Thursday, April 17, 2003
A plundered museum is a tragedy, no doubt. But every time we hear about stories like that, let's remember stories like this. When men like Robert Fisk ask "why," we can say, "THIS IS WHY!"
NY Times - Unmarked Graves Testify Silently to Iraq's Decades of Grief
KIRKUK, Iraq, April 17 — The mounds stretch in rows for more than a quarter-mile across the hard, cracked earth at the edge of an industrial park here. Many are covered in weeds; all but two look undisturbed.
They are unmarked graves, nearly 1,600 in neat lines. They are close enough together in places that it would seem the skull of one skeleton might be within a yard of another skeleton's feet.
The first of the potential mass graves has been found in this northern Iraqi city, between a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant and one of the mansions of a cousin of Saddam Hussein.
It is a grim, dingy place, and judging by what Kurds described as the quick exhumation of two skeletons from mounds at the graveyard's edge, it seems certain to be the hastily dug and anonymous resting place of hundreds of Iraq's lost.
For decades Iraq has been a land of grief and wasted lives, from the 500,000 soldiers and civilians thought to have died in the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, to the untold tens of thousands of civilians who were killed or disappeared in crackdowns across the land Mr. Hussein ruled.
Human rights organizations and Iraqi households have long awaited the collapse of Mr. Hussein's Arab Baath Socialist Party, saying it would allow the beginning of the tedious process of accountability and the return to families of missing remains.[...]
They are unmarked graves, nearly 1,600 in neat lines. They are close enough together in places that it would seem the skull of one skeleton might be within a yard of another skeleton's feet.
The first of the potential mass graves has been found in this northern Iraqi city, between a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant and one of the mansions of a cousin of Saddam Hussein.
It is a grim, dingy place, and judging by what Kurds described as the quick exhumation of two skeletons from mounds at the graveyard's edge, it seems certain to be the hastily dug and anonymous resting place of hundreds of Iraq's lost.
For decades Iraq has been a land of grief and wasted lives, from the 500,000 soldiers and civilians thought to have died in the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, to the untold tens of thousands of civilians who were killed or disappeared in crackdowns across the land Mr. Hussein ruled.
Human rights organizations and Iraqi households have long awaited the collapse of Mr. Hussein's Arab Baath Socialist Party, saying it would allow the beginning of the tedious process of accountability and the return to families of missing remains.[...]
