The Killing Fields
by Nyier Abdou
Survivors of the 1991 Intifada are finally able to search for their dead, but as volunteers continue to uncover mass graves in southern Iraq, evidence that could be used in future tribunals is slipping away, reports Nyier Abdou in Hilla
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Karim Aziz Kathem Al-Hussein is looking for his father. He carries with him his father's ID card as he searches through bundles of belongings uncovered with the remains of thousands of Iraqis who were killed by the Ba'th regime during the 1991 Shi'a uprising in southern Iraq. Nine of Karim's relatives are believed to be buried here, although he has found none of them.
Like many of the mourners who come to the mass grave sites recently uncovered by local volunteers at Al-Muhawwil, near the city of Hilla, Karim can give the exact day his father was taken: 24 March 1991. He remembers that he was fasting then, as it was Ramadan. His father was a well-known religious leader in the area, and at the time of the Intifada, that was enough to make him an enemy of the state. "The government wanted to eliminate those who might encourage people to resist the regime," says Karim. "If they had the smallest doubt about someone, they took him."
Arriving at Muhawwil is a powerful reminder of the ruthlessness with which Saddam Hussein's regime carried out this doctrine of extermination. The sea of small mounds, each tagged with a plastic bag holding the belongings found with each body, brings home the extent of the overwhelming tragedy that took place here. While men dig doggedly in the blazing heat, others carefully separate the remains of uncovered bodies and wrap them in anonymous white bundles. Walking through the makeshift cemetery where bodies have been reburied, the tears began to flow and I wiped them away as I tried to take pictures.
COUNTING THE DEAD
Diggers have been working here for a month, and as of last week, they had uncovered more than 3,100 bodies. In the early days, a stream of some 2,000 people a day were descending on the site, hoping to identify the remains of those they had lost. Workers were forced to ask the United States military to help keep the crowds back, and a handful soldiers remain at the site.
All the people working at Al-Muhawwil are volunteers, mostly from the nearby village of Al- Hussein. The men come every day, from 7.00 in the morning to 5.00 in the evening. Mohamed Gasm was one of the first people to start work at the site. "When we came here it was just a hill, like that one," he says, pointing to a long, low ridge behind the site. "We came on our own. We didn't have any equipment for excavation, just some basic tools."
When the workers found that the graves were quite deep, they went to the American military for help. The Americans provided more equipment and still lend a hand clearing away the top layers of soil. The occasional sight of an American soldier lumbering by bundles of cloth- wrapped remains in a tractor and kicking up clouds of dust seems incongruous and manifestly inappropriate given the solemn task at hand, but diggers maintain it has been an invaluable help.
When diggers find a body, they do what they can to identify it -- often, the person was buried with some form of identification -- and give the name to authorities in the governorate. The names are assembled and listed regularly on television. Small groups of mourners still haunt the gravesite, walking slowly, purposefully, through the maze of graves, the sight of a woman's black abbaya standing out in the monotonous landscape as she bends down to fish in the bags of belongings looking for something familiar.
Most people who claim the remains of their family members or friends take the bodies to the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf and rebury them in the holy city's vast Shi'a cemetery. But many bodies remain unclaimed. "A lot of the bodies, we don't know who they are," says Gasm. "Maybe no one comes to look for them because their whole family is buried here."
An imam performs burial rites on rows of bodies before they are reburied. I watched over the burial of a woman and her baby. The man held up the small bundle before tucking it into the grave and wedging a stone beside it. Somberly, the workers filled the grave with soil.
"I found my nephew here," says Gasm quietly, gesturing at what is now rows of graves. "Just over there. He was arrested on 20 April 1991. He didn't do anything. They just came and took him."
JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
The search for Iraq's disappeared is perhaps one of the most public and immediate facets of the social catharsis that the people of Iraq are undergoing in the post-war period. The scouring of intelligence files, the search for mass graves -- all are being undertaken by assiduous locals who have seized the long-awaited chance to bring the crimes of the Ba'th regime to light. The US and UK have yet to unveil evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that were the grounds on which the war in Iraq was built, but with each day, the register of atrocities lengthens.
As men arrange the bones of the dead, cupping their hands gently around the muddy skulls, I check myself from taking pictures. But the workers motioned to continue. "Let them see," says one, wrapping the bundle with string and pointing to the row of remains. "Let people see how we suffered."
People here are determined to make it clear to Arabs who supported Saddam that they were wrong. While men reburied the bodies of the woman and her son, one man indicated the row of bodies waiting to be buried and said, "Those who stood by Saddam, those who said he was a hero for standing up to the US -- let them come here and see this."
