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[Previous entry: "Boots on the keyboard"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Left-wing, right-wing and the Spanish civil war"] 05 January 2004: "Whitewash roundup"
It's a new year, which means that lord only knows how many media outlets will refer to stuff that happened as recently as last week as having taken place "last year." Much of the time, I find this practice incomprehensible. I mean, it's technically correct, obviously, but it strikes me as being unnecessarily vague to use a larger measurement when a smaller one will do. If it's the first of the month, and I'm recounting something that happened to me the previous day, it does not require more effort to say "yesterday" instead of "last month," while the information as to when this event took place is significantly more accurate. Ann Clwyd has shown standing at site, with a hillside in the background strewn with white plastic sacks. The viewer is invited to make the connection that these sacks contain human remains.I don't know where Mr. Young gained his knowledge of forensic pathology, particularly concerning mass grave sites, but having worked for the ICTY for a few years, I think I can rebut a couple of his points with some authority, though I am far from being an expert. Much of my experience comes from having processed several boxes of pathology reports, of which I read the occasional couple of pages, on bodies recovered from sites near Srebrenica. (The following is an expanded version of what I wrote in Oliver's comments section.) Corpses decompose, their clothing disintegrates, and the whole lot falls apart. In the case of mass graves, where the corpses may be stacked several layers deep, you then get what pathologists call "commingling," as the remains of the bodies on the upper layers sink and become mixed ("commingled") with those on the lower layers. Once commingling occurs, it becomes impossible to recover individual corpses. So you lay out a grid, bag up everything recovered in a grid square along with the surrounding soil so as not to miss teeth, small bones, wedding rings, etc., label the bag with which grid square it came from, take the whole lot to the lab and try to piece together which bits belonged together. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, the path reports I worked on came with diagrams of the human skeleton where the pathologist could mark missing bones, locations of remains of clothing, ligatures, etc. On more than one of these reports, over half the body had been crossed out; it had been impossible to match up all the parts. At the time these bodies were recovered in the summer of 1998, they had been in the ground for no more than three years. Saddam was in power for 24. Even when commingling does not occur, decomposed corpses do not come out of the ground in an orderly shape, but in separate bits. Again, a competent pathologist will include the surrounding soil with the mortal remains in order to avoid missing small pieces. If the bags in the photograph are not shaped like human bodies, that's because decomposed corpses are usually no longer shaped like human bodies either, (take a look at this photo to get an idea of what I mean) and while they usually do contain "particulate matter," that is not the only—let alone the most significant—thing they contain. The scattered locations of the bags are most likely dependent on where the bodies fell at the time the victims were killed, and as for there being "no indication of [their having] actually be[en] excavated from anywhere," I suggest Mr. Young either get his eyes checked or buy a monitor with higher resolution, since disturbed earth is clearly visible by every bag visible in the photograph, particularly the ones visible to the right of Mrs. Karim's chin, to the left of Ms Clwyd's face and between two women at the bottom of the picture. Actually, there seems to be little evidence of commingling in the foreground of this photo; several of the bodies do not appear to have fallen near any others. Presumably, Mr. Young's response would be to argue that since not all the bodies are in a single hole, it's not a mass grave. Yeah, well, "mass grave" is shorter than "mass burial site" and it gets the point across just as readily. And given the number of white bags visible, it's rather reminiscent of reports from Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 which emphasised that no mass graves had been found, while conveniently omitting to mention that there were a shitload of individual ones. Just because dozens to thousands of dead have been given their own holes rather than being dumped into one big one doesn't mean fewer people were murdered. The extent of Mr. Young's research skills can be divined from this passage: Returning to Parliament in tears [Ms Clwyd] claimed that she personally had counted 10000 remains removed from a mass grave.Let's take a look at the minutes of Ms Clwyd's testimony to the