Unrecorded victims
21 July 2004, Brendan O'Neill, The Guardian
We now know that the public was misled over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But have we also been misled over the even more emotive issue of Iraq's mass graves?
There are without doubt many mass graves in Iraq, into which the bodies of thousands of Iraqis killed by the Ba'ath regime were dumped over the past 25 years. Coalition officials have claimed that they contain the bodies of 300,000 Iraqis. In November last year, Sandra Hodgkinson, then head of the coalition's mass graves action plan, told the press that 260 grave sites had been located, which contained the bodies of "at least 300,000".
In comments and speeches, Labour ministers and MPs have repeated this figure time and again. Tony Blair told the Today programme in April: "We have found the mass graves of 300,000 people already in Iraq. It doesn't get a great deal of publicity, but it's true." At the end of last year, Stephen Ladyman, Labour MP for South Thanet, declared: "We are rebuilding a nation where we found 300,000 bodies in mass graves so far." According to Denis MacShane, minister for Europe: "We've now uncovered 300,000 bodies in mass graves, there because of [Saddam Hussein's] torture and tyranny."
Some journalists took such comments as evidence that thousands of bodies had already been retrieved. In a press conference with a senior US official on November 20, a journalist asked about Blair's claim that "400,000 [sic] bodies have been exhumed from Iraq". The US official said: "We've seen numbers that are in the hundreds of thousands. It's certainly absolutely at least 300,000 or more; it could be as high as ... 500,000."
For pro-war commentators, claims that there were at least 300,000 bodies in mass graves became the trump card in debates about the war, overriding the anti-war lobby's concerns about the failure to find WMD or the chaos caused by the coalition's military intervention. "According to the latest estimates, the mass graves in Iraq contain the remains of at least 300,000 people, but we're still arguing about whether the war was 'justified'," wrote Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph.
So what is the coalition's evidence to substantiate the numbers cited? The coalition's claims are based less on investigation and excavation than on guesswork.
Blair stated that the graves of 300,000 have already been found. Yet when I asked Joanna Levison of the US state department how many bodies have been exhumed, she said: "Through official procedures? None." Levison, who has taken over from Sandra Hodgkinson as head of the coalition's mass graves action plan, says that more than 270 grave sites have been reported and over 50 confirmed. At some of these there have been "community-led exhumations", where Iraqis have desperately dug around for the remains of loved ones, "but no coalition-led exhumations".
Jonathan Forrest of Inforce, the International Forensic Centre for the Investigation of Genocide at Bournemouth University, also says that no bodies have been exhumed, except unofficially by Iraqi communities.
Inforce is one of many teams of scientists from Europe that has carried out initial forensic tests on grave sites, to verify that they are graves and to estimate how old they might be. Forrest's team worked in Iraq for five months last year. "I do not believe that any forensic scientists have exhumed any bodies in Iraq at all," he says.
With no evidence by way of officially exhumed bodies, how did the coalition arrive at the estimate of 300,000 buried in mass graves? Levison says there is an "international consensus" that this number of Iraqis perished under the Ba'athists. Forrest believes that he might, inadvertently, have played a part in giving prominence to this figure. He says journalists in Iraq constantly asked his team how many were in the graves. "So we adopted the Human Rights Watch figure of 290,000, and rounded it up to 300,000."
Yet HRW's figure is an estimate for the number of Iraqis who disappeared under the Ba'athists, "many of whom are believed to have been killed" - not for the number buried in mass graves. HRW itself refuses to use its figure of 290,000 as an estimate for the number of bodies in mass graves. The group's senior researcher in Baghdad says: "How can we conclude that they are all in mass graves? We won't know that until there have been full-scale exhumations of the grave sites. There have been no official exhumations yet."
The estimate of 300,000 Iraqis killed by the Ba'athists also includes deaths for which the western powers arguably bear some responsibility. According to the US state department, most of the graves discovered to date correspond to five major atrocities committed by the Saddam Hussein regime: the 1983 attack against Kurds of the Barzani tribe; the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds, for which estimates of the numbers killed vary from 50,000 to 180,000; chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988; the 1991 massacre of Shia Muslims during their uprising at the end of the Gulf war; and the 1991 massacre of Kurds who fought for autonomy in northern Iraq after the Gulf war.
Saddam's brutal attacks on the Kurds in the 1980s occurred as part of the Iran-Iraq war, during which the Reagan administration supported and armed his regime. When that war ended in 1988 Saddam sought to consolidate his rule at home; in the Anfal campaign he sent forces to quell the Kurdish uprising in the north (supported by the Iranians), again with US consent. The massacre of the Shias in 1991 took place after they were encouraged by the first Bush administration to rebel following the first Gulf war, and then abandoned to their fate.
Mass Graves
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