Condoleeza & Iraqi gays

[xmasdale]

Iraqi gays have sent us this report:

Rice Pressed On Iraqi Treatment Of Gays


June 14, 2007
(Washington) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is being urged to investigate reports that LGBT Iraqis are being rounded up by militias on the streets of Baghdad and murdered.
In a letter to Rice the two openly gay members of Congress - Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) - cite a human rights report issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq that says from November 1 to December 31, 2006 there were open and violent campaigns against LGBT
Iraqis.
"According to news reports, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the chief spiritual leader of Iraqi Shia Muslims, issued a 'fatwa,' or religiously-inspired legal pronouncement, in October 2005 calling for death for all gays and lesbians in 'the most severe way possible,'" the letter says.
"While the fatwa was eventually removed from Sistani’s website last May, it was never revoked, and the decree has led to the deployment of anti-gay death squads by the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq, the Badr Corps. As a result, violence against gay Iraqis surged in 2006," the letter goes on to say.
It also refers to a speech made by the leader of an exiled Iraqi LGBT rights group in London who said that hundreds of gay men and women have been murdered by the militias and the US-led coalition is doing little to stop the killings. (story)
Ali Hili said that the Badr and Sadr militias - the armed wings of the two main Shia parties that control the government of Iraq - are routinely rounding up men and women, primarily in Baghdad, suspected of being gay. The men and women are never heard from again, Hili said.
The letter from Frank and Baldwin tells Rice that the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and one from the Institute for War and Peace "present a substantial body of evidence that LGBT Iraqis have been systematically targeted for violence by Islamic clerics and militias.
"Yet the 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released by the State Department this March, made no reference to any human rights violations in Iraq based on sexual orientation," the letter says.
The two Democrats are urging Rice to investigate the allegations and incorporate the findings in the annual human rights report.
"Furthermore, we urge you to utilize every diplomatic tool available to engage Prime Minister Al-Maliki and President Talabani and call on the Iraqi government to crack down on the systematic prosecution of Iraqi homosexuals," the letter says..
in January Iraq's government strongly criticized a U.N. report on human rights that put its civilian death toll in 2006 at 34,452, saying it is "superficial" because it included people such as homosexuals.
A State Department spokesperson decline to comment on the letter saying Rice had not yet received it.
http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/06/061407iraq.htm
http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/




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