- The Observer,
- Sunday May 4, 2003
They lift him into one of the six coffins they brought for members of this extended family who disappeared in November 2000. A skeletal foot sticks through the shroud. One man crouches and tenderly kisses it.
The family, who live in the sprawling poverty-stricken Shia suburb once known as Saddam City, have come to this place by coach to perform rites denied to them for so long by Saddam Hussein.
Close to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison where all these men were taken, in all likelihood tortured and hanged, Saddam's regime made this a graveyard within a graveyard, where no one was meant to go except Shia dead.
Relatives have broken holes into the wall that barred access to a dirt plot, each site bearing a metal marker with a number. In comparison with the graves outside, well-tended marble affairs, the dead here were covered with a pile of dirt.
But now among looted documents taken from the intelligence headquarters the families who have been searching for their missing men for so long have found an answer. So they come in their large groups, bearing slips of paper that say how a son, a father, an uncle died. Why he was taken and on what charge. Hamid Nama tears Isa's name out of the form and slips the scrap of paper under a fold in the shroud. Suddenly a man Saddam wanted to strip of his identity has regained part of his lost humanity.
So the men go back to work, disinterring Isa's cousins: Ali Eyssa, Mustafa Eyssa, Ibrahim Eyssa and their friend, Mortada Abdel Jaber. They will be taken to the vast Shia burial grounds in the holy city of Najaf.
Relatives say the Eyssas and Isa were good young men whose crime was to be seen to go to the mosque too much and wear their beards too proudly. Saddam's secret police accused them of belonging to al-Dawa - Islamic Call - an underground group. They said they weren't. Mortada was taken and killed simply because he was sitting with the Eyssas when the policemen came.
Outside the cemetery was Abbas Abdel Jaber and his family with a stack of coffins en route for Najaf. They had come to fetch his brother, Abdel Sattar, and four other family members.
Nathem Naim Jasem had come with his family from Basra. They had lost two of their family. 'We knew they were dead when they disappeared but could not bury them. Saddam did this deliberately to offend the Shia families his men took from.'
But if there is one thing more tragic than this gentle scooping out of the earth of Saddam's long-murdered, it is the knowledge that a son is in this terrible place who yet cannot be found.
Othman Shammari's shoulders are hunched, head on his chest, hands clasped at his waist. He is frozen in both grief and disappointment. A few moments before we had heard a commotion on the far side of the cemetery. A man was desperately pacing the flattened mounds of earth, examining their markers, calling to any who could hear whether they had seen the grave he was searching for.
He waved his green form and men clustered round while Othman stood stock still. He had come from Kut to get the body of his son, Talab al-Shammari, who had been taken from there and hanged. He had been arrested in 1980, then in 1990, and finally in 1994 for alleged involvement with the Islamic underground. When the Baath Party fled Kut, his cousin, Ared Munem, broke into the party headquarters and found a report which said Talab was a member of Islamic Call. Finally he was told Talab was on the list of those buried in al-Karq.
Ared tells me his cousin was not in Islamic Call. He was a hard worker, but had had problems with the Baath Party. He did not like them. So he died. 'We have the paper, the gravediggers said he must be here, but we cannot find the grave', says Ared Munem.
Then it strikes you, as it does across Saddam's fallen dominions, the slapdash nature of this once authoritarian state. On some markers the paint has faded or not been used at all. So what would they do? Ared answers for the devastated Othman: 'We will ask God to help us.'