Basm Mohamed Kathem denounces Arab regimes in particular for their silent acquiescence during the years of Hussein's rule, but he has special venom for Egypt. "There are many Egyptians buried here, so we contacted the embassy," he says. "The Egyptian ambassador came here and we ended up fighting with him. He told the people here, 'You supported Saddam once'. But all the Arab regimes supported Saddam. We told him that if we supported Saddam, it was by force. 'You, you supported him by choice. It was you who supported him, not us'."
HEART OF DARKNESS
The land that is now the Al-Muhawwil gravesite was seized from a local farmer and allotted to a Ba'thist supporter who villagers identify as a "criminal" named Khais Al-Atwani. An armed guard was posted at the site and, according to locals, was paid 250,000 Iraqi dinars a month for his silent vigil. Al-Atwani disappeared before the war, but his relative, Mohamed Juad I'Nefas, who people maintain collaborated with Al-Atwani in the crimes committed at Al- Muhawwil, was apprehended by villagers and handed over to American troops. But it was reported this week that the US military mistakenly released Al-Nefas, and there is $25,000 reward for his apprehension.
Jaber Al-Hussein continued to farm the land adjacent to the site, and at the time of the 1991 massacres, he hid himself nearby with a telescope. It was he who first identified the site to those searching for the graves, although there were others who lived nearby who saw what he did. Like Jaber, they said nothing at the time. More than a decade later, he describes the atrocities he witnessed with clinical calm.
During the period between 7 March and 6 April 1991, says Jaber, prisoners were brought to the site in batches. Before the buses arrived, people were already in the field, digging trenches, and Ba'th henchmen were out in force to seal off the area. Minibuses carrying about 40 passengers each arrived daily in groups of two or three.
"They came in shifts. First in the morning at 9.00, then at noon, and again around 5.00 in evening," says Jaber. "The prisoners' arms were tied behind their backs, and they were blindfolded, their heads pressed against the seats. The buses would pull up close to the trench and one by one, they pushed them from the door. Then they'd just shoot into the trench. It didn't matter if they were dead or alive; they used shovels and buried them."
The hasty and indiscriminate killing is unmistakable in the bodies uncovered. One woman was found still wearing her elaborate and expensive gold jewellery. Most bodies still have their watches, their rings, their IDs. Many show no indication of being shot, meaning they were probably buried alive. All across the site, one sees remnants of uncovered graves -- a sandal, a bit of clothing, shoes with the cloth used to tie someone's feet wound around them.
"I have three brothers buried here," says Jaber. "Most of Iraqi land has been turned into graves. All Iraq is now one big grave for the Iraqi people."
FLYING BLIND
About an hour's drive from Al- Muhawwil, on the way to Rumadi, the desert is barren and full of long, low ridges, most of them either natural, or formed by defunct irrigation projects. But it was in this expanse of harsh territory that a group of villagers from Al- Mussayib came to look for graves they had been told were in the area. Diggers Mohamed Abu Awwas and Hamza Mattar Hussein say they spent days scouring the ground for bullet casings or large areas of shifted soil.
The graves they finally uncovered, in a place called Jurf Al-Sakher, are believed to hold 390 people from one clan alone, the Shamali, who come from the town of Shamali, close to Kut. In the 12 days workers have been digging here, they have found the remains of more than 600 people, 40 from Shamali. Like those found at Al- Muhawwil, they are victims of the Shi'a Intifada.
Near the group's pickup truck, wrapped remains are lined up in rows of two, most with their names written on the white cloth. At the end of the day the bodies are unceremoniously loaded onto the truck and taken to Al-Mussayib.
Here, as well as at Al-Muhawwil, the workers are methodical and organised, but untrained. They rely on intuition and luck, often digging large trenches and clearing away layers of soil with a tractor lent by the municipality without knowing that there is anything below. In one disturbing case, instead of finding bodies, they uncovered a dump of chemical waste.
We watch as a group slowly removes layers of a trench, bringing the tractor in, digging, and repeating the process numerous times. Suddenly, the tractor pulls up a piece of faded clothing and a couple of men leap into the trench, digging gently around the area. They unearth the remains of two bodies, the skulls still blindfolded. A bullet hole is evident in the forehead of one.
As one man carefully pulls away the mud around the remains and arranges them, two men are digging a new trench nearby. There they hit upon another body, and one man walks over carrying the skull on his shovel.
Watching from afar is Jonathan Forrest, of the British charity INFORCE (the International Forensic Centre of Excellence for Investigation of Genocide). This is the first visit to Jurf Al- Sakher for Forrest's group of seven forensic scientists and one senior crime officer, who are part of an advance assessment team commissioned by the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). Asked by ORHA to help formulate a policy on dealing with the mass graves, INFORCE has been given an almost prohibitively delicate task. In the weeks since the war ended, locals have established a surprisingly rigorous programme of self-administered excavation in what is a very emotional and political matter. The intrusion of foreign influence is unlikely to be welcome.
The US and UK have indicated that they may seek to try cases of gross human rights violations against Iraqis, like the massacres of the Intifada, as part of an "Iraqi process", rather than in an international war crimes tribunal, which will surely be sought for senior Ba'th leaders. But with every day that workers vigorously seek and uncover graves, the forensic evidence that would be crucial in such tribunals is lost, either because the families are actually taking the remains and burying them, or simply because the method of excavation and identification is grossly insufficient to be used as evidence in a court of law.
HOW IT'S DONE
The INFORCE team observe the digging unobtrusively at first, but it is clear that the haphazard means by which the workers are unearthing the remains is painful to watch. Most of the scientists have worked in former Yugoslavia doing similar work, but Forrest says that handling the sensitivities of workers whose aims are personal rather than legal is a new and daunting challenge.
"They are obviously organised and work in an extremely efficient way," says Forrest. But he underscores the unnecessarily severe conditions the workers are dealing with, given that modern equipment can easily identify graves. What took the workers from Al-Mussayib days of gruelling searching could have been swiftly completed with equipment that provides a three- dimensional underground picture -- equipment sitting in the back of the INFORCE team's van. Ground-penetrating radar can tell where the ground has been disturbed and pick up anomalies. "We can find the graves," says Forrest confidently, his tone indicating that this is the least of their difficulties.
Members of the INFORCE team are squatting next to diggers, all of them huddled around a cloth with the two sets of remains just uncovered laid out on it. "We can help you," I hear one woman tell them, through their translator. "We can help you identify the bodies." But the man guards the remains jealously and looks at the INFORCE team, their bright white tee-shirts and bandannas wrapped around their heads, with a look of impatience that borders on disdain. The woman explains that they can teach them to separate and recognise the bones, but this offer is rebuffed on the basis that the workers already know how. "Do they know about bones?" she asks. The question is rhetorical, but the answer is firm. "Yes," the translator says. "All of them? All of them know about bones?"
Forrest says that one of the major problems he has seen in both Al-Muhawwil and Jurf Al-Sakher is that remains that are piled on top of one another are being mixed up in the process of being unearthed. "We can help them to uncover the remains in a more scientific way," he says, noting that this means separating the remains more effectively and keeping "more" of one body. "Right now, they're leaving the hands and feet behind -- the small bones that are not easily uncovered," he notes.
"Forensic evidence has to be held and dealt with in a certain way," explains Forrest. "There are currently no facilities in Iraq to secure evidence." What INFORCE can do, he says, is put such facilities in place, so that international teams can come to the country and prepare evidence that could be used in tribunals. "There are many things we can do," says Forrest.
The problem is, they have to be done fast. The scale of the graves in this region has yet to be made clear, but one thing is certain: locals are not only more aware than ORHA, they are also acting swiftly. At Al- Muhawwil workers told us that they knew of another site, some two kilometres away, and that they intended to start digging there this week.
It is estimated that over 20,000 people could be buried in the mass graves south of Baghdad and it seems doubtful that INFORCE will be able to get to them as quickly as they are found in order to initiate procedures for comprehensive excavations. "Iraq is a country full of graves," says Forrest. "We have to prioritise where we work. It's important that we work on graves that can lead to prosecutions."
Last week US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer visited the gravesites -- the clearest sign yet that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is aware that an effective policy on the mass graves needs to come sooner rather than later. On Sunday, British Prime minister Tony Blair's special human rights envoy, Ann Clwyd, visited the gravesites with the INFORCE team. While the commissioning of the INFORCE team is a strong indication that such a policy is being made a priority, it is likely that locals will remain a step ahead of the bureaucratic behemoth that the CPA has already become. With INFORCE only in its "assessment" stages, a concrete policy still needs to be formulated by ORHA, and then a larger forensic team will need to be assembled and deployed.
In the time it takes for this to happen, countless more bodies will be spirited away, while workers at gravesites grow more settled in their routine. Every day that passes augments the inevitable confrontation between modern science and dry legal procedures and a very natural process of recovering and burying one's dead. The long-term project of legal retribution falls uneasily in between and time is of the essence.
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– Nyier H Abdou
Nyier H Abdou
Al-Ahram Weekly
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E-mail: Nyier H Abdou
This article was first run on Al-Ahram Weekly
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