Survival of Abu-Ghraib Jail

This entry is part 6 of 10 in the series Survival of Abu-Ghraib Jail

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Grounds For gloominess

For many years, the Faili Kurds people were deliberately experienced racial microaggressions treatment by the dominant and privileged group. The dominant group was in a superior position to favour and appropriate certain cultures and reject others.

The oppression that the Faili Kurds went through from generation to generation, was created from the place of privilege and power (systematic discrimination and structural racism), by taking no notice of the minority group’s existence.

At Abu-Ghraib Jail, the Faili youths used to experience microinsult every day. The guard’s communications approach was very terrible. They were very rude and insensitive, for the purpose of demeaning the youth’s racial heritage and identity.

The cumulative effect of microaggressions on the Faili youths led to the feeling of disgraced, blameworthy, and hopeless, that led to diminish their self-confidence and created the concept of poor self-image of themselves, which in return, it led the youths to feel self-doubting rather than justifiably angry, and isolated rather than supported.

The unfair institutionalization placed a huge negative shock on the Faili Kurds youths internal disorder, stress, fear, and aggression. Yet, incarceration has taught most Faili Kurds youths not to trust anyone inside the facility and to cover their internal states, and not to openly or easily reveal their intimate feelings or reactions.

Once we were locked up inside those small individual cells, the prison’s humiliation and hostility toward us became a reality, even from the criminals themselves, and it was part of our daily existence. For the Faili Kurds youths, the Abu-Ghraib Jail environment was a world full of degradation and resentment, where survival comes before everything.

So, we had to protect our self from all that, especially when we were tagged as intruder and unwanted in their society. Therefore, finding a means to cope with the prison’s debasement and aggression was an unfortunate reality for many of us.

One of the coping schemes that I had to accomplish at Abu-Ghraib Jail was the Preoccupation technique. I purposely made myself so Preoccupied with the idea of analyzing our circumstance and tried to come up with a logical answers for our continual wretchedness.

The fixation on the grounds of our misery was one of the coping strategies that might be accommodating for those who were experiencing undeserved and unfair penitentiary. Because we were wrongly placed behind bars, I had no choice but to force myself to deeply think about the facts and the results of our case. Thus, for all the time that I was there, I became so absorbed with the details and the grounds of our situation.

The questions that I used to preoccupied my mind with all the time when I was incarcerated at Abu-Ghraib Jail was, “Why we have being subjected to the nastiest ethnic disposition procedure”? And “What did we do to deserve this kind of treatment”? I used to go through deep thoughts constantly thinking about this question and tried to come up with a coherent answer in order to preoccupy my mind with and to convince my curiosity.

Did Saddam placed us under the most awful ethnic disposition system due to the Baath dense national ideology? Or did Saddam placed us under the nastiest ethnic disposition method due to our Shiite faith? Or did Saddam placed us under the most evil ethnic disposition act due to the Faili Kurds resistance to the Baath’s insurgency during the 1960’s? Or did Saddam placed us under the worst ethnic disposition act due to the fact that the Faili Kurds conquered Iraq’s economy? I got all these answers in my mind, but none of them was thrilling to me, and it got me more sadder and angry.

The losses that the Faili Kurds youths experienced with the unfair and wrongly imprisonment were very profound. Those losses include the loss of their freedom and the loss of their former identity and sense of self. We lost ourselves, our identity, and who we were.

I came to the point to hate myself and who I was. I lost faith in everything that existed in this universe. I lost hope in spirituality and pathology. I lost respect for all humanity and goodness. I lost hope in everything that I used to believe in, and so sadly, I even lost admiration for myself, my people, and my ethnic background. Everything that I was taught by my family, community, and society, had no wisdom to me.

Nothing that I read, heard, taught, or experienced in my youth’s life had any meanings for me. These gloomy thoughts fuelled my anger, my appalling feelings, my wound emotions, my approach of aggression, and my hatred towards myself, my ethnic background, authority, and society at large.

Without a doubt, I became so cynical, more aggressive, further impaired, and angrier. It didn’t take much for me to blow up, and before my incarceration, I was more patient, so kind, a strong believer, highly respectful, and very considerate, and it would take me a lot more to get angry.

These feelings, emotions, frustrations, and thoughts particularly true and normal for people who experienced unfair and undeserved penitentiary system, that is lacking a network of close personal contacts with family members and people who know them well.

However, when severely institutionalized persons confront complicated problems, situations, or conflicts, especially in the form of unexpected events that cannot be planned for in advance, the myriad of challenges that the non-institutionalized confront in their everyday lives outside the institution may become overwhelming.

The facade of normality begins to deteriorate, and persons may behave in dysfunctional or even destructive ways because all of the external structure and supports upon which they relied to keep themselves controlled, directed, and balanced have been removed.

Therefore, the Faili youths were the victims of microaggression policy that positioned the dominant culture (Arab culture) as normal and acceptable, and the minority culture (Faili Kurds culture) as abnormal and not acceptable. Thus, the Faili youths lost their rights in their homeland to live liberally with dignity and respect.

The dominant group has the power and the privileges to reject the minority group and to eliminate them from the whole society. As you can see now what the Faili Kurds youths have to undergo at Abu-Ghraib Jail and like I said before, what I am giving you now it is just a summary of what really happened at that institution, and there were many more that have not being said yet.

A small portion of us were liberated from Abu-Ghraib Jail, which I will talk about it in my next narrative, but the majority of those youths did not make it and they were innocently executed. God bless their souls and rest them in his paradise. I still remember those days and the faces of those youths. I will continue to remember those days and events, and I will take those memories with me to the grave.

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan, a Canada-based Faili Kurd, PHD Candidates in Clinical Psychology.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.