Posted on 11/22/2004 10:15:55 AM PST by knighthawk
SARAJEVO (AFP) - The search for more than a million Iraqis who went missing under the regime of Saddam Hussein may take more than 30 years due to the lack of local expertise and poor security, Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said.
"It will take more than 30 years ... to find more than one million missing," Amin said Monday, adding that the main problem was the lack of experts and technical support to identify bodies.
"So far we have found 283 mass grave sites, and if the security situation allows we will find more of them," Amin said, adding that Iraq counts only 20 forensic pathologists.
Iraq also lacks storage facilities for human remains, with a current capacity of fewer than 80 bodies.
"Saddam turned Iraq into a museum of crimes, into a land of mass graves," the minister said, referring to the ousted dictator who is now on trial for crimes against humanity.
Amin is in Bosnia for a four-day visit to meet officials from the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP).
The organization was established in the Balkans to help discover the fate of some 30,000 people listed as missing from the wars that ravaged Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
"We have to learn from the experience of others," Amin said.
"We plan to send some people to be trained in Bosnia, Kosovo and Jordan," Amin said after meeting ICMP chief-of-staff Kathryine Bomberger.
The ICMP earlier this month signed an agreement with the authorities of Iraq's northern Kurdish region to assist in the search for Saddam's victims.
The Sarajevo-based ICMP is to donate a sophisticated forensic database that matches victims' DNA with that from living relatives.
Nine years after the war in Bosnia, DNA analysis remains the only tool that can identify some 18,000 remains.
Since the first positive identification, made in late 2001, some 6,000 remains have been identified and 10,000 have been DNA-profiled.
Middle East list
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Considering that Saddam and his thug family "processed" many of his victims using plastic shredders, I suspect that a full accounting will never be realized.
What an interesting turn of words.
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