Mass graves tell of despotic Iraq regime
By Christopher Drew and Tresha Mabile The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2005
A chain of evidence that investigators believe will help convict Saddam Hussein begins at a wind-swept grave in the desert near Hatra, in northern Iraq.
The burial site - a series of deep trenches that held about 2,500 bodies, many of them women and children - is one of many mass graves that dot the country. But it was the first one excavated by an American investigative team working with a special Iraqi tribunal to build legal cases against Saddam and others in his government.
A senior Iraqi court official has said the tribunal is planning to start the first trial of Saddam by late summer or early fall in a case that focuses on the killings of nearly 160 men from Dujail, a Shiite village north of Baghdad, after the former dictator survived an assassination attempt there.
But American legal advisers say the Hatra grave holds a key to what is likely to be one of the broadest charges against Saddam - that he is responsible for the killing of as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, some in chemical weapons attacks. They say those charges could be filed later this year, and Iraqi officials said last weekend that there would be 12 separate cases against Saddam and others. Each would require a separate trial, and multiple convictions could mean multiple death sentences for any defendant.
According to Gregory Kehoe, the American who set up the investigative team, what was found at Hatra shows how the Hussein leadership made a "business of killing people" - the scrape marks from the blade of a bulldozer that shoved victims into the trench, the point-blank shots to the backs of even the babies' heads, the withered body of a 3- or 4-year-old boy, still clutching a red and white ball.
Much rests on the prosecutions of Saddam and his lieutenants - for Iraqis seeking a reckoning and for the Bush administration, which hopes the trials and the Iraqi-American partnership will help vindicate its involvement in Iraq and serve as a model of justice and democracy in the Arab world.
Yet in the 18 months since Saddam's capture, questions have been raised from several quarters about whether the process can produce a fair trial. Not only has Saddam challenged the tribunal's legitimacy, mocking an Iraqi judge for "applying the invaders' laws to try me," but also the United Nations and most European countries have refused to help, partly out of opposition to the death penalty. Human-rights advocates have questioned whether the tribunal's standards for finding guilt will be high enough to link Saddam justly to the killings.
In their first extensive interviews, with The New York Times and the Discovery Times Channel, Kehoe, the top American adviser to the tribunal from March 2004 until this spring, and other investigators provided a detailed look at how the cases were being built.
More than 50 American advisers have been training several hundred Iraqi investigators and judges, none of whom had experience with human-rights laws or handling such complex cases. The Americans have provided forensics expertise, while the Iraqis have fanned out to find witnesses. With American advice, the Iraqis will decide what charges to bring and will run the trials.
What the investigators are ultimately trying to do, Kehoe said, is "connect the circle" to prove "command responsibility" - that Saddam violated human rights by knowing about indiscriminate killings, before or afterward, and doing nothing to stop or punish those who carried them out.
The way to do that, Kehoe said, is through basic detective work, starting with bodies in the ground and tracing the orders up the chain of command.
The tribunal initially planned to leave Saddam out of the Dujail case and charge only five associates, partly to test the new court system. But Gregg Nivala, now the top American adviser, said yesterday that new evidence, including the testimony of new witnesses and documents found last month, had strengthened the case against him.
Investigators have authenticated Iraqi government documents and audiotapes seized by Kurdish militias in the early 1990s. In a June 1987 document, Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam's cousins and top deputies, commanded Iraqi troops "to carry out random bombardments using artillery, helicopters and aircraft at all times of the day and night in order to kill the largest number of persons present" in areas linked to Kurdish fighters. On an audiotape, Majid, who became known as "Chemical Ali," can be heard shouting, at a Baath Party meeting about Kurdish villagers: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons."
Saddam's lawyers say that he and his former top associates are not guilty, and that they will counter any charges by attacking the tribunal as a "kangaroo court." Still, one of the lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said, "We know his chances are grim and very slim."
The trenches lie hidden in a dip in the sand that for centuries was an oasis during spring rains.
The dig began last September just outside Hatra, about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, north of Baghdad. What investigators found in the first trench suggested a powerful link to the campaign to drive the Kurds from their lands. Kehoe said it was also the first step in piecing together evidence that Saddam's government had turned the campaign, code-named "Anfal," or "the spoils," into a killing spree.
Iraqi officials have said their main goal was to root out Kurdish militias siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. But Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, has estimated that as many as 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed, and 2,000 villages destroyed, including dozens bombed with chemical weapons.
Michael Trimble, an archaeologist who headed the forensics team, said the first surprise was that the trench held only the bodies of women and children - about 300 in all. He said two-thirds were children, and most of the skeletons rested inside several layers of handmade clothing, with bags of pots, pans and toys strewn in the dirt. He said it quickly became clear that most of the victims had been carrying, or wearing, all their belongings, as if they had been told they would be resettled.
The bodies were stacked haphazardly in four or five layers. Nearly all had a single .22-caliber pistol shot behind one ear. Trimble said it looked as if the first people had been shot inside the trench, while the others had been killed at the lip and pushed in with a bulldozer.
A second trench held the bodies of 150 men, each sprayed with fire from automatic weapons. Most had been blindfolded and tied together in a chain.
Kehoe said this suggested that the women and children had been killed by Iraqi security officers carrying small-caliber arms, while the men had been killed by a military unit.
"This was a killing field," he said, adding that, "multiple entities knew it was there."
Kehoe said the rolling field held as many as a dozen other trenches, with at least 2,000 more bodies. Nivala said a second grave site, at Samawa in southern Iraq, yielded similar results. In April, investigators excavated one trench and found the bodies of 114 Kurds, all but five were women and children.
At the Hatra grave, there was a break: the investigators found identification cards tucked inside some of the women's clothes. A few cards turned out to be for children who escaped when their villages were destroyed. Those cards took the investigators back to remote mountain areas, where the now-grown children and others confirmed that the Hatra victims had indeed been seized by Iraqi forces during the Anfal.
In building this case, the investigators are expanding on research done by Human Rights Watch, which has found that Iraqi forces made at least 40 chemical attacks to kill Kurdish fighters or destroy villages thought to have supported them.
Ghazzawi, the lawyer for Saddam, said the Kurds were traitors, and "there are always casualties, innocent casualties in every war." As for killing civilians, he said, "I know for sure that the government under Saddam Hussein, the president, that they didn't do it." |
