[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 26 (Wednesday, March 3, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E290]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          A VAST HUMAN TRAGEDY

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. CLIFF STEARNS

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, March 3, 2004

  Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following article for the 
Record. Surely this is evidence of a vast human tragedy.

                          A Vast Human Tragedy

                          (By Andrew Natsios)

       In a decade and a half of humanitarian work I have 
     witnessed the aftermath of much human tragedy, including the 
     Rwandan genocide and the killing fields of Cambodia. In June 
     2003, I visited Iraq's mass graves, the most recent addition 
     to mankind's legacy of mass murder.
       Rows of white bundles containing bones filled room after 
     room. Families filed by, searching for signs of those who had 
     disappeared, some stolen during the night, others taken in 
     daylight. Even small children were not spared the butchery.
       The graves that Saddam Hussein's henchmen dug and filled 
     with human beings are a bitter sign that mankind still has a 
     long way to go before every person has the basic human rights 
     promised by all our religions and cultures--the rights of 
     life and liberty.
       Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the United 
     Nations that under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was ``a murderous 
     tyranny that lasted over 35 years.'' ``Today we are 
     unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament,'' 
     Zebari said.
       I walked across the sandy plains of Iraq and saw the mass 
     graves that were just found and are beginning to yield their 
     tragic secrets. The bones tell a story of horror and shame: 
     arms bound together, skulls pierced from behind. Hundreds in 
     one long trench.
       Those who survived inside Iraq, and those who watched 
     helplessly from abroad, have joined together to begin the 
     long, painful process of accounting for the dead. British 
     Prime Minister Tony Blair said on November 20, 2003, that as 
     many as 400,000 Iraqis lie in these mass graves.
       They are Kurds, killed because of their ethnicity. They are 
     Shiites, killed because of their religion. They are Sunnis, 
     killed for their political views. They are Egyptians, 
     Kuwaitis, and Iranians, killed because their lives meant 
     nothing to Saddam Hussein, his sons, and their followers.
       As Saddam's evil regime collapsed in April and May, 2003, 
     and his Baath Party mass murderers retreated into the 
     shadows, Iraqis began to act on their formerly hidden grief. 
     They searched for their loved ones rounded up over the years 
     in campaigns of terror. They had heard rumors about shots in 
     the night, mass burials, and vanished prisoners. Now they 
     followed those bloody trails to the mounds of earth they 
     suspected entombed their beloved children and parents.
       The new leaders in Al Hillah, Karbala, Najaf, and a dozen 
     other cities and towns around Iraq worked with U.S. and 
     British forces to try and protect some of the mass graves. We 
     hope to preserve the evidence of these crimes against 
     humanity.
       Human rights groups have formed, assisted by USAID and 
     working with the Coalition Provisional Authority, to urge 
     people to record the names of those being exhumed and 
     describe the circumstances under which they were seized and 
     slain.
       Yes--people want to find the remains of their loved ones 
     and give them a proper burial in consecrated ground. But the 
     Iraqi people also want justice--to punish those who callously 
     killed their fellow citizens by the busload, day after day, 
     year after year.
       Above all, if people in Iraq and around the world hope to 
     learn from the crimes of the past, the mass graves of Iraq 
     must be documented, reported, and never forgotten or denied.
       This booklet is a small, early marker on that path.

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