Justice clashes with culture as dead are exhumed

Kehoe is confident that, with the exception of insurgents, most Iraqis would support their efforts if they knew about them because "people want this resolved. If they can get their loved ones back for a proper burial, they will opt for that." He says Iraqi human rights officials gave him their permission, to exhume the first site at Hatra and nine more after that, with gratitude: "They were very happy that it was finally being done."

But some scholars who study burial rites across cultures wonder if the Iraqi citizenry will show the same support as their interim government does. From the ancient Egyptians to the Central American descendants of the Mayans, an undisturbed grave is understood to help the deceased carry on a peaceful afterlife, according to Gary Laderman, associate professor of religious history at Emory University in Atlanta and an expert on burial rites. In this sense, the quest for temporal justice on earth gets measured against the need to respect what is eternal, and here even the most pressing of earthly priorities can seem petty.

"This is pretty much a common concern," says Professor Laderman. "You want the dead to rest in peace, no matter the circumstances of how they died.... The forensic process would [in many places] be seen as just another indignity, especially if it's impossible to identify the bodies."

Indeed, those seasoned in grave-site research have at times heard such protests. Haglund recalls a Bosnian Muslim woman who lashed out at the exhumation effort, saying, "You will finish the ethnic cleansing they began because now you're cleansing the dead." Likewise in Congo in 1998, a United Nations team had to cut its investigation short after residents in Mbandaka charged them with desecrating a traditional grave site.

Still, international initiatives tend to proceed with confidence that justice is being served and local residents will be supportive.

Robin Coupland, medical adviser to the legal division of the International Committee of the Red Cross, says he has never faced a situation where locals resisted an investigation on religious grounds.

"I have difficulty seeing this as a moral dilemma," says Dr. Coupland via telephone from Geneva. "If it's murder, presumably it will be investigated.... Most families would find it abhorrent to have their loved ones simply dropped in a mass grave. They would want them exhumed, identified, and given a proper burial."

How ordinary Iraqis would like their mass graves treated is ultimately unknown. Unlike most international investigations, which come backed by the authority of the United Nations, this one has no such blessing. Whether an American-led presence will come across as a sanctifying or desecrating force remains to be seen. But whatever the sentiment may be, the history of lands torn apart by war crimes suggests it's sure to be filled with passion.

"The families are the secondary victims" of mass murder, says Haglund. "You have to try to come to a consensus that is comforting to them."

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