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Iraq: families make their final visits to relatives detained in Bucca
17-09-2009 Photo gallery
For families who used to visit their relatives detained in Bucca, southern Iraq, the journey was always long, perilous and costly, but well worth it. Since October 2005, the ICRC had helped make the journey possible, not least by covering part of the costs. In September 2009, with the American facility at Camp Bucca set to close down, the ICRC ended its family-visit allowance programme. During the four years that the programme ran, almost 30,000 detained people received 146,000 visits from their relatives with ICRC support.
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Mother-of-three Leila (in a white headscarf) lives in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad. She is visiting her son, Mohammad, 27, who has been detained in Camp Bucca since the beginning of 2008. It has been two months since she and her family last visited him. It is five o'clock in the morning and the waiting room in the visiting families’ section of Camp Bucca is already full. Families arrive very early to avoid the searing summer heat of southern Iraq.
Leila, her husband and Tabarok, her little disabled daughter, have come to visit Mohammad. Fighting back tears, Leila recalls the day he disappeared. “It was a nightmare, I looked everywhere for him until somebody from the ICRC called to tell me that he was here in Bucca.” Since then, Leila has come to visit Mohammad regularly, bringing him family news, photos and letters.
She boards the bus that will take her to her son. A few hours later Leila is back in the waiting room, sad and unable to conceal her pain. “Mohammad was so happy to see the photos", she says. "I only pray that soon he will be reunited with his brothers and sisters.”
According to Leila, the ICRC goes to great lengths to help her, her family and other people with relatives in prison. -
For 40 days Suad (left, in black) looked for her son, Mahmoud, who had disappeared mysteriously. She then found out that he had been arrested. She was notified of his arrest and whereabouts by the ICRC in Baghdad. Today Suad is visiting Mahmoud.
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Adel (in blue striped T-shirt) lives in Baghdad. His brother, Ahmad, was arrested at the beginning of 2008. Adel, who last visited his brother in April 2009, is accompanied by his brother's wife and four children on this visit.
The family is excited and anxious about seeing Ahmad. His wife, who has not been able to visit him for a year, is teary. She has had to cope with pregnancy and the illness and recent death of her mother-in-law. As if that is not enough, now the family has to convey the bad news to Ahmad. "We don’t know how to break the news to him," says Adel.
Adel and the rest of the family make the visit. They come back still very emotional. "We told Ahmad our sad news, but at least we were all there to share his grief," says his wife. The goodbyes are hard. "It is a blessing that we can come and see him, but parting is very difficult," says Ahmad's wife, and Adel agrees.
Ahmad is said to appreciate the role of the ICRC in notifying his family of his arrest and making it possible for them to visit him regularly in Bucca.
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Maryam’s son Mohammad is a 20-year-old university student who was arrested in 2006. Maryam, who lives in Mosul in northern Iraq, has been making the long trip to visit her son in Bucca, in the south, for three years. Today she is accompanied by her daughter, 10-year-old Sheyma.
The visit is bittersweet for Maryam. She is looking forward to seeing her son, but dreading the time when they must part again. “I just hope that Mohammad will soon be back with us," she says.Maryam and her family cannot afford to pay the cost of the trip to Bucca. She says, “without the help I get from the ICRC, I would not have been able to come and see my son all these years.”
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Saadiye, from the Abu Ghraib area in Baghdad, is visiting her son, Jassem. He is unaware that his father passed away before Ramadan. Saadiye is anxious to see him, but at the same time apprehensive about having to break this news to him.
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Thamer Al-Abdullah is the field officer who has supervised the ICRC family-visit allowance programme since 2006. He and his five colleagues live in trailers inside Bucca and visit their own families only every week or two. "Families visit their detained relatives here in Bucca every day and we have to be around to help them," says Thamer. "There were times in the past when as many as 350 visits were made per day. Work was very intense then," he recalls.
Families often share their woes with him and his colleagues. "For us, in our culture, family is very important, and we do understand the sadness of the people who benefit from our programme. But we are happy to be able to help them come here and to show them that we care."
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Restoring and maintaining family links between detainees and their families remains a top priority for the ICRC in Iraq and in all the other countries where it operates. In addition to running the family visit programme for Bucca, the organization enables detainees and their families to exchange news via Red Cross messages, collected by the ICRC and distributed to the families by the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and vice versa.
For the last four years, the team of ICRC staff shown in this photo have been helping families visit their relatives in Camp Bucca.
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