At this point, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. The team carefully researched Muslim burial customs, learning that the bodies needed to be wrapped in cotton cloth and buried with their heads pointing toward Mecca. He was known to have publicly declared before that arrest that he was "glad that he got away alive." From there they were driven into the remote desert, separated into groups men in one, women and children in another and then corralled into trenches. She was carrying a handbag with some baby clothes and personal items: a spool of thread, a tube of antibiotic ointment, matches, a metal container, some coins, a barrette and five pairs of gold earrings. We found in that village that all of the children had been brought to a single building next to the church and kept there all day while their parents and grandparents were being interrogated and executed. [51][52], "Fifty-seven boxes were recently returned to the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya in Zeit truckslarge Russian military vehiclesby the Iraqi government authorities. In court, he described how the bones of a young woman named Liliana Pereyra indicated she was tortured while pregnant. To his ally Kenneth Kaunda Saddam once sent a Boeing 747 full of presentsrugs, televisions, ornaments. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. [133], The guards at the Baghdad detention facility called their prisoner "Vic", which stands for "Very Important Criminal", and let him plant a small garden near his cell. His own daughters had once worn similar shoes. The Iranians, demanding that the international community should force Iraq to pay war reparations to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. He was 86. Over the next three days, the team searched the terrain for scraps of cloth and traces of back-dirt piles--indicators of buried graves. Bodies Yield Evidence of Hussein-Era Killings - The New York Times Then one of the crowd repeatedly said the name of the Iraqi Shiite cleric, Moqtada Al-Sadr. Dr Clyde Snow is widely considered to be the father of forensic anthropology. Everyone on the team agreed that the intake analysts had the worse job. It gives them some of their humanity back.. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture. With it, he created composite maps of the entire grave for Malin-Boyce, who used them as progress reports--or "dailies"--to plan for the next day's work. "So we left no bone, no speck, not so much as a broken bead behind," says Malin-Boyce. Heather Pringle is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY. Western charges of Iraqi resistance to UN access to suspected weapons were the pretext for crises between 1997 and 1998, culminating in intensive US and British missile strikes on Iraq, 1619 December 1998. These ranged from a young child's prayer beads and little red shoes to a woman's spoon for measuring medicine or powdered milk. Each evening, back at the field camp, Smith, a quiet, reserved man, downloaded the day's data into the GIS program. [145], Saddam's last words during the execution, "May Gods blessings be upon Muhammad and his household. It resembled a fortress. A presenter from the Al-Ikhbariya television station officially stated: "There is a feeling of surprise and disapproval that the verdict has been applied during the holy months and the first days of Eid al-Adha. ", "Digging for the Disappeared is an informative, moving, and enriching read, well written and perceptive. The US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam in an emergency meeting on 25 July 1990, where the Iraqi leader attacked American policy with regards to Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE): Saddam stated that he would attempt last-ditch negotiations with the Kuwaitis but Iraq "would not accept death. Hussein grew up in Auja, a village of mud-brick huts northwest of Baghdad. [36] In September 1966, Saddam initiated an extraordinary challenge to Syrian domination of the Ba'ath Party in response to the Marxist takeover of the Syrian Ba'ath earlier that year, resulting in the Party's formalized split into two separate factions. While some of the defendants tried to cast doubt on how the victims actually died, others such as Chemical Ali questioned the exact location of the Muthanna mass grave. During the Iraq War (2003-2011), the U.S. government dispatched teams of forensic archaeologists and anthropologists to examine a series of mass graves, a site of genocide allegedly perpetrated. Snows testimony helped convict five former military leaders. A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, Forensic archaeologists uncover evidence of a secret massacreand help convict Saddam Hussein of crimes against humanity, Archaeologists and physical anthropologists exhumed 114 victims of the Kurdish genocide from a mass grave in the center of Iraq's Muthanna province. When asked about her father, Raghad told CNN, "He was a very good father, loving, has a big heart." Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the Soviet Union, China, France, and the US, which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary Iran's influence in the region. And to convict on the charge of genocide, prosecutors had to show that a defendant intended "to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." Having removed the threat of Iranian fundamentalism he "overran Kuwait and confronted his Gulf neighbors in the name of Arab nationalism and Islam. He then proceeded to his first question: Why, he wondered, was the court even listening to Trimble's testimony? [I]t carries its weight when it comes to the contents, detailed discussion on various themes including the merging human rights movement, transitional governments, and tribunals. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician. I went in 1991 to Kurdistan on a mission sponsored by Middle East Watch to document some of these crimes . In addition to the People's Army, the Department of General Intelligence was the most notorious arm of the state-security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. Two days before the first attacks, Saddam reportedly offered Egypt's Hosni Mubarak 50 million dollars in cash, "ostensibly for grain. It was his first interview with a US reporter in over a decade. Malin-Boyce knew that the team could not afford any competition between these groups, particularly as the 120-degree temperatures began to fray everyone's patience. [107][108][109][110][111] On 9 December 1996, Saddam's government accepted the Oil-for-Food Programme that the UN had first offered in 1992. Foreign observers believed that from 1982 this department operated both at home and abroad in its mission to seek out and eliminate Saddam's perceived opponents. Several yards away, in the Cultural Objects Laboratory, Ariana Fernndez, a cultural anthropologist from Costa Rica, studied the clothes and artifacts found on the bodies in an effort to draw further clues about their identities and their fates. The anthropologists examined the skeletal remains for bullet wounds and other signs of injury or trauma, and handed over the bones to the team's radiographer Jim Kister. These were Case No. And nearly three-quarters of the victims suffered gunshot wounds in their legs and feet: a common tactic that prevents the targets from fleeing. The appearance of the 78-year-old forensic anthropologist from Oklahoma brought objections . To clinch their case, prosecutors needed to put a team of highly skilled forensic archaeologists and anthropologists to work excavating some of the country's mass graves. Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray, A free-access on-line archive relating to U.S.Iraq relations in the 1980s is offered by, For a statement asserting the overriding importance of oil to U.S. national security and the U.S. economy, see, e.g., the declassified document, "Responding to Iraqi Aggression in the Gulf," The White House, National Security Directive (NSD 54), top secret, 15 January 1991. A template for international, multidisciplinary, and volunteer teams with norms of enhanced sensitivity to cultural and political realities has clearly emerged . Wafa is the daughter of, Assistant Secretary of the Regional Command (19661979), Assistant Secretary General of the National Command (19791989). Saddam Hussein started recitation of final Muslim prayers, "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." He also was managing editor of the Ventura Star-Free Press. The first visit took place in December 1974, when the Caudillo of Spain, Francisco Franco, invited him to Madrid and he visited Granada, Crdoba and Toledo. The defense counsel consistently argued that the architects of Anfal had drawn up plans for a strictly military campaign, one that targeted only Iranian soldiers and Kurdish saboteurs. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency. Three previous marriages ended in divorce. There's no independent case for mass graves." To achieve his goals, the American president embraced a strategy of coercive . Other photographs inside the paper show Saddam washing his trousers, shuffling, and sleeping. Shortly after the 2003 invasion, looters trampled through the compound, carrying off everything of value, but vestiges of the Hussein years remained. Saddam had allegedly married a third wife, Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research. My father was a country doctor out in west Texas, a very rural area. Today, Trimble and Malin-Boyce are looking toward the future, hoping to create a permanent mass-graves team to help courts around the world bring death squads and war criminals to justice. In the past few decades, due to rapidly developing technologies and a powerful global human rights movement, the scientific study of those graves has become a standard facet of post-conflict international assistance. Does this thumb belong to this hand?' To make this point forcefully, he and his team created a graphic PowerPoint presentation to ensure that the most important forensic facts would not get lost in translation. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa. For example, in the case of Saddam Hussein my testimony concerned the genocidal campaign which the Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein carried out against the Kurdish people in 1988 and 1989. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war. Newton, Michael A. and Michael P. Scharf. That's just what archaeologists do--you re-create the scene from every possible perspective. You spend enough time with these individuals, you really want to see them go home, Mr. Trimble said. [14] His mother remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. Lending was based on cronyism. He supposedly died accidentally from a gunshot wound about the same time and had been buried in the area. As the ailing, elderly al-Bakr became unable to execute his duties, Saddam took on an increasingly prominent role as the face of the government both internally and externally. A few weeks later, Dr. Ibrahim was sacked when held responsible for a fatal incident in an Iraqi hospital where a patient died from intravenous administration of the wrong concentration of potassium supplement. [30] Saddam moved from Syria to Egypt itself in February 1960, and he continued to live there until 1963, graduating from high school in 1961 and unsuccessfully pursuing a law degree[31] at Cairo Law School (19621963). [74], Saddam routinely cited his survival as "proof" that Iraq had in fact won the war against the US. [114], In 2002, Austrian prosecutors investigated Saddam government's transactions with Fritz Edlinger that possibly violated Austrian money laundering and embargo regulations. Over the years, the U.S. Army called upon him to undertake several difficult and sensitive missions. Geoarchaeology, Forensics, and the Prosecution of Saddam Hussein: A Specific charges included the murder of 148 people, torture of women and children and the illegal arrest of 399 others. Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for postwar rebellions. The pattern of shell casings found at the site shows that the shooters, whose numbers cannot be determined, likely stood at the southern end of the pit and fired into the throng with AK-47 assault rifles, mowing the victims down in a spraying motion. The narrative style is a model for forensic writing and analysis that should be highly prized going forward. He stopped the trackhoe and crawled over for a closer look. Born in Forth Worth, Texas, he obtained a doctorate in physical anthropology but moved into forensics after years studying aeroplane crash victims for the Civil Aeromedical Institute. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion. Mass graves searched for 2nd Saddam trial - NBC News The researchers have given some of the victims nicknames: Quinn after the Bob Dylan song Quinn the Eskimo for a boy who was found in a ski jacket with a fluffy hood; Pochahontas for a girl wearing a shirt with a beaded design; and Gray Guy, Brown Guy and the Blue Man. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. Eleven Iraqi . The choice of sites, says Schuldenrein, principal archaeologist at GRA, was "a fatal flaw" in the executioners' plans. To alleviate the threat of revolution, Saddam afforded certain benefits to the potentially hostile population. One time that she-- she did so-- was when he went to-- to Northern Iraq-- to-- to Kurdistan to exhume-- a mass grave of people who had been killed in the Anfal, Saddam Hussein's-- method of trying to-- to wipe out-- the-- the Kurdish-- men because he thought that they had Trimble's testimony at the Anfal trial did not bring the Muthanna work to an end, however. [32], Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of February 1963. Behind a glass wall, two rows of reporters and distinguished visitors watched attentively. This backfired on Iraq and the Arab states, for Khomeini was widely perceived as a hero for managing to defend Iran and maintain the war with little foreign support against the heavily backed Iraq and only managed to boost Islamic radicalism not only within the Arab states, but within Iraq itself, creating new tensions between the Sunni Ba'ath Party and the majority Shi'a population. This skeleton of a Shiite who died in a mass killing was found to have gunshot wounds from assault rifles. He clearly articulates the politics and contingencies of such humanitarian practices, and makes a persuasive argument for a holistic, victim and mourners centric approach. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam's government. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. Talking for more than three hours, he denied possessing any weapons of mass destruction, or any other weapons prohibited by UN guidelines. Moreover, a small number of Kurds follow an ancient religion known as Ezidi. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. They flagged, measured, and recorded every feature. "If Steven Spielberg ever did a documentary on what happened to the Kurds, this is where he would come," observes Trimble. Saddam laughed and later said, "Do you consider this manhood?" But seldom had he been given the kind of golden opportunity he was handed in court by the deposed dictator, who contended that the bones in a mass grave examined by Snow could have been those of Hittites from thousands of years before. His real date of birth was never recorded, but it is believed to be between 1935 and 1939. Taymour stepped into the cool night air and noticed at once that their bus, along with the 30 others in the convoy, had parked next to a large, shallow pit. To me it is always quite a dramatic experience to be in the same courtroom with people of this sort. Snow helped identify their remains. Its not a deliberate thing, explained Kerrie Grant, an archaeologist on the mass graves team. The clothing was remarkably well preserved, and by displaying it on a mannequin, they could create a vivid likeness of the dead person. It was important enough to prove that a complex chemical like serum has persisted long enough to be traced. "[93] The US sent warplanes and combat ships to the Persian Gulf in response to these threats.[94]. With a notebook in his left hand and a pen in his right, he first piously quoted a verse from the Koran. In the center of the room, Saddam Hussein and the other six defendants sat in an iron-barred enclosure, facing five judges. Saddam Hussein [c] (28 April 1937 - 30 December 2006), known mononymously as Saddam, was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who was the fifth president of Iraq, from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. Among the many challenges of the trial were: On 5 November 2006, Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. [58], In the course of his reign, the Ba'athist regime officially included the historic Kurdish Muslim leader Saladin as a patriotic symbol in Iraq, while Saddam called himself son of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar and had stamped the bricks of ancient Babylon with his name and titles next to him.[59][60]. "Imagine the children crying and screaming and everyone begging." The killers, says Trimble, first led the two adult male victims--possibly the bus drivers--and the adolescent boys into the grave, positioning them at the deepest end. "When you make this mental connection that these people were not unlike yourself," says Rubenstein, "it hits you very hard.". . It is now possible for these people to be brought to court to answer for their crimes. In all, Muthanna's adult victims averaged eight gunshot wounds each, the children four. Initially, Saddam Hussein appeared to take in this opinion as part of his cabinet democracy. Beginning in 1974, Taha Yassin Ramadan (himself a Kurdish Ba'athist), a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People's Army, which had responsibility for internal security. Ariana Fernndez, an anthropologist on a forensic team, pointed to a bullet hole in a Kurdish childs clothes. Their defiance infuriated Saddam Hussein, who feared losing control over the rich oil fields of northern Iraq's Kurdish region. But many details of Taymour's account fit hand-in-glove with the evidence Trimble's team unearthed. "You need to be able to identify an individual case," says Malin-Boyce, "and lift that person out, while still leaving other individuals in place." Saddam was shown with a full beard and hair longer than his familiar appearance. US officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions. He led an effort to find and identify Argentinas desaparecidos the thousands of disappeared citizens who were murdered and tossed into unmarked graves by a brutal regime. The Albu Nasir tribe had settled in Tikrit after migrating from Yemen. In return, Yasso said that Saddam Hussein donated US$250,000 to his church, which is made up of at least 1,200 families of Middle Eastern descent. The US government stated that it considered the release of the pictures a violation of the Geneva Convention, and that it would investigate the photographs. Some of the victims twisted in terror to escape the line of fire, receiving wounds both in their chests and backs. Others tried to parry bullets with their bare hands, an instinctive, defensive response. for no nombre.. After two years of intermittent activity, US and British warplanes struck harder at sites near Baghdad in February 2001. We went down to Bolivia where a couple of historians had established that Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid had been killed in a shootout. [67] In September 1975 he met with Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, France. Grant's team then sent each victim's clothing on to the cultural objects laboratory. The team was determined to be different. But this, Taymour soon discovered, was a cruel illusion; inside, they were squalid mobile prisons. Required reading for anyone interested in the promotion of justice and social reconstruction in post-war societies. A shift was, therefore, clearly visible among many Islamic movements in the post war period "from an initial Islamic ideological rejection of Saddam Hussein, the secular persecutor of Islamic movements, and his invasion of Kuwait to a more populist Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist support for Saddam (or more precisely those issues he represented or championed) and the condemnation of foreign intervention and occupation. Digging for the Disappeared provides readers with a window into this growing but little-understood form of human rights work, including the dangers and sometimes unexpected complications that arise as evidence is gathered and the dead are named. In a private meeting with Salah Omar al-Ali, Iraq's permanent ambassador to the United Nations, he revealed that he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran within months. [47] According to The Economist, "Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanizing German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. [35] He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaqthe founder of Ba'athist thought. The simple and accessible approach in parts belies a fiery critical analysis and personalised knowledge . [121], With war still looming on 24 February 2003, Saddam Hussein took part in an interview with CBS News reporter Dan Rather. He recited the shahada one and a half times, as while he was about to say Muhammad on the second shahada, the trapdoor opened, cutting him off mid-sentence. The next morning, Trimble and Malin-Boyce walked the site alone, planning out the work. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs. The two men had been at this work for nearly an hour on a sweltering April morning in 2005. Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. 21, "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union", "Iraqi leader's Koran 'written in blood'", "Iraq surveys show 'humanitarian emergency', "Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions", "Sanctions on Iraq: A Valid Anti-American Grievance? (Courtesy US Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District and the Regime Crimes Liaison Office). They are no longer immune. Saddam also commissioned the production of a "Blood Qur'an," written using 27 litres of his own blood, to thank God for saving him from various dangers and conspiracies.[106]. The Iraqi government and military collapsed within three weeks of the beginning of the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq on 20 March. "They were having what we called 'a moment.' As one of the worlds foremost forensic anthropologists, the wisecracking, chain-smoking Oklahoman had been on the witness stand many times before. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. ", Lucy Easthope and Stephanie Armstrong, Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences, "Despite dealing with subtle and challenging concepts, the book is engaging, self-reflective and surprisingly accessible; Rosenblatt's most significant achievement could, in fact, be the ability to make an academic book on a highly technical subject a page-turner for a broad readership The innovative scope of the book, the unique questions it raises and comprehensively addresses, and its accessibility make it a must-read for anyone interested in human rights, transitional justice, and post-conflict studies more broadly. [46] Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor. [141] The execution was carried out at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kadhimiya, a neighborhood of northeast Baghdad. (Courtesy US Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District and the Regime Crimes Liaison Office).
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