PRESS CONFERENCE
National Press Club, Washington DC, October 22nd, 2002
Statement By
Judge Zakia Hakki

Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of our Independents Liberal Politician Iraqi Women Group, I would like to welcome all of you. Your presence is a good sign of solidarity with Millions of our long suffering Iraqi women.
Also I would like to thank Sheikh Mohammed Ali for inviting me as an Iraqi independent woman to join him to this Press conference and present our case.

We are in this panel from various ethnic backgrounds, but we have our common goal as Iraqis. I am here to let you hear the screaming voices of innocent Iraqi women who were raped inside Saddam’s prisons, others were decapitated and their heads were displaced on the doors of their houses to defame their families. I am here to tell you about 182,000 of civilian Kurdish Iraqi women, children and elderly who were poisoned and killed by slow death by chemical weapons during the infamous campaign of Sadam’s Anfal on April 1988, as if Halabja was not enough for him. I am here to let you hear the voices of 12,000 other Iraqi Barzani Kurds who were arrested and disappeared in Saddam’s prisons in 1980.

Just imagine the suffering each family endures when ONE of its members is snatched away for no crime. Imagine the suffering of the wife and children as their bread winner is butchered by Saddam’s gangsters, sometimes in front of their eyes. I was talking about only ONE.. How about HALF A MILLION IRAQI Faylee KURDS who had been forcibly deported from their own country in Saddam’s infamous campaign of ethnic cleansing after the tyrant and his henchmen confiscated all their valuable personal possessions, identities and documents. I am here to tell you how Saddam had robbed these victims of their history, dignity and their birth right country and how these victims turned over- night to penniless refugees thrown to walk miles across the border to a foreign country. Remember that these penniless refugees were one day, the backbone of Iraq’s largest Business Center in Shorja – Baghdad that made the one Iraqi Dinar equivalent to three U.S. dollars and now it’s not even worth a penny.

I am here to tell you about the inhuman horrific crime of Saddam who ordered to keep the young men among the deportees as hostages in the Iraqi prisons since April 1980. The estimated number of the Faylee hostages in the first six month of the Deportation Campaign reached twenty thousand , but the number increased as more people were being deported..
Now Saddam is trying again to cheat the World by his announcement of Amnesty for all Iraqi prisoners as thank- you to the nation for re- electing him. Amnesty for what? What crime did they commit in the first place? What kind of court or judge or jury did they have to end up tortured and imprisoned?

More than Thirty Thousand of Faylee Kurds are somewhere in the prisons of Saddam, not as prisoners… NO.. BUT as.. Hostages. They were not convicted with any crime except of being due to Saddam’s believe; from the wrong race as Kurds .
Iraqi people Arabs, Kurds, Turcoman, Assyrians, Kildanian will not be free until Saddam is held accountable. . The Iraqi independent women call upon the free World, the United Nations to establish an International Tribunal to prosecute the tyrant Saddam and his inner circle for their Holocaust and savage crimes against Humanity , and the Iraqi people. Iraqi people should not be left to suffer under the iron fist of the tyrant. Iraqi women needs your help to live without fear and have their freedom and democracy.

We need to restore Baghdad as Darul Salam
The home of Peace as it always was.
FINALLY, I say this :
If ONE Iraqi is oppressed, then NO Iraqi is FREE.
Thank you.