Posted on 04/18/2004 11:41:47 AM PDT by RWR8189
The legacy of a mass murderer.
A field outside Baghdad
THE DEAD DON'T TALK in Iraq but their graves do. In northern Iraq, a grave was unearthed last July with several thousand bodies, mostly women and children. From the bullet holes in the top of the skulls, it was clear the deaths weren't natural. The victims had been shot from above while kneeling or after being forced into a mass grave. They had personal household items with them like baskets. They had their clothes on. These were clues that helped identify their hometown and led to the conclusion they'd been compelled to gather up their belongings and march miles to their grave. The exact date of their massacre was determined from the fact that their village had been razed at a certain moment in the 1980s, at a time when Saddam Hussein and his security police were carrying out mass killings.
That's one story among many. Here's another: the tragedy of Musayib, an hour's drive south of Baghdad. When the Shia rose against Saddam in 1991 after the Gulf War, many men from the town were taken away. They never returned. Their families suspected the worst. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam in April 2003, their fears were realized. A large grave was found miles away and an orderly process begun to dig up bones, teeth, clothes, jewelry, shoes, identification papers, everything found in the burial pit. These along with the physical remains were wrapped in white linen shrouds and taken to a religious center in Musayib. Townspeople streamed to the center, opening the shrouds to see if they could identify the victim. When they did, sobbing and wailing erupted.
One more story: Mahawil. That's the name of the mass grave a few miles from Hilla, south of Baghdad. It was discovered last May and quickly overrun by 2,000 people from Hilla, who started digging with their hands and shovels. About 3,000 bodies, or separate sets of bones, were found. Killed in the roundup of Shia after the 1991 uprising, these people had been shot at the edge of the grave and fallen in or been pushed. Every hour as the digging went on, onlookers gathered around a hill to hear the list of names of those who'd been identified. Each name was met with cries of pain and sorrow. In all, 2,100 were identified. The remains of the other, anonymous 900 were reburied with markers and their personal effects on top. Now, a year later, Iraqis still flock to Mahawil to see if their father, husband, son, or brother is among the 900.
Mass graves are Saddam's most heartwrenching legacy in liberated Iraq. More than 270 have been reported and about 60 examined, partly or fully exhumed, and confirmed. The proven death toll in the graves is more than 300,000 and rising. More than one million Iraqis were reported missing in the 1980s and 1990s, and mass graves continue to be uncovered. "There will be graves people haven't seen or don't remember," says Sandy Hodgkinson, the State Department expert who just returned from a grim year in Iraq working on mass graves. "It will be a long time before we determine how many sites there are and where they are."
The victims include men, women, children, Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Christians, political prisoners, regular prisoners, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Iranians--and I may have left out a few categories. The graves are spread around Iraq, many in the remote and barren desert of southwest Iraq. It was to the desert that Kurdish men and boys, grabbed in the middle of the night, were trucked--and then shot and buried. Some of the sites were uncovered recently by Kurds, traveling far from home and operating on their own. Others in the desert were pinpointed through satellite photography. One Iraqi told Stephen Franklin of the Chicago Tribune he learned of his brother's killing and burial only when an execution order was found after Saddam's regime collapsed.
Mass graves in Iraq have attracted little media attention. But more inexcusable is the failure of the Bush administration to publicize the graves and what they reveal about Saddam. True, President Bush from time to time has mentioned "mass graves," but without elaborating. In response to a question at his press conference last week, he described Saddam as "a torturer, a killer, a maimer," before adding, "There's mass graves." But, again, he didn't say anything more. Yet, the existence of mass graves teeming with hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of Saddam's tyranny strengthens the moral case for intervening in Iraq. Mass graves humanize the moral case.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has, in fact, made this case in an impressive brochure entitled "Iraq's Legacy of Terror: MASS GRAVES." It was produced in January. But only now, 13 months after the invasion of Iraq, is it being sent to American embassies to distribute. USAID also funded an hour-long documentary on mass graves by a Kurdish filmmaker. The film has been ready since February, when Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer screened it for reporters in Baghdad. I saw it in Iraq in March. It is an enormously powerful film, showing the devastating impact of mass killings on Iraqi society. Yet it still hasn't been broadcast outside Iraq.
