Saddam Hussein was very just: He distributed mass graveyards all over the country
Forensic Teams to Probe Iraqi Mass Graves
Sunday, December 07, 2003
Associated Press
MAHAWEEL, Iraq — The killers kept bankers' hours.
They showed up for work at the barley field at 9 a.m., trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.
Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt.
Sometimes the gunmen couldn't keep up and people were simply pushed into the pit to be buried alive. Then the backhoes dug another hole and the next group was led to their deaths.
At 5 p.m., the killers — officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party (search) — went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.
In this wind-swept field in the central town of Mahaweel, witnesses say, this went on without a break for 35 days in March and April of 1991, during a crackdown on a Shiite Muslim uprising (search) that followed the first Gulf War.
"I watched this with my own eyes," said Sayed Abbas Muhsen, 35, whose family farm was appropriated by Saddam's government for use as a killing field. "But we couldn't tell anyone. We didn't dare."
The mass grave at Mahaweel (search), with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.
There are Kurdish men killed when Saddam became suspicious of their affiliations in the 1980s. Shiite women slain after their communities heeded U.S. calls to rise up against Saddam in 1991. Political prisoners released throughout Saddam's rule from fetid cells into unmarked graves.
Some of the graves hold thousands of bodies. Some hold only a few. Some are clearly marked, their inhabitants recorded coldly in the files of Iraq's former secret police. Some are just covered-over trenches in the remote desert, their records — if they ever existed — forever lost.
"It's as easy to find mass graves in Iraq as it once was to find oil," said Adnan Jabbar al-Saadi, a lawyer with Iraq's new Human Rights Ministry (search). He added with sarcasm, "Saddam Hussein was very just: He distributed mass graveyards all over the country."
In the days following Saddam's fall on April 9, family members who had kept a bitter silence for years rushed to grave sites, digging for ID cards and clothing that confirmed their worst fears: The bones in the ground belonged to a son, a wife, a grandfather.
The U.S.-led occupation authority desperately tried to halt the digging, telling people that if they waited, forensic teams would unearth the remains and use the evidence to punish those responsible.
Now, an Associated Press investigation has discovered, forensic teams will begin digging in January to preserve the first physical evidence at four grave sites, their desert locations classified as secret to prevent relatives from disturbing them first.
Iraqis, impatient with the pace, hope that Saddam's crimes will finally be punished. |
