Human rights minister calls for exhumation of mass graves

Iraq's minister for human rights, Baktiar Amin, is calling for the country's mass grave sites to be exhumed for DNA matching to find relatives who disappeared and were presumed to be killed under the former regime of Saddam Hussein. According to human rights officials who were in the now disbanded US administration in Iraq, some 300,000 opponents of Saddam were buried in 263 mass graves. Human Rights Watch (HRW) put the number at 290,000 people and has been calling for exhumation. "The US-led Coalition must take the lead, not only in securing grave sites, but quickly communicating its commitment to exhume and identify the remains," a HRW statement said. Most of those buried in mass graves are believed to be Kurds killed by Saddam in the 1980s after rebelling against the government and Shi'ites killed after an uprising following the 1991 Gulf War. Mass graves in places like Hilla, about 100 km south of Baghdad, hold hundreds of unmarked bodies. Following the fall of the former regime last spring, some families did their own exhumations of the massive dirt hills outside the city, desperate to find out what happened. Hundreds of Shi'ite Muslims were killed in 1991 in the Hilla region when they rose up against the former regime. "DNA tests will help in our efforts to find prisoners of war and missing persons and help people who are victims of the Iran-Iraq war," Amin told IRIN. Amin also wants to start a truth and reconciliation commission in Iraq similar to one created in South Africa and another in Rwanda following ethnic violence there that killed thousands of people. "We can draw lessons from it that will apply to the reality of Iraq," Amin said of the idea. UN agencies in Amman, Jordan, said they will support projects to address past human rights violations. This was announced in a press release following a meeting with Amin and Malek Dohan al-Hassan, Iraq's new minister of justice, late last week. The world body's officials said they would support programmes to promote and protect human rights and the rule of law in Iraq, the statement explained. Amin declined to put a price to his plans, although he suggested that UN international workers should return to Iraq to oversee them. "We have emphasised that the UN can't work by remote control from Cyprus or Amman. It is more efficient that they work from inside Iraq," he said. "If you want to play a vital role, you have to be with the people." UN representatives also agreed to help build institutions to protect human rights, the release said. Amin also has big plans to open centres around Iraq to redress a variety of human rights abuses under the former regime. One centre will help victims of torture; another will document former abuses and offer resources from other countries where wide scale abuse occurred, he said.