BAGHDAD: Two mass graves that appear to contain the remains of as many as 7,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein’s government have been discovered in southern Iraq, according to an Iraqi government minister.
The new Iraqi government may use some of the remains to build their case against alleged war criminals, including Saddam, Human Rights Minister Dr Bakhtiar Amin said on Friday.
Iraqi officials said they have as yet been unable to excavate the burial grounds found earlier this year because of security concerns and because Iraq lacks enough forensic workers to perform the grisly task. Amin said that several of his investigators recently visited the sites and calculated the number of bodies by surveying the contours of the graves and interviewing witnesses of the burials.
The largest of the grave sites is in a deserted area near the southern port city of Basra, where Saddam’s Baathist government waged a brutal campaign against a Shia uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Amin said that 5,000 bodies of people involved in the uprising might be buried there.
Amin said the rest of the bodies were found in Samawa, a less inhabited area in South Central Iraq.
“We have found about 2,000 remains in the Samawa area of the family of Massoud Barzani,” Amin said, referring to the current chief of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two most powerful Kurdish organizations in Iraq, and a longtime leader of a guerrilla movement against Saddam.
Saddam’s army detained 8,000 of Barzani’s clansmen in their homeland in northern Iraq in 1983 and they were never heard from again.
If the ministry’s estimates are correct, the two mass graves would be among the largest of 290 secret burial sites reported to be found in Iraq since the US-led invasion. Iraqi human rights investigators estimate that between 600,000 to 1 million people disappeared during Saddam’s rule.
Amin said a relatively small number of remains will be needed to build war crimes tribunal cases against former Baathists accused of having committed mass murder. But he said exhuming and identifying the bodies also has a cathartic effect for the families of victims of Saddam’s regime.
The most recent discoveries developed over several weeks early this year, said Amin, after witnesses of the mass burials came forward to speak with human rights officials.
“We first heard about it in January and started taking photos of the site, and we have come to the conclusion that we have about 5,000 graves,” Amin said of the site near Basra. “We base this on the land that has been changed and we have spoken to witnesses.”
Amin said that preliminary investigation of the sites have confirmed witnesses’ statements. John Pace, head of the United Nations Human Rights Office for Iraq, said that there could be even more bodies inside the graves. “Some graves contain multiple layers of bodies, so they might contain more remains than the surface area might indicate,” Pace said.
Investigators have found other mass graves around Iraq in recent days in the vicinity of Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Halabja and Nasiriyah.
At the latter site, authorities said they had to stop residents from exhuming the bodies themselves. Amateur excavators found the remains of 25 people before they were halted, Amin said. There have been several recent discoveries along the Iran and Kuwait borders as well, Amin said.–Dawn/LAT-WP News Service.
