Over One Million Still Missing From Saddam's Reign
Command-Post
From the AFP via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :
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Iraq has urged the international community to help it find more than 1 million people who have gone missing or disappeared over the past 25 years, mainly during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
It also pushed the plight of some 1.5 million Iraqis who have been displaced inside the war-weary country as the cold winter months draw in.
Officials from about 60 countries, including the United States, Britain and Japan, UN agencies and other advocacy groups met with Iraq’s Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin and Justice Minister Malek Dohan Al Hassan in Geneva to discuss plans to improve the country’s human rights situation.
“One important issue we are [exploring] with the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross and we are looking for international support for it is the issue of missing persons, disappeared and mass graves,” the human rights minister, Mr Amin, told reporters.
“We have more than 1 million missing persons and possibly disappeared people and we have found, up to now, 283 mass grave sites in Iraq,” he said.
The people included those who vanished during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the first Gulf War in 1990-1991 and last year’s US-led invasion, said John Pace, the Amman-based head of the United Nations human rights office at the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq.
In addition, some 700 to 800 bodies needed to be identified every month in the Baghdad area alone, Mr Amin told a news conference, noting that the country had no DNA laboratories and a severe shortage of forensic experts.
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As reported in a previous post, European Forensic experts have declined to help in Iraq, due to the possibility that their evidence might be used to convict Saddam Hussein of capital crimes.
Posted By Alan E Brain
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