Without Clues to Its Missing, Iraq Panicked, Papers Show

It was a public relations disaster, an embarrassment, a serious danger to Saddam Hussein’s regime. What happened to 8,591 people who disappeared without a trace?

They had most probably been executed. That wasn’t the concern. The question was when, where and for what reason.

The U.S. was pressing for war, and Baghdad was scrambling to win widespread support, when desperate Iraqi families took to the streets asking for information about their missing loved ones. The regime didn’t have the answers -- and so it panicked, according to documents that offer a rare insight into the last months of Hussein’s inner circle.

“This issue is very significant and even dangerous especially in this current situation,” one of the regime’s top security officials wrote in a memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times. “The enemy will seize the opportunity in order to gain benefit of that in a malicious way to provoke the people and the mass media against the country.”

The events unfolded last fall, as Hussein was trying to head off a U.S. attack. In one of his most dramatic gestures, he issued a general amnesty on Oct. 20, freeing many thousands of prisoners across the country. For a time the PR gambit worked, at least at home, where Hussein was lauded for setting so many people free.

Then came the day after.

Hussein’s gulag was emptied, but many people never arrived home. Their loves ones had waited years, in some cases decades, without a single communication from the government that had swept their relatives away. Now they wanted answers.

They converged on security offices around the country, and in an unprecedented show of defiance a group of about 100 people demonstrated outside the Ministry of Information. The list, though only a fraction of those executed by Hussein’s security forces, had a total of 8,591 names.

The regime hadn’t kept very good records, if it kept records at all. Now it was being asked to explain, not only to survivors but to the international community, the fate of these people.

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Fears of a Revolt

The events set off great distress at a time when the regime was fighting for its very existence. A file of documents from the Office of the Director of Security for Baghdad laid out fears that enemies of Hussein would turn his people against him, and brought embarrassment that the regime had killed so many people but could not account for the deaths.

The file contained correspondence between the director of public security of Baghdad, whose name was not mentioned, and the secretary of the president, Abid Hamid Mahmud Tikriti, one of only two men in Iraq believed to have known the whereabouts of Hussein at any given time.

The papers offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at Hussein’s eleventh-hour public relations battle and documented the “purging” of thousands of citizens in southern Iraq after uprisings following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They also suggested that the government often failed to notify families concerning their loved ones, not as part of a strategy to keep them in line, but out of incompetence or indifference.

“Keeping silent and ignoring this issue is not possible for the time being,” wrote the head of security. “So dealing with it (which might need high-ranking decisions) has become urgent. Especially since the enemy is trying to seize the opportunity, and they know a lot about this matter so this is one of their cards which they might target.”

The Baghdad security chief said this case was particularly troublesome because of the dearth of records about prisoners seized and slain. “We don’t have specific numbers in the security departments for those missing or for the years they went missing. And that is complicating the matter,” he wrote.

He also said the case threatened to resurrect memories better left buried by time. “The resolution of the general amnesty, despite all of its great positivity and its positive reflections internally and externally, brought up this issue which was on the way to being forgotten by those families.”

To address the crisis, he recommended the creation of a high-ranking commission that would advise on how to proceed; suggested that the government fabricate files on individuals, post-dated so that they appeared genuine; and proposed telling some families that their loved ones had fled the country or been killed by saboteurs.

Above all, he suggested that the government move slowly. “We should use procrastination in this matter,” he wrote. “Procrastination should be used for the embarrassing and serious status. That is necessary and urgent.”

In post-Hussein Iraq it seems that everyone knows someone who is missing. It is impossible to speak with a group of people for more than a few minutes before someone cries out about a lost relative.

“My brother was executed, and I don’t know where is his grave,” Ahmed Badr, 42, shouted out while walking down a street in the Mansour district of Baghdad. He spotted a foreign journalist and his frustration jumped out. “We are all like dead people in this life. Saddam Hussein slaughtered people for 35 years.”

When Hussein first issued the general amnesty, state media reported on joyous family reunions and broadcast images of free prisoners hailing the president’s compassion. But soon the regime grew fearful that it would be unable to control the wave of questions -- and anger -- that had been released.

Authorities began collecting names and promising answers. Within days it had more than 8,000 names.

The security file indicates that it was impossible to follow up on every case for a variety of reasons. There were overlapping security agencies, and no one was sure which had grabbed which prisoners. And the Baghdad security chief concluded that more than 5,000 of the missing had been killed in purges in the south after the 1991 uprising -- and the military did not keep records of those deaths.

Families could be told that the disappearances were “due to either confronting the army or they were targeted by some rioting mobs, or they fled after the purge because they were afraid of the next procedures,” the document said.

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Lying Inadvisable

The director also concluded that it would be inadvisable to flatly lie because “their burial locations were discovered by a lot of people, especially in [areas] like Babylon and Najaf and maybe others.”

In a letter dated Nov. 3, the security director reported that the advisory commission had been set up and that it had ordered death certificates issued for those sentenced to die by a court. But the letter added that they would be doled out slowly, so as not to attract attention.

By then, the sense of urgency in the documents seemed to have eased. Perhaps that can be explained by this realization from the security director: The families “might think that a lot of them are still in prisons and that they were not included by the resolution of general amnesty.”