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Desert Graves in Northern Iraq Yield
Evidence to Try Hussein
7.6.2005
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and TRESHA MABILE |
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A chain of
evidence that investigators believe will help
convict Saddam Hussein begins at a windswept 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 excavated by an
American investigative team working with a special
Iraqi tribunal to build cases against Mr. Hussein
and others in his government.
A senior Iraqi court official has said the tribunal
is planning to start the first trial of Mr. Hussein
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. |
Photo : Saddam, AP
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But American legal advisers say the Hatra grave
holds a key to what is likely to be one of the
broadest charges against Mr. Hussein - that he is
responsible for the killing of as many as 100,000
Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980's, some in
chemical-weapons attacks. They say those charges
could be filed later this year, and Iraqi officials
said last weekend that there could be up to 12
separate cases against Mr. Hussein and others. Each
would require a separate trial, and multiple
convictions could mean multiple death sentences for
any defendant.
According to Gregory W. 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
the 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 Mr. Hussein 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 Mr. Hussein's capture,
questions have been raised from several quarters
about whether the process can produce a fair trial.
Not only has Mr. Hussein challenged the tribunal's
legitimacy, mocking an Iraqi judge for "applying the
invaders' laws to try me," but 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 justly link Mr. Hussein to the killings.
In their first extensive interviews, with The New
York Times and the Discovery Times Channel, Mr.
Kehoe, the top American adviser to the tribunal from
March 2004 until this spring, and several other
investigators provided a detailed look at how the
cases are 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,
Mr. Kehoe said, is "connect the circle" to prove
"command responsibility" - that Mr. Hussein 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, said Mr. Kehoe, a former federal
prosecutor in Florida who spent five years
investigating Bosnia war crimes, 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 Mr. Hussein
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 found last month had
strengthened the case against him.
Mr. Kehoe and Mr. Nivala said there was enough
evidence - including the testimony of new witnesses
and newly found documents - to charge Mr. Hussein
and other top officials with crimes against humanity
for the Kurdish campaign.
Investigators have also authenticated Iraqi
government documents and audiotapes seized by
Kurdish militias in the early 1990's. In a June 1987
document, Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Mr. Hussein'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, Mr. 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."
Gregory Paw, who was one of Mr. Kehoe's deputies,
said that in a hearing in December, Mr. Majid, now
in American custody, "was gradually acknowledging
more and more of what took place" in Kurdistan. Mr.
Paw said Mr. Majid was "looking for others to cast
blame upon."
Mr. Hussein'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."
Bodies in the Sand
The trenches lie hidden in a dip in the sand that
for centuries had been an oasis during spring rains.
The ground was hard, and Mr. Kehoe's forensics team,
sweltering in the 110-degree heat, had to dig eight
feet to reach anything.
The dig began last September just outside Hatra,
about 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.
Mr. Kehoe said it was also the first step in piecing
together evidence that Mr. Hussein's government
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, the New
York-based group, has estimated that up to 100,000
Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed, and 2,000
villages destroyed, including dozens bombed with
chemical weapons.
Michael K. Trimble, an archaeologist who headed the
forensics team, said the first surprise was that the
trench held only 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. Mr. 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 by a bulldozer.
A second trench held 150 men, each sprayed with fire
from automatic weapons. Most had been blindfolded
and tied together in a chain.
Mr. 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."
Mr. Kehoe said the rolling field held up to a dozen
other trenches, with at least 2,000 more bodies. Mr.
Nivala said a second grave site, at Samawa in
southern Iraq, yielded similar results; in April,
investigators excavated one trench and found bodies
of 114 Kurds, all but 5 women and children. Mr.
Nivala said that field had 18 trenches, and 10 were
filled, with at least 1,500 bodies.
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.
The jets buzzed in low, Abdullah Abdulqadr Askary
recalled, low enough to see that most people in the
fields near Goktapa were women and children. They
dropped balloons at first, to assess the wind
direction. Then came bombs. Mr. Askary, a chemist,
said he knew from the vapor and flowery smell that
the bombs had spewed chemicals.
It was late one afternoon in May 1988, in the middle
of the Anfal. Mr. Askary said nearly 50 of the 150
people who died were his relatives. As he rushed to
help, he came across his mother's body lying by a
stream.
"I want to kiss her - the last kiss," he told Mr.
Kehoe and others who visited the town in March. But
as he bent down, he said, "I thought that if I kiss
her, perhaps I will die also."
Anne Tompkins, a federal prosecutor who worked on
the case, said Mr. Askary also pointed to another
village, Jillemort, that was bombed that day.
Identification cards from Jillemort were found at
the Hatra grave, Ms. Tompkins said.
In building this case, the investigators are
expanding on research done by Human Rights Watch,
which has found that Iraqi forces mounted at least
40 chemical attacks to kill Kurdish fighters or
destroy villages thought to have supported them.
Mr. Ghazzawi, the lawyer for Mr. Hussein, 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."
But Mr. Kehoe said several documents help carry
responsibility for the killings up the chain of
command.
In the June 1987 document seized by the Kurdish
fighters, Mr. Majid, the Hussein deputy, declared
that any area linked to the Kurdish fighters was off
limits, and that Iraqi troops could shoot any
villagers who did not leave. The document was issued
less than three months after Mr. Hussein put Mr.
Majid in charge of restoring order in Kurdistan.
Investigators said that two of Mr. Hussein's
personal secretaries have also helped validate
crucial documents in the Anfal and other cases.
Mr. Nivala said investigators believe they will be
able to show that Mr. Hussein was aware not only of
the retribution in Dujail but also of the harsh
actions against the Kurds and Shiites. He said the
forensics team had recently begun excavating a third
grave, believed to hold some of the 150,000 Shiites
killed in 1991.
Ms. Tompkins said the Iraqis initiated the Dujail
case and have also interviewed hundreds of witnesses
about the killings of more than 500 members of a
Kurdish clan that opposed Mr. Hussein. Iraqi
officials also are looking into the use of chemical
weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja and in
the Iran-Iraq war, as well as the executions of 42
Baghdad merchants blamed for rising consumer prices
in 1992.
www.nytimes.com |
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