NEW
YORK, May 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The US
should investigate the humiliation of Muslim detainees and the abuse
of their religious beliefs rather than attack those who expose them,
an international human rights group has said.
“Around
the world, the United States has been humiliating Muslim detainees by
offending their religious beliefs,” Reed Brody, a special counsel
for the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), was quoted as saying
by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“If
the United States is to repair the public relations damage caused by
its mistreatment of detainees, it needs to investigate those who
ordered or condoned this abuse, not attack those who have tried to
report on it,” Brody averred.
In
its May 9 edition, the mass-circulation Newsweek quoted “a
knowledgeable US government source” as saying that investigators
probing abuses at Guantanamo found that US interrogators “had placed
Korans (sic) on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book
down the toilet.”
The
report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from
Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Gaza.
After
protests from the Pentagon, the weekly cast some doubts on the story
in its next edition, saying the source “couldn't be certain about
reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and
said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts”.
“Extensive”
Abuse
The
HRW counsel said the Newsweek’s story would not have
resonated had it not been for “extensive” US abuse of Muslim
detainees and the Bush administration's failure to fully investigate
all of those implicated.
He
said the reaction of the Bush administration to the reported
desecration had been so vocal as to drown out documented complaints of
similar ill-treatment of the Noble Qur’an.
Brody
asserted that the world rights watchdog had heard several complaints
from former detainees, including three Britons and a Russian, on cases
of the Qur'an desecration by US jailers.
Complaints
on the desecration of the Noble Qur'an by US interrogators were widely
reported outside the US in interviews with former detainees in
Guantanamo and Baghram prison in Afghanistan.
In
2003, an ex-Guantanamo detainee told the Washington Post that
American jailers dumped the Noble Qur'an in a toilet.
“It
was a very bad situation for us,” said Ehsannullah, 29, who was
arrested by US soldiers in Afghanistan and shipped to Guantanamo.
“We
cried so much and shouted, ‘Please do not do that to the Noble
Qur'an’.”
Similar
cases of the Qur'an desecration were also reported by Asif Iqbal, a
former Guantanamo detainee who was released to British custody in
March 2004 and subsequently freed without charges.
“The
behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the
Qur'an was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as
possible. They would kick the Qur'an, throw it into the toilet, and
generally disrespect it.”
The
US is holding more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo, most of them were
detained in Afghanistan after US-led troops invaded the country and
ousted the Taliban in late 2001.
Amnesty
International published a report in April, 2004, hitting out at
Washington’s violations rights abuses in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.
In
a report entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib,” the HRW linked
the abuse of detainees in Iraq , Afghanistan and Guantanamo to US
President George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror.
