IRAQ: Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has hit back at former prime minister Iyad Allawi for saying human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein.
"I cannot imagine that such nonsense has been said by Dr Allawi because he is very well aware that now in Iraq we are enjoying all kinds of democratic rights," Mr Talabani told BBC World television after Dr Allawi's comments appeared in Britain's Observer newspaper.
"If we go back to Saddam's Iraq, we see that it was turned by Saddam into concentration camps on the ground and mass graves underground," Mr Talabani said. "How can one compare this new situation with that situation which was unique?"
Dr Allawi was Iraq's first prime minister of the post-Saddam era but failed to win January's election, which brought current Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, an Islamist Shia, to power.
Dr Allawi, who is a secular Shia and has a seat in parliament, is critical of some Shias in power, viewing them as overly Islamic and too close to Iran.
He told the Observer that many Iraqis were being killed in the course of interrogations.
"People are doing the same as (in) Saddam Hussein's time and worse," said Dr Allawi, a former Baathist who is standing in elections scheduled for December 15th.
"These are the precise reasons why we fought Saddam Hussein and now we are seeing the same things.
"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," he said, in an apparent reference to the discovery of a bunker at the Shia-run interior ministry where 170 men were held prisoner, beaten, half-starved and in some cases tortured.
Mr Talabani insisted that the government was against any form of torture or harming of detainees.