Agence France Presse, 15 February 2006
AL-SHAIBAH BASE, Iraq - Major Naseer has been a policeman for nearly two decades in Iraq's southern city of Basra, but today he is a student learning lessons on human rights.
Huddled in a classroom at a sprawling police academy at this base, on the outskirts of Basra, Naseer is one of the dozens of police officers being trained by cops from Britain and Denmark in modern-day policing -- which includes respecting the human rights of hardened criminals.
"Never kill a criminal who is fleeing," says their teacher Omar Abdel Jalil, a human rights activist brought in by Danish policemen to lecture the Iraqi officers.
But his words are falling on deaf ears in a culture long used to the ruthlessness of authoritarian regimes.
For Naseer, 40, who is too scared even to give his full name, classroom lectures on human rights hold no value when it comes to taking on a militant in a street battle or interrogating a detainee in prison.
"It is good to listen to the lecture in the classroom, but in Iraq we can't implement these values. This is a different land completely," says Naseer, a cigarette-smoking dark, burly policeman.
"How do you think I should react to a terrorist who is out to kill me or my family?"
The Joint Training Academy is currently training more than 1,000 young and senior policemen from Iraq's southern region in basic and specialised courses as part of a plan by the coalition forces to develop the country's security forces.
Iraq's fledgling security forces, especially the police, are facing the brunt of rebel attacks with hundreds of policemen killed and kidnapped across the war-torn country since 2003.
"Sometimes we have no option but to use techniques that may not fall under the norms of human rights. You know we can't talk about what methods we use with criminals, but what do you do?" says Naseer.
"These lectures are for perfect conditions, but we live in a country full of terrorists. How do you expect me to interrogate a man caught with a car full of explosives?"
Naseer's views are shared by dozens of his classmates.
"Sometimes human values are violated even when the situation is different. What happened in Abu Ghraib when US troops abused Iraqi detainees?" says First Lieutenant Ali, who also declines to give his full name.
"In the day-to-day life of a Iraqi policeman, this is difficult to observe especially when you know that someone is out there to take your life."
Their teachers, however, are optimistic and claim that the Iraqi officers, despite their years of dictatorial background, are flexible students keen to adopt their lessons.
"I think they (the policemen) do stick to what we teach them," said Kaj Kristensen, 60, a detective inspector from Copenhagen, who has been with the academy for nearly two years.
"In my two years here, I have not seen them violating any human rights either at the police station or at any of their detention centres."
For the coalition forces, led by the British troops in the south of Iraq, the job of training these policemen is not easy.
"Iraqis are different. For them the rule of God is more important than the rule of law," says the academy's head instructor and British policeman Martin Quinn.
"What we are doing is trying to teach them how to do democratic policing" which includes "using forensic techniques to pin a criminal rather than adopting the route of confessions".
During the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi security forces were notorious for their torture techniques used to extract confessions from suspects.
"They want to learn the democratic way of policing but what they lack is patience, which is why we are focusing on the middle level officers who will take over a few years from now and execute the democratic principles," adds Kristensen.
"This is a long-term project and it is an uphill task, but we are getting there."
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Citation: "Iraqi Policemen Shrug Off Classroom Lessons on Human Rights," Agence France Presse, 15 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1548&ncid=1548&e=6&u=/afp/20060215/lf_afp/iraqpolicerights_060215145608
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