Mass Graves Hide Horror of Iraqi Past

BASRA, Iraq —  “This is a good place for a mass grave,” remarked Jawad Kadhim Ali, a 54-year-old Iraqi in search of his “disappeared” teenage son.

We were 25 miles west of Basra, looking out over a barren landscape where the earth was heaped into several mounds. Ali had come to dig for his son Mustafa’s remains. Our Human Rights Watch team had come with him to begin assessing the mammoth task of coping with Iraq’s brutal past.

But Ali couldn’t even approach the site, much less dig. The mounds were strewn with live mortar shells and other unexploded ordnance. Whoever dug those graves, if they are indeed graves, intended that the task of uncovering them would be as difficult as possible.

And so it will be. More than 250,000 people were detained or murdered by the government of Saddam Hussein, and almost all of them have relatives who now want justice, or physical remains, or at the very least information about what happened to their loved ones. In the looting that followed the U.S.-led invasion, countless documents about arrests and executions were pilfered or destroyed.

Some victims’ families may take private revenge against officials of the old regime. Ali was motivated not by bloodlust but by a poignant need for emotional closure.

Mustafa was a senior in high school when an armed gang came to the family’s house and took him away, together with an older brother, on March 24, 1999. A Shiite uprising had recently shaken Basra, and the Baath Party was taking its revenge.

Less than a month later, Jawad Ali came home from work to find his house ransacked and the rest of his family gone. He went to the jail and joined his relatives, to protect them as best he could.

Ali and two of his children were held in Basra in a 12-by-18-foot room with 70 to 80 other people and one open toilet. They were released on Oct. 14, 1999, and found their home had been razed and that Jawad had lost his job as a teacher.

This month, the looting of the Security Directorate in Basra yielded an interesting handwritten document, which is now posted at every mosque in town. “Name,” “Age,” “Date Killed,” “By Whom” read the categories across the top, and 140 victims’ names are listed. The document suggests they were executed in groups, some by relatives of those who had been killed in the Shiite uprising and some by security officers.

According to the document, Mustafa was shot by security officers on May 8, 1999. Was this bizarre site west of Basra the mass grave where Jawad Ali’s son was buried? He wanted to believe it.

Across Basra, people are swapping rumors and frantically looking for evidence. What are the coalition forces doing, not only to assuage these tortured souls but to ensure for very practical reasons that justice is done and the vengeances of past atrocities are finally laid to rest?

No one’s interests are served when individuals disturb mass graves. People rarely find what they’re looking for, and they often spoil the chances of everyone else to find what they need.

American and British forces must, as an urgent priority, begin guarding sites such as the one we visited west of Basra to prevent spontaneous digging by bereaved relatives. These are crime scenes, and the coalition forces, as occupying powers, must function as the police in Iraq right now. Mass graves will provide crucial evidence for tribunals the U.S. government has said should be established to prosecute the crimes.

At the same time, most victims’ families seem far more concerned with the emotional need to know than with the abstract need for justice. They must have a voice in devising a recovery and documentation plan.

International forces cannot simply keep people away from sites they desperately want to visit; the American and British authorities should work with local leaders to establish a missing-persons agency where families can come with things like the dental records of the vanished.

For a host of legal reasons, as well as emotional ones, families will need official confirmation of the death and cause of death of their loved ones.

The site we visited with Ali was literally explosive. But the crimes of the past can still explode in many other ways.