[NYTr] For Gays in Iraq, A Life of Constant Fear

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[...as for just about everyone in Iraq, gay or straight. But gays have a
bit more to be concerned about. -NYTr]

sent by Rick Kissell

Los Angeles Times - Aug 5, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraqgay5aug05,1,7627798.story?coll=la-headlines-world


For gays in Iraq, a life of constant fear

Since the U.S.-led invasion, homosexuals have been increasingly targeted 
by militias and police, human rights groups say.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

BAGHDAD --- Samir Shaba sits in a restaurant, nervously describing gay 
life in Iraq. He speaks in a low voice, occasionally glancing over his 
shoulder.

The heavyset, clean-shaven Christian says that before the U.S.-led 
invasion in 2003, he frequented the city's gay blogs, online chat rooms 
and dance clubs, where he wore flashy tight clothes, his hair long and 
loose to his shoulders.

After the invasion, he and other gays and lesbians were driven 
underground by sectarian violence and religious extremists. Shaba, 25, 
packed his flashy clothes away, started wearing baseball caps and baggy 
T-shirts and stopped visiting clubs and chat rooms. But he couldn't bear 
to cut his hair.

"I cannot change everything immediately," he said, fingering his black 
ponytail. "I suffered because I didn't cut it."

Recently, Shaba said, police commandos spotted his hair as he was riding 
in a taxi through a checkpoint in central Baghdad. Suspecting that he 
was gay, the four commandos dragged him out of the taxi by his hair, and 
forced him into an armored car. They demanded his cellphone, cash and sex.

When he refused, they beat him with a baton and gang-raped him. He 
rubbed the back of his shirt, feeling for the scars.

"They got what they wanted because I thought otherwise I would lose my 
life," Shaba said, and he began to weep. "They threatened me that if I 
told anyone, they would kill me."

*Heightened attacks

*Human rights groups say that Iraqi gays are increasingly targeted by 
militias and police. The United Nations and State Department have issued 
reports documenting some of the more recent killings.

A U.N. report in January cited attacks on gays by militants, as well as 
the existence of "religious courts, supervised by clerics, where 
homosexuals allegedly would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death and then 
executed."

Iraqi leaders dismiss those allegations, and Middle East experts say 
it's difficult to tell whether the attacks are state-sanctioned.

"Nobody's paying attention to this issue," said Ali Dabbagh, spokesman 
for Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. "It is not the custom of the people of 
Iraq. Not only Iraq, but the whole region."

In October 2005, Iraq's leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah 
Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, on his website 
forbidding homosexuality and declaring that gays and lesbians should be 
"punished, in fact, killed."

"The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way," 
the decree said.

The fatwa against gay men was removed from Sistani's website last 
year, but it was not revoked, said Ali Hili, an Iraqi gay-rights 
activist living in London who petitioned Sistani's office to remove it.*

*Hili compiles details of the killings of homosexuals, including 
photographs of victims, and posts them online. Included in his list of 
victims are:

.  Anwar, 34, a taxi driver who ran a safe house for gays in the 
southern city of Najaf. Hili said Anwar was shot execution-style after 
he was stopped at a police checkpoint in March.

.  Nouri, 29, a tailor in the southern city of Karbala who had received 
death threats for being gay and was beheaded in February, Hili said.

.  Hazim, 21, of Baghdad also received threats, Hili said, and after 
police seized him at home in February, his body was found with several 
gunshots to the head.

Shaba said his cousin Alan, 26, who also was gay, was shot in the head 
one day when he went to answer the door while the two were having lunch. 
Although Alan might have been targeted because he was working as an 
interpreter with U.S. forces in the Green Zone, Shaba said he thought 
his cousin was killed because he was openly gay.

"There are other translators in our neighborhood, and nobody killed 
them," he said.

*Difficult to discern

*Given the pervasiveness of sectarian violence in Iraq, it's hard to 
tell whether such men are targeted for being gay, said filmmaker Parvez 
Sharma, a gay Muslim based in New York. Sharma just finished filming a 
documentary called "A Jihad for Love," set in Iraq and a dozen other 
Middle Eastern countries. It is to be released this fall.