It should be, and the sooner the better. When Saddam and his associates go before the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide--trials will start next year--evidence from mass graves will play a crucial role in the prosecution's case. What have been dubbed "emotionally overrun sites" like Musayib and Mahawil can't be used because the evidence has been tainted for forensic purposes. So 20 other "full criminal investigation sites" or "pristine sites" are being examined and exhumed to document the crimes so that Saddam and his accessories may be held accountable. Saddam, by the way, won't be the first to go on trial. His crony Chemical Ali will be.
ONE DAY LAST MONTH I drove to a suspected mass grave outside Baghdad with British archaeologist Barry Simpson and a crew of forensic experts that included anthropologists and two Finnish geophysicists who operate ground-penetrating radar. Simpson is a former Birmingham homicide detective with long experience in finding buried bodies. This rural site was a real test. It is dozens of acres and offers no immediate signs of any grave digging. A small section had been dug up by nearby residents. Simpson scanned the piles of dirt they'd left and found a few scattered bones--a femur, a tibia, several ribs, two small pieces of skull, two fingers, and part of a shoulder.
The site was viewed as a potential source of evidence because most of it was "uncontaminated," meaning not disturbed, and thus usable at trial. Also, it is located across the road from a military base. Saddam sought to hide his mass killings and mass graves. That's why thousands of Kurds were executed and buried in inaccessible desert areas. But other mass graves--Mahawil, for instance--have been found at military installations that were off-limits to Iraqi civilians. The executions and burials were carried out secretly, but residents were aware of people going in and out of military bases. Authorities have received tips that as many as 40,000 people entered the base adjacent to the field southwest of Baghdad and never came out.
Simpson's team needs a couple of things that aren't in great supply in Iraq. "We need time," Simpson says. And forbearance. "We depend on the patience of the Iraqi people." It can take six or eight weeks to examine and excavate a site carefully and scientifically. But the needs of Iraqis can't be ignored altogether. "We have to balance forensic justice and humanitarian recovery. It's not just evidence. It's people. There's a thing called closure. There are so many people missing that people need to know what happened. Until they recover their loved ones with dignity, they can't move forward."
At this site, Simpson tried two techniques. First, he wandered around the field looking for ruffles or markings in the ground. Picking a place, he summoned a bulldozer to dig a narrow gully. It was scrutinized for bones, clothes, or other evidence, but none was found. Then the radar that detects differences or objects in the ground beneath the surface was put to work. It consists of a large piece of equipment dragged behind a truck. Nothing unusual was registered.
The day's effort by Simpson and his crew ended without confirmation of a mass grave. But Simpson was not ready to give up. Only a small section of the site has been checked out. Mass graves can be hard to uncover. And not every mass grave is filled with innocent victims. One turned out to be a cemetery for soldiers killed in Iraq's war with Iran. Simpson says he will return to the field. "So many disappeared under Saddam's rule, so many people," he says. "They have to be somewhere. We believe something happened here. What I want to do is prove something happened here." He buried the bones he found. "I have to believe it's somebody's son or daughter. A few words to God and down they go."
THE SUBJECT of Saddam's mass graves is so vast and varied that investigators have broken it down into chronological eras, just as historians have done with Stalin's episodes of executions and forced starvation in the Soviet Union. The most famous is the third period from 1986 to 1988 when Saddam ordered the destruction of at least 40 Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. Kurdish officials say the number is far more than 40. One is Halabjah, a village of Swiss-like beauty at the foot of a mountain range. There, about 5,000 people were killed by poisonous gas in 1988 and buried by surviving family members in mass graves.
A museum has been erected at Halabjah as a memorial to the dead. Its most graphic display shows the town after the gas attack, with bodies of adults, children, and mothers clutching infants lying motionless along the streets. Paul Bremer came to Halabjah last month on the 16th anniversary of the killings. "For those in my country and elsewhere who still wonder if the war [in Iraq] was worth fighting, I say come to Halabjah," he said. "Come see the tombstones of the 5,000 men, women, and children. . . . Look in the faces of the survivors. See the peaceful village turned into a hell overnight by evil."
