Iraqis pull 3,000 bodies from mass grave

[Gość: IZRAEL]

Iraqis pull 3,000 bodies from mass grave
Digging with bare hands: Rights groups worry evidence of murder being
destroyed

Peter Goodspeed
National Post, with files from news services


Thursday, May 15, 2003

CREDIT: Takuro Yabe Kyodo, The Associated Press

Relatives search for missing loved ones among plastic bags containing
remains exhumed from a grave in the town of Mahawil. The bodies of 15,000
executed Iraqis are believed to be buried there.

ADVERTISEMENT


Distraught relatives, scrabbling with their bare hands, are pulling body
after body from a mass grave in the marshland behind a brick factory in the
Iraqi town of Mahawil.

In the past week, Shiite farmers in the region 60 kilometres south of
Baghdad have unearthed more than 3,000 decomposed corpses and expect to find
12,000 more.

But international human rights groups worry that in easing their grief and
recovering the bodies of murdered relatives, Iraqis may be destroying any
chance Iraq's mass murderers will ever be brought to trial.

As more and more mass graves are uncovered, providing appalling indications
of the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime, concern is growing that
officials responsible for the killings may ultimately avoid criminal
prosecution.

Mass graves all over Iraq are being opened before any international
authority or human rights organization can properly document, photograph or
catalogue the sites and their gruesome contents.

"Excavation of mass graves without proper forensic examination is making it
difficult to either identify the remains or to begin proper criminal
investigations," the London-based group Human Rights Watch says.

Just as many possible Iraqi weapon storage sites have been looted,
scattering or destroying any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the
mass graves are now being stripped of their victims and their evidence
before being properly studied.

The U.S.-led administration in Baghdad is doing little, if anything, to
prevent the destruction of such crucial evidence.

Around Mahawil, residents had long known thousands of their relatives had
been murdered and buried in graves on the outskirts of the village near the
site of ancient Babylon.

In February and March of 1991, Iraq's Shiite Muslims rose up in rebellion
against Saddam, encouraged by the United States. But their revolt was
brutally put down and thousands of civilians were killed.

Throughout the spring of that year, death squads executed and buried their
victims in the sandy flat lands behind the village brickyard.

But it was only in the last month, since the fall of Saddam's regime, that
most Iraqis have had the courage and the opportunity to hunt for their
missing relatives and dig up the dictator's grim secrets.

For nine days now, residents of Mahawil have been poring over the site of
the largest mass grave yet discovered in Iraq, using their hands and a
backhoe to search for bodies.

Hundreds of grieving relatives, including women clutching pictures of
missing loved ones, watch from behind rows of barbed wire.

They wail as they examine each newly unearthed corpse and bundle of cloth.
Searching for evidence, they pick through piles of bones, hunting for faded
identity cards or a scrap of clothing or a pair of glasses that might help
them identify a dead relative.

Many of the decomposed corpses still have their hands bound behind their
backs and strips of cloth tied across their eyes. Many have been shot in the
skull, but some show no evidence of any wounds at all, leading to
speculation they may have been buried alive.

Once identified, a corpse is usually reclaimed by a family and given a
proper burial elsewhere.

Human rights workers sympathize with the families, but are worried not
enough is being done to protect the forensic evidence that will be needed to
prosecute Iraq's mass murderers.

In the case of the Mahawil mass grave, Human Rights Watch says it told the
U.S. Marines and the the U.S.-led Iraqi administration about the grave on
May 3, and pleaded with them to protect it and send a forensic team to
investigate.

So far, nothing has been done.

"It's obvious the U.S. government has no plan to secure the Iraqi sites, as
it did in Bosnia," when U.S.-backed forensic scientists gathered proof to
lay war crimes charges against Slobodan Milosevic and his cohorts, says a
Human Rights Watch report.

"Coalition forces must immediately secure sites of potential mass graves in
order to preserve the evidence necessary for identifying the remains and
initiating prosecutions against human rights violators."

Mass graves have also been unearthed in Najaf, Basra and the Hillah area,
near Mahawil, just south of Baghdad.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch announced it has discovered another secret
burial ground with more than 1,000 numbered graves in Muhammad Sakran, 40
kilometres north of Baghdad. It says the graves may contain victims of a
1980s political purge.

"By conservative estimates, at least 290,000 people are missing in Iraq and
the answer to their whereabouts likely lies in these graves," says Peter
Bouckaert, a researcher in Iraq with Human Rights Watch.

[e-mail]

© Copyright 2003 National Post