Sharma's film concentrates on the prosecution of 52 gay men arrested in 
2001 aboard a floating nightclub on the Nile; they became known as the 
"Cairo 52." No similar incident has been documented in Iraq, Sharma said.

"It's very difficult to tell whether there is a pogrom of any sort to 
kill gay men," he said, but the environment for gays in Iraq has clearly 
soured.

In the 1980s, Baghdad and Cairo were gay social centers, Sharma said. 
Many Iraqi gays settled into straight marriages and had families, but 
many continued to have homosexual relationships on the side.

Although President Saddam Hussein shut down many of Baghdad's gay bars 
in the 1990s and passed a law against sodomy in 2001, Iraqi gays and 
lesbians still socialized.

After the 2003 invasion, a man who gave his name as Ahmed still cruised 
Rubaie Street, a once popular gay thoroughfare in the eastern Baghdad 
neighborhood of Zayuna, but he was not openly gay, he said.

A year and a half ago, one of the men he'd met there showed up at his 
apartment wearing an Iraqi army uniform. He threatened to tell fellow 
soldiers that Ahmed was gay unless he paid a bribe of 160,000 dinars, 
about $135.

That was a probable death sentence, he said.

Ahmed paid, fled the country for Amman, Jordan, and considers himself 
among the lucky ones.

A 31-year-old gay pharmacist in the mostly Sunni west Baghdad 
neighborhood of Amiriya, said several of his friends were killed for 
being gay. He is often followed and stopped at checkpoints, he said. He 
spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear that he might be attacked.

He dreams of getting a visa to Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, which 
have accepted the bulk of Iraqi refugees, and then applying for asylum 
because of political persecution.

The United States has recognized asylum claims by gays and lesbians 
since 1994, but the applications of only about 14% of lesbians and 16% 
of gay men have been approved, according to the San Francisco-based 
Asylum Documentation Program of the International Gay and Lesbian Human 
Rights Commission.

In Iraq, the wait for visas is long. Fake travel documents cost at least 
$15,000 on the black market, out of the pharmacist's price range.

"I'm just looking for salvation," he said. "Maybe next month you will 
call and my family will say, 'Oh, he is killed.' "

'A cultural issue'

A U.N. spokesman said it was difficult to determine how many gays have 
been targeted and whether the Iraqi government is trying to help them.

"They have said they are trying to improve human rights for all Iraqis, 
but they are not even willing to say there are gays in Iraq. This is a 
cultural issue," U.N. spokesman Said Arikat said.

Wijdan Mikaeil, Iraq's minister of human rights, said her office had not 
received reports of attacks on gays. She said that gays may be afraid to 
come forward but that the United Nations is over-emphasizing the problem.

"The Iraqi people have been attacked all across Iraq --- not because 
they are gay, but because of the sectarian issue," she said.

The State Department has urged Iraq to prevent attacks on gays, 
spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said, but the insurgency and sectarian 
violence have made it difficult for the government to protect human rights.

Gabor Rona, international legal director at New York-based Human Rights 
First, said the chaos shouldn't stop the U.S. government from pressuring 
Iraqi authorities to hold security forces accountable for abusing gays.

"We may not have any ability to do anything about suicide bombings and 
insurgent attacks, but we may have the ability to influence the Iraqi 
government if they have a hand in this," Rona said.

Some U.S. legislators are demanding that the State Department act.

Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), both openly 
gay lawmakers, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 
June demanding that she investigate attacks on Iraqi gays and pressure 
Maliki to respond.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has sponsored legislation that would 
prioritize gay Iraqi refugees in an expanded Iraqi refugee program.

Ahmed, now living in Amman, said U.S. forces in Iraq should investigate 
reports of assaults on gays and ensure that those responsible are punished.

"At least if they catch one of them, they may be afraid to do it again."