CPTnet
18 June 2005
IRAQ: Mass graves--theirs or ours?
by Will Van Wagenen
Recently we visited Human Rights Watch of Karbala (HRWK), an organization
founded on April 5, 2003, immediately after the fall of Saddam's regime.
HRWK was the first organization to discover mass graves in the region, and
has been involved in opening them, documenting the identities of the
victims, and notifying the families of the victims' whereabouts. Forty-one
of the forty-three mass graves near Karbala date back to 1991, when Saddam
crushed a Shiite uprising seeking to depose him shortly after the first Gulf
War. Estimates of the total number of victims in mass graves throughout the
country range as high as 300,000.
Many Americans would agree with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
who commented that, "Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the
true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not
need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me."
But unlike Friedman, many of those Iraqis whose relatives were murdered and
dumped in these mass graves had something other than praise for the US
government. As one Iraqi from HRWK told us, "The U.S. let Saddam's regime do
what it did and therefore the mass graves are also the responsibility of the
United States. For this reason we don't believe the US came [in 2003] to
bring freedom to Iraqis."
Though the U.S. expelled the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and bombed Iraqi cities
extensively, U.S. forces stopped short of going on to Baghdad and deposing
Saddam, calling instead on Iraqis to overthrow him. The Iraqi Shiites
responded, rising up against Saddam en masse, with the expectation of
receiving US support. Much to the Shiites' horror, U.S. troops instead
merely watched as Saddam mercilessly crushed the uprising. According to
Richard A. Clark, former National Coordinator for Security and
Counter-Terrorism and longtime member of the National Security Council
Staff, the US also lifted the no fly restrictions on Iraqi military
helicopters, which "mowed down the rebels" as "US forces stood by."
Our host from HRWK said that many residents of Karbala saw US planes flying
above Saddam's helicopters as they attacked the Shiite rebels, and that
these U.S. planes did not intervene. After Saddam's helicopters had done
their job, the Iraqi security forces rounded up thousands of people in a
further effort to quell the uprising, taking them to locations outside the
cities, where they were shot and buried.
Despite acknowledging US complicity in the massacre of their friends and
relatives, all the members of HRWK with whom we met were adamant that
responding with violence to U.S. complicity in the crimes against their
fellow Shiites is against the precepts of Islam. As one HRWK member noted,
"All the religions of the book came from the same source, and they share the
idea of peace and mercy."
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