Iraqi Docs Forced To Cut Off Ears

Iraqi doctors were forced to cut off ears, falsify reports on torture and participate in other human rights abuses during Saddam Hussein's regime, a survey of physicians there found.

Fewer than 10 percent of the 98 doctors surveyed said they had performed such abuses, but their responses indicated they believed human rights abuses by other physicians were not uncommon.

The results appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

About half the respondents said they believed other Iraqi physicians were frequently forced to amputate ears as punishment and falsify medical reports. Seventeen percent said they believed doctors were frequently forced to remove organs from dead and living patients without consent.

A current Iraqi official agreed with them.

Dr. Amer al-Khuzaie, deputy health minister in Baghdad, said Saddam Hussein "tried everything to terrorize the Iraqi people and he used mean and brutal methods to oppress the people. One of these methods was the use of doctors to cut ears and tongues of opponents and army deserters, and other illegal and unethical practices."

"The aim of doctors is to end the suffering, but in Saddam's time, the opposite happened," al-Khuzaie said. "Most of the doctors conducted such practices under threat and they feared for their personal safety. Doctors who refused to do such things were imprisoned or tortured."

The survey was conducted in June and July by the Boston-based research and advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights. The results are based on questionnaires and interviews with doctors in two cities in southern Iraq. The abuses the doctors discussed occurred from about 1991 to last year.

"This happens in totalitarian regimes, and it wasn't surprising that doctors were forced to do this," said Dr. Lynn Amowitz, who helped conduct the surveys.

Earlier this year, some 1,778 survivors of medical experiments in Nazi Germany received checks from the proceeds of Holocaust lawsuits. New surveys of the victims showed the extent of torture-like experiments, some involving sterilization, injection of infections diseases and unnecessary amputations, were more widely practiced than previously known.