Iraq atrocities - giving victims a voice

Putting into practice the skills he learnt during his PhD, University of Adelaide graduate Dr Tim Anson has played an important role in helping to bring to light atrocities committed against Kurdish people in Iraq. His work has given a voice to hundreds of victims of the Saddam Hussein regime.

In 2005, just two years after he had marched in protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq, Dr Tim Anson travelled halfway across the world to put his skills into practice, helping to piece together some of the many atrocities committed in that country under Saddam Hussein's rule.

His political views on the invasion of Iraq notwithstanding, Dr Anson joined a team headed by Dr Michael ("Sonny") Trimble from the US Army Corps of Engineers, working to discover the truth about what happened to some of the estimated 100,000 Kurdish people believed to have been killed by the Iraqi government in the 1980s.

Under contract to the Parsons Corporation, he spent a total of 14 months with the Iraq Mass Graves Team, part of the Regime Crimes Liaison Office (RCLO) based in Baghdad, whose job it was to uncover evidence of atrocities committed by Hussein's government and help to prosecute those responsible, including Hussein himself.

The team involving Dr Anson examined and made detailed reports on human remains recovered from mass graves, in an attempt to identify the age of the person at death, the sex, and any physical trauma they might have suffered, among other details. During his time in Iraq he studied the human remains of hundreds of men, women and children, including infants.

He was well prepared for this work by his PhD in Biological Anthropology. Biological Anthropology (also known as Physical Anthropology in the United States) involves analysing the human skeleton in an archaeological context. Dr Anson already had a Masters degree in Archaeology from Flinders University before studying for his PhD at the University of Adelaide's Discipline of Anatomical Sciences.

Despite concerns of family and friends about his safety, Dr Anson said he never felt in danger at any point during his 14 months in Iraq. "I always had a lot of faith in the people I was working for and was confident that they were not going to put us in a position of danger," he said.

That's despite attempted car bombings on the highly fortified security zone where he worked, and stray bullets fired over the walls and into the compound. The team was based near the Baghdad airport, with high walls and battlements. Dr Anson did not set foot outside that secure zone once during each of his three stays in Iraq, although protective Kevlar clothing and battle helmets were often required whenever he was outside of the many buildings housed within the zone.

Dr Anson had other things than security on his mind - the huge job of processing skeletons recovered by teams of archaeologists from a handful of the estimated hundreds of mass graves throughout Iraq.

"I had no idea what to expect, and I was quite confronted early on when we were getting individuals who were partially mummified (due to their burial conditions) and still a bit fleshed," he said.

In addition to examining human remains, much of Dr Anson's time was spent on the painstaking work of rebuilding skeletons using glue so that a clearer picture of what happened to them could emerge.

Among the discoveries made was the amount of gunshot trauma suffered by the Kurdish victims.

"There were definite patterns from mass grave to mass grave in terms of how individuals had been killed, as a trend in each group," he said. "One of the mass graves was full of women and children, who in most cases had suffered a single shot to the head, and the other was full of men who had been sprayed from head to toe with automatic weapons fire.

"You try not to come to any conclusions - you just had to report what you were seeing - but you couldn't help thinking... this looks pretty malicious."

Leaders of the Kurdish community visited the team during Dr Anson's time there and expressed their gratitude for the work being done.

"The cliché is that we are giving these people a voice, and that actually rings very true because once you see what they have been through and get an idea of the final events in their lives, you think, `oh my God, how many other people out there are like this?' And there are a lot out there.

"I felt really good about what we were doing. It meant that these people weren't just left there, and whoever committed these atrocities didn't get away with it like they so often have in the past."■

STORY DAVID ELLIS