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Press Releases |
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For Immediate Release
Contact:
Rob Rubin, Senior Vice President
(703) 245-9646
RubinR@mvminc.com
Protecting Those Who Uncover Atrocities
Wars, and the relics from them, have been found all over the globe. It seems that as long as man has existed we have found ways to create territories,
defend them, and expand their boarders – usually at the expense of neighboring, if not our own, people. Communities have attacked one another in any number and manner of ways, from the Danes in Ireland (700 CE) and the Europeans in the Americas (14 th Century) to the Yugoslavians in their own country during modern times.
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How do we know about these moments in history? The aggressors, including Julius Caesar around the Mediterranean, Hitler in Europe and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, always leave a trace. Unfortunately the practice of mass murder is so common that today we have standardized methods and practice to uncover the evidence and either tell the story or prosecute the perpetrators. We are told as young children in grade school that the purpose of studying history is to ensure that we don't repeat it.
Yet with mass murder, it appears that the more history tells us, the better we become at repeating it.
In recent memory, there have been massacres in Darfur, Rowanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Cambodia, Kuwait, Argentina, Iraq, Algeria and too many other parts of the globe to form a complete list. Whether as retribution for disloyalty as Saddam Husein claims, for ethnic purity or cleansing, or for political gains, people have been gasses, shot, disappeared and buried alive all over the world.
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The good news is there are several groups now coming to the forefront to take charge of finding the sites of these atrocities, exhuming the evidence and prosecuting the aggressors, sometimes on both sides of a conflict. In Iraq, the Regime Crime Liaison Office (RCLO) was created within the US Department of Justice to support just such a mission. In an article written by a US Military officer involved in a series of mass grave sites in Bosnia early in 2002 we find out why this process is more than simply bring people to justice. It also serves the people left behind. "It's good, that we can identify more and more victims with DNA-analysis, explained the judge. This is good because the families of the victims will acquire a certainty as to what happened to their family members." |
According to the US State Department, most mass graves in Iraq are tied to one of five major initiatives undertaken by Saddam’s regime: 1983 attack against 8,000 Kurds; 1988 Anfal campaign against 182,000 men, women and children; 5,000 Kurds who were gasses in aerial chemical attacks in the late '80s; The Shi'a massacres in 1991 after the first Gulf War; and the 1991 Kurdish massacre in the north. In each of these areas, multiple mass graves have been discovered and the RCLO is attempting to exhume evidence in each.
Crime scenes are normally difficult to secure in a way that preserves the evidence and curtails the curious, without disrupting all activity in the area. In Iraq, it is especially difficult because the families want access to bury the dead properly, the insurgents want to remove the evidence to deny information for a trial, politicians want to use the evidence for political gain, and law enforcement is conducting an investigation. In each instance, the RCLO has turned to MVM and asked for our support. To date, our personnel in Iraq have provided Personnel Security Details, Static Post Security and Convoy protection. We have been tasked with securing the perimeter of the camps, the grave sites, protecting the evidence, and ensuring that the scientists involved in the exhumations are safe. The MVM team in country is made up of Lebanese Christians, South Africans, Americans and other third country nationals, as the RCLO precludes the use of even vetted Iraqis in security for this effort.
In a web site maintained by the State Department it states: "The discovery of mass graves in Iraq graphically testifies to the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the challenges of building a more pluralistic and law-based state. … [I]dentification of as many bodies as possible and accountability for the circumstances of their deaths will enable [the Iraqis] to move forward to build a society that respects and protects fundamental human rights and dignity." At the very least, let’s hope history will not repeat itself, again. |
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