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KURDISH NEWSMAN/HCC STUDENT TELLS TALE OF TORTURE/REPRESSION UNDER SADDAM

By Jennifer Jones

BRIDGEPORT - It is 1991. A printing press rolls in a small basement room of a house in the city of Arbil, Northern Iraq. The news it prints is important as it informs the Kurdish people of what the regime of Saddam Hussein is doing to them and their country.

The news it prints is dangerous to Saddam’s regime. One day it’s suddenly halted. Iraqi government officials entered the house, seize the printer and jail its owner.

For the owner, Gazi Hassan, that began an odyssey, a long journey through prison, back home to his village Elinjagh in Iraq, to Syria, and eventually to America, where Hassan is now a journalism student at Housatonic Community College.

Hassan has a dream…

to go back…

to work for a free newspaper in Kurdistan…

 “…to tell the (Kurdish) people what is true about their history, their culture and their country,” he says.”

Throughout Saddam’s regime, says Hassan, the Kurdish people were given a different history. They were made to “study Arabic history, not Kurdish history.”

“There was no library or books,” says Hassan, recalling his childhood days in Elinjagh. Hassan remembers of his village as a child. “we kept books at home, but any Kurdish book was a danger.”

Because they were against Arabic and the regime, he says.

It was then that Hassan found his love for the printed word – and what that word can tell about the plight of the Kurds.

During the winters Hassan would go to the city of Arbil with his father so that he could go to school. “In high school,” says Hassan, “one of my teachers would give me books, under the table, history books, Kurdish history.”

The books “opened my mind and eyes, I learned who we are,” says Hassan. “They made me think about a lot of things.”

It was in the city also, that Hassan first became interested in newspapers. “People in the city read and study the newspaper,” says Hassan, “I would look for the sports page when I was young … it started there.”

Then his love for the printed word intensified.

In 1988, Hassan attended Baghdad University to study the Kurdish language. While there he wrote for a weekly Kurdish newspaper. “I got paid for writing … just for practice, nothing political,” he recalls.

It was a time of political turmoil.

During the war between Iran and Iraq, the inhabitants of some 4,000 Kurdish villages were moved into cities, says Hassan, “Saddam gassed villages, killed thousands, and [thousands of] others moved to cities and (due to illnesses from the gas) hospitals.”

While he was a student in Baghdad, Hassan remembers the poison gas attack of the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians within hours. “It was March 16, 1988,” he says. “Many students talked of how they lost people, lost family,” he says, “Many left college to find their families.”

After completing his studies, Hassan returned to Arbil and became involved with a political group. It was “a small opposition group,” says Hassan, “that published an underground paper (with) political views against Saddam Hussein.”

The paper, along with a “Kurdish radio in the mountains, gave important news,” Hassan recalls. It informed the Kurdish people about “the problems, how many were killed, how to fight, and how to keep safe if Saddam used gas against them.”

The small opposition group had a spy. “Someone in the group was there for Saddam,” says Hassan, “he knew of the paper and reported it.”

Hassan was taken to the prison in Arbil and interrogated while blindfolded. They asked “who are you working with? Who gives you supplies and the information you are writing about?” he recalls.

 “I decided I wouldn’t say anything,” says Hassan, “I thought this was my last stop in life, if I said anything or not, the outcome would be the same.”

But they continued their attempts make him talk.

He was made to stay “35 days in a small two-foot room,” so small “you can’t lay down.” At one time, he had to stay in a squatting position, blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back for 10 hours, and twice he was “given electric shocks with wires attached to my ear lobes.”

He still didn’t talk and still he didn’t talk.

“It was very hard to come out (of prison alive),” he says. “A lot of people lost their life in jail.”

  But the end of the Golf War and the subsequent uprising of the Kurdish people throughout Iraq made it possible for Hassan to leave prison.

“I remember it was March 11, 1991,” said Hassan, “around 10:00 a.m., people started a popular uprising against Saddam. Police broke open the door to the prison and we just ran out. We didn’t look back, it was very dangerous.”

“We went back with the opposition in the north,” says Hassan, “after 1991, Saddam could not go to a free Kurdish City.”

Hassan stayed in Northern Iraq throughout the 1990's where he met and married his wife and had two children.

In 2000, after obtaining a legal visa, Hassan and his family were able to cross into Syria. “It was easier for me to go to Syria than any other country,” says Hassan. From there they came to the United States in 2001.

Hassan, who speaks Arabic and Kurdish, is studying to become an English-language journalist. This third language, he says, will give him another forum for spreading the word about the Kurdish people and their culture.

My classes [at HCC] help me in different ways,” says Hassan, “first, I practice learning how to write in English, second it helps me to give students new information on Kurdistan [through the college newspaper] and how people are thinking from the middle east, and also, it teaches me about writing news for a free newspaper.

 “I look for freedom,” says Hassan, “a lot of people need more freedom. America has freedom. I came here to study and learn more about a new method for a great life.”

Jennifer Jones of Shelton is a journalism intern at Housatonic Community College.

 

Sidebar

THE PLIGHT OF THE KURDS

BRIDGEPORT -- After World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the people of Kurdistan, an area in the Middle East roughly the size of Texas, hoped for a state of their own. Instead, Kurdistan became divided among five bordering countries: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria.

     Though many still hope for a one day united Kurdistan, Gazi Hassan does not see that in Kurdistan’s future. “It is very hard to make one country between different parts,” he says, “there are now different dialects and different cultures.”

     What Hassan does hope to see, is an Iraq where the Kurds can live in freedom. “Now in Iraq, the condition is open,” says Hassan, “it can make a lot of things better. People like freedom, what is happening is good, but very hard and dangerous.”

     Even though Saddam Hussein is out of power, Hassan says the “people now are still scared. Saddam’s ideology is still there and can still come back.”