Focus on mass graves

Hussein Dinar a 29-year-old teacher left Baghdad where he has been working for the last couple of years immediately after the end of the war on 9 April 2003 to his home town of Hilla, some 120 km south of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, to search for the body of the his dead brother Jabir. “Both of my brothers who were Shi'ite activists in the 1991 uprising and my father who hadn’t participated in the uprising were killed and buried somewhere in an undisclosed location," he told IRIN in Baghdad. Hussein didn’t find either of the bodies of his family but he has now vowed to help others in his situation and joined the Society for the Preservation of Mass Graves. Rafid al-Husseini, President of the Society, who is a surgeon at Baghdad hospital, was searching for his two cousins who were killed in the 1980s during the war with Iran at the same place, Hilla. Rafid said that many of the people killed and buried randomly by the Iraqi security were during the Iraq-Iran war, and after the 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims. “In the Shi'ite uprising at the end of the Gulf war, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and Hilla were killed fighting for autonomy in southern Iraq,” he told IRIN. He said that every Iraqi who had a missing relative and friend started searching for them. “Many people were searching collectively and gathering information from papers left at security points, but me and other volunteers decided to help in the search for other people," he added. Now, Rafid’s NGO is working with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the interim Iraqi Human Rights Ministry who are implementing a programme to identify remains in mass graves and collect evidence of past atrocities for future prosecutions. The Mass Graves Action Plan began in May 2003 and called for people to refrain from unskilled digging at grave sites, and engaging local or national leaders and members of civil society in a discussion on how to handle the question of missing persons in Iraq. The plan also called for the preservation of mass graves, and to plan for exhumation of selected sites for the purposes of criminal accountability, said Sandra Hodgkinson, director of Human Rights at the CPA. “So far, we have assessed approximately 40 sites with forensic assessment teams, and another 70 or so with military assessment teams. We selected certain sites for exhumation based upon their value as potential evidence in criminal trials," she told IRIN in Baghdad. "Some 80 individuals were also selected countrywide to participate in training courses for Iraqi legal, criminal, archaeological and medical experts to acquire skills in identification of the missing from personal effects, age-sex profiling, dental examinations, etc,” she said. Hodgkinson added that planning for extensive training programmes in forensic exhumation would begin after the rainy season of February. According to a fact sheet released on 19 December by the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour and Bureau of Public Affairs, over 250 grave sites have been reported, of which approximately 40 have been confirmed to date. There is no accurate figure on the number of Iraqis believed to be missing as a result of executions, wars and defections, of whom hundreds of thousands are thought to be in mass graves. Most of the mass graves discovered to date are the results of one or more of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime. It started with the 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, 8,000 of whom were rounded up by the regime in northern Iraq and executed in deserts at great distances from their homes. Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages between 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Iraqi Air Force dropped sarin and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people, and then the thousands killed later in the Shi'ite uprising in the south. During the 1988 Anfal campaign as many as 182,000 people disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of Iraq. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves. “By conservative estimates, at least 290,000 people are missing in Iraq, and the answer to their whereabouts likely lies in these graves,” according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) statement. “The US-led coalition must take the lead, not only in securing gravesites, but quickly communicating its commitment to exhume and identify the remains,” the statement said. The CPA said the second step of the plan for mass graves investigations involves formally gathering evidence. The forensic site assessment involves gathering information such as precise location, number of remains in the grave, approximate date of the grave, origin of victims and other information regarding site conditions such as soil, weather and security. The graves must be generally undisturbed and have probative value as evidence for a crime against humanity, for example, bullet holes in 100 skulls. This call was echoed by Iraq's Minister for Human Rights, Abdel Bassit Turki, who pressed on the urgency to protect the mass graves and prevent people and families from disturbing them. According to Rafid, while families were digging, they identified a lot of people by their clothes, things they carried in their pockets, artificial teeth and so on. “People were killed on the spot especially during after the Shi'ite uprising,” he said. In May 2003, the International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide (INFORCE), a British NGO, was contracted by the British Government to work with the CPA to develop standard protocols to govern the forensic work. INFORCE experts also performed 15 initial forensic site assessments. Since then, teams from Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States have performed forensic site assessments in coordination with the CPA Forensic Team. The Finnish Government plans to send a team in January 2004. But the painstaking task of finally giving news to relatives whose loved ones have been missing for years will take some time yet if ever. ”We are working between the living and the dead. We know we would like to get as many as possible to the ones they loved, but we cannot bring back the hundreds of thousands of missing Iraqis,” Rafid said.