Police recruits learn about human rights

At a dusty, austere centre in the middle of the desert, a group of Iraqi recruits are learning the Western ways of policing. One set of trainees is out on the rifle range, shooting at paper targets. Another group relaxes after a session of physical training that's relatively uncommon in this part of the world. Police guarding the eight-foot gate at the camp about half an hour's drive from the capital are polite but stern, just as you might expect at a similar facility anywhere in the world. In an eight-week course, instructors working for Dyncorp, a US defence contractor, teach police recruits how to shoot, arrest suspects, investigate crimes and drive police cars. With bombings continuing and security deteriorating, the need for a trained Iraqi police force is becoming increasingly urgent. This week alone at least 34 people have been killed in separate attacks. At least 27 died and 45 were injured when the Mount Lebanon hotel in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, was blown up on Wednesday. Four foreigners working for an international aid agency were killed and another injured in a shooting in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul late on Monday. Four people were killed in three shooting incidents in the country on Tuesday. Two German civilians and two Iraqis were killed by gunmen in an attack near the town of Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad and three Iraqi policemen were shot dead in the northern city of Mosul. Earlier, a female Iraqi translator working for the US army was shot dead as she drove to the main US military base in Mosul. Western trainers in Iraq are also teaching police recruits how to respect human rights, Col. Hussein Mehdi, dean of the Iraqi police training school in Baghdad, told IRIN in Amman. US-led administrators decided to train police in both Jordan and Iraq to get through the programme more quickly, Mehdi said. "We had no [respect for] human rights before, so when police dealt with suspects, they would hit them and hurt them," Mehdi said. "Now, we learn that when you catch a person, you have to respect him until he is proven guilty." Mehdi, who was a mid-ranking officer under Saddam Hussein's regime, proudly said that he recently finished a three-week "transition" course designed to teach him and other former officers about how their colleagues work around the world. By all accounts, various police forces in Iraq, including the feared secret police, or mukhabarat, regularly tortured those who disagreed with the regime. "All people should be treated equally," Mehdi said. "We are showing that in the new Iraq there's a new procedure that follows human rights. Otherwise, you could lose your job." Getting police to respect human rights is relatively uncommon in the Middle East, but Jordanian police set a good example for the new Iraqi recruits, said Lt. Fatima Hailehiya, a national spokeswoman for the Jordan police force. The country's police directorate created a complaints office seven years ago to try and be more responsive to citizen's complaints about human rights, Hailehiya said. Policing isn't perfect in Jordan, but the police are trying to do the right thing, she said. "Jordan's human rights are better than Turkey's, and Turkey is a NATO country," Hailehiya said. But Western trainers in Iraq have no illusions that the recruits they are teaching will necessarily continue to uphold basic human rights unless they see other police doing the same, said Allister Hutchison, deputy director of training in Baghdad. International police trainers also taught police in the Balkans. They followed up the training with Western police mentors working alongside the new recruits in police stations, Hutchison told IRIN. But the scheme may not be workable in Iraq. "It's so dangerous in some regions of Iraq, that the planned 1,500 mentors will not be sent out to stations," he said. "The security situation is not stable enough for us to mentor them," he added. "We're stuck in an artificial environment here - we can't see what they're doing." In many places, including Iraq, respecting human rights seems to be seen as a sign of weakness, according to Hutchison. It's that mentality that may take a generation to change, he said. "It's the new recruits in their early twenties that we're trying to reach the most. When they reach the senior ranks, then we'll see change," Hutchison explained. "We can help the new recruits, but they need to continue to get guidance after we're gone." Hutchison said he had not been told what would happen to the training programme amid the planned handover of sovereignty to Iraqis on 30 June. But he expects that it will continue for several more months. Classes two and three, each with 450-480 recruits, are now getting trained in Baghdad, Mehdi said. About 800 students have already graduated from the Jordanian training programme; two groups of about 400 each. Plans call for 35,000 Iraqi police to be trained in Jordan, according to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). But policing the new Iraq is difficult and dangerous. According to the Interior Ministry, more than 600 police officers have been killed since the end of major combat operations in Iraq a year ago. The ministry says there were 76,000 police officers in Iraq during Saddam's time.