Local woman scoured Iraq graves for evidence
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By Joanne Young/Lincoln Journal Star
You might call Melissa Connor an expert on man's inhumanity to man.
Technically, she is a forensic archaeologist who has done extensive work on battlefields — both recent and historic — using archaeological techniques to uncover physical evidence.
While battlefields aren't usually thought of as crime scenes, Connor used her skills recently to gather evidence from mass graves in Iraq on potential war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity believed committed by former President Saddam Hussein and his regime.
Connor spoke Thursday at the Nebraska Wesleyan Forensic Science Symposium about her three-month mission there. She returned to Lincoln in November.
She is an adjunct instructor for Wesleyan's forensic science graduate program. She also is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has taught. She has worked on missions to such places as Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda and Cyprus.
While she could not talk specifically about what the team in Iraq found because it was part of a legal investigation, she outlined the questions they went there to answer.
During the past 20 years, an estimated 262,000 Kurds, Shiite Muslims and political opponents of Saddam disappeared, were executed or deported from Iraq, Connor said. About 250 mass graves have been found.
Her job, and the task for the 20 experts on the team in northern Iraq, was to help determine whether crimes were committed, what they were, who the victims were and who committed the crimes. The team is compiling physical evidence from the remains found in the mass graves, documents and the testimony of witnesses.
"Witnesses and physical evidence are extremely important," Connor said.
A huge number of available documents exist — the equivalent of about 22 tons of paper, she said. They include executive orders and lists of people who were to be rounded up.
Of the 250 mass graves, only a small number will be used for the trials to be conducted by an Iraqi tribunal, she said.
One of the two she worked at contained the remains of women and children, the other adult men. It was believed, she said, that people in the graves could have been abducted in one part of the country, then taken about 100 kilometers away for interrogation and execution.
As they worked, the team looked past the individual homicides for patterns to prove mass homicide and crimes against humanity.
Three crimes apply to mass murders, Connor said. They are genocide, which could pertain to the deaths of the Kurdish people; war crimes, which could result from the alleged use of poison gas in Iran and Kurdistan; and crimes against humanity, which could include execution, deportation and torture of large populations such as the Shiites and Kurds.
The team was seeking answers to these questions:
n Did the people in the graves belong to a specific ethnic group? That could be proven through clothing, documents and religious artifacts.
n Were the acts against the dead committed with intent? How were they killed and was there a pattern in the killings, such as firing lines?
n Were the victims civilians? That could be proven by the numbers of women and children and how the people were dressed.
Jessica Mondero, a Wesleyan forensic science student from Hays, Kan., who accompanied Connor to Iraq, worked with Iraqi nationals to catalog traditional clothing that might be worn by Kurds and southern Iraqis. They used the information to help identify clothing on bodies found in the graves.
Those clothes included homemade dresses with special sleeves, Mondero said Thursday from Hays Medical Center, where she works as an emergency room nurse. Other identifying items were fabric pockets with a piece of the Quran, in the shape of a triangle or rectangle, sewn into children's clothing to protect them from evil.
The exhumations were done to confirm evidence given by witnesses and documents, Connor said, and so that remains could be returned to families for burial.
"It also can provide a strong historical record that can separate the myth and legend (of Saddam Hussein) from the reality," she said.
Connor's team stayed in large green tents at a desert camp.
"Camp life was better than most of us anticipated," she said.
The team was escorted to and from the gravesites by Army and private security.
A frequent question she has been asked is how she stayed sane working with dead people every day.
"The answer lies in having a sense of humor," she said, showing a picture of the group on "Funny Hat Day."
"Wear Your Underwear Outside Day" was canceled, she said, when water couldn't be delivered to the camp and the laundry was shut down.
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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