It’s Not Torture, Just Cutting Off Ears

Iraq’s U.N. envoy confirmed Tuesday that in recent months his country has used branding and “something like” cutting off ears to curb a crime wave that he blames on U.N. economic sanctions. But he said the punishments were better than decapitation and denied Saddam Hussein’s regime is using torture.

“No, not torture. There is some branding,” Ambassador Nissam Hamdoun said.

Asked whether the steps also included “cutting off ears,” he said, “Yes, something like that - which is better than cutting heads, of course.”

Hamdoun made his remarks in a news conference. In a subsequent hallway interview he said “history will judge” whether the punishments he described are “better than chopping their heads.”

The ambassador was commenting on two recent reports on human rights in Iraq by former Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel, who said Monday in Geneva that the Baghdad regime is one of “the worst offenders of human rights since the Second World War.”

Van der Stoel, a special rapporteur for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, reported to the commission last week that Iraq had recently decreed amputation of hands for thieves and for farmers who refuse to sell their produce to the state at low prices.

In November, he criticized Iraq’s decision to allow amputation of a hand, foot or ear to punish desertion from the army. He reported that the Iraqi regime had ordered an “X” tattoed or branded between the eyebrows of those sentenced to amputation.