FORLORN mounds of sun-bleached clothes stretch across the barren field. Traces of the people who died wearing them - a washed-out vertebra near a small canvas shoe, a jawbone by a faded lavender dress - reveal that they mark the shallow graves of 1,200 of Saddam Hussein’s unidentified victims.
Little else except a lingering stench marks the bleak burial site that lies up a muddy track in Mahawil, a farming village just outside the Shi’ite southern Iraqi city of Hilla. Even the weeds have not grown back.
Up to 15,000 men, women and children are believed to have been shot and buried here when Saddam unleashed the elite Republican Guard on his rebellious people in 1991, just days after he promised the United Nations that he would “end all military action”. He had lost his war in Kuwait; he would win this one.
An estimated 100,000 Shi’ites and Kurds died as the Republican Guard tanks rolled northwards in a murderous onslaught on those who had risen up against him.
The vengeful Iraqi troops struck hard in Hilla which, like most of the Shi’ite south, had been seized by an angry population following encouragement from the first President George Bush to rebel against Saddam. American help never came. Hilla lists 4,800 families who lost a member.
When American-led troops invaded in 2003, the city was buoyed by the knowledge that President George W Bush and Tony Blair had cited Saddam’s massacres as part of their justification for war.
Many were impoverished because they had lost their bread-winner or had suffered as Saddam cracked down on the region. They thought their lives would be transformed when the Americans and a nascent Iraqi government pledged to give them compensation and help.
Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who ruled Iraq as head of the new Coalition Provisional Authority, told a press conference in May 2004 that the CPA would pay $25m to compensate Saddam’s victims. A press release announced the formation of a task force to distribute the money.
Less than a year later, the Iraqi government’s assurances of help were enshrined in draft legislation. It promised a monthly pension, cancellation of debts, help with home loans and provision of land to “the victims of mass graves”.
Yet today, most of the families who uncovered relatives in the Mahawil field are still living in desperate poverty.
Their anger is compounded by the fact that all but the most senior members of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath party, mostly Sunnis who victimised them, have either returned to their jobs after an initial purge, or are collecting government pensions.
Sadiya Saleh, a 67-year-old widow who found her daughter, Halda Aboud, 34, and her grandson, Mohammed Aboud, 12, in the mass grave, was left in a wheelchair after Iraqi soldiers kicked and beat her as she tried to save her son.
Surviving on handouts from relatives and sales of sunflower seeds, she is one of the many still waiting for the promised compensation for appalling suffering at the hands of their own government.
“Soldiers came to my house looking for guns. I told them we are poor, we have no weapons,” said Saleh, dressed in the traditional black abbaya robe, last week. “My daughter was in my house because she used to visit me once a month. They dragged her out with her son. He was only 12. They were screaming.”
Saleh threw herself on top of her own son Nasir, who was the same age as his cousin. Her voice breaks as she continues. “They punched me and kicked me in the back until they got me off him and took him away.” The beating left her crippled.
Nasir returned traumatised two days later. He did not speak of what had happened for 12 years. Formerly a bright, happy boy who loved football, he never went back to school or played with his friends again. Only when the news came that Saddam’s regime had fallen did he break his silence.
Saleh gathers her abbaya closer as she tells his story. “Nasir told me that every night a group was taken out and never came back,” she said. One night, Halda, Mohammed and Nasir were driven to the field in Mahawil and shoved into the night, blindfolded and with their wrists tied. The soldiers opened fire.
“Nasir said they all fell and he was covered with blood but not shot,” Saleh said. “Dirt fell on top of him but not too much. After a while he crawled out and hid in the trees.” After Nasir told his story, Saleh went to the field.
It was a chaotic, desperate scene, as I recall from seeing it myself. I remember walking over the hill to a vision from hell. In the blazing heat, a yellow mechanical digger was gouging a huge trench, gently dumping dirt and bundles of bones wrapped in cloth.
Men dug with shovels and their bare hands. Others separated the bodies and laid them out gently on blankets, placing recognisable objects on top - a watch here, a small gold necklace on a pile topped by a skull. The smell was overpowering.
A loudspeaker broadcast a name when an identity card was found. Thousands of men and women walked past the rows of bodies, some throwing themselves on a dirty jumble of rags and bones they recognised. Others trudged by with their dead wrapped in plastic bags.
Saleh recognised Halda’s body by her clothes, a grey dress over brown trousers and a brown scarf. “I knew her clothes. I bought them for her,” she said. Next to her daughter were the bones of her grandson.
