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Mass Graves-Anniversary (Feature)

Historical glimpses of Iraq’s mass graves on first anniversary

By Adel Fakher

Baghdad, May 15, (VOI) - On the first anniversary of the mass graves perpetrated by the former Iraqi regime, the Iraqi government declared May 16 a memorial day to commemorate what it described as the “hideous crimes committed by the former Iraqi regime.”

In a statement released last week, the Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, called on Iraqi people to commemorate the anniversary and keep it alive in their national memory.

“Choosing this day to commemorate mass graves victims is attributed to the finding the first and biggest mass grave in al-Mahawil in 2003 in the aftermath of the collapse of the former regime,” the statement explained.

On May 16, 2003, local residents in al-Mahawil found a mass grave containing more than 2,000 bodies.

According to a report issued then by Human Rights Watch, “Two significant mass graves have been discovered near the al-Mahawil military base, located some twenty kilometers north of Hilla (100 km south of Baghad ) - one located in an open field and containing the bodies of more than two thousand persons, ‘the al-Mahawil mass grave’ and a second located some five kilometers away behind an abandoned brick factory containing the bodies of several hundred persons, ‘the al-Mahawil brick factory mass grave.’”

“A third mass grave is suspected to exist on the premises of the military base itself. At least one other mass grave, just south of Hilla in the village of Imam Bakr, contained an additional forty bodies from the same period.”

“In all these sites the bodies were buried en masse, in contact with one another, rather than in individual plots. Mass graves in this sense are unusual, and almost always signify that the deaths were the result of mass atrocities or natural disasters,” the report explained.

“The chaotic and unprofessional manner in which the mass graves around Hilla and al-Mahawil were unearthed made it impossible for many of the relatives of missing persons to identify positively many of the remains, or even to keep the human remains intact and separate. In the absence of international assistance, Iraqis used a backhoe to dig up the mass grave, literally slicing through countless bodies and mixing up remains in the process. At the end of the process, more than one thousand remains at the al-Mahawil grave sites were again reburied without being identified. In addition, because no forensic presence existed at the site, crucial evidence necessary for future trials of the persons responsible for the mass executions was never collected, and indeed may have been irreparably destroyed,” the report added.

After the discovery of these graves, the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights set up a draft law designed to compensate the victims’ relatives and submitted it to the Iraqi cabinet for approval.

According to the High Committee of the Mass Graves in the Iraqi government, the mass graves were “an evitable result of the former regime’s policy against the Iraqi people throughout three decades, reaching a peak in the period from 1979-2003, when former President Saddam Hussein monopolized authority.”

The committee further explained that following a series of mass killings in 1979 that coincided with Saddam’s seizure of power and targeted certain religious and secular figures, the former president issued retroactive Decree No. 461 of the year 1980, ordering the killing of everyone who belonged to the Shiite Daawa Islamic Party or propagated its policies. Thousands of Iraqis were killed and buried in unmarked mass graves.

According to the website of the committee, the former Iraqi regime detained a large number of Kurds, who are loyal to current Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Massoud al-Barazani, liquidated and buried them in southern and central Euphrates provinces in the early 1980s.

One of the gravest crimes committed by Saddam’s regime was the chemical bombardment of Kurdistan’s city of Halbaja on March 16, 1988, leading to the deaths of 5,000 people, mostly women and children. In the same year, the then government conducted a series of campaigns against Kurds in what is known as the Anfal Campaign. Nearly 182,000 Kurds were killed and buried in several mass graves all over Iraq, the website said.

In 1991, around 350,000 Iraqis were also believed to have been massacred following an uprising staged by Iraqis against the then government.

Moreover, statistics produced by the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry revealed a mass grave in al-Madain, 24 km southeast of Baghdad, which dates back to April 4, 2003, four days before the toppling of Saddam’s regime. A total number of 240 mass graves have so far been discovered in more than 100 sites all over Iraq.

In a meeting held on November 9, 2006, the committee stressed the importance of taking samples from unidentified bodies and numbering them so that they can be identified in the future by their next of kin.

Addressing the unearthing of mass graves, the Human Rights Ministry made a effort to have Law No. 5 of the year 2006 issued, which organizes the unearthing of mass graves.
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Source: Mass Graves-Anniversary (Feature) :: Aswat al Iraq (English) The Arabic version can be found here.

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