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"We bribe some people, we share documents with some
people, we stay in the deserts and some other parts
of the country for three or four weeks to gather as
much information as we can."
Many Iraqis are very keen for further trials. Just
ask Muhammad Ihsan, minister for human rights for
the Kurdish Regional Government and leader of a team
that is locating and excavating the mass graves of
thousands of Kurdish victims of Hussein's
crackdowns, forced displacements, and reprisals.
Between 1979 and Hussein's ouster, roughly half a
million Kurds were picked up by Iraqi security
forces and never returned, Ihsan says.
"We have been searching for missing people for a
long, long time, since 1991," he says. "But we
started the active searching process after the
liberation of Iraq."
He believes the families of the Kurdish victims want
to know the fate of their loved ones and to bring to
justice those who killed them.
So Ihsan, whose ministry is located in Irbil, spends
a considerable amount of the year traveling across
Iraq. He and a small team of forensic experts
regularly drive to areas where they believe mass
graves may be located.
He says the team of nine -- a figure that includes
security experts -- locates grave sites by combing
through eyewitness accounts, documents, and
survivors' accounts that today may already be
decades old.
But trying to exhume a grave site itself can present
even greater problems.
"For so many reasons," he says, locals are
frequently unhelpful and uncooperative. One reason
is that they do not have enough information. Another
is that "they are afraid because most of them were
part of that crime."
Breaking through such barriers is "very hard. We
bribe some people, we share documents with some
people, we stay in the deserts and some other parts
of the country for three or four weeks to gather as
much information as we can."
Ihsan says his team always works undercover, without
revealing its connections to the Kurdish Regional
Government or that it is collecting criminal
evidence.
Still, the exhumation effort has made progress: the
bodies of victims have been returned to their home
villages in northern Iraq.
"We started returning bodies to Kurdistan last
month," Ihsan says. "We managed to get 512 bodies
[of members of the Barzani clan] that had been
killed by Saddam Hussein in 1983."
These are just some of the over 8,000 male members
of the Barzani clan arrested in July 1983 by
Saddam's security force. Seized in the northern
province of Irbil, they were then transported to
southern Iraq. Nothing has been heard of them since.
Cases Unopened, Wounds Unclosed
This slaughter of the Barzani clan is one of a dozen
cases for which prosecutors say they have enough
evidence to convict Saddam.
Another case centers on the massive forced
displacement of the Kurdish population between
February and September 1988 -- known as the Anfal
(Arabic for "spoils") campaign -- which left tens of
thousands of people dead.
Still another case focuses separately on the use of
mustard and nerve gas against residents of the
Kurdish town of Halabjah in August 1988, during the
Anfal campaign.
Other cases include Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in
1990, the crushing of the Kurdish and Shi'ite
rebellions after the 1991 Gulf War, and the killing
of political activists over the course of three
decades.
Returning bodies is the most painful part of his
work, Ihsan says. It re-opens wounds that are
decades old and may have partially healed. But he
says the families want to have at lease a bone or a
piece of cloth that they can bury and create a
proper grave for their loved ones.
For others, the wounds have not healed. "The unknown
fate [of a loved one] creates big social and
economic problems for us," Ihsan says. "We have some
girls who've been engaged for more than 23 years.
Still they are waiting for their beloved. We have
wives still waiting for their husbands. We have
daughters still waiting for their fathers to return.
We were sure that [the missing] had been killed but
these people did not believe it. Returning the
bodies to them will put an end to their sad lives
[of waiting] and the pain."
So far, the team has located 284 sites of mass
graves of Kurds across Iraq. With time, it hopes to
exhume them all.
Ihsan says that he wants to see Hussein finally go
on trial for all the cases against him. But he says
that, so far, he has received no official word of
whether there will be new court proceedings once the
Al-Dujayl case is completed.
"We are presenting our evidence to the courts so
they have it available," he says. Beyond that, it is
up to the judicial authorities themselves to decide
what to do.
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