Mom, I have Arabs in the cellar!

On Tuesday, US forces raided an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad, drove befuddled guards out of it and found a basement chock-full with prisoners. Nearly all of them were Sunni Arabs; nearly all of them showed signs of having been tortured and starved. Embarrassed, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari quickly distanced himself from the affair, as did all his junior officials. Quipped deputy interior minister Hussein Kamal:

"I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralyzed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

Interviewed by the BBC, Hussein Kamal smoothly added that the Interior Minister did not, in reality, have full control over the ministry’s armed forces. At one point, he implied his ministry might be infiltrated by terrorists.

It seems that nobody, including the Iraqi government, had fair warning of the American raid. Caught with pants down, official excuses come thick, fast and incredibly colorful.

Four things stand against the Iraqi government’s disavowal of responsibility:

1. Sunni parties have consistently complained of ill-treatment from Shia police and militias. After Tuesday’s horrific discovery, Farid Sabri, a UK-based spokesman for the mainly Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, caustically pointed out:

"This is the tip of the iceberg…We told the government about this months ago and they did nothing."

2. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report on human rights abuses carried out by Iraqi policemen and soldiers. Bodies of Sunni Arabs dumped in the river were never investigated.

3. Anne Clwyd the UK government’s human rights envoy in Iraq, said she had raised such allegations with Iraqi authorities back in May. "It is shocking what has happened," she told Newsnight.

4. The prison is located in the basement of an Interior Ministry building. It is inconceivable that no one, until the US raid, had thought to ask: "What’s down there?"

Understandably, Sunni parties don’t trust Ibrahim Jaafari, even if he had swiftly called for an investigation. After all, the Prime Minister’s idea of an independent commission is to enlist the services of the third (and smallest) ethnic group in Iraq- the Kurds.

How effective will the Kurds be? Still reeling from the victory of winning an autonomous homeland in the north, the Kurds seem unlikely to upset their larger partners in government, the Shia. And Ibrahim Jaafari belongs quite firmly to the latter.

If the invitation for Sunni Arabs to participate in Iraqi politics is genuine, the Shia-dominated government should allow an international body to investigate the matter, much as the Lebanese did for the murder of Rafik Hariri. Anything less would smack of cover-up.

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