The Halabjah atrocity became known at the time and has provided irrefutable evidence of a crime against humanity. But evidence in the other seven periods or episodes isn't as readily available. In 1980, Saddam targeted Falyi Kurds, a Shia sect. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. And while many remain missing, no mass graves have been discovered. In the second era, the killing of 3,000 men and boys (ages 15 to 65) of the Kurdish Barzani clan in 1983, a number of mass graves have been identified.
In 1988, Saddam committed one of his worst atrocities, the Anfal campaign. Anfal means "the spoils," and the spoils were 182,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys systematically arrested and taken from their homes. None came back. Many mass graves have been found where it's believed they are buried. The Kurds live in northern Iraq, but these graves are in the southwest desert. Those seized had no idea where they were being taken and they were killed clandestinely in a remote, sparsely populated area. Years later, with help from a passerby who had witnessed one of the mass burials, the Kurdish graves were located.
Next came two episodes of slaughter and mass graves after the Gulf War in 1991. The Shia uprising led to many mass graves, including Mahawil and Musayib. Most are south of Baghdad, reaching as far south as Basra near the border with Kuwait. As many as 60,000 Shia were killed and dumped in graves. The Kurds, who list 1.3 million as missing during Saddam's rule, were hit again. In areas below the "green line" and not protected by American air power, thousands were murdered in Kirkuk and Mosul. Several mass graves have been found and confirmed.
The seventh episode occurred in 1999, when students rose in protest against Saddam in Najaf, the holy Muslim city to which extremist cleric Moktada al-Sadr fled recently. Many of the rebellious students were executed, and a suspected site of their burial has been located.
The last episode covers three decades of Saddam's killing of political opponents, which continued right up to the toppling of his regime on April 9, 2003. Saddam occasionally emptied his jails of political prisoners and killed them to provide space for new prisoners. Their organs were often extracted for use by ailing Baathist party members. Certain days were set aside for specific surgical procedures such as the transplanting of eye parts. Graves of political opponents are scattered around Iraq, many near prisons.
Inside the protected green zone in Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority has an office of oral history. Iraqis appear there to tell personal stories of torture and atrocity. The most compelling come from the survivors of mass graves, the few there are. To its credit, USAID is now publicizing their experiences.
Three survivors of Mahawil tell the same story. Grabbed without explanation by Saddam's forces, they were blindfolded, their hands and feet tied, and driven by bus to the edge of a swamp. Victims tumbled into the swamp as they were shot. One survivor recalls a mother executed in front of her five-year-old child. The child was shot in the face. Three brothers pleaded for one to be spared. They were shot one by one.
That survivor fell in the swamp without being shot and escaped before a bulldozer covered the swamp with mud. Another was kneeling next to an Egyptian who leaped to his feet when hit by bullets and swept the man into the swamp with him. The third was wounded but only partially buried. They were the lucky ones. Many were killed even before reaching a mass grave, beaten to death with pipes or thrown into a blazing fire. The survivors recall no moments of mercy or regret or guilt by Saddam's killers.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
The UN cared only for the graft they received. The american news media cared only for their 'access' as outlined by CNN.
Much like the genocide in Rwanda, most seem not to care about the loss of innocent lives.
X42 cared only as a means of wagging the dog, changing the subject from his own lawlessness and chose the side of the islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
C'mon Fred. You and your ilk are responsible for informing the public. Why don't you do your job and quit blaming Bush?
Not until sometime after June 30, certainly. And probably not until after elections are held in January, 2005.
That much more time to milk him dry.
Most are much too lazy to do the necessary work on a story like Fred did. They would rather chum around with their fellow lefties complaining about the conditions in IRAQ and waiting for the NEXT casualty so they can REPORT it with grim faces and the necessary hyperbole needed to describe IRAQ as a QUAGMIRE or another VIETNAM.
Rwanda, Cambodia, Iraq. The liberals could care less. If it doesn't empower them, they are just not interested.
I believe they plan to investigate Saddam's crimes after they finish up with Stalin, Mao, Castro, Reno and a few others. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to look into matters that make Bush and the military look good.
Well said. God bless George Bush.
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