She now relies on Ayat, a nine-year-old granddaughter, to push her decrepit wheelchair and clean for her. She has not been able to afford heating gas for a fortnight, despite the bitterly cold Iraq winter.
Ayat sits on the arm of her chair, wearing a woolly hat and scarf and embroidered jeans, solemnly listening to the story. Her only smile comes when her grandmother says that “she is such a help to me”. The 500,000-dinar (£200) monthly payment now being mooted by the government would change everything but there is little sign it will be paid soon.
Saleh’s sense of injustice is intensified by the relative comfort enjoyed by former members of the Ba’ath party, which Saddam built into his personal fiefdom during three decades of power. “The Ba’athists have their land, their houses and their cars,” Saleh said bitterly. “We have nothing.”
Shalah Jabar, 62, would be one of the targets of her anger should she meet him. He worked as an accountant in the government fabric factory in Hilla and rose through the ranks in the Ba’ath party.
Bremer’s first decree expelled all Ba’athists from public jobs. As the insurgency took hold in 2004, fuelled by Sunni bitterness at their treatment, the decree was watered down.
Teachers, who generally held lower ranks in the party, were allowed to return to their jobs. Jabar and others of similar rank could apply for pensions. He now receives £200 a month, along with what he earns from rent on his grandfather’s farm. He makes no apologies.
“I joined the Ba’ath party out of a sense of patriotism in 1976,” he said last week. Many of his rank, called district officers, spied on their fellow residents, but he insisted that he had merely given lectures and organised cultural events.
Asked why he had stayed in the party as it turned into an instrument of Saddam’s oppression, he replied: “I wished to continue my studies. I could only do that if I was in the party.”
There is no doubt that it was almost impossible to get ahead in Saddam’s Iraq without joining his party. But this is small solace to Saddam’s victims.
On a wall outside the govern-ment-run Martyrs Memorial Foundation in Hilla, a handwrit-ten sign reads, “Ba’athists not welcome”. Inside the ramshackle office, there is no electricity. Men in shabby suits and women in black abbayas queue to fill out the forms that the government requires for a job or compensation.
Few have been helped, admits Hussein Jabar, the 32-year-old director, who lost a nephew and two uncles in the mass grave. He is angry with the Americans who, he says, should help since they are the occupying power. He also chides the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government.
“Our young government has forgotten many things and this mass grave is one of them,” said Jabar in his unlit office. He said he had given plots of land to 534 families, although he is aware they have no money to build homes.
“The families have already been caused too much pain by the deaths of their relatives. I hope we can give them something,” he said.
Story after story is told as if it is fresh. Najia Aziz, now in her sixties, saw Iraqi soldiers shove her 20-year-old son Mazen Yousef into a car as he walked to a friend’s house. He had just returned from serving in Kuwait.
“I ran to the car, begging and screaming at them to release him. I kept running after the car,” she said.
She never gave up hope, going from prison to prison, asking for him for years. “I almost didn’t go to the grave. I was telling myself, ‘He didn’t do anything. He won’t be there’,” she recalled. She did not know that Saddam regarded the returning soldiers as suspect because so few fought.
Aziz identified her son’s bones through the army leave permit still in the pocket of his jeans. A friend who had been with him in prison told her he had been so badly beaten before he was shot that he couldn’t open his eyes. “My spirit left with him that day,” she said.
There are fears that the desperation and injustice felt in Hilla and among other families who lost relatives to Saddam’s brutality could provoke renewed sectarian fighting unless the government acts on its promises.
The Mahdi army, the radical Shi’ite militia responsible for attacks on allied forces, has been boosted by their rage. Many of its recruits from Hilla, who had relatives buried in the mass grave, joined because they felt their plight was being ignored.
The unclaimed bones in the field are as neglected as the living. After a few months of lying exposed, dirt was spread over them and clothes and personal items were left on top of the shallow graves for those still looking for their loved ones. There is little chance of that now.
Every year on the anniversary of the March 1991 uprising, Hilla residents travel to the site and stage a demonstration calling for a memorial to honour the dead. Even that small plea has been ignored. They will be there again next month.
Rebels crushed
After Saddam Huseein's crushing 1991 defeat in Kuwait, rebellions broke out in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and among Shi'ites in the south.
The rebels seized 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Many expected American support. It never materialised.
Instead, Saddam regrouped and brutally suppressed the uprisings. Up to 100,000 died.