Gravedigger Unearths His Secrets

As a gravedigger for Saddam Hussein’s regime, Kadem Gatea Sofaieh said there were nights when he found it difficult to sleep, tossing with memories of bodies shot, tortured or beaten.

For 10 years, Sofaieh, 54, kept his uneasy secrets -- the sites of several dozen nameless people he buried, many of them victims of the regime.

But late last week, he decided it was time to clear his conscience. He approached Al Talea Al Eslameya, a local activist group that has recently come out into the open, and led members to graves he had dug behind a sand mine on the outskirts of this southern city.

On Saturday, the activists took a massive road excavator to the spot for the delicate task of unearthing the remains -- a scene likely to be repeated across Iraq as communities seek to learn the fate of those who crossed the Hussein regime and disappeared.

As the excavator went to work, the activists seemed a little uncertain of their purpose. Mainly, they wanted the world to know about the suffering of Nasiriyah’s people under Hussein’s regime, and wanted to display the evidence as quickly as possible. So the excavator tore through the soil with little sense of the dignity of the dead, or of any systematic approach to the problem of counting and identifying the bodies.

It quickly became clear the excavator was the wrong piece of equipment.

“This is not the right way,” said one Al Talea Al Eslameya official, Jasim Mohammed, 42, as the excavator roared back and forth, biting deep into the earth and messily unearthing flesh, bones and clothing.

The digging was halted as the activists considered whether to continue.

They decided to consult Sheik Osama Mohammed Baqer, a local imam, who said that while Iraqis needed no evidence of the regime’s crimes, the rest of the world did.

“We need to try to find out who these people are,” he said, after which the bodies would be reburied with proper Islamic rituals. “You need to dig with spades to show respect for the souls of the dead.”

The digging resumed, by hand.

It is unclear how many people from Nasiriyah were killed by the regime. Residents say the worst period came after the 1991 anti-Hussein uprising in the south, when more than 1,000 people were arrested, many who were never heard from again. The total could not be confirmed.

Sofaieh said he buried about 50 individuals -- mostly nameless dead from hospitals, many who had been prisoners. But on five occasions, when he buried about 14 bodies, Security Ministry officials accompanied him.

“They’d be shouting at me, telling me to hurry up,” he recalled. He said he did not know their full names, referring to them only as Hassan and Kahtan.

Upon completing his task, he received a terrifying admonition.

“After I’d finished, they’d warn me: ‘You didn’t see it, you didn’t hear it, otherwise we’ll put you in there, just like them,’ ” he said. “When it happened I was praying to God to forgive me for helping these people.”

Sofaieh said that when he ran into the officials in the streets, he would hide his face or slink away to avoid eye contact.

His forehead bears the permanent mark where his head hits the ground when he kneels and prays. He said he tried to deal with the bodies of the dead as tenderly as he could, praying for them and carrying out the proper Islamic rituals.

“I am a pious man. I am trying to please God. I couldn’t sleep when I had this job,” he said. “I always asked myself, ‘What was the mistake of those victims to get them into such trouble with the Security Ministry?’ ”

On Saturday, Baqer, the local imam, said the mosques were urging the populace not to try to take vengeance for relatives killed by the regime.

For Sofaieh, there is a sense of relief to be freed from his onerous work.

“Thanks to God,” he said. “I feel at peace now.”