Human rights festival in north draws hundreds

Hundreds of people attended the "Peace, Cohabitation and Human Rights" festival in the northern Iraqi governorate of Sulaymaniyah last week, the first such event that organisers could recall. Ministers and others held workshops to present work undertaken to uphold international principles of human rights since the fall of the former Saddam Hussein regime. "This festival is a way to spread the principles of human rights and to make a good connection between local and international NGOs and the Ministry of Human Rights," Kamran Rasheed, general organiser in the Kurdish Human Rights Ministry, told IRIN. The problems faced by women and their position in society was the theme of a domestic violence workshop put on by local aid agencies. In Iraq, violence against women continues because of illiteracy and poverty, those at the workshop said. Poverty causes many men in society to become depressed and angry, and thereby to abuse women, they said. "There is a negative view about women. A man can always present himself as supreme, and the woman is still a nobody," Mazen Rasheed Abud, chief of the board of the Iraqi Society for Victims of Violence against Women, told IRIN. More women's centres should be built across the country to help solve such problems, participants said, adding that such workshops could also help define the meaning of women's rights in all sections of society. "There will be cooperation between the Women's Ministry and society to build a national centre against domestic violence." Maha Abd al-Satar, vice-president of the Iraqi Society Against Violence, told IRIN. Iraqi teachers spoke about human rights principles and how to apply them to the education curriculum. Several events were organised on human rights education as part of the festival. Other workshops focused on war crimes and prisoners' rights. At one workshop, officials from the Ministry of Justice discussed what they are doing to stop prisoner abuse. Officials involved with Iraq's prisons called for more police and army training. They added that they had written laws to bring Iraq into compliance with international human rights standards. Such laws deal with prisoners' rights, their social conditions and their psychological state, the officials said. Another new law says a detainee must not be physically coerced to confess to a crime. Officials at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs discussed services and treatment for orphans and street children in their workshop. They reiterated that it was the government's duty to protect children's rights and to provide them with the basics in life if they are orphans. Azadi Park was chosen as the festival site because it is a symbol of the injustice committed there during the former Saddam Hussein regime, local officials said. The park was a battleground where many Kurdish people were killed by the Iraqi army for rebelling against Saddam. Mass graves were found in the park after 1991. There was also a more creative side to the event when actors presented a silent play called "Sound of the Cry" to illustrate the improvement in human rights between pre-war and post-war Iraq. Other entertainment included music, films, art exhibitions and Iraqi folklore performances, all focusing on the same theme. Officials from the Education and the Migration and Displacement Ministries attended the 10-day festival along with civil society groups and Iraqi unions.