06
May
2009
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Kill the Iraqi gays?

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gay64

6 Iraqi gay people were executed by machine guns in Sader city in April 2009, this makes the number of executed gays in Iraq reach 10 after 4 other executions in March in the last few weeks, 25 boys and men are reported to have been killed in Baghdad because they were, or were perceived to be, gay. Three corpses of gay men were found in the Shia area of Sadr City last week – two of which were reported to have had pieces of paper bearing the word “pervert” attached to them. The Iraqi police condemned the action and said we will bring the killers to justice, as in Iraq since Saddam days there is no law forbidding people to become gay, but there is a strike tribal law to execute any one how dishonor the tribe name and acting as a gay means you dishonored the tribe and the tribe council will give the permission to kill you to your close relatives as in brother, fathers and cousins, it is an honor for them to have the chance to eliminate this part of the tribe that had brought the heads of the family down as they describe it.

But during Saddam days this tribal law lost its effective authority with the rise of the central government law, which considers homosexuality as a non-threatening issue to the party or the government, in the contrary it was useful to keep homosexual activities’ under discretion in a country were men are forced to stay for years in their army units on the front and women were stuck in houses waiting for them ,as Iraq went from 1 war to another the percentage of women to men became very high as into 3 to 1, gay behaviors were known in the society but kept in a forbidden discreet area were no one is allowed to mention it , if someone was found it usually was explained as curiosity or hyper activity and they rush the boy into marriage , as for women such acts were never found out due to close women society and the gap between the male and female members of the family as tradition and religion make it unorthodox to socialize between them ,making even the relation ship between family members distend and non personal ,so what happens in the women quarters are kept there

After 2003 a rise in the attack against gay people in Iraq started to show a return of the tribal power and rise of radical extremist calls to cleans the community of these weak people who had fallen to the temptation of the devil , a well known café for gays in Baghdad was burned to the ground ,many were beaten ,killed or kidnapped and in some cases they were raped by the same people who oppressed them for their homosexuality

Threats to any family how had gay member to start to take action against their relative or the tribe or the militia will do so, a UN human rights report in 2006 documented many cases of savage attacks against gays in Iraq, Amnesty International has urged The Iraqi government TO do more to protect homosexuals in the wake of a reported spate of killings of gay young men.

In a letter to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, the rights organisation called for “urgent and concerted action”. It also criticised the government’s failure to condemn the killings.

The recent killings are said to have been carried out by armed Shia militiamen as well as by members of the tribes and families of the victims, Amnesty said.

The letter also raised concerns that religious leaders may be inciting violence against members of Iraq’s gay community, and over reported statements by one senior police officer that appear to condone or even encourage the targeting of gay Iraqis, as it is told that in the web site of one of the biggest Shia holy men in Iraq he had answered a question on what to do against gays by answering they must be killed and not a normal death but a death after a judgment from the tribe and community to provide a near execution to the religious’ punishments’ .

Amnesty called on the government to bring those responsible for the killings to justice and to afford effective protection to the gay community in Iraq.