Amnesty International accused Saudi Arabia Tuesday of killing and torturing Iraqi refugees and using tanks to quell protests inside camps where they are held unarmed.
It said in a report that hundreds who sought shelter in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Persian Gulf War have been arbitrarily arrested and killed or forcibly returned to Iraq in the past three years, sometimes allegedly in concert with Iraqi intelligence agents.The London-based human rights group said collective punishments for protests about living conditions and bad treatment by camp authorities include denying refugees food and water.
"Available evidence indicates that the Saudi Arabian government has turned a blind eye to torture," it said. "Protests and marches inside the camps have been met with tanks and soldiers firing indiscriminately into crowds of refugees."
It said those held at camps at Rafha and Artawiyya, both in northwest Saudi Arabia near the Iraqi border, were subject to human rights abuses for protesting living conditions, criticizing camp authorities, disobedience or to extract confessions.
But it said that following condemnation by international non-governmental organizations, authorities improved some living conditions. The Artawiyya camp was closed in December 1992, the report said.
Amnesty said some 23,000 Iraqi refugees were in Saudi Arabia as of last month. Some are former members of the Iraqi armed forces who surrendered to the allies at the end of the war and refused repatriation. The United States, Saudi Arabia and their allies fought the war to expel invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
It said others are civilians who fled southern Iraq when President Saddam Hussein's forces crushed a rebellion that erupted there in March 1991 shortly after the war.
"In one incident in March 1993, at least nine refugees in Rafha camp may have been extrajudicially executed by soldiers in violence sparked by a protest against the Saudi Arabian authorities' refusal to grant asylum to an Iraqi family fleeing southern Iraq," it said.