Saddam Hussein's government is believed to have buried as many as 300,000 opponents in 263 mass graves that dot the Iraqi landscape, the top human rights official in the US-led civilian administration said.
Sandy Hodgkinson said the administration has been sending forensic teams to investigate those grave sites reported to US officials. So far, the existence of about 40 graves has been confirmed.
"We have found mass graves with women and children with bullet holes in their heads," she said Saturday.
PHOTO: AP
US President George W. Bush has referred to Iraqi mass graves frequently in recent months, saying they provide evidence that the war to drive Saddam from power was justified.
But some human rights activists have criticized the US-led administration in Iraq for moving too slowly to protect grave sites and begin excavations, and have expressed skepticism that it will ever fully identify who is buried in the mass graves.
"There is just no way -- technologically, financially -- that they're going to deal with mass graves on this magnitude," said Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights in Boston.
The US-led administration held a workshop Saturday to train dozens of Iraqis to find and protect the mass-grave sites. Hodgkinson said the workers would be crucial in protecting the sites from desperate relatives trying to dig for evidence of their missing loved ones.
In the weeks after the US-led war drove Saddam from power, relatives damaged some grave sites, using bulldozers that mangled bodies and scattering papers and clothing that could have been used to identify remains.
The largest mass grave discovered so far, a site near the southern town of Mahaweel believed to hold at least 3,115 bodies, was damaged by relatives searching for remains. But officials say most of the mass graves haven't been disturbed.
Mass graves "tell the story of missing loved ones such as where, when and how they were killed," Hodgkinson said. "Truth and proper burial is the first step toward reconciliation."
Iraqi Human Rights Minister Abdul-Basit Turki said that in addition to families' need to find the bodies of missing relatives, excavating mass graves is important in building criminal cases against members of the former regime.
International tribunals handle prosecutions for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, where tens of thousands of missing are believed buried in mass graves, and Rwanda, in which many of the 500,000 victims of a 100-day killing spree in 1994 were buried in communal pits.
But for Iraq, the US has insisted any trials be conducted by a new Iraqi legal system that is still being developed.
Neither Iraq nor the US are signatories to the International Criminal Court and it would take a vote of the UN Security Council to create a special tribunal for Iraq, which is considered unlikely.
Many human rights groups agree that Iraqis should lead the legal process, but say international participation is crucial for it to be legitimate and impartial. Some have been hesitant to participate in excavations before the legal system is in place.
"Mass graves really can corroborate witness testimony and documents which show what happened in a crime," Hodgkinson said, although she cautioned: "a mass grave by itself won't tell you who did it."
Hodgkinson said the majority of people buried in the mass graves are believed to be Kurds killed by Saddam in the 1980s after rebelling against the government and Shiites killed after an uprising following the 1991 Gulf War.
Hodgkinson said the investigation process would be similar to that used in Bosnia after its 1992-to-1995 war. But she cautioned that if Bosnia is any indication, the process in Iraq will be long and complicated.
In Bosnia, she said, it has taken nine years to unearth 8,000 of the 30,000 bodies believed buried in mass graves.
Human rights activists say US authorities in Iraq have been much slower to address the problem than were authorities in Bosnia. In Bosnia, said Sam Zia-Zarifi of Human Rights Watch, "within the first year there were 25 teams in and a [UN] tribunal in place."
In Iraq, some international teams that were hoping to begin their work before winter have delayed their arrival because of violence, including the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
At a donor conference last month, more than US$100 million was requested for uncovering mass graves. The donations, which are expected to come in the form of equipment and personnel, would be used over five years, Hodgkinson said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.