Iraqi family searches in vain for missing loved ones

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, June 13, 2003

Iraqi family searches in vain for missing loved ones

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The last time Talib Hissein saw his brothers was 1992; they were being taken away by Iraqi intelligence agents. Investigating their fate could have cost him his life until Saddam Hussein was toppled in April.

Intelligence and state security buildings once associated with terror were raided by thousands of Iraqis who uncovered documents on how their relatives were taken, tortured, and usually executed. Families formed committees, displayed pictures of the missing and started digging up mass graves.

Hissein no longer worries about the five government informers living in houses just across the street who kept close watch because his brothers Saad and Hamid had taken part in a Shi'ite protest in 1991.

But freedom is turning into frustration.

Information is scarce on anyone associated with the unrest in 1991, when Saddam's troops and tanks crushed uprisings following the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.

"We have been to five mass graves. Every day we ask about Saad and Hamid. We went to the Special Security offices and drove away with files on a truck. But we don't know anything," Hissein said. "I even offered to give the intelligence people my house for information on my brothers."

His plight is typical of thousands of Iraqi families struggling to find and rebury relatives, the only way to reach closure after suffering in silence for years.

SHI'ITE SLUM WITH PAINFUL MEMORIES

Many may never know the truth, especially in Sadr City, home to about 3 million mostly Shi'ite Muslims, who were repressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated government.

Formerly called Saddam City, it is a sprawling network of pot-holed roads, littered with raw sewage and piles of stinking garbage like the ones outside Hissein's house.

Sitting in his spartan living room, he concludes what many families have -- his relatives were tortured, executed and buried, probably in mass graves.

Even if many more mass grave sites are found -- about 40 have been discovered so far -- actually identifying the corpses requires forensic experts. The lucky ones find clothing worn on the day the missing disappeared. Or a button or a watch might provide clues.

A group of British forensic scientists are in Iraq, hoping to help families find their loved ones and prosecute the Iraqi officials behind the killings. But families who rushed to mass graves just after Saddam fell have disturbed possible evidence, making it even more difficult for forensic experts.

And Iraq has a long way to go before proper courts are set up again.

So Hissein and many others like him can only wait.

While he goes to a local building housing a humanitarian group looking for the missing, his brother Raad combs mass grave sites over and over again.

Raad, 29, doesn't have to wonder if his brothers suffered. He was arrested in 1996 on charges of making contacts with Iran, Iraq's enemy in a war in the 1980s. A former runner, he said he was electrocuted and beaten on the legs with an iron bar during seven years in prison.

"I go to the mass graves and there is a bunch of people and photographers hanging around. When you look at a body you just wonder how you could know if this is your brother," he said.

REMINDERS

Aside from cracked, grainy photographs, there are other reminders of the two brothers. Hamid's wife was eight months pregnant when she last saw him.

Their daughter, now 13, sat in the living room wearing a veil and school uniform, listening to her uncle talk about her father. Hamid was just standing in the street near a protest when he was arrested and Saad was taken away in the middle of the night.

"She calls me dad," said Hissein.

Hissein learned early on that his brothers were probably dead. He made contact secretly with an Iraqi intelligence officer through trusted friends and began asking questions.

"All he told me was 'forget about your brothers. Drop the issue or you will be in danger'," he said, sipping syrupy tea. Sometimes he just recalls the horror stories that Iraqis told each other secretly over the years, the only form of freedom of expression in Iraq.

"I heard that army officers were taken to mass graves. They poured gasoline in their mouths and shot them, and their bodies blew up," he said.

Looking to the future isn't soothing either, even without Saddam's Baath party.

Hissein said he didn't trust the Americans but was happy they had toppled Saddam.

"The future is bleak. We will fight America. They are occupying us. But even if (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon occupied us to get rid of Saddam it would have been all right," he said.

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