instead of packing their briefcases every morning and heading to court to defend torture victims, …officials were packing suitcases and heading for the airport,” to attend seminars and dinners – Albawaba.com
