BAGHDAD (dpa) – The secret service video, recorded by a secret camera, leaves nothing to the imagination. A prostitute waves her slip around her finger and declares it the new Iraqi national flag.
According to all the reports going the rounds in Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein was furious.On the orders of Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, 36, commandos of the Fedajin Saddam (Saddam’s Partisans), a special unit dressed all in black, captured around 100 pimps in Baghdad and the port of Basra and decapitated them with swords before onlookers in the streets.Witnesses said the decapitated heads of two of the victims – brother and sister – lay for two hours in front of a housing block next door to the information ministry. The couple were said to have been warned several times.The state-run media did not report the incident which took place at the end of October last year, just as it has carried no coverage of other public punishments such as the cutting out of tongues or the branding of the foreheads of repeat offenders.But the witness reports of the killings have spread like wildfire.Yet the executions have not stopped the problem. Taxi drivers say prostitutes are merely living in fear, and the risk of being caught has led to prices being doubled.Aid organization representatives say poverty and a “dramatic loss in spending power” has led to a major leap in prostitution. Lower level public service officials earn around 5,000 dinar (3 dollars) a month. Teachers earns about 10,000 dinar (6 dollars).Meanwhile the price for the favours of an “escort” is anything between 15 and 100 dollars.The government says its reprisals were aimed at a mafia organization controlling prostitutes which is said to have even sold young girls and women to other criminals abroad.The pimps in Baghdad target mainly students or business visitors from other Arab countries who are easily identified by their different dialects or clothing. Some villas in the suburbs are said to have been turned into brothels.The reports say that most of the young women come from broken homes in which there is no male figure such as a father or brother to help take care of them. Others have come into the city from poorer provinces. Their search for work often leads to prostitution.“At times like this the families don’t ask where all the money is coming from,” said one Iraqi.As a result of the increase in prostitution the Revolutionary Command Council, the highest body in Iraq, tightened AIDS testing in 1999.As a rule entry into Iraq is only possible with proof of a current AIDS test, otherwise blood will be taken at the border. Anyone wishing to stay in the country more than 15 days must undergo an AIDS test.The issue has been completely hushed up in the media. Official figures of AIDS cases have never been released.
