Desperate for a Scrap of Paper to End Decades of Wondering

There are so many names, so many documents, so much proof that their government viewed human life as expendable. It should not surprise the men and women who lived under Saddam Hussein, who spent years in his jails, who watched relatives taken away forever -- but it does.

“Look. Brothers,” Meer Ali Saleh said, a bit of shock in his voice as he held up two death certificates. They were about to be typed into the computer at a mansion that once belonged to Hussein’s personal military escort, a spacious house on the banks of the Tigris River that has become an archive of execution.

The thin orange sheets of paper bore the names of Ali and Said Assadi of Basra. Dr. Farouk Amr signed the forms. The documents said that on Dec. 30, 1984, at 5 a.m., both men were hanged. Ali was 28. Said was 21.

“We have thousands like this,” said Saleh, a volunteer for a group that calls itself the Committee of Free Prisoners and is collecting and distributing information about the missing. “We have documents showing whole families being rounded up.”

He picked up another form. It marked the death of Mohammed Zaho, a student from Karbala who was hanged Jan. 7, 1981, at 6 a.m. He was 21.

Another form. Mohammed Mutair, 30, a teacher who was hanged March 7, 1981, at 6 a.m.

The newly formed committee has thousands of pages of documents collected from cemeteries and security offices all over Baghdad. Its volunteer members are going through each one, typing name after name into a spreadsheet as long as there is electricity to run the computer. They’re also writing names on red paper and posting them outside the house.

A crowd had gathered on the cool stone steps of the villa. A line of people queued up in front of a smashed picture window. Inside, a man sat at a desk with a large ledger taking down the names of missing relatives from the people in line. There were so many names on the walls, so many people still unaccounted for, it seemed nearly impossible that anyone would make a match.

But the work of the committee may someday offer closure to the relatives. Hussein’s government knew how to make the execution of political prisoners as painful as possible for the loved ones: It almost never confirmed a death, instead letting mothers, fathers, brothers and cousins hold on to the hope that their relatives were alive.

That painful uncertainty has darkened every day for Kharia Kadr since her 17-year-old son disappeared on the way to high school 24 years ago.

“Just yesterday, my mother quarreled with me. She doesn’t believe that my brother was executed,” said one of Kadr’s children, Fadhal Mehdi, 35, whose family went to the mansion seeking information. “She believes he is alive. This feeling is destroying us.”

As the U.S. moves to restore electricity and create a government here, it also must confront the psychological wounds imposed on a society after nearly 30 years of tyrannical rule. Many Iraqis are desperate and angry -- and they want to take control of their lives. That attitude may have a profound effect on the direction of the country and the willingness of the people to cooperate with a U.S.-backed administration.

“We would like you Americans here as a friend, as a guest,” said Ayatollah Imad Din Awadi, a Shiite leader who started the group. “We don’t like you to behave as invaders. You will have to leave.”

For now, however, Awadi and his group are focused on helping people find answers. That, they hope, will be a step toward empowerment.

Almost everyone gathered at the mansion has a similar story. A loved one accused of being a member of the banned Shiite party Al Dawa, or being involved in anti-government activity. A knock at the door at night. Loaded guns pointed at the family. A doorstep goodbye.

Zaman Mohammed Ali, 28, drove two hours from Najaf looking for information on his missing brothers, Jasim and Basim, who were taken away in 1991. He searched the prisons and then heard about the committee. He saw nothing on the board and left his brothers’ names.

Karim Ouda Nazer, 40, lives in Saddam City, the Shiite ghetto now called Sadr City after a popular religious leader killed by the government. Five years ago, security agents took Nazer’s brother, Nazar, from their home, and he was never heard from again. Nazer added his brother’s name to the list.

The desperation grew, and the crowd swelled, as one person after another recounted last moments together -- decades ago but told in such detail they seemed like yesterday. The family being herded into the yard. A mother crying. Guns pointed at everyone’s head.

In Hussein’s world, there was no peace from death, not for the family. Was it a game? Bureaucratic inefficiency? Plain cruelty?

Mohammed Nasser Ridha, 35, had two cousins, Hassan and Hussein, both in their 20s when they were taken away, accused of being members of Al Dawa. The Ridha family was lucky in a way: Two months later, the body of Hassan was returned -- with a bill. The government forced his family to cover the cost of the bullets used to execute him. A year later, the other body arrived, with another bill for the bullets.

More than a year after Kharia Kadr’s son Hussein Ali Mehdi disappeared on his way to school, she was sent a government document saying he was missing in action in the Iran-Iraq war. The government even paid his military salary for a year, about 100 dinars a month.

It gave his mother something to cling to, and perhaps that was the point. With hope comes obedience because, as she said, she didn’t want to do anything to anger the authorities while her son was being held.

In 1991, a security officer sent messengers to the family’s home to say that Hussein Ali was alive and in prison.

“It was just to pacify us,” Fadhal Mehdi said at his home Saturday. Last year, Mehdi pulled a security officer aside and begged him for answers. He was told that his brother had been executed but that it was impossible for him to see any documents.

Abdel Karim Adai was 26 when security agents burst into his home sometime after midnight 23 years ago and took his brother Abdul Mehdi away at gunpoint. A week later, his 15-year-old brother, Salim, vanished.

Over the years, he and his parents begged the authorities for documents, some proof of what happened to their loved ones. A few years ago, they checked with a military hospital and were given a death certificate for Abdul Mehdi that said he had died of a heart attack. There was no body, no grave site.

“We don’t know anything about them until now,” Abdel Karim said.

When the regime collapsed, and the city exploded in a spasm of looting, crowds descended on security offices and their locked filing cabinets. They brought bags full of documents to a mosque near Abdel Karim’s house.

There, buried deep inside a folder, written on the yellowing stationery of the Iraqi intelligence service, was confirmation that his brothers had been executed many years ago.

“Our information said that his brother Salim Adai is an executed criminal, one of the members of the traitor Al Dawa Party,” the document said. “And his other brother Abdul Mehdi Adai is an executed criminal for being a member of the traitor Al Dawa Party.”

Abdel Karim read the document to his father and, after all these years, blinked, folded it up and put it away.