IRAQ 350 Fifth Ave 34 th Floor New York, N.Y. 10118-3299 http://www.hrw.org Vol. 15, No. 5 (E) – May 2003 (212) 290-4700 The chaotic and unprofessional manner in which the mass graves around al- Hilla and al-Mahawil were unearthed made it impossible for many of the relatives of missing persons to identify positively many of the remains, or even to keep the human remains intact and separate. In the absence of international assistance, Iraqis used a backhoe to dig up the mass grave, literally slicing through countless bodies and mixing up remains in the process. At the end of the process, more than one thousand remains at the al-Mahawil grave sites were again reburied without being identified. In addition, because no forensic presence existed at the site, crucial evidence necessary for future trials of the persons responsible for the mass executions was never collected, and indeed may have Relatives of the missing search through bags containing corpses recovered from a been irreparably destroyed. mass grave near Hilla. © 2003 Peter Bouckaert/Human Rights Watch THE MASS GRAVES OF AL-MAHAWIL: THE TRUTH UNCOVERED 1630 Connecticut Ave, N.W., Suite 500 2nd Floor, 2-12 Pentonville Road 15 Rue Van Campenhout Washington, DC 20009 London N1 9HF, UK 1000 Brussels, Belgium TEL (202) 612-4321 TEL: (44 20) 7713 1995 TEL (32 2) 732-2009 FAX (202) 612-4333 FAX: (44 20) 7713 1800 FAX (32 2) 732-0471 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] May 2003 Vol.15, No.5 (E) IRAQ THE MASS GRAVES OF AL-MAHAWIL: THE TRUTH UNCOVERED Table of Contents I. Summary ....................................................................................................................................................1 II. Recommendations .....................................................................................................................................2 To political, religious, and other community leaders in Iraq...........................................................................2 To the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance................................................................3 To U.S. and coalition forces.........................................................................................................................3 To donors, nongovernmental and governmental agencies, and U.N. agencies..................................................4 To the U.N. Security Council.......................................................................................................................4 To the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general............................................................................4 III. Background: Repression of the 1991 Uprising.............................................................................................5 IV. Discovery of the Mass Graves at Al-Mahawil .............................................................................................5 V. Failure of the U.S. and Coalition Forces to Support Exhumations ..................................................................6 VI. Consequences of the Failure to Provide Forensic Assistance........................................................................7 VII. The Victims ............................................................................................................................................7 VIII. A Survivor ...........................................................................................................................................10 IX. Witnesses to the Al-Mahawil Arrests and Detentions ................................................................................11 X. Witnesses to the Executions ......................................................................................................................13 XI. Establishing Accountability for the Mass Murder......................................................................................14 Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................................15 I. SUMMARY On March 4, 1991, thirteen-year-old Khalid Khudair and his thirty-three-year-old cousin Fuad Kadhim, a former Iraqi soldier, left their village of Albu `Alwan to walk to the southern Iraqi city of al-Hilla looking to buy food. They were never seen alive again: like tens of thousands of other Iraqis in the predominantly Shi`a South, they were arrested and “disappeared” in Iraqi government custody. More than twelve years later, on May 16, 2003, their families’ search finally ended when their identification documents were found on decomposed remains at an exhumation of a mass grave located in an open field. Two significant mass graves have been discovered near the al-Mahawil military base, located some twenty kilometers north of al-Hilla —one located in an open field and containing the bodies of more than two thousand persons (“the al-Mahawil mass grave”) and a second located some five kilometers away behind an abandoned brick factory containing the bodies of several hundred persons (“the al-Mahawil brick factory mass grave”). A third mass grave is suspected to exist on the premises of the military base itself. At least one other mass grave, just south of al-Hilla in the village of Imam Bakr, contained an additional forty bodies from the same period. In all these sites the bodies were buried en masse, in contact with one another, rather than in individual plots. Mass graves in this sense are unusual, and almost always signify that the deaths were the result of mass atrocities or natural disasters. The chaotic and unprofessional manner in which the mass graves around al-Hilla and al-Mahawil were unearthed made it impossible for many of the relatives of missing persons to identify positively many of the remains, or even to keep the human remains intact and separate. In the absence of international assistance, Iraqis used a backhoe to dig up the mass grave, literally slicing through countless bodies and mixing up remains in the process. At the end of the process, more than one thousand remains at the al-Mahawil grave sites were again reburied without being identified. In addition, because no forensic presence existed at the site, crucial evidence necessary for future trials of the persons responsible for the mass executions was never collected, and indeed may have been irreparably destroyed. This report attempts to tell the story of the mass graves around al-Hilla. It identifies the victims, the circumstances of their arrest, and their ultimate execution and mass burial. The conclusion is inescapable: those whose bodies were recovered from these mass graves were the victims of a coordinated campaign of repression, arrests, and executions carried out by the Iraqi government in the aftermath of the failed Shi`a uprising in 1991. The report demonstrates the importance of the evidence that can be gathered from the mass graves that are being discovered all around Iraq—all of which have their own individual history, but which together testify to decades of mass murder by the Iraqi government. Human Rights Watch researchers spent five days at the three mass grave sites near al-Mahawil and al- Hilla, collecting as much testimony as possible before the relatives of the missing returned to their homes. By interviewing the relatives who said they had identified victims in the mass graves through identity documents, items of clothing, medications, and the like, Human Rights Watch was able to establish who many of the persons in the grave were, and when and how they disappeared. Farmers living in the proximity of the mass grave were able to speak out for the first time about the daily executions and burials they had witnessed in 1991. A survivor of the executions at the al-Mahawil brick factory—he was dumped in the mass grave with his mother and two relatives, but miraculously was not shot and managed to escape alive—told his remarkable story to Human Rights Watch, thereby making the crucial link between the arrests of thousands in the al-Hilla area in March 1991, their detention at the nearby al-Mahawil base, and their ultimate execution and burial in the mass graves discovered around al-Hilla and al-Mahawil in May 2003. This report also documents the failure of the occupying powers to assist Iraqis at this time of great need. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been “disappeared” by the Iraqi government over the past two decades. Many of these “disappeared” are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq. For the moment, the Iraqi people are being left to their own very limited resources in Human Rights Watch 1 May 2003, Vol. 15,No.5 (E) attempting to exhume and identify those remains. Iraqis are in desperate need of expert assistance, and there is an urgent need for the occupying powers, with the assistance of the international community, to put in place a process of assistance for the recognition of the “disappeared,” the exhumation of mass graves, the identification of those buried in them, and the collection of important forensic evidence. U.S. forces have explained this failure by asserting that any efforts to halt diggings at mass graves of victims of massacres would thwart the understandable determination of desperate relatives to confirm the fate of missing loved ones, and would thereby risk causing serious disturbances. Yet, despite the fact that U.S. authorities had