Human rights workers yesterday accused the US military of failing to protect and properly excavate the largest mass grave discovered in Iraq.
Villagers said they had unearthed more than 3 000 bodies from a barren field in Mahawil, close to the ancient Babylonian city of Hilla, south of Baghdad. Hundreds of clear plastic bags were lined up across the site, each containing a handful of torn clothing around broken bones, the only remains of thousands of Shia Muslims arrested and executed after the 1991 uprising.
Relatives of the missing tramped over the site searching through faded identity cards trying to find their dead. Next to one bag was a broken pair of crutches. A prosthetic leg emerged from another.
Lieutenant General James Conway, of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, was at the site but he and his men chose not to help in the search. ”Our feeling is that you would rather do this yourself,” Gen Conway told a crowd of Iraqis.
”The proper thing is for these people to be able to bury their families,” he added afterwards. ”We have the evidence we need.”
But it was hard to see what detailed evidence the US marines might have retrieved. Instead of a forensic investigation that would hold up in a court of law, villagers wearing orange plastic gloves commandeered a mechanical digger and were tearing through the earth in a desperate search for answers. After the rush, few of the bodies could be properly identified.
”The failure really is of the international community who did not provide these people with an alternative,” said Peter Bouckaert, the senior emergencies researcher with Human Rights Watch. ”This is like going pigeon hunting with a tank.”
The scramble at Mahawil was in stark contrast to the excavation of mass graves in Kosovo and Bosnia, where forensic scientists accompanied western troops. Sites were sealed off and investigated in painstaking detail.
”Why was there all this talk about the crimes of the regime of Saddam Hussein if the effort is not being made to identify the remains and establish the evidence of these brutal crimes?” said Bouckaert.
Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 200 000 Iraqis have gone missing since the Ba’ath party came to power in 1968.
Mohammed Gattan Jasim (44) was in his home in Hilla on March 23 1991, when Republican Guard tanks rolled into town. The guards carried a list of wanted Shias.
”They were going from house to house, kicking down the doors and dragging people away,” Jasim said. ”They came to our house and I ran from the back into the forest. Two of my brothers were arrested. The guards came back later and arrested the third.”
It is now clear the three, who took part in the uprising after the 1991 war, were executed soon after their arrest and buried with around 3 000 others at Mahawil. Villagers even found the bodies of the Egyptian drivers who were forced to bring in the bodies and dig the graves. They were executed after their work was done.
When he heard of the discovery of the mass grave, Jasim came to search. ”We have never had a proper funeral for my brothers,” he said.
Two days ago Jasim found his younger brother Radhi’s identity card, wrapped in a bundle of bones and rags. Last night he was still searching through the piles of remains, increasingly certain he would eventually find his other brothers, Kadhem and Ali, too.
The new US administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, is preparing security measures that include permitting soldiers to shoot looters on sight, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Bremer, at a meeting with senior staff members, also said he was eager to hire more police officers and ban Ba’ath party members from serving above a certain rank in future governments, it said.
”They are going to start shooting a few looters so that word gets around,” the newspaper quoted an official who attended the meeting as saying. – Guardian Unlimited Â