House of Commons Select Committee on International Development. In response to question 35, Ms Clwyd states: We went to the biggest, which is near Babylon in Al Hilla. They have already taken about 3,000 bodies out, and they think there could be between 10,000-15,000 buried there.That's a slightly different picture from the one Mr. Young paints. Three thousand sets of remains had been recovered at that time, but that in no way precludes that more would not be. Moreover, I can find nothing to support Mr. Young's assertion that Ms Clwyd claimed to have personally counted 10,000 sets of remains recovered. From a BBC article, "Envoy MP backs Blair" (01-Jun-2003), I find a reference to the Al Hilla site: This is a mass grave of 10,000 people. People did not know that this even existed until the end of the war.And from another BBC article, "MP's anger over Iraq row" (06-Jun-2003), we have: I find it exasperating when I stand at the edge of a mass grave containing 10,000 bodies and people say: 'Where are the weapons of mass destruction?'In both cases, Ms Clwyd cited a number which was the lower end of the estimated number of people buried at Al Hilla, an estimate made by someone other than herself. In neither instance did she make any claim of having personally counted 10,000 sets of remains recovered. I can but wonder who is falsifying what. Moving on from denial to apology, we have the piece "Iraqi mass graves don't justify war" by one Mark Gery, a member of both the Orange County Peace Coalition and the Education For Peace in Iraq Center. The only word I can think of that adequately describes my initial reaction to this article is "gobsmacked." Bill Herbert, from whose blog I followed this link, has a few choice words himself about this piece, which I strongly urge you to read, not in the least place because I won't bother to address the points which he already has. Gery's assertion is that the bulk of mass graves being uncovered in Iraq are the result of the crushing of the 1991 uprising. He then makes the case, in so many words, that the Ba'athi régime was acting in self-defence. I really don't know how else to interpret sentences like What government in the world would refrain from using all necessary means to quell a violent uprising of this kind?Even assuming that such apologism held even a modicum of truth, Gery conveniently ignores the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds, which was commanded by "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid, and is estimated to have killed between 100,000 and 182,000 Iraqi Kurds. The Anfal campaign, it might be added, followed on the heels of the Iraqi régime's chemical warfare campaign, which included the infamous attack on Halabja, and which claimed the lives of several thousand more Kurds. If the brutality of the régime's response to the 1991 uprising was understandable, even justified, in the light of the alleged behaviour of the Kurds during the uprising, then would, by the same reasoning, that behaviour not have been justified in the light of the régime's actions against the Kurds? Gery also omits to mention the régime's campaign against the Marsh Arabs, which started in the late 1980s (again, prior to 1991), but really caught its stride in the 1990s. The régime set about draining the Marshes, thereby destroying the Marsh Arabs' habitat, and displacing most of their number. If the régime's brutal response to the 1991 rising was the moral equivalent of self-defence, akin to shooting an assailant, the campaign against the Marsh Arabs was the moral equivalent of subsequently burning down the assailant's house, shooting his dog and running his family out of town. Let me quote the rest of that sentence I used an ellipsis on above. But if blame is assigned, shouldn't it start with the instigators of the carnage along with the foreign government who misled them about the forces they were going up against and yet egged them on?Bill Herbert remarked that this was going to be another "but the US hung the Shi'ites and the Kurds out to dry in 1991" whingefest, but it's worse. I mean, that sentence reads like it's meant to convey the impression that the Bush the Elder not only hung the Kurds and Shi'ites out to dry, but incited a revolt he knew was doomed beforehand. Are we supposed to believe he thought the Republican Guard hadn't received enough exercise during the 100 Hours' War or something? If Gery's opinion is anything to go by, it seems being a pacifist these days means blaming the dead, and leaving their killer in peace (and I use that last word deliberately). Disgusting. In closing, I'd like to move away from Messrs. Young and Gery and wonder what to make of the predictions that Saddam will be subjected to a "humiliating public trial" which I've been reading? Would people who use such terminology prefer the trial took place behind closed doors? Or would they prefer a quick lynching by an irate Iraqi mob? |
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