A crowd of men and women dig frantically in the dirt with their hands as they try to tunnel into what they believe is a prison in Iraq. The voices they think they hear echoing up are those of their loved ones crying out for water. The British troops try to tell them that the sounds are echoes of their own voices but they do not believe them and refuse to stop digging.
This is just the beginning of many scenes we will witness as the Iraqis search for thousands of their missing. The entire world watches and asks, “How did this happen?”.
The answer is not as simple as the single name “Saddam Hussein.” The answer is the Iraqi Arab Baath Socialist Party.
Formed in 1963, the party swallowed the country of Iraq and eliminated all questions and competition. The very first victims were their own military officers who had aided them in the coup of 1958. Non-Baathists were purged from the state. They were either removed or liquidated.
In 1971 the regime began to deport Iraqi citizens to Iran. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 300,000 Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans — almost all of them Shiites — were deported. In 1975 the regime waged its first war against the Kurdish citizens of Iraq. In 1978 the regime turned against the Iraqi Communist Party and carried out mass executions and detentions, killing more than 7,000 people. In 1987 they began a new campaign against the Kurds. It was an operation in the extermination of thousands. It resulted in 100,000 to 180,000 people disappearing.
No one is sure how many fled the country and how many simply vanished. In 1988 the regime used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing 5,000 people. In March, 1991, after the Gulf War, the regime turned the Republican Guard units against their citizens who had risen up in rebellion. Millions of Kurds fled to Turkey and Iran. In southern Iraq the defense minister ordered the deaths of another 30,000 people. Between 1992 and 1995 they waged a military campaign against the southern marshes, draining the waters, burning the villages and killing the people. Over 300,000 marsh Arabs were made homeless. In 1992 the regime began ethnic cleansing against the Turkomans in Kirkuk and thousands were driven from their homes. The European Union now estimates that there are 800,000 internally displaced people in Iraq — some 23 percent of the total population.
How many Iraqis have been imprisoned and how many have been executed is unknown. What is known is that political dissidents were tortured, women in the custody of the security forces were routinely raped. We know that prisoners were kept in inhumane and degrading conditions. We also know that in Az-Zubayr, British forces found 200 coffins containing human remains at the former headquarters of the Iraqi Army’s 51st Division. The bodies were Iranian prisoners of war who were tortured and killed. We also know that 605 Kuwait citizens have been missing since the end of the Gulf War.
The most frightening information comes from a former Iraqi intelligence officer, Capt. Khalid Sajed Al-Janabi. He worked for over 20 years as an intelligence operative and was appointed to the Abu Ghraid prison committee. The office of the president issued an order for all the prisons to undergo “prison cleaning.” This meant mass executions in an effort to reduce the prison population. The captain personally witnessed the execution of 2,000 prisoners in one day. Dr. Maher Khashan also worked in the prison and said that inmates were all identified by number rather than by name. He watched as the bodies were removed for burial in undisclosed locations. He also says that the authorities forced the doctors to inject some detainees with poison and then to issue death certificates attributing death to natural causes. The current victims of these crimes are the searching Iraqi people.
The guilty men and women who carried out the regime’s despicable crimes have escaped from Iraq. There are countries that have given them “safe haven.” The United States is demanding that the chief participants be returned to Iraq to stand trial. There are 2.4 million Iraqis who were members of the Baath Party. The US is looking for 55. That includes such key decision makers as the head of the Mukhabarat, the former Iraqi secret police force. They have captured Barazan Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, the former head of Iraqi intelligence who is No. 52.
A UN special report on human rights in Iraq stated that extreme and brutal force was applied without hesitation and with total impunity in order to control the population. The report maintains that the human rights situation in Iraq was worse than in any other country since the end of World War II. To harbor and protect these criminals goes beyond the boundaries of political ideology, ethnic identity or religious beliefs and into a realm reminiscent of postwar Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg Trials. At that time, some people were tried, many were already dead and countless others were never identified. Yet the families had the satisfaction of seeing the majority of criminals brought to justice. Surely, the Iraqi people are entitled to no less.
(Adrienne McPhail is an American journalist based in Riyadh.)
Opinion 20 April 2003
