HOW HE SEES IT Gathering Saddam evidence is slow

By GEORGE GEDDA
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON -- Iraq's 270 mass graves could be the key to a successful prosecution of Saddam Hussein, but bodies have been dug up at only one site in the year and a half since he was toppled.
Worries about security at the grave sites and a lack of resources and direction from the Iraqi government have contributed to the slow progress.
Also, Europeans with expertise in exhumations generally are not helping because of their aversion to the death penalty, a legal punishment in Iraq that Saddam could well face.
Saddam appeared in court July 1 to hear seven preliminary charges, including the killing of rival politicians and of Kurds and Shiites.
Eleven leading officials from his regime also face trial. Among them is Ali Hasan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds.
Eagerness and patience
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, is eager for an early start to the trials, but U.S. officials say patience is necessary to ensure the proceedings meet the highest international standards.
The graves are among the chief legacies of Saddam's regime. About 270 grave sites have been identified, but exhumations have begun only at the site near the Kurdish town of Hatra.
Some of the worst massacres occurred in Kurdish areas in the 1980s. At the time, however, the Reagan administration said virtually nothing about the butchery because the United States was siding with Iraq in that country's war with Iran.
As of earlier this month, investigators had removed 120 bodies from a trench believed to contain about 300. A bulldozer appeared to have been used to dump remains into graves. Among the victims was a mother still clutching her baby. The infant was shot in the back of the head and the mother in the face.
Indeed, many of the remains were those of women and children. In Bosnia, scene of widespread ethnic cleansing operations a decade ago, the great majority were fighting-age men.
U.S. officials say quicker action on exhuming sites in Iraq could have served as good public relations for an administration struggling for politically positive images from Iraq -- something to contrast with the slaughters carried out by Iraqi insurgents and their foreign allies.
But the insurgency in Iraq is making it hard to get to those sites to examine them.
Only a small percentage of the remains unearthed in Iraq will be used for courtroom evidence against Saddam and his former lieutenants. For the rest, attempts will be made to identify them to help Iraqi families come to closure.
Some Iraqis are digging up remains of relatives on their own, rather than waiting for exhumation experts to do the job.
Extensive experience
One group expected to play a key role in the exhumations is the International Commission for Missing Persons, which has had extensive experience in identifying remains of Bosnian war crime victims.
The commission is putting together an international conference on helping Iraqis deal with a similar problem. Iraqi officials invited to the conference will be expected to provide guidance on how they want to proceed. Another of the few groups with expertise on humanitarian exhumations is the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights.
"The challenge is to develop in a careful but hopefully expeditious way a plan for all of Iraq that would involve the various stakeholders, including Iraqi government, religious leaders and representatives of families of the missing," said Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of the doctors' group.
Ideally, Sirkin says, outside groups prepared to help would bow out as Iraqis develop their own expertise in unearthing and identifying the hundreds of thousands of Saddam-era victims. She says the process could take decades.
XGedda has covered foreign affairs for The Associated Press since 1968.