Show Originally Aired: 4/21/2003 CALL 1 800-423-TALK
Mourning in Iraq
An alleged torture chamber in the basement of a jail in Basra, Iraq (AP) Email to friend
View images from Dick Gordon's interviews with people waiting for news of their missing loved ones, and former military servicemen in Baghdad
All across Iraq the scenes of searching for missing loved ones, scouring lists for the names of people who might have been executed, and waiting outside hospitals are being repeated. Relatives, too frightened to ever search for news of the disappeared are going from prison to prison, hospital to hospital in search of the brothers, sons and fathers, taken by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
There are further reports of mass graves only just now coming to light. This is the reconstruction that matters to them. Not bridges, not buildings. People. No one knows how many, perhaps 100's of thousands. It is the first page in a human rights story that still has not been told.
Michael Ignatieff, Director at the Carr Center for Human Rights and Professor for Human Rights Practice at the J. F. K. School of Government at Harvard University.
Michael Ignatieff, we need to create a structure that Iraqis can own, and face their past. listen
Dick Gordon speaks with men around the ping pong table. listen
