IT WAS more than a touch bizarre to be offered freshly baked brown muffins and garish yellow juice as I entered the Abu Ghraib prison on Wednesday. The new man in change, General Geoffrey Miller, freshly arrived from Guatanamo Bay, certainly did not look as poker-faced as he did on TV. Frequently peppering his introductory words with “to be frank with you”, he promised a new regime.

There are to be visits by relatives to all but 92 high-security prisoners. In addition there will be prisoner representatives who will report back to the general. The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry will have a permanent presence at the prison. There are to be more frequent releases of prisoners. As I write, 300 have been let out today. Nearly 5,000 more are still there behind the high walls, the razor wire and bars of cells.

General Miller, like every member of the coalition, feels shamed by the horror of the scandal. How could US soldiers, steeped in American values, have taken part in the sadistic and humiliating treatment of their Iraqi prisoners? He swore it would never happen again.

General Miller was firm about the threat that some of those prisoners posed. He told me there were an estimated 600,000 rocket- propelled grenades in Iraq. It would take at least three years to destroy all stockpiled weaponry there.

The Abu Ghraib is the place that during Saddam’s time could hold 50,000. Given that Britain’s prison population is around 73,000, it gives you some idea of the size of the place where tens of thousands died after torture, murders or acid baths. In one day alone 2,000 were killed on Saddam’s orders.

With me was a man who 25 years ago was tortured here; many of his relatives died here too. Dr Hameed al-Bayati, now Iraq’s Deputy Foreign Minister, is an old friend from our days of campaigning on human rights in Iraq. He was returning to the prison for the first time. He was strong in his condemnation of the brutal abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. His words were, however, measured. This time he said, those who were responsible would be punished. In the past murder was institutionalised and it was an unchallenged daily fact of life.

I had first come to the Abu Ghraib in June last year, before the prisoners were brought here. I wanted to see it because for 25 years I had known and publicised the awful history of the place. I saw the execution block and the pits into which the lifeless bodies fell; the colour portraits of a munificent and benign Saddam in a silk suit, a dove on his shoulder, smiling as he puffed a cigar.

When I came here again in March, I was shown prisoners being brought in and “processed” as the sign said outside. It sounded efficient — cards giving their details were filled in for the Red Cross for onward information to their relatives. I filled one. It never arrived at my home. I asked about relatives’ prisons visits. There were none. Releases; very few. Despite a lot of talk about improving the process, changes have been much too slow, I wrote at that time. I knew nothing then about the shocking accusations of abuse which were to follow eight weeks later.

Later on Wednesday I gave numerous TV and radio interviews which meant seeing Baghdad from various rooftops at night. I was in mid-sentence in one of the interviews, when the gunfire started. It was frequent, loud and getting closer. A producer plucked me off the roof, tracer bullets lighting up the sky as we stumbled to safety below. Later we heard the news: Iraq had just beaten Saudi Arabia 3-1 and qualified for the Olympic football finals for the first time. This was party time Baghdad-style.

The next morning it was the Today programme and John Humphrys. He is not alone, of course, in perceiving Iraq as a country in chaos, a nation where nothing and nobody works. Looking at it from thousands of miles away, it is hard to believe that ordinary people still go to work and school. There are satellite dishes, suites of furniture for sale on the pavements, brightly lit shops selling everything. There are also roadblocks, traffic lights that don’t work, ID checks and the new concrete barriers, and still the occasional roadside bomb or mortar fire. They all remind you that Baghdad can also be a dangerous place.

But there are many positive signs of renewal. Dr Latif Rashid, the Minister for Water and Irrigation, is co-ordinating the effort to restore the Marshlands, drained by Saddam. Thousands of displaced Marsh Arabs are returning to the area to resume a way of life and culture that was 5,000 years old.

Civic society is flourishing. There are 91 TV and radio stations, 106 newspapers are regularly published, hundreds of Iraqi journalists are being trained to question rather than parrot regime press releases. Voluntary organisations such as the Free Prisoners’ Association are proliferating. It gathers documents detailing the atrocities of the fallen regime to help to inform those who are still trying to trace their relatives. They have recorded 120,00 killings so far with a mountain of documents to work through. For them the grief and the suffering under Saddam is not yet in the past.

I asked the founder of the Free Prisoners’ Association, Ibrahim Idrissi, imprisoned 11 times, whether he had been interviewed by Al-Jazeera, the TV channel hated by so many Iraqis. Yes, he said, they have come to our offices three times but local people have always kicked them out. Why, I asked: “Because they say it is the voice of Saddam.” Yet another example of Iraqis asserting their new-found freedom.

There is little nostalgia for Saddam and a mixture of apprehension and optimism about the future. The task of rebuilding Iraq was never going to be easy. The years of brutalisation and deprivation brought Iraqis to their knees. I asked Dr Ali Allawi, the new Minister for Defence, what Britain could do now. His answer was swift: “Just stay the course.”

The author is the Prime Minister’s human rights envoy to Iraq and MP for Cynon Valley

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