Monday, June 02, 2003

How unjustified and cruel America is to put an end to such a regime.

Like so many Iraqis these days, Chedha al Awsi feels betrayed and confused.

On a computer screen before her, poorly recorded footage shows half a dozen laughing soldiers of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard as they beat and kick civilian men kneeling on the ground, their hands bound behind their backs.

There is a glitch in the recording, then the screen shows soldiers tying dynamite to the chests of their prisoners and blowing them up, one by one. Pieces of human flesh and bone fly in all directions. Al Awsi jolts in her seat, her face distorted by a grimace of pain.

"You just suddenly realize that you didn't know what was happening. I feel deceived," said al Awsi, a 31-year-old office manager at a private trading company, her eyes glued to the computer screen.

When the Baath Party rule collapsed in Iraq six weeks ago, the magnitude of Hussein's crimes came crashing down in an avalanche of gruesome information.

In a sign of the changing times, street vendors sell for $3 apiece bootleg CD-ROMs featuring video recordings of Hussein's executions of his political opponents and relatives fallen from grace. Iraqi television -- only sporadically available because of the irregular electricity supply -- broadcasts reports from mass graves that are being exhumed across the country's fertile marshes, rolling mountains and arid deserts.

Newspapers that have sprung up since the fall of Hussein's regime print daily accounts of past atrocities. "The dictator had an ugly voice to conceal the truth. You have been fooled by his media and by his slogans. Wake up and see his crimes," read an opinion piece in Wednesday's Al Adala newspaper.

See below, those same media people are upset that they are now out of work.

The revelations are bound to continue. Volunteers have dug up crumbling remains of about 10,000 people in mass graves across southern Iraq, said Bouckaert, of Human Rights Watch. "On an average day we see six or seven mass graves. New ones," said Bouckaert, who has been working in Iraq for more than a